The covenant - James A. Michener [10]
Like her husband, she was deeply worried about the safe continuance of her clan, and she saw that to protect it she must instruct other women in the collecting of poisons, but none had demonstrated any special skill. Clearly, Naoka was the one on whom the clan must depend in the future, and it was Kharu's job to induct her, regardless of the fear in which she held her.
'Come,' she muttered one morning, 'we must replenish the poison.' And the two women, so ill-matched and so suspicious of each other, set forth upon their search.
They walked nearly half a day toward the north, two women alone on the savanna with always the chance of encountering a lion or a rhinoceros, but driven by the necessity of finding that substance which alone would enable the band to survive. So far they had found nothing.
'What we're looking for is beetles,' old Kharu said as they searched the arid land, 'but only the ones with two white dots.' In fact, they were not looking for adult beetles, only for their larvae, and always of that special breed with the white specks and, Kharu claimed, an extra pair of legs.
It was impossible to explain how, over a period of more than ten thousand years, the women and their ancestors had isolated this little creature which alone among beetles was capable of producing a poison of remorseless virulence. How had such a discovery been made? No one remembered, it had occurred so very long ago. But when men can neither read nor write, when they have nothing external to distract their minds, they can spend their lives in minute observation, and if they have thousands of years in which to accumulate folk wisdom, it can become in time wisdom of a very high order. Such people discover plants which supply subtle drugs, and ores which yield metals, and signs in the sky directing the planting of crops, and laws governing the tides. Gumsto's San people had had time to study the larvae of a thousand different insects, finding at last the only one that produced a deadly poison. Old Kharu was the repository of this ancient lore, and now she was initiating young Naoka.
'There he is!' she cried, delighted at having tracked down her prey, and with Naoka at her side, watching attentively, she lay prone, her face a few inches from earth: 'Always look for the tiny marks he leaves. They point to his hiding place below.' And with her grubbing stick she dug out the harmless larva. Later, when it had been dried in the sun, pulverized and mixed with gummy substances obtained from shrubs, it would convert into one of the most venomous toxins mankind would discover, slow-acting but inevitably fatal.
'Now my son can kill his eland,' Kharu said, but Naoka smiled.
Only two tasks remained before the imperiled clan was free to embark upon its heroic journey: Gumsto must lead his men to kill a ritual eland to ensure survival; and his wife must seek out the ostriches. Gumsto attacked his problem first.
On the night before the hunt began, he sat by the fire and told his men, 'I have sometimes followed an eland for three days, hit him with my arrow, then tracked him for two more. And when I stood over his fallen body, beautiful and slain, tears sprang from my eyes, even though I had tasted no water for three days.'
The effect of this statement was ruined when Kharu growled, 'We're not interested in what you did. What are you going to do this time? To help your son kill his eland?' Gumsto, staring lasciviously at Naoka, ignored the question, and was profoundly excited when the girl winked at him, but on the hunt his desire to find an inheritor of his skills drove him to work with Gao as never before.
'In tracking, you notice everything, Gao. This touch here means that the animal leans slightly to the right.'
'Is it an eland?'
'No, but it is a large antelope. If we came upon it, we'd be satisfied.'
'But in your heart,' Gao said, 'you would want it to be an eland?'