Reincarnations

The cattle were not that far away. The other herdboys jeered and waved their fists at Tshingana as he approached. "Was the inside of your hut too dark to remind you it’s daytime?" asked the tallest of them, a ski

"More likely he stopped for ukuHlobonga with one of the girls," suggested Tshingana’s half-brother Sigwebana. Everyone laughed at that; Tshingana felt his face grow hot. Men and women did ukuHlobonga when they did not want to start children. None of the herdboys had yet spent seed even at night, though, so Sigwebana was just being rude. He was good at that, Tshingana thought.

"Where were you, Tshingana?" asked his best friend Mafunzi.

"I saw the vultures come down, so I went to see why," he answered.

"I didn’t see that," Sigwebana said.

"I did," Mafunzi said, "and over from the east, the direction Tshingana came from. What was it, Tshingana?"

"A moso killed an elephant, over by the acacias. I saw it eating," Tshingana said importantly.

The rest of the youths stared at him, eyes wide and white in their black faces. Then Sigwebana snickered. "You lie, Tshingana," he said. "Come on, tell us who you were playing ukuHlobonga with. Was it Matiwane? She’s pretty, isn’t she?" His hips thrust obscenely.

Tshingana hit him. Yelling at each other, the two herdboys rolled in the dirt, punching and wrestling. The others cheered them on. Finally, with honors about even, they warily separated. Tshingana wiped dirt, dry grass, and a few bugs from his hide. "It’s the truth," he told Sigwebana, who was doing the same thing. "Go look for yourself if you don’t believe me. I hope the moso eats you, too."

"It wouldn’t," Inyangesa said. "Moso don’t bother with people, any more than lions with rabbits: not enough meat for them to worry about. Moso don’t even bother much with cattle."

"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 gri

"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.