Percy Fitzpatrick - Jock of the Bushveld

That is Rocky, as remembered now! A bit idealised? Perhaps so: but who can say! In truth he had his sides and the defects of his qualities, like every one else; and it was not every one who made a hero of him. Many left him respectfully alone; and something of their feeling came to me the first time I was with him, when a stupid chatterer talked and asked too much. He was not surly or taciturn, but I felt frozen through by a calm deadly unresponsiveness which anything with blood and brain should have shrunk under. The dull monotone, the ominous drawl, the steady something in his clear calm eyes which I cannot define, gave an almost corrosive effect to innocent words and a voice of lazy gentleness.

“What’s the best thing to do following up a wounded buffalo?” was the question. The questions sprung briskly, as only a ‘yapper’ puts them; and the answers came like reluctant drops from a filter. “Git out!”

“Yes, but if there isn’t time?”

“Say yer prayers!”

“No – seriously – what is the best way of tackling one?”

“Ef yer wawnt to know, thar’s only one way: Keep cool and shoot straight!”

“Oh! of course — if you can ?”

“An’ ef you can’t,” he added in fool-killer tones, “best stay right home!”

Rocky had no fancy notions: he hunted for meat and got it as soon as possible; he was seldom out long, and rarely indeed came back empty-handed. I had already learnt not to be too ready with questions. It was better, so Rocky put it, “to keep yer eyes open and yer mouth shut”; but the results at first hardly seemed to justify the process. At the end of a week of failures and disappointments all I knew was that I knew nothing – a very notable advance it is true, but one quite difficult to appreciate! Thus it came to me in the light of a distinction when one evening, after a rueful confession of blundering made to the party in general, Rocky passed a brief but not unfriendly glance over me and said, “On’y the born fools stays fools. You’ll git ter learn bymbye; you ain’t always yappin’!”

It was not an extravagant compliment; but failure and helplessness act on conceit like water on a starched collar: mine was limp by that time, and I was grateful for little things – most grateful when next morning, as we were discussing our several ways, he turned to me and asked gently, “Comin’ along, Boy?”

Surprise and gratitude must have produced a touch of effusiveness which jarred on him; for, to the eager exclamation and thanks, he made no answer – just moved on, leaving me to follow. In his scheme of life there was ‘no call to slop over.’

There was a quiet unhesitating sureness and a definiteness of purpose about old Rocky’s movements which immediately inspired confidence. We had not been gone many minutes before I began to have visions of exciting chases and glorious endings, and as we walked silently along they took possession of me so completely that I failed to notice the difference between his methods and mine. Presently, brimful of excitement and hope, I asked cheerily what he thought we would get. The old man stopped and with a gentle graveness of look and a voice from which all trace of tartness or sarcasm was banished, said, “See, Sonny! If you been useter goin’ round like a dawg with a tin it ain’t any wonder you seen nothin’. You got ter walk soft an’ keep yer head shut!”

In reply to my apology he said that there was “no bell an’ curtain in this yere play; you got ter be thar waitin’.”

Rocky knew better than I did the extent of his good nature; he knew that in all probability it meant a wasted day; for, with the best will in the world, the beginner is almost certain to spoil sport. It looks so simple and easy when you have only read about it or heard others talk; but there are pitfalls at every step. When, in what seemed to me perfectly still air, Rocky took a pinch of dust and let it drop, and afterwards wet one finger and held it up to feel which side cooled, it was not difficult to know that he was trying the wind; but when he changed direction suddenly for no apparent reason, or when he stopped and, after a glance at the ground, slackened his frame, lost all interest in sport, wind and surroundings, and addressed a remark to me in ordinary tones, I was hopelessly at sea. His manner showed that some possibility was disposed of and some idea abandoned. Once he said “Rietbuck! Heard us I reckon,” and then turned off at a right-angle; but a little later on he pointed to other spoor and, indifferently dropping the one word ‘Koodoo,’ continued straight on. To me the two spoors seemed equally fresh; he saw hours’ – perhaps a whole day’s – difference between them. That the rietbuck, scared by us, had gone ahead and was keenly on the watch for us and therefore not worth following, and that the koodoo was on the move and had simply struck across our line and was therefore not to be overtaken, were conclusions he drew without hesitation. I only saw spoor and began to palpitate with thoughts of bagging a koodoo bull.

We had been out perhaps an hour, and by unceasing watchfulness I had learnt many things: they were about as well learnt and as useful as a sentence in a foreign tongue got off by heart; but to me they seemed the essentials and the fundamentals of hunting. I was feeling very pleased with myself and confident of the result; the stumbling over stones and stumps had ceased; and there was no more catching in thorns, crunching on bare gritty places, clinking on rocks, or crackling of dry twigs; and as we moved on in silence the visions of koodoo and other big game became very real. There was nothing to hinder them: to do as Rocky did had become mechanically easy; a glance in his direction every now and then was enough; there was time and temptation to look about and still perhaps to be the first to spot the game.

It was after taking one such casual glance around that I suddenly missed Rocky: a moment later I saw him moving forward, fast but silently, under cover of an ant-heap – stooping low and signing to me with one hand behind his back. With a horrible feeling of having failed him I made a hurried step sideways to get into line behind him and the ant-heap, and I stepped right on to a pile of dry crackly sticks. Rocky stood up quietly and waited, while I wished the earth would open and swallow me. When I got up abreast he half turned and looked me over with eyes slightly narrowed and a faint but ominous smile on one side of his mouth, and drawled out gently:

“You’d oughter brought some fire crackers!” If only he had sworn at me it would have been endurable.

We moved on again and this time I had eyes for nothing but Rocky’s back, and where to put my foot next. It was not very long before he checked in mid-stride and I stood rigid as a pointer. Peering intently over his shoulder in the direction in which he looked I could see nothing. The bush was very open, and yet, even with his raised rifle to guide me, I could not for the life of me see what he was aiming at. Then the shot rang out, and a duiker toppled over kicking in the grass not a hundred yards away.

The remembrance of certain things still makes me feel uncomfortable; the yell of delight I let out as the buck fell; the wild dash forward, which died away to a dead stop as I realised that Rocky himself had not moved; the sight of him, as I looked back, calmly reloading; and the silence. To me it was an event: to him, his work. But these things were forgotten then – lost behind the everlasting puzzle, How was it possible I had not seen the buck until it fell? Rocky must have known what was worrying me, for, after we had picked up the buck, he remarked without any preliminary, “It ain’t easy in this bush ter pick up what don’t move; an’ it ain’t hardly possible ter find what ye don’t know!”