"How do you know so much about moso?" Mafunzi asked. "You’ve never seen one. Nobody in our iNtanga has ever seen one, or in the group older than we are, either. Nobody except Tshingana, I mean." He grinned at his friend.
"I don’t think he saw one either," Inyangesa said.
Tshingana wanted to hit him too, but he’d just had one fight and was pretty sure Inyangesa could beat him. All he said was "See for yourself. Take Sigwebana with you."
"We’ll both come after you if you’re lying," Inyangesa warned him. "By the acacias, you said?" He started trotting toward them. After a moment, Sigwebana followed.
"What will you do if they don’t find it?" Mafunzi asked.
"So you don’t really believe me either, do you?" Tshingana said bitterly. "It was there. They’ll see it."
He and Mafunzi walked along, following the cattle and occasionally yelling and waving their arms to keep the beasts together. The herd was not a chief’s fancy one, with all the cows the same color, but, Tshingana thought, that only mattered to chiefs-the milk was just as sweet either way.
Inyangesa and Sigwebana were gone so long, Tshingana began to worry. They might have been too small for the moso to care about, but more than a moso had been by the acacia trees. Some of the predators there were of a size to find herdboy a fine meal.
No, here they came, Tshingana saw with relief. Not even Sigwebana deserved to be eaten by hunting dogs… he supposed. Certainly it would set the kraal in an uproar if he was. On the other hand, if he was going to call Tshingana a liar-
He wasn’t. He and Inyangesa were almost leaping out of their skins in excitement. "It’s there! It’s there!" they shouted, and Tshingana’s heart leaped too. He’d almost begun to doubt himself. He glanced over at Mafunzi. His friend had the grace to hang his head.
"Big as a-big as a-" Sigwebana seemed stuck for a comparison. Tshingana did not blame him. Only rhinos, hippos, and elephants were bigger than that moso. Tshingana’s half-brother went on, "A lion got too close to the elephant’s carcass, and the moso roared at it. It sounded just like thunder, but even more frightening. You should have seen that lion scramble backwards."
Inyangesa said, "I know it’s not noon yet, but I think we should bring the cattle back to the kraal early No one will be angry at us when we tell what we found."
"We?" Tshingana yelled in outrage. "Before you did not believe me, and now you want to take credit?" He balled his fists. He still did not want to fight Inyangesa, but it did not look as though he’d have much choice.
Then Mafunzi said, "For finding a moso, there is enough credit to go around." Inyangesa nodded. After a moment, so did Tshingana. Mafunzi was right.
The herdboys got the cattle turned round, though the beasts were inclined to balk at having routine broken. They moved so slowly and resentfully that it was nearly noon by the time the beehive huts and thorn fence of the kraal drew near.
Still, they were early enough to be noticed. Several of the women out hoeing in the millet fields around the kraal yelled at Tshingana and his companions. The yells turned to curses whenever the cattle tried to nibble the crops or stepped on the young plants nearest the track.
The commotion the women raised made the kraal’s men look up from what they were doing. "Too early to milk the beasts yet!" shouted Mafunzi’s father Ndogeni.
"But we saw-" Mafunzi began.
Shamagwava the smith shouted him down, as grown men shout down youths all over the world: "I don’t care what you saw. Go back out and see it again till the proper time." Shamagwava was father to Tshingana and Sigwebana, by different wives. He was as burly as his trade would suggest-not a man to argue with, not at any normal time.
This time was not normal. "Father, we saw a moso!" the two half-brothers yelled together. Sigwebana even smiled at Tshingana afterwards. After years of squabbling, they’d found something about which they could agree completely.
Dead silence for a moment, almost as unusual round the kraal as mention of the greatest cat. Then all the men were shouting at once, most of them in high excitement. But Shamagwava said, "If they’re making this up to keep from working…" As smith, he worked more steadily than the rest of the baTlokwa men, and had exaggerated notions about the value of labor.
Even as Shamagwava complained, though, Ndogeni asked, "Where did you see it?" The boys quickly told him. He got down on hands and knees to crawl into his hut. When he came out, he was carrying several assegais-throwing-spears as tall as he was, each with a span-long iron point- -and his oval cowhide shield. Several other men also armed themselves. "We will go look," Ndogeni declared. They trotted off toward the stand of acacias, which was hardly visible from the kraal.
"They can’t be thinking of hunting the moso!" Tshingana exclaimed. The assegais seemed flimsy as reeds to him, when set against the bulk and power of the elephant he had seen.
Shamagwava came out to him, set a hard hand on his shoulder. "If there is a moso, they will not hunt it," he said. "Why should they? Moso rarely trouble men or cattle. But they will drive the scavengers from the body of the elephant, so they can bring back fresh meat for us."
Tshingana’s mouth watered. It occurred to him that the men were scavengers of the moso too, no less than the vultures or hunting dogs. He did not care. Meat was meat. He had never tasted elephant before.
His father brought amaSi to him and Sigwebana. They ate the milk curds and waited for the men to return. Mafunzi and Inyangesa started milking some of the kraal’s cattle, but only halfheartedly. Their heads went up at every sound-they were waiting, too.
The cattle, impatient to get back to the scrub for the afternoon’s grazing, lowed and tossed their heads. The herdboys, though, did not want to take them out, and the few men left at the kraal did not insist. As much as anything, that showed Tshingana how remarkable the moso was.
The sun was heading down toward the western hills before the band of men finally reappeared. They moved slowly; as they drew closer, Tshingana saw that they were burdened with as much meat as they could carry. His stomach growled. He patted it, anticipating a feast.
The women working in the fields set down their hoes and digging-sticks and rushed out toward the returning men with glad cries: they saw the meat too. "Raise the fires high tonight!" Inyangesa shouted.
Shamagwava turned to him. "Since you had the idea, you can gather the wood." Inyangesa’s long, mobile face fell. Tshingana laughed as he sadly shambled off to start dragging in branches and dry grass. That was a mistake. "You can help," his father said.
Sigwebana was doubly foolish, for he had seen the fate of his companion and his half-brother but laughed anyhow. That drew Shamagwava’s attention to him. With three boys hauling fuel, soon the fires could have been made big enough to roast food for the whole baTlokwa impi- -big enough to cook for a regiment, not just the folk of this kraal.
Ndogeni, bent almost double under the great chunk of elephant meat on his back, set down his load with a sigh of relief. Flies descended on it in a buzzing cloud. Ndogeni took no notice of them. He walked over to Tshingana and spoke to him most seriously, as if he were a man and a warrior: "There was a moso, Tshingana. We saw it just as it was leaving the carcass, and heard it too."
Inyangesa’s father Uhamu, an even taller, thinner version of his son, shuddered as he lay down the meat he was carrying. "That roar is the deepest, most frightening sound I ever heard, a sound like the beginning of an earthquake. My bones turned to water; nothing could have made me draw close to it, even had I wished to."
Ndogeni nodded. "If you ask me, the moso is an umlhakathi- -a wizard-in the shape of a beast. It must be more than simply a big cat. A lion’s roar is savage, but it does not put that heart-freezing dread in a man."
Uhamu visibly gathered himself. "It is gone now, though, and we have this lovely meat it left behind. And I will drink millet-beer, and after I have drunk enough I will forget I was ever frightened in all my life. And for that, the headache I will have tomorrow will be a small price to pay."