The elephant meat proved tough and strong-tasting. Tshingana ate his fill anyhow, as much for the novelty of it as for any other reason. He also drank a couple of pots of beer, which left him yawning even before the evening twilight was gone from the sky.
His mother Nandi was already snoring on her grass mat when he got down on all fours and crawled into the hut they shared. As soon as he closed the low door behind him, the hearthfire made the hut start to fill up with smoke. His eyes watered as he got his own sleeping-mat down from where it hung on the wall. He lay down.
The air was a little fresher near the ground, but smelled of the cow dung that had been pounded into the dirt to make a smooth floor. To Tshingana, it was part of the smell of home. Aided by the beer he’d drunk, he drifted toward sleep.
Cockroaches scuttled through the straw of the hut’s walls, darted across the floor. One scurried over Tshingana’s leg. He was snoring himself by then, and never noticed.
The moso wandered away from the kraal, following the elephants on which it preyed. The brief notoriety that had accrued to Tshingana for first spying the beast slowly faded as newer matters caught the fancy of his clan.
Among those newer matters, to Tshingana’s mortification, was his half-brother Sigwebana’s coming of age. The two of them had been born about the same time; Tshingana had always assumed he would reach puberty first. But one night Sigwebana woke with his belly wet-manhood had come to him, while Tshingana remained a boy.
Sigwebana was revoltingly smug about the whole thing, too, which only made it worse. Tshingana vowed revenge, and got it. When a boy became a man among the baTlokwa, as among other nearby Bantu tribes, one morning he drove his kraal’s cattle far out into the grassland, trying to hide them from everyone. The longer he succeeded, the greater the success expected from him in the future.
Tshingana stalked Sigwebana like a lion going after a gnu. It was not even noon when he found his half-brother and the cattle in a drift-a wash with a trickle of stream in the bottom- surprisingly close to the kraal.
He stood at the top of the drift, yelling and jeering, drawing boys and men to Sigwebana. Sigwebana wept and cursed and looked as though he wanted to throw his new man-sized assegai at Tshingana.
That evening, back at the kraal, his father took him aside. "You did well-maybe too well," Shamagwava said. "No one likes to be humiliated… and Sigwebana is my son too."
"He shouldn’t have boasted so much," Tshingana said sullenly. He knew he ought to feel guilty, but could not manage it.
"I suppose not." Shamagwava sighed, "How do you imagine he will act, though, when your turn to hide the herd comes?"
Tshingana’s lips skinned back from his teeth. "I hadn’t thought about that," he said in a small voice.
"Maybe you should have," his father said. "Be sure Sigwebana will think of little else. I cannot even say I altogether blame him for it."
For the next few weeks, the problem of what Sigwebana would do remained only a worry at the back of Tshingana’s mind. But then he awoke one night from a dream of confused but overwhelming sweetness, to discover that his seed had jetted forth for the first time. By the usages of the baTlokwa, he was a man.
He watched Sigwebana as he told Shamagwava he had spent himself in the night. His father pounded his back, almost knocking him down, and roared out the traditional bawdy congratulations. His half-brother, though, looked at him like a leopard studying an antelope from a thorn tree.
Shamagwava gave Tshingana a man’s assegai, a weapon a foot taller than he was. "Tomorrow the cattle are yours, my son-for as long as you can keep them," he said. His eyes slipped to Sigwebana, who was, after all, also his son.
Knowing how his half-brother would go after him, Tshingana had no great hope of keeping the clan’s herd undiscovered for very long. Staying on the loose till mid-afternoon would be fine. Anything better than Sigwebana had done would be fine.
Even if he thought he’d be quickly caught, Tshingana did not intend to make things easy for Sigwebana-or for the rest of the clan. He crawled out of his mother’s hut just past midnight, a good deal earlier than it was customary for herdboys-turned-men to head off to hide the kraal’s cattle.
The cattle were convinced it was too early. They lowed in sleepy protest as Tshingana moved aside the heavy poles that barred their pen. "Shut up!" he hissed. He knew Sigwebana would be up soon no matter what he did; he did not want the beasts rousing his half-brother all the earlier. That kept him from whacking them into motion with the shaft of the assegai, as he would have done otherwise. Instead, he gently coaxed them out of the pen and away.
Luckily the moon was only a couple of days past full. By its light Tshingana managed a fair pace, not what he could have done in daylight but much better than the crawl he would have had to use in real darkness.
As best he could and for as long as he could, he kept the herd to the same path it used going out to its usual grazing grounds. If fortune smiled, the tracks the cattle were making tonight would be hard to pick out from the thousands of other hoofprints, some fresh as yesterday, that pocked the grass.
The kraal was invisible by the time the eastern horizon lightened toward day. Tshingana danced a few steps-he’d come farther than he’d dared hope. In a while, he could start thinking about where to abandon the usual track and strike out for a proper hiding place.
Motion behind him, highlighted by the morning sun, made him whirl-was that, could that be, his pursuers already? Would he be laughed at for the rest of his life? But Tshingana’s clansmen were not coming up; instead he saw a large herd of elephants ambling along, each immense’ beast now and then pausing to pull up a bush or clump of grass with its trunk and stuff the food into its mouth.
Where Tshingana had danced before, he sang now. If he could keep his herd headed in the direction the elephants were going, their huge feet would erase the tracks of the cattle. The men and boys from the kraal might never catch up to him! What sort of triumph would be foretold by his triumphant return home after they all gave up?
He shouted to the cattle, smacked a couple with his assegai. They had to move quickly now, to stay ahead of the elephants, and move in a tighter body than usual, too, so no stragglers’ hoofprints would let his pursuers pick up the trail.
The cattle complained, but they were used to obeying herdboys. They would do what Tshingana wanted, at least for a while. The elephants were faster than they were, so eventually he would have to get out of the way. But not yet, he thought. Not yet.
Tshingana sang louder. Things were going better than he had ever dared hope. Even the elephants were cooperating, walking a fairly straight path that was easy to anticipate. They would hide the herd as a witch-doctor’s mask hid his face while he was smelling out an umThakathi.
Just as Tshingana was starting to feel like a great chief (or as he imagined a great chief might feel), everything came apart at once. The elephants were about a quarter of a mile behind the cattle when Tshingana heard a low, rumbling roar that jabbed twin spears of ice into the small of his back.
The elephants’ trunks went straight up into the air; their great fanlike ears stood away from their bodies. First one, then another, trumpeted the high shrill cry that meant danger.
The moso roared again. Tshingana partly heard that roar, partly felt it with some ancient part of his body that seemed specially made for knowing terror. He remembered what Uhamu and Ndogeni had said about the moso’s roar. He had thought they were exaggerating. He thought so no longer. The moso’s roar made him afraid, in the most bowel-loosening literal sense of the word.