Reincarnations

MOSO

"Moso" is also an alternate history, but of a different sort-an ecological a-h, you might say. Each member of the cat family chooses prey based not least on size. Cats eat mice; bobcats eat ground squirrels; and so on up to leopards, which eat things like baboons and smaller antelopes, and lions, which eat larger antelopes and zebras. No feline big enough to hunt critters like rhinos and elephants ever evolved. But what if one did?

Tshingana saw the vultures spiraling down from the sky as he walked out from the kraal to the cattle. Many, many vultures were descending. Something large must have died, Tshingana thought, and not far away. He trotted through the scrubby grass to see what it was.

Large indeed: an elephant lay not far from a stand of acacia trees. The vultures hopped around, not getting too close to the great mountain of meat. Other, larger scavengers were there before them-hunting dogs; hyenas; and three lions, one a big, black-maned male. Tshingana’s hand tightened round the knobkerrie he was carrying, through he was nearly a quarter-mile away, not close enough to be interesting.

Not even the lion showed any inclination to approach the elephant’s carcass. Tshingana understood why a moment later, when a moso climbed up onto its prey and began to feed.

The youth dropped his club. He shivered all over, though the morning was already warm. He had never seen a moso before. Now he understood why the storytellers of the baTlokwa tribe likened the greatest of all cats to lightning and fire. What but lightning, fire, or a moso could bring down an elephant?

The moso would have made three, perhaps four, of the big male lion. Even across several hundred yards, Tshingana could see its fangs gleaming as it tore chunk after chunk of flesh from the flank of the animal it had killed. Had it not been atop the elephant, though, he might never have spied it at all, for its striped coat, dark brown on tawny, was made for blending into grassland.

It raised its enormous head and looked toward Tshingana. Those golden eyes seemed to pierce his very soul. He shook his head, rejecting the idea. Surely he was too small and puny for the moso to notice.

So it seemed, for the beast started eating again. Tshingana remembered the cattle he was supposed to be tending. The rest of the boys in his iNtanga-his age group-would be angry at him for giving them more to do. He loped away with a ground-eating stride he could keep up for a couple of hours at a stretch.

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 skinny youth named Inyangesa.

"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 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."

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.

The elephants were terrified too. They scattered in panic, running every which way. The ground shook under Tshingana’s feet. The moso bounded after a cow elephant who fled with her ridiculous fly-whisk tail straight out behind her. With its bulk, the moso was not as fast as a lion, but it was faster than any elephant. Tshingana watched the great muscles ripple under its striped hide as it slammed into the cow.

Like a lion that had seized a gnu, the moso tried to drag the elephant off its feet. Its claw scored the cow’s thick hide, leaving behind dripping lines of red. The elephant’s screams grew even more frantic. The moso roared and bit, roared and bit.,

Finally the moso pulled the elephant down. Tshingana heard the thud of that huge body slamming to the ground. Forgetting his own safety, he ran closer. He wanted to watch this greatest of all kills. Through the dust the other elephants had kicked up, through the cloud that surrounded the fallen female, it wasn’t easy.

Even down, the female kept fighting, striking out with her big round feet at the moso, which clawed her belly like a wild cat ripping the guts out of a squirrel. Blood was everywhere now, on the elephant, on the ground, ‘all over the moso. The moso was biting as well as clawing, trying to get a grip under the elephant’s chin and throttle it.

Then, unexpectedly, the moso’s roar rose to a shriek that made Tshingana stuff fingers in his ears. The cow elephant, still screaming itself, scrambled up onto its feet and lurched away. The moso slapped at it with a barbed foot as it escaped, took two or three shambling steps after it, and stopped. After a moment, Tshingana saw why: in the struggle, the elephant’s bulk had crushed one of its hind legs.

The moso shrieked again, fury and torment mingled. Tshingana’s flesh prickled. He was not used to feeling empathy for animals, but he did now, for the moso. A three-legged cat was as useless as a one-legged man-and no one would provide for the moso, as clansfolk might for a cripple.

However beasts know things, the moso must have known it was doomed. It sank back on its haunches, methodically licked the blood from its flanks and belly. It licked its ruined leg too, then let out a snort that said as clearly as words that it knew it would do no good.

But while the moso lived, it would try to keep on living. It snorted again, this time, Tshingana judged, in pain, as it got up. Only three legs touched the ground. Its enormous head swung back and forth, finally stopping, to his horror, on him. The moso growled, and that growl brought on the same freezing fear as its roar. It limped toward him-if it could not hunt elephants any more, smaller prey would have to do.

Tshingana fled. The moso came after him. For the first time, he wished his clansfolk had caught him hours ago. But he had done too good a job of hiding. He was on his own-he was a man. He wished-oh, how he wished!-he were a herdboy again.

He looked back over his shoulder at the moso, tripped over a root, and fell on his face. Thorns scratched his chest and arms. The shock and pain of the fall helped clear the panic from his head. His wits were working once more as he jumped up.

The moso still limped after him, remorseless as death. But Tshingana was faster now, and could change directions far more nimbly. If he kept his head, he was safe.

Safe, suddenly, was not enough. Instead of running, Tshingana danced toward to the moso. Its baleful yellow eyes followed him as it tried to turn to keep itself facing him. Had it roared, its fear would have made him run again. But it was silent, panting, watching to see what he would do.

He slipped round till it presented its left flank to him. There, he thought-just behind that stripe. That was where the assegai would have to go in. From ten or fifteen yards, he threw the spear. Then, weaponless, he fled in good earnest.

The moso screamed, a cry so loud and terrible he thought for a dreadful instant it was coming hard after him. But when he looked around, he saw it writhing on the ground, batting at the assegai with a forepaw. Each time it touched the shaft, it drove the point deeper into its side and screamed again.

Tshingana saw his cast, his first with a man’s spear, had not been perfect. The assegai was sunk into a brown stripe, not the lighter fur in front of it for which he had aimed. The moso was making up for it, though; its frantic efforts to dislodge the spear simply stirred it through the beasts’ vitals. At last it must have pierced the heart. The moso gave a convulsive shudder and lay still.

Tshingana looked around and gasped in dismay. The moso had made him commit the herder’s ultimate sin-however briefly, he’d forgotten about his cattle. As cattle will, they had taken advantage of his inattention and were happily scattering themselves over the savannah.

He dashed after them, shouting and waving his arms. Rather grumpily, they acquiesced in being regathered into a tight knot-all but one, an old white cow with a crumpled horn that delighted in making herdboys’ lives miserable.

After spearing a moso, Tshingana was not about to let a cow intimidate him. He screamed in its ears and threw clods of dirt at it. It lowed mournfully, baffled that its usual tactics were failing. Tshingana slapped it on the nose. Utterly defeated, it went back to the herd.

Tshingana cautiously went back to where the moso lay. Its eyes were glazed now; its flanks did not move. Blood ran from its mouth. Tshingana was sure it was dead… but not sure enough to risk getting in range of those dreadful claws. He picked up a long stick, prodded the end of the spearshaft with it.

Only when the great cat still did not move did Tshingana dare to reach for the assegai. Just as his fingers closed round it, he heard a shout, thin in the distance: "I see you, half-brother of mine, you worthless clump of cow dung!"

Tshingana’s eyes flicked to the sun. It was into the western half of the sky. "I did better than you, Sigwebana," he yelled back.

His half-brother ran toward him. "You were just lucky, Tshingana," he said, still at the top of his lungs. "You didn’t even really hide the cattle; I saw them from a long way away. All you did was a lot of running, so it took a while to catch up with you."

Tshingana glanced around. Sigwebana was right-the herd could have been much better hidden. Others had spotted it besides his half-brother, too; behind Sigwebana, Tshingana saw Inyangesa and his father Uhamu, and more clansfolk behind them.

Still… "How I did it doesn’t matter, just that I did it," Tshingana said truthfully. "Besides, I’ve been busy with other things than hiding them prettily."

"Other things? Like what?" Sigwebana was getting close now, but not yet close enough to see through the thick, thigh-high grass in which Tshingana stood. "Like what?" he challenged again. "UkuHlobonga?"

"Go do ukuHlobonga between a hyena’s thighs," Tshingana retorted. He jerked his assegai free, waved it to show Sigwebana the blood down half the length of the shaft. "I was busy with things like this."

"What did you spear, a rabbit?" Sigwebana pushed his way through the grass so he could find out what lay at Tshingana’s feet. He looked at the dead moso, at his half-brother, at the moso again. "No," he whispered. "You didn’t. You couldn’t."

"Yes, I did," Tshingana said proudly. "Yes, I could."

"Did what, new man? Could what?" Uhamu came up, sweat making his lanky body gleam like polished ebony. As Sigwebana had, he stopped short when he saw the moso. "It wasn’t dead when you found it?" he demanded sternly of Tshingana. Just behind Uhamu, Inyangesa stared at his friend.

"I speared it still alive," Tshingana declared.

Uhamu was studying the ground where the moso lay. "I believe you," he said at last. "I see how it twisted and fought when the assegai went home." He raised an eyebrow. "I suppose you also smashed its hind leg there."

Tshingana felt his face grow hot. "No, of course not." More and more men and boys from the kraal came up and listened while he told the story of how he had killed the moso.

"So that’s why the elephants stampeded," Shamagwava said. He shook his head in wonder and put an arm round his son’s shoulders. Tshingana felt nine feet tall. Shamagwava went on, "We were still a good ways behind you when that happened. I didn’t think of the moso; I thought it had followed that other herd north."

"It must have doubled back," Tshingana agreed.

"So it must." Shamagwava shook his head again. "The first moso near our kraal in years, and not only is it slain, but slain by my son, my son who has just become a man. How could a father be more proud?"

"You are lucky indeed, Shamagwava," Uhamu said. Mafunzi’s father Ndogeni nodded. Mafunzi beamed at Tshingana, who smiled back at his friend. Inyangesa was smiling too, a little less certainly; he seemed to have trouble getting used to the idea that Tshingana was suddenly a person of consequence. Tshingana did not mind. He had trouble with that idea himself.

Sigwebana had not stayed around to listen to his half-brother praised. He was heading back toward the kraal, a small, lonely figure thinking in the distance. Tshingana had wanted to outdo him, yes, but he was not sure he’d wanted to outdo him like this. He might have made an enemy for life.

Tshingana supposed he would have to do something about that one day. Not today, though. Today his father was saying, "Now that you’ve killed the moso, my son, my man, have you thought about what you want to do next?"

"Two things, father." In the aftermath of the fight with the greatest cat, Tshingana found his mind clear as a stream in a pebbled bed. "For one, I want to make my warrior’s shield from the moso’s skin instead of cowhide, so everyone will know what I was able to do-and so I will never forget."

The clansmen murmured approvingly. Shamagwava said, "That is very fine, son. You will have a shield to make even an inDuna, a subchief, jealous. And what is the other thing?"

Tshigana grinned. "Now that I’m a man, I’m going to find out about ukuHlobonga for myself!"