Free 1972 - A Story Like the Wind by Laurens Van Der Post, Prefers to remain anonymous

sympathies to add flame to the fire of pity.
    His only instinct now, therefore was to rush out and try to rescue the trapped Bushman without delay from his terrible, if not already fatal, predicament. But how?
    Suddenly he remembered how Koba had always impressed upon him that if her people were greeted in the correct manner they would always respond in the friendliest fashion, no matter how unpredictable the situation. The most important point of this greeting was for it to make the Bushman feel big and strong. They were, according to Koba, extraordinarily sensitive about the fact that they were so small, seldom more than four foot ten inches in height and they resented the fact that fate had made black and white both taller and bigger and consequently more powerful.
    So by way of some sort of compensation for this injustice of biology, the soothing thing to do when one met a wild Bushman, Koba had told him, was to call out: ‘Good day, I saw you looming up from afar and I am dying of hunger.’
    Accordingly without showing himself and keeping flat on the ground to make himself as difficult a target as possible François called out, in Bushman, trying in vain to prevent excitement and apprehension from adding a tremble to his clear voice: ‘Good day, I saw you looming up from afar and I am dying of hunger.’
    At the sound of a voice addressing him in his own language, the Bushman stopped struggling, sat up rigid with apprehension. He looked wildly around him as if he could not believe what he had heard. Indeed he seemed almost immediately convinced that the pain and anguish of his situation had made him delirious and he was hearing voices from within himself.
    He started again to wrestle with the trap more desperately than ever, groaning to himself as if groaning helped to relieve the pain. François at once called out the greeting a second time, louder and more confidently. This time the little man seemed to be convinced. He looked in Francis’s direction. François could hardly bear to look in the little man’s eyes, so dark were they with suffering. Yet he gave François slowly, in a voice hoarse with pain, which came out of him not consciously so much as if by a kind of reflex of history, the proper response that Bushmen had for this kind of greeting throughout their thousands of years in Africa:
    ‘I was dying, but now that you have come I live again.’
    At that, François stood up, ran forward quickly. Half ashamed of himself, he first snatched up the bows and arrows as if still afraid the Bushman might try to use them when he saw a red stranger, even a young one, confronting him, before saying, ‘Please do not be alarmed, we want to help you all we can.’
    Murmuring words of gratitude so blurred and low with pain that François could hardly hear him, the little man’s wide dark slanted eyes suddenly seemed to lose their light, the eyelids to close over them and his body to relax, before he fell back in a faint to the ground. François somehow had a hunch that this reaction of the trapped man might be a vote of confidence in him and Hintza. Only a feeling of certainty that he was about to be rescued from fatal peril could have allowed him the luxury now of giving in so completely to pain and exhaustion.
    Nothing could have suited François better. He could now tackle the trap without the twisting and jerking of the man’s body to hamper him. He knew from past experience how difficult it was going to be to get the tough giant spring of the trap I suppressed sufficiently for its jaws to open, since it normally took two grown men to do so comfortably. He had often tried it before in calmer circumstances by standing on the spring or pushing it down with his hands with all his weight behind them. But he had always failed. His only hope now he knew, was to get a long, stout piece of wood and use it as some kind of lever I to suppress the spring. Luckily, there was plenty of such wood ( near at hand in the