Edge of the Rain Read online

  !Ka dropped down in front of the child who looked back at him with blue-green eyes which never wavered and were full of innocent curiosity. His hair was the colour of spun silver, the colour of the moon. ‘Da,’ he said in a high clear voice, holding out his hand with the sparkling stone.

  !Ka had no knowledge of the white man’s tongue but thought the child was offering him the stone. ‘Da,’ he repeated politely, stretching out his own hand to take the diamond.

  The boy snatched his hand back, shaking his head.

  !Ka looked up at !Oma. ‘This little !ebili will feed the lions tonight.’

  !Oma pointed to the bush. ‘Her With The Bad Foot was here.’ He walked to the bush and looked at the sand. ‘She was ready to kill.’

  ‘That would be a very bad thing.’ !Ka knew lions. He knew once they had killed a human they lost their fear of them and quickly included them in their diet. ‘She must be very hungry. Her bad foot makes her bold.’

  !Oma laughed. ‘Not so very much bold. She must still remember your spear for she ran away.’

  !Ka nodded, remembering the day he had defended his kill against Her With The Bad Foot and very nearly lost his life. More by good luck than good defence, because she had taken him by surprise, he had jabbed his spear at the lioness and punctured her sensitive nose. He returned his gaze to the boy who smiled, showing perfectly spaced, even white teeth. ‘How did he come here? He is alone. We must take him with us tonight and try to find his people tomorrow.’ He rose and held out his hand. The child stood easily and took it trustingly. ‘If that is possible,’ !Ka added, worried.

  !Oma agreed. He too had seen the frantic activity of the ants and beetles. Both men had read the signs: the weather was changing bringing something in, something big, the insects were never wrong. ‘I will carry the meat.’ !Oma concentrated on practical things for there was no point in worrying about the inevitable.

  The little boy tried gamely to walk but stumbled. !Ka could feel the weariness in the small, sturdy body and wondered again where the boy came from. He hefted the child and was about to put him on his shoulders when he caught a whiff from his shorts. ‘Pooh! He smells like a dead thing.’ The child’s diet caused his faeces to be very different from that of San children.

  !Ka pulled off the boy’s shorts and nappy and, using up their precious store of water from the ostrich egg, wiped the child’s soiled bottom with his hand. Then, leaving the clothing on the ground—for he could not imagine anything more uncomfortable, nor could he work out how the nappy was supposed to fit—he picked him up and hoisted him on his shoulders. The child shrieked with pleasure, chuckling constantly, remarkable considering his sunburn and exhaustion. Soon both !Ka and !Oma were laughing with him, particularly when the boy urinated and his warm water ran down !Ka’s shoulders and chest.

  ‘The little !ebili makes good water.’ !Oma cupped his hand and caught up some of the urine to smell.

  ‘His water smells good, not like his food’ !Ka agreed.

  ‘He is brave.’ !Oma remarked in admiration.

  !Ka was certain that this child was why they saw the flying mantis last night. The Great God was testing them somehow. He had sent this young boy for a reason. !Ka hoped he was doing the right thing by rescuing the boy. He did not want the Great God to be displeased and send the Lesser God to punish him.

  From his position on !Ka’s shoulders, the child was still fascinated by the shining lights in his diamond, holding it up to see better. ‘Da,’ he said, again and again. In this manner, the warthog and the child were carried back to camp.

  The camp was semi-permanent, which meant the clan had lived there for some five months, a long time for a nomadic tribe. Accommodating some twenty-seven individuals, the camp was a simple circle of grass huts with doors facing inwards, set around a flat dancing ground. They were due to move on shortly as they had all but cleaned out the roots and nuts, wild honey, termites, fruits and leopard tortoise which were their staple diet. The clan had stayed longer than usual because there was an underground spring nearby which gave them an abundance of water. But they knew, because they lived as one with their environment, that if this camp was to be enjoyed at some time in the future they had to give nature a chance to recover.

  One of !Ka’s children saw them coming and ran to tell his mother, Be, that his father was bringing something strange back from the hunting trip. The entire clan gathered in the centre of the camp and the murmur of speculation as to what strange animal !Ka carried on his shoulders quickly turned to excitement and disbelief. The young boy had fallen asleep, rocked by !Ka’s steady walk, his silvery head dropped over !Ka’s forehead, one hand resting on the Bushman’s left shoulder, the other tucked behind his neck, still clutching the diamond.

  ‘Oh, oh, oh, what have you done?’ Be cried, agitated beyond belief, for she truly believed her husband had killed the boy. ‘Why have you killed one so young?’

  ‘We found this little !ebili alone. The lions would have eaten him,’ !Ka told her disapprovingly. To take the life of another, particularly a child and especially a strange white child, would have been behaviour so alien to the San that he felt his wife should have given him the benefit of the doubt.

  ‘Ntsa, ntsa, poor little beetle. Here, give him to me.’

  The movement of transferring him to Be’s caring arms woke the child. ‘Da,’ he said, staring at her face. She must have presented a strange sight to him indeed. Her yellow skin, tufted peppercorn hair, strong cheekbones, bulging forehead, folded eyelids and flat nose all set in a tiny childlike face creased with hundreds of wrinkles and bearing tribal scars representing a zebra’s stripes would have had most children his age screaming with fear. Instead, he beamed at her.

  Be rounded on one of her older children. ‘Bring water,’ she ordered. Then she turned back to her husband. ‘Did you give him water?’

  !Ka hung his head. ‘We used the water to clean him.’

  Be clucked and shook her head, then taking a gourd from her daughter she offered it to the child who drank so fast he began to cough. Then he chuckled and drank some more.

  ‘He’s a brave little beetle,’ !Ka said.

  Although most of the light of day had gone, it was still very hot. Be carried the baby to the waterhole, followed by the entire clan who were dumbfounded by the strange child. The boy sat in the lukewarm water and splashed, laughing and happy. Then he fell over backwards and got up slowly, spitting water, thoroughly enjoying himself.

  ‘Oh, oh, oh, what have we done?’ Be asked in a low, scared voice.

  The clan looked on, horrified. The boy’s beautiful silver curls had been washed away, replaced by a darker colour which clung to his head in long straight strands.

  ‘We have washed away the light of the Moon,’ someone said.

  They removed the child and carried him back to the camp. They sat him in the centre of an admiring throng as they stared and stared at his impossibly fair skin and blue-green eyes. Then a miracle occurred: in the warmth of the evening first one, then another, then another curl whitened and sprang back until his face was, once again, framed by silvery white curls. ‘He is a child of the Moon,’ one of them whispered in awe.

  This explanation pleased them all; they distrusted the white man. Once upon a time, in the days when things were different, all the San and all the white men, as well as all the sheep and cattle and goats, lived together. But the white men and the San argued over who should own the livestock. So the white men said, ‘Let us have a tug-of-war to settle this matter,’ and provided a rope. The rope broke with most of it remaining in the Bushmen’s hands. ‘You have the rope,’ said the white men. ‘Use it to trap the steenbok and the duiker while your women gather other food. We will keep the livestock.’ This story, like all their stories, had been handed down through the generations. The little beetle was more palatable as a child of the Moon. For although the San have a great love of children, and often lamented that the Great God gives them so few, he was still a white man i
n the making.

  Suddenly the child yawned and Be sprang up. ‘He must eat with us,’ she commanded. Her cooking pot was bubbling on the fire. Their meal this night was a mixture of tubers and tortoise meat, thickened with a paste of ground mongongo nut.

  Visits by members of the camp to the cooking fires of others was a common enough occurrence. Hospitality was the key word. Children particularly were invited to try the food of others and no good wife would prepare a meal which could not cater for visitors. But the arrival of the white baby had the entire clan at Be’s cooking fire so she built it up and the women were sent scurrying away to bring their own meal to join hers. Everyone wanted to gaze at the little !ebili and touch his hair in reverence.

  If the young child thought the meal and the attention of everyone strange, his appetite was not affected and he tucked into it with the same gusto as the clan members, using his fingers as though he had been born to eating this way. Almost immediately he finished, he burped loudly, piddled where he sat, watching with natural enjoyment as his urine sank into the warm sand. Then, crawling over to Be, he curled up against her and fell fast asleep, seeming to sense she was the comfort figure, despite her strange appearance.

  ‘What are we to do with this little beetle?’ Be asked, touching the fair head gently which rested on her thigh.

  ‘We will take him to his people,’ !Ka answered. ‘I hope we can track his steps tomorrow.’

  ‘How could they have lost him?’ she wondered, derision and disbelief clear by her tone. This child, with his silver head, infectious laugh and obvious courage had touched her heart. Maternal instincts had already stirred in her and she admired the boy and wanted to protect him. She wondered again how his people could have been so careless as to lose him.

  ‘We may never know,’ !Ka said sternly although, like Be, he wondered how the child came to be wandering in the vast Kalahari on his own. ‘But we cannot keep him, there would be much trouble for us if we tried.’

  !Ka and his clan spent the next three hours enjoying a spirited debate as to how the boy became lost, and how best to return him to his own people. Wild speculations, laced with superstitious fear of the white race and the Bushmen’s own belief in the magic of the moon, spoken in their strange clicking language, were put forward, rejected, enlarged on, argued about and laughed over.

  A pale sickle moon sailed lazily on its back above them and the clan fell silent, staring upwards at the shoe which the Mantis had thrown into the sky so he could have light. ‘Does he search for his son?’ !Ka wondered aloud, watching the silvery sliver.

  !Oma expressed the worry of them all. ‘If he thinks we have stolen his son he will not send us rain.’

  ‘Do not be foolish,’ another said. ‘This boy is of the earth. I have seen others with hair like his.’

  ‘Perhaps he was stolen by the Hare,’ one of them suggested.

  Diverted, the clan asked !Ka to tell them the story of the Moon and the Hare and, although they knew the story by heart, they listened avidly as !Ka, a gifted and favourite storyteller, related the tale of the origin of death.

  ‘A very long time ago, before we were born, before our fathers were born, the Moon and the Hare were having an argument,’ !Ka began. He rose, sucking on his pipe and then, holding out his arms to resemble the curve of a new moon he played the part of the new moon, and continued in a high and tremulous voice. ‘When a person dies, as I die every night, that person is reborn. Just as I come back the next night, so do men come back. All men die and return, die and return,’ he said, flopping and straightening, flopping and straightening to match his words. He inhaled more smoke with quiet contentment.

  ‘Tell us what the Hare said,’ a listener implored, although he knew the story as well as !Ka.

  !Ka, by wrinkling his nose, baring his teeth and lowering his voice, became the Hare. ‘I . . .’ !Ka gave a hearty laugh, ‘. . . laughed at the Moon. “Dead people rot and smell,” I said to him. “They do not return.”’

  !Ka began circling, his hands turned into claws. ‘The Moon and I argued and fought all night and all the next day.’ !Ka shot out his hand. Several men jumped in fright. ‘I scratched the face of the Moon with my nails. Now he carries my black marks for all to see our fight.’

  ‘Tell us what the Moon did!’ the same listener begged, hanging onto every word.

  !Ka became the Moon. ‘I took a shoe,’ he said, bending and picking an imaginary shoe from the ground. He lunged forward. ‘And I split the lip of the Hare with the shoe. To this day the Hare’s lip is split in two.’

  !Ka sat down again and his voice returned to normal. ‘These are the signs of their quarrel. The argument was won by neither. Since then, men have died and not returned.’ Heads nodded in satisfied agreement. The spirits of the dead lived in the eastern sky with the Great God. Sometimes they turned into bad spirits. It was comforting to know, however, that they would not return as bad men.

  ‘This child . . .’ !Ka said, ‘. . . has been sent to test us. We must return him. It is true he has been touched by the Moon but he is of men and to men he must be returned.’

  ‘How?’ !Oma asked. ‘We do not know where he is from.’

  ‘The Great God will show us the way.’

  The clan then reminisced on past signs sent to them by the Great God and while the conversation ebbed and flowed around him, the child slumbered peacefully against Be, his small pudgy hand still clutching the large diamond, his dreams spinning with shining light images of brilliant reds, shimmering greens and incandescent blues.

  !Ka had intended to leave at first light with the child. An excellent tracker, he knew he would have no difficulty in tracing the boy’s steps and hoped to return him to his people quickly. But the message of the ants and beetles in the sand, warning of a change in the weather, came true more quickly than expected. During the night, wind whipped up a vicious sandstorm which raged all the next day, leaving the San helplessly pinned down in their lightweight huts. Dust-devils, restless spirits of those who had taken their own lives, spun across their dancing ground ensuring no-one would venture into that raging, stinging maelstrom.

  The sandstorm broke around five in the afternoon, only to be followed by a heavy downpour of violent Male Rain which came to the Kalahari only once every few years and had the sands running in gushing rivulets and the men shouting abuse through the open doors of their huts so the Male Rain would see they were not frightened. When the rain finally stopped all hopes of tracking the child’s footsteps were lost. Nature had wiped the sandy landscape clean. Be was delighted and began to think the baby had been sent by the Mantis for her to keep.

  After the stinging, suffocating sandstorm and the clinging stickiness which followed the rain, the clan went down to their waterhole. Childlike, they all frolicked in the water, the white baby receiving a great deal of attention from everyone, his infectious laughter rising and falling with the delighted shrieks of the San who were always ready to laugh and play games. It was then Be noticed the boy’s birthmark—a small, brown half-melon shape on his left buttock. ‘The child has the mark of the Moon on his body,’ she said, plucking worriedly at the strands of hair on his head, trying to tease back the silver curls which she was convinced had washed away for good this time.

  ‘Do not look for signs that are not there.’ !Ka could see his wife was becoming too attached to the child.

  ‘You will not be able to find his people now,’ she replied happily.

  ‘I will find them,’ he said, ‘it will just take longer.’

  The baby toddled over to them, still holding the diamond. ‘Da.’ He showed it to Be. They were used to this by now and instead of trying to take the stone she simply leaned over and admired it. ‘Da,’ she replied. He beamed at her.

  ‘He is very fond of that stone,’ !Oma’s wife told Be. ‘He will lose it if we don’t do something.’

  ‘He has already dropped it many times,’ Be agreed.

  ‘I have the very thing,’ !Oma’s wife sai
d. ‘I made it for your husband.’

  !Ka heard. ‘Then I give it to my wife.’

  ‘Then I in turn give it to the child,’ Be said, delighted that their gift-giving tradition had found the answer.

  It was a small pouch, made from the skin of a springbok’s scrotum, threaded at the opening with sinew which acted as a drawstring. The pouch was designed to carry the flea-beetle pupa with which the San made their hunting poison. It was perfect for the diamond.

  ‘Da,’ Be said to the boy, holding out the pouch.

  He looked at her, uncomprehending.

  She reached out and took the diamond between thumb and forefinger, holding it in such a way so he knew she was not taking it from him. After dropping the stone into the pouch she drew it shut and placed the drawstring over his head. The child shook his head vigorously. Be gently removed the drawstring, opened the pouch and showed him the diamond. The boy smiled and those watching laughed, relieved he approved. Then, with an avid audience, the boy amused himself for a long time, opening and shutting the pouch, pulling the drawstring over his head, taking it off again and reassuring himself constantly that the beautiful shining stone was still here. He fell asleep against Be that night with the drawstring wrapped around his hand.

  ‘Why does he like it so?’ Be wondered aloud.

  ‘He is white. They are different from us,’ !Ka replied. It was the only explanation he could think of.

  That night the men spontaneously initiated a dance. The women clapped and sang songs about the giraffe, the elephant and the mamba snake, strong medicine songs which would empower !Ka and !Oma to find the baby’s own people. Despite Be’s longing to keep the small white child, despite clear signs the boy had been touched by the Moon, they all knew in their hearts he had come from somewhere and belonged to someone and every effort had to be made to return him to his family.

  After the dance, and to be sure that returning the little beetle was what the Great God wanted, !Ka threw his divining tablets, watched avidly by the rest of the clan. He took five discs from his hunting bag and touched each of the thick animal hide tablets in turn, naming them.