The Lost World of the Kalahari Read Free Page B

human flesh that they ignored the herds of game whenever it was possible to go after human prey. Yet oddly enough they never seemed to go after the Bushman. It was said that the Bushmen smeared themselves with an ointment whose smell so offended the lion’s sensitive nose that it would not come near them. But whatever the reason the Bushman would come and go fearlessly and unscathed through lion-country wherein a man armed with a gun was barely safe.
    My aunt was more impressed by the Bushman’s way with the ostrich. She said he used it, without its knowledge, as his hen and chicken. He never cleared a nest of all its eggs but always left one for the bird. When I asked the reason she said the Bushman knew that the ostrich, although the greatest in size of all birds was also the stupidest, and so unless he left one egg in the nest to remind it what it was supposed to be doing, it would forget its job and stop laying! She also gave me wonderful imitations of how the hunter covered himself with the wings and feathers of a dead ostrich and then, with the neck and head of the bird held erect by a stick, set out to stalk a flock of birds with inevitable success.
    But perhaps my favourite of all the Bushman stories came from a very old ’Chuana cattle-herder who had been raised in superb giraffe country. I remember him today mainly for two reasons: for the beating I got from one of my elder brothers because one day I addressed that crumpled old body directly by his first name and omitted the respectful ‘old father’ which should have preceded it: and also for this story. The Bushman, this old father told me, knew only too well that all giraffe were women at heart, utterly inquisitive and completely incapable of resisting a pretty thing. Moreover the Bushman knew from long experience what hard and thankless work it could be stalking one who looked down on life from so great a height and out of such far-seeing eyes. So he thought up a wonderful plan. He took out a glittering magic stone he always carried on him and crawled into a bush which was just in sight of a troop of giraffe. He held the stone in his hand in the sun at the side of the bush, constantly turning it in the bright light so that the giraffe could not fail to see it. At first they thought nothing of it, dismissing it as a sparkle of sun on dew, or an effect of the mirage of the heat-mounting distortion and hallucination in the quicksilver light of day. But as the sun climbed higher and this sparkle followed them, so prettily, wherever they moved, they began to get curious. ‘And there little master,’ the old father would always exclaim, ‘the fat was in the fire!’ I could see the giraffe, vivid in the mirror of the old man’s words, their timid hearts, despite all their other instincts and whatever they had of reason in their shapely Victorian heads, drawn slowly towards the concealed hunter. They would come so near that the Scheherazade pattern in the silk of their clothes would be distinct and visible and their wide slanted eyes, perhaps the loveliest of all animal eyes in the world, would shine behind their long dark lashes like wild honey deep within the comb. For a moment they would stand there in the hypnotic sparkle of so unusual and pretty a thing – and then the Bushman would send his arrows trembling like tuning forks into the tender place below the shoulder because, much as he loved the lard of ‘fat little old aunt sea-cow’, he loved more the marrow in the long giraffe-bone.
    Yet with all this hunting, snaring, and trapping the Bushman’s relationship with the animals and birds of Africa was never merely one of hunter and hunted; his knowledge of the plants, trees, and insects of the land never just the knowledge of a consumer of food. On the contrary, he knew the animal and vegetable life, the rocks, and the stones of Africa as they have never been known since. Today we tend to know statistically