The Covenant by James A. Michener Read Free Book Online

dawn, as if to send the travelers on their way, a host of pink flamingos rose from the far end of the lake and flew in drifting arcs across the sky, turning at the other end and doubling back in lovely involuted curves. Back and forth they flew some twenty times, like the shuttle in a loom weaving a cloth of pink and gold. Often they dipped low as if about to land, only to sweep suddenly upward to form graciousdesigns in their tapestry, the bright pink circles on their wings spilling through the air in vivid color, their long red legs trailing aft, their white necks extended fore.
    As Gumsto watched them, they circled for the last time, then headed north. They, too, were abandoning this lake.
    When the file formed up, twenty-five persons one behind the other, Gumsto was not in the lead. That spot was taken by old Kharu, who carried a digging stick and about her shoulders a skin garment in whose flowing cape she had wrapped four ostrich eggs filled with water. Each of the other women carried the same supply, with little girls caring for only two.
    She was in command because the clan was heading due west for five days to a spot where, two years before, Kharu had buried an emergency nest of nine eggs against the day when stragglers reached there exhausted. Since they were leaving this area, she wanted to recover those eggs and take them with her.
    As they moved into land where few lakes or springs existed, she became the spiritual leader, for she knew the curious places where dew-water might be hiding. Or striding along earth so parched that water might never have existed there, she would spy a tendril so brown and withered that it must be dead, but when with her digging stick she traced it far underground, she would find attached to the vine a globular-root which, when dragged to the surface and compressed, yielded good water.
    She enforced one inviolable rule: “Do not use the ostrich eggs.” She was in charge of the water, and would allow no one to touch it. “Dig for the roots. Drink them.” The ostrich eggs must be reserved for those frightening days when there were no roots.
    Gumsto’s clan did not inhabit this vast area alone. There were other San tribes hidden away in the savanna, and often they would meet as their journeys crisscrossed, and sometimes a woman from one clan would leave to marry a hunter from another, or children whose parents had died would be adopted from group to group. And in these chance meetings Gumsto’s people would hear of other bands less fortunate: “They went into the desert without enough water and were seen no more.”
    It was Kharu’s responsibility to see that this did not happen to her people, and often as they walked she would pass many trees without stopping, then notice one with a slightly different look, and whenshe went to that tree she would find trapped in the fork where branch met trunk a cache of sweet water.
    Best of all, she would sometimes walk ahead for two or three days, her ostrich eggs bouncing behind, convinced that water lay hidden somewhere—her eyes sweeping from one horizon to the other. Then, stopping for the others to catch up with her, and in obedience to some signal they could not detect, she would indicate with her digging stick that all must head in this direction, and when they attained a slight rise they would see a far bank covered with vines bearing tsama melons, speckled, smaller than a man’s head and filled with loose pulp from which extraordinary amounts of water could be extracted.
    A tsama melon, Gumsto decided, was among the most beautiful objects in the world, almost as lovely as Naoka. He had been watching the girl, and was impressed by the manner in which she listened to Kharu’s instructions in the rules for survival; at the end of this journey the girl was going to be competent to lead her own band across deserts, and Gumsto intended sharing that leadership with her.
    “I am still thinking about Naoka,” he told Kharu one night.
    “I