The covenant - James A. Michener [9]
Disdainfully the girl waved her right arm, indicating the bleak settlement: 'And where do you expect to find me a husband?'
'My son Gao needs a wife.'
'Has he spoken to Kusha? She has a baby daughter.'
'I wasn't really thinking of Kusha ... or her daughter.'
'No?' the girl asked softly, smiling at Gumsto in a way to make him dizzy.
'I've been thinking of you,' Kharu said, adding quickly, 'Now if you married Gao . . .'
'Me?' the girl said in what seemed astonishment. Appealing to Gumsto, she added, 'I'd never be the proper wife for Gao, would I?'
'And why not?' Kharu demanded, rising.
'Because I'm like you, Kharu,' the girl said quietly. 'The daughter of a great hunter. And I was the wife of a hunter, not quite as good as Gumsto.' She flashed a look of power at the little man, then added, 'I could never marry Gao. A man who has not yet killed his eland.'
For this terrible dismissal she had chosen a freighted word: eland. The clan coexisted with the antelope, finding in them their physical and spiritual needs. They divided the breed into some twenty categories, each its own distinguished unit with its own terrain and individual habits. Any hunter ignorant of the variations of the antelope was ignorant of life.
There were the elegant little klipspringers, not much larger than a big bird; the small impala with black stripes marking their rumps; and the graceful springbok that could leap as if they had wings. There were the duiker, red and short-horned, and a universe of middle-sized animals: steen-bok, gemsbok, blesbok and bushbuck, each with a different type of horn, each with its distinctive coloring.
These prolific animals of the middle range the hunters stalked incessantly; they provided much food. But there were four larger antelope that fascinated the little men, for one of these animals would feed a clan: the bearded wildebeest that trampled the savanna in their millions; the lyre-horned nyala; the huge kudu with its wildly twisting horns and white stripes; and rarest of all, the glorious sable with its enormous back-curved horns, so enchanting that hunters sometimes stood transfixed when they chanced to see one. Beast of beauty, animal of wonder, the sable appeared only rarely, as an apparition, and men at their campfires would often recall where and when they had seen their first. Not often was a sable killed, for the gods had given them perceptiveness beyond normal; they kept to the darker groves and rarely appeared at exposed watering holes.
That left the animal which the hunters treasured above all others: the giant eland, taller than a man, a remarkable beast with horns that twisted three or four times from forehead to tip, a tuft of black hair between the horns, a massive dewlap, and a distinctive white stripe separating forequarters from the bulk of the body. To the hunters this stately animal provided food to the body, courage to the heart and meaning to the soul. An eland was walking proof that gods existed, for who else could have contrived such a perfect animal? It gave structure to San life, for to catch it men had to be clever and well organized. It served also as spiritual summary to a people lacking cathedrals and choirs; its movements epitomized the universe and formed a measuring rod for human behavior. The eland was not seen as a god, but rather as proof that gods existed, and when, after the hunt, the meat of its body was apportioned, all who ate shared its quintessence, a belief in no way unusual; thousands of years after the death of Gumsto, other religions would arise in which the ritual of eating of a god's body would confer benediction.
So Naoka, faithful to the traditions of her people, could laugh at old Kharu and reject the idea of a marriage with Gao: 'Let him prove himself. Let him kill his eland.'
It was now obvious to Kharu that unless she made it possible for her son Gao to qualify as a hunter, and thus marry Naoka, that young woman was going to steal Gumsto, who showed himself pathetically eager for the theft. It became advisable for the old woman to