The covenant - James A. Michener [207]
Now he talked with the animal more than ever, as if the hyena's return laid bare his need for companionship; Swarts, for his part, kept closer to his master, as if after tasting the freedom of the wild, he realized that partnership with a human being could have its rewards, too.
Down the long plains they came. 'It must be over this way, Swarts,' Adriaan said, looking at the last line of hills that rose from the veld. 'The farm is probably down there, and when you meet Seena you two are going to have fun. She's red-headed and she'll throw things at you if you don't look out, but you'll like her and I know she'll like you.' He was not at all sure how Seena would take to sharing her hut with a hyena, but he kept assuring Swarts that it would be all right.
But the hyena's recent experience in the wild had revived animal habits, and one evening after Adriaan shot a gemsbok, a beautiful creature with white-masked face and imperial horns, a lioness thought it safe to move in and command the kill, whereupon Swarts leaped at her, receiving a horrible slash of claw across his neck and face.
When Adriaan, screaming at the lioness, reached his companion, Swarts was dying. Nothing that the man might do could save the beast; his prayers were meaningless, his attempts to stanch the blood fruitless. The great jaws moved in spasms and the eyes looked for the last time at the person who had been such a trusted friend.
'Swarts!' Adriaan shouted, but to no avail. The hyena shuddered, gasped for air, got only blood, and died.
'Oh, Swarts!' Adriaan moaned repeatedly through the night, keeping the misshapen body near him. In the morning he placed it out in the open where the vultures could attend it, and after an anguished farewell to a constant friend he resumed his journey south.
Now he was truly alone. Almost everything he had had with him at the start of his exploration was gone: ammunition, horses and oxen lost to the tsetse fly, the wagon, the trusted Hottentot, his shoes, most of his clothing. He was coming home bereft of everything, even his hyena, and his memories of the grandeurs he had seen were scarred by the losses he had sustained. Most of all he mourned for Swarts; Dikkop, after all, had lived his life, but the hyena was only beginning his, a creature torn between the open veld and the settled farm that was to have been his home.
As he slogged his way south Adriaan began to feel his age, the weight of time, and idly he calculated the farms he had used up, the endless chain of animals he had bred and passed along, the huts he had lived in and never a house: 'Swarts, I'm fifty-seven years old and never lived in a house with real walls.' Then he braced his shoulders, crying even louder, 'And by God, Swarts, I don't want to live in one.'
He came down off the great central highland of Africanot defeated, but certainly not victorious. He could still walk many miles a day, but he did so more slowly, the dust of far places in his nostrils. From time to time he shouted into space, addressing only Swarts, for now he was truly Mai Adriaan, the crazy man of the veld who conversed with dead hyenas, but on he went, a few miles a day, always looking for the trail he had lost.
When he broke through the mountains into unfamiliar terrain he calculated correctly that he must be a fair distance east of his farm, and he was about to turn westward to find it when he said, 'Swarts! If they had any sense, they'd have moved to better land over there.' And like earlier members of his family, he headed east.
But when he reached the territory that ought to have contained the new farm, he found nothing, so he was faced with the problem of plunging blindly ahead into unknown territory or turning back, and after long consultation with Swarts he decided on the former: 'Stands to reason, Swarts, they'd be wanting better pastures.'
At the farthest edge of where he could