The covenant - James A. Michener [26]
It was an able group that had moved south in this black migration: skilled artisans knew the secrets of smelting copper and making fine tools and weapons tipped with iron. In certain villages women wove cloth, sometimes intermixing threads of copper. And every family owned earthenware pots designed and crafted by clever women and fired in kilns in the ground.
Their language bore no resemblance to that of the small people. A few tribes, moving south along the shores of the eastern ocean, would pick up the click sounds, but Nxumalo's people had acquired none. Their speech was pure, with an extensive vocabulary capable of expressing abstract thought and a lively aptitude for tribal remembrance.
Two special attributes set these tribes ahead of any predecessors: they had developed sophisticated systems of government, in which a chief provided civil rule and a spirit-medium religious guidance; and they had mastered their environment, so that cattle herding, agriculture and the establishment of permanent villages became practical. And there was one more significant addition: over the vast area trade flourished, so that communities could socialize; Chief Ngalo's people could easily import iron ingots from the great mines at Phalaborwa, one hundred and seventy miles away, and then send fabricated spearheads to villages that lay two hundred miles southwest, beyond the Ridge-of-White-Waters.
In other words, when Nxumalo set forth to find the rhinoceros horns that would carry him to Zimbabwe, he was the inheritor of a substantial culture, which he intended, even at his early age, to augment and protect. He knew that when his father died, his older brother would inherit the chieftainship, at which time he himself would take a wife and move farther west to establish a frontier village of his own, and this prospect pleased him. His impending excursion to Zimbabwe was an exploration, not a removal.
On the sixth day of their march, after passing great herds of buffalo and wildebeest, Nxumalo told his companions, 'There must be rhinos among those trees,' but when they reached the area where the savanna gave way to real forest, they found nothing, and an older man suggested, 'I've never seen rhinos where the trees were so many,' and he pointed back toward the sparser savanna.
Nxumalo was about to rebuke the man, for he had once been with hunters who had found their rhino in heavy woods, but he restrained himself and asked, 'You found rhinos back there?'
'We did.'
'Then let's look there.' And when they did, they saw unmistakable signs of the mighty beast. But these blacks were not Bushmen, and the mastery the brown people had shown in tracking animals was little known; it was obvious that rhinos had been here, but where they had gone, the hunters could not determine. They hunted, therefore, in a hit-or-miss way, moving about in large circles and with such noise that a Bushman would have been shocked. But they were fortunate, and in time they came upon a black, pointed-snout rhino with two massive horns, one behind the other.
Killing so formidable a beast required both skill and courage. The former would be contributed by the six huntsmen with iron-tipped spears, the latter by Nxumalo as leader of the expedition. Placing his men along the route he intended the animal to follow, he moved quietly into position somewhat ahead of the beast, leaped suddenly from the grass and exposed himself to the startled animal, which, with instant impulse to destroy, lunged madly at the boy like some enormous juggernaut launched upon an undeviating course.
Horns low to impale, little legs pumping, snout ablaze and throat uttering deep growls, the rhinoceros charged with enormous power, while the boy ran backward with beautiful deftness. It was a moment no hunter could forget,