Jock Of The Bushveld by Sir Percy Fitzpatrick (Chapter 26)( Page 2 ) Our Various Ways

"Goodness knows what the row was about.  As far as I can make out from your heathen, it is because the other boy is a Shangaan and reads the Bible.  Jim says this boy--Sam is his name--worked for you and ran away. Sam says it is not true, and that he never even heard of you, and that Jim is a stranger to him.  There's something wrong in this, though, because when the row began, Sam first tried to pacify your lunatic, and I heard him sing out in answer to the first few licks, `Kahle, Umganaam; Kahle, Makokel'!'  (Gently, friend; gently, Makokel'.) `Wow, Makokela, y' ou bulala mena!'  (Wow, Makokela, you will kill me.)  He knew Jim right enough; that was evident.  But it didn't help him; he had to skip for it all the same.  I was glad to pay the noble Jim off and drop him at his kraal.  Sam was laid up when we left." It is better to skip the change from the old life to the new--when the luck, as we called it, was all out, when each straw seemed the last for the camel's breaking back, and there was always still another to come. But the turn came at last, and the `long arm of coincidence' reached out to make the `impossible' a matter of fact.  It is better to skip all that: for it is not the story of Jock, and it concerns him only so far that in the end it made our parting unavoidable. When the turn did come it was strange, and at times almost bewildering, to realise that the things one had struggled hardest against and regarded as the worst of bad luck were blessings in disguise and were all for the best.  So the new life began and the old was put away; but the new life, for all its brighter and wider outlook and work of another class, for all the charm that makes Barberton now a cherished memory to all who knew the early days, was not all happy.  The new life had its hours of darkness too; of almost unbearable `trek fever'; of restless, sleepless, longing for the old life; of `home-sickness' for the veld, the freedom, the roaming, the nights by the fire, and the days in the bush!  Now and again would come a sleepless night with its endless procession of scenes, in which some remembered from the past were interlinked with others imagined for the future; and here and there in these long waking dreams came stabs of memory--flashes of lightning vividness: the head and staring eyes of the koodoo bull, as we had stood for a portion of a second face to face; the yawning mouth of the maddened crocodile; the mamba and its beady hateful eyes, as it swept by before the bush fire.  And there were others too that struck another chord: the cattle, the poor dumb beasts that had worked and died: stepping-stones in a man's career; the `books,' the `chalk and blackboard' of the school--used, discarded, and forgotten!  No, they were not forgotten; and the memory of the last trek was one long mute reproach on their behalf: they had paved the roadway for the Juggernaut man. All that was left of the old life was Jock; and soon there was no place for him.  He could not always be with me; and when left behind he was miserable, leading a life that was utterly strange to him, without interest and among strangers.  While I was in Barberton he accompanied me everywhere, but--absurd as it seems--there was a constant danger for him there, greater though less glorious than those he faced so lightly in the veld.  His deafness, which passed almost unnoticed and did not seem to handicap him at all in the veld, became a serious danger in camp.  For a long time he had been unable to hear a sound, but he could _feel_ sounds: that is to say, he was quick to notice anything that caused a vibration.  In the early days of his deafness I had been worried by the thought that he would be run over while lying asleep near or under the waggons, and the boys were always on the look-out to stir him up; but we soon found that this was not necessary.  At the first movement he would feel the vibration and jump up.  Jim realised this well enough, for when wishing to direct his attention to strange dogs or Shangaans, the villain could always dodge me by stamping or hammering on the ground, and Jock always looked up: he seemed to know the difference between the sounds he could ignore, such as chopping wood, and those that he ought to notice.