The covenant - James A. Michener [212]
It was always this way when generations clashed: the best of the old found it easy to appreciate the merits of those among the new who displayed integrity. It was the second echelons, deficient in understanding and empathy, who caused the trouble, and now Lodevicus was prepared to do just that.
It was the second expedition against the Bushmen which demonstrated how stone-like he had become and how justly he merited the title Hammer. This time there had been no massive theft of cattle, only the constant spiriting away of a cow here, an ox there, but all farmers in the region were enraged with the little brown men, and when Lodevicus said, 'They're like vermin. Periodically they have to be exterminated,' they agreed, and once more a commando was sent north to cleanse the area.
On this expedition no rhinoceros was used as bait, and for good reason: there were now no herds of large animals in the region; most had been killed off or driven away. Rhinoceros, hippopotamus, lion, zebra, those glorious beasts who had roamed these hills had vanished before the horse and gun, and now these dreadful weapons were to be turned against the Bushmen.
What Lodevicus did was separate his commando into three groups operating like a vast pinwheel, riding in circles that tightened toward the center, and as the men rode they watched for little brown men who might be trapped within their circle. As the bewildered Bushmen ran this way and that in sad confusion, the horsemen picked them off, one by one. There was no mass slaughter of ninety, as before, but only the deadly attrition of knocking down running targetsuntil two hundred were slain.
Adriaan, remembering his friendship with the Bushmen, had spoken against the hunt, but he had been ignored. He was appalled at its inhumanity, and when one old man, hampered by a kind of belt he wore, stumbled about in confusion, Adriaan rode to rescue him, but Lodevicus swept in, lowered his rifle, and killed the man.
'What have you done?' Adriaan cried.
'We're clearing the land,' Vicus shouted from his horse.
'Damn you! Look at him!' And Adriaan dismounted to inspect the dead man's belt, and found it to be of rhinoceros hide imbedded with eight tips of eland horn. Holding the belt aloft, he cried, 'What is it, Vicus? Tell me, what is it?'
His son reined in his horse, rode back, and looked contemptuously at the leather. 'Seems like a belt.'
'Dip your finger into one of the horns,' and when he did, the ringer came out a deep-stained blue.
'What is it, Vicus?' And when his son said he didn't know, Adriaan cried in pain, 'They're the pots of an artist. Who paints the living veld on the roof of the cave. And you murdered him.' Looking up at his mounted son, he said with bitter scorn, 'Lodevicus the Hammer. I won't share my house with you one day longer.'
'It's my house,' Lodevicus said. 'I built it.'
Whereupon the old man cried in terrible rage, 'Read the Bible you prate about! It was Abraham's house as long as he lived. But you've tainted it . . . with red blood . . . and blue paint. And I'll have no more of it.'
Turning his back on his son, he mounted his horse, hurried over the hills, and shouted as he rode into De Kraal, 'Seena! Come on, old Redhead. Get yourself ready to leave this pitiful place.'
'Good!' she shouted back. 'Where do we go?'
'I'll find a place,' he assured her, and at sixty-five the old wanderers began scouting far lands to determine where they would build their own hut.
In 1778 the Hollanders who came to Cape Town to govern the colony, spending temporary terms in a land that confused them, gave honest proof of their desire to administer the area justly, for they devised a solution to frontier problems that was more humane and considerate than any being offered at this time by either the British or the French in their colonies. The governor himself trekked all the