The covenant - James A. Michener [6]
Night fell, and a woman responsible for tending the fire placed her branches with delicate attention, enough wood to produce a flare to warn away predators, not too much to waste fuel. The swift, sure blackness of the savanna lowered upon the camp, and the twenty-five little brown people curled up under their antelope cloaks, their hips nestled in the little hollows. Two hyenas, always on the prowl, uttered their maniacal laughs at the edge of darkness, then moved on to some less-guarded spot. A lion roared in the distance and then another, and Gumsto, planning his exodus, thought not of these great beasts but of Naoka, sleeping alone not a dozen lengths away.
His plan had two parts: ignore old Kharu's bleating but involve her always more deeply in the exodus so that she would have no alternative but to support it; and lead his hunters on the trail of that rhinoceros for one last meal. In some ways it was easier to handle the rhinoceros than Kharu, for at dawn she had six new objections, delivered in a whining voice, but despite her irritating manner her cautions were, as Gumsto had to concede, substantial.
'Where will we find ostriches, tell me that,' she railed. 'And where can we find enough beetles?'
Glaring at her ugly face, Gumsto showed the love and respect he felt
for this old companion. Chucking her on the cheek, he said, 'It's your task to find the ostriches and the beetles. You always do.' And he was off to muster his men.
Each hunter reported naked, except for a quiver of slender arrows, a bow, and a meager loincloth to which could be attached a precious receptacle in which he kept his lethal arrow tipsbut only when the rhinoceros was sighted. Few hunters have ever sallied forth with such equipment to do battle with so monstrous a beast.
'From the next rise we may see him,' Gumsto reassured his men, but when he followed the spoor up the hill, they saw nothing. For two days, eating mere scraps and drinking almost no water, they pressed eastward, and then on the third day, as Gumsto felt certain they must, they saw far in the distance the dark and menacing form of the rhino.
The men sucked in their breath with pleasure and fear as Gumsto sat on his heels to study the characteristics of their enemy: 'He favors his left foreleg. See, he moves it carefully to avoid pressure. He stops to rest it. Now he runs to test it. He slows again. We shall attack from that corner.'
On the next day the little hunters overtook the rhino, and Gumsto was right: the huge animal did favor his left front leg.
Deftly he positioned his men so that no matter where the beast turned, someone would have a reasonable target, and when all were ready he signaled for them to prepare their arrows, and now a cultural miracle took place, for over the centuries the clan had developed a weapon of extraordinary complexity and effectiveness. Their arrow was like no other; it consisted of three separate but interlocking parts. The first was a slight shaft, slotted at one end to fit the bowstring. The secret of the arrow was the second part, an extremely delicate shaft, fitted at each end with a collar of sinew which could be tightened. Into one collar slipped the larger shaft; into the other went a small ostrich bone, very sharp and highly polished, onto which old Kharu's deadly poison had been smeared.
When assembled, the arrow was so frail that of itself it could scarcely have killed a small bird, yet so cleverly engineered that if properly used, it could cause the death of an elephant. It represented a triumph of human ingenuity; any being who had the intellect to devise this arrow could in time contrive ways to build a skyscraper or an airplane.
When the final tip was in placehandled with extreme care, for if it accidentally scratched