Read Online The Covenant by James A. Michener - Free Book Online

did give the massive composition a curious balance and a sense of real eland chasing across the timeless rock.
    But why had the boy been so careless? Time was pressing, but he could have pleaded for two extra days. Pigments were also precious, and perhaps he realized he might not have enough to show each of the thirty-three properly, but he could have enlisted some hunter to help him find more.
    There were a dozen other reasonable explanations for the wildcoloring, but none approached the truth: Gao had created the eland in this arbitrary manner because at the height of his powers, when his senses were ablaze, he had experienced a revelation which showed that it was not the faithful laying down of color within the confines of his composition that would best indicate the reality of an eland, but a wild splashing that would catch the spirit of the sacred animals. It was an accident, the kind of accident that inspired artists contrive, and Gao could not explain it to his father.
    Gumsto did not like the carelessness, not at all, for he deemed it an insolence to the eland, whose colors should be thus and so, as all men knew, but as he was about to complain he saw in the lower right-hand corner of the mural his son’s depiction of a San hunter, a man awed by the eland but facing them with his frail arrow, and he saw that this little fellow was himself. This was a summary of his life, the recollection of all the eland he had slain to assure his people survival and meaning, and he was silent.
    Three times he asked his son to carry him back so that he might study it, and live again with the animals that had meant so much, and whenever he saw himself so small at the lower corner he felt that Gao was right. This was the manner of life, that a man live forever with the major concerns, not with the grubs hiding under the bark of the thorn tree. To be on the savanna with a tiny arrow tip, and it the difference between death and life, and to throw oneself among the mightiest of the antelope, not the klipspringer and the duiker, and to fight them as they came, that was the nature of man—and it was his son who had shown him this truth.
    When the others realized that Gumsto’s days were almost finished, for he was now forty-five, a very old age for these people, they knew that the day was approaching when they could wait for him no longer, and one afternoon they watched indulgently as he crawled from his area into the one occupied by Gao and Naoka, where the young bride lolled in the sand. “I wanted you for my wife,” he told her. She smiled. “We could have …”
    “It’s better this way,” she said without moving. “Gao is young and you’re an old man now.”
    “No more hunting,” he said.
    “How good that your son learned.”
    “Indeed,” the old man agreed. He had an infinity of things hewished to say to this splendid girl with the unwrinkled face, but she seemed uninterested, yet when he started to crawl back to his own area she smiled at him in her ravishing way and said, “I would have liked you for my husband, Gumsto. You were a man.” She sighed. “But my father was a man, too, and one day Gao will be as great a hunter as either of you.” She sighed again. “It’s always for the best.”
    Everyone in the tribe knew that the decision had to be made. Gumsto lagged so constantly that he was becoming an impediment, and this could not be tolerated. For two more days old Kharu served as his crutch, allowing him to lean upon her while she leaned on her digging stick, two old people striving to keep up, and on the third day, when it seemed that he must be left behind, Kharu was surprised to find Naoka coming back to urge Gumsto along.
    “Let him lean on me,” the girl said as she assumed the greater burden, and in the heat of the day, when Kharu herself began to falter, Naoka alone carried him along. At dusk, when the others were well ahead, Gumsto told his two women, “This is the last night.” Naoka nodded and