The Great Karoo

by Fred Stenson

  Pomeranian

  When they first saw the Pomeranian, rock solid on her anchors and cables at the Halifax pier, the Canadian Mounted Rifles thought the ship a strong and strapping thing. By the time they boarded her to sail, on January 27, 1900, they knew from the sea-savvy people of Halifax that it was no more than a cattle boat, twice sunk and salvaged. The way a good horse trader will trim and groom an old nag until she shines, they had been gulled by a new coat of paint.

  The only latrines for hundreds of men were on the top deck. There was always a lineup. Tilted boards took the offal over the edge where, depending on the day, a wind could catch it and drive it through the portholes into the steaming mess kitchen a deck below.

  Out on the rolling ocean, they were sick most of the time, never having been on anything bigger than a steamboat in a river. They puked themselves lean, but the army was not satisfied. Daily drill was conducted in the sun and sea breeze of the main deck; physical exercise was taken twice daily. A funny thing to see, if it wasn’t you: a man jogging on the spot or touching his toes suddenly breaking for the rail to heave.

  In a moment of angry inspiration, a fellow said, “And Ottawa’s fairy hand was everywhere.” It became a slogan, something to say when you took a bite and tasted shit, or when you were shaving in a tin mirror a foot away from a man groaning from dysentery.

  Probably the sickest man on the whole Pomeranian was Ovide Smith. After a while, the officers saw that he was a special case and stopped trying to get him out on deck for work and exercise. By virtue of being the only two who knew him, Frank and Jeff were his nursemaids. They brought him what he needed and took away what he’d lost. They watched him get smaller inside his already baggy uniform, and Frank made two new holes in his friend’s belt with an awl.

  “I won’t go home by boat,” Ovide would say, at his sickest, and Frank and Jeff kept it to themselves lest it become a joke on the decks above: the cowboy so ignorant he thought he could return to Canada by land.

  A difference developed in how Jeff and Frank treated Ovide. When it was Jeff’s turn beside Ovide’s cot, he talked about how sick the horses were, how they were suffering in their winter hair, and how they were getting worse the farther south the ship went. Frank thought this was wrong and did the opposite. He told Ovide nothing about the horses, because why add depression to how sick the cowboy already was? Frank wondered if Jeff had a cruel streak.

  The horses were in the ship’s basement, a place stone dark and dependent for ventilation on deck sails that scooped air down the hatchways. Not much air penetrated to the lowest hold, where half the horses stood backed against the ship’s outer walls and the rest stood tail to tail in the middle, facing alleys.

  There could be no drainage holes into the ocean, so Frank and Jeff, and all the other soldiers except Ovide, took turns descending to hoe the shit across the cleated floor and dump it into baskets by lantern light. For the horse piss, there was a kind of drainage ditch and buckets bent to scoop into it. Everything had to be raised through the decks to the top and tossed overboard. Before they left Halifax, Ottawa’s fairy hand had decreed that all horseshoes be removed. Standing unshod in shit and piss around the clock had caused the hooves to become yellow, punky, and tender to the touch.

  The work was sickening in all that darkness and stench, but it was also treacherous. The horses thought they were being killed and, one time, when Frank’s hoe caught a cleat and jumped sideways into Dunny’s paining hoof, she kicked a pipe inches from his face. In her sickness, she did not even recognize him. When he worked around horses to whom he was a stranger, the risk was worse.

  When the ship entered the tropics, conditions that seemed incapable of getting worse worsened. The horses had been pulled off the prairie with their heavy winter coats on. Now, with the hold like a wet oven, the men could do nothing about it. Ottawa had supplied no clippers, not one pair. Even the desalted water—all the horses had to drink—was hot. Many horses began to hang their heads and refuse food and water.

  From the time they left Halifax until now, the Mountie veterinarian, Staff Sergeant Tracey, had been tramping the horse hold by lantern, day and night, doing everything he could for the animals. In the tropics, he worked even harder but the task began to defeat him. Angrily, he explained to whomever was present why things were so much harder on horses.

  “Horses get seasick, same as men,” he said. “But they can’t puke.”

  Not a single man had before considered puking a gift from God.

  Finally, it was Jeff Davis’s telling Ovide every detail of the desperate lives of the horses that saved him. Hearing how seasick the horses were, and how unable they were to get rid of that sickness, Ovide sat up and turned his legs out. He grabbed the upper bunk and levered himself to his feet. He staggered onto deck and straight to the nearest rail, Jeff following closely lest Ovide meant to pitch himself off. But he only clung to the rail with both hands, and then, holding with one, hauled up his belt until it caught in the last of the new holes Frank had made.

  Jeff told Frank that Ovide stood there for half an hour, the wind buffeting his empty clothes, and then he went to the ladder and started down. Frank was working in the horse hold and saw the rest himself: how Ovide came weaving down the alley headed for the yellow beacon of Tracey’s lamp. Ovide told the vet he knew horses and wanted to help. Spotting his seriousness, Tracey jerked the lantern out of a young private’s hands and gave it to Ovide. They moved on.

  Jeff had been right all along. Working in the ghastly stench, Ovide seemed to forget to be sick. He and Tracey became a close team, and together evolved several improvements. They detected a slight relative cooling in certain hours of the tropical night. They made sure that all the next day’s horse water was on deck and exposed during those hours, and that the horses received the water just before dawn. They figured out that certain stalls were better served by the wind scoops, and they moved the sickest horses there.

  Beyond that, Ovide used his ability to fool a horse’s mind, to wake it from its nightmare and help it remember there was something about living that it liked. To this end, he ripped away the mats of hair as they came unrooted and massaged deep into the sweating hides. He washed the horses as often as he could. He talked and he sang, and gently stroked ears, lips, and noses.

  One of Ovide’s and Tracey’s toughest fights turned out to be Morden’s gelding. The big bay had been a much admired horse back in Regina, but had taken sick almost as soon as the ship passed the first breakwater. In the heat, he had become worse and, finally, a private checking the alleys at night found the gelding down on his front knees with his back legs splayed.

  The private ran for Tracey, and Tracey roused Ovide, and together the two ran their hands along every leg bone. None were broken, but when they got the horse back on his feet, there was pain in one leg, and the bay would not put weight there. He swayed three-legged. Tracey knew the bay could not last like that. He would fall again, and a splaying fall would break a leg or hip soon enough. So Tracey sent the private to wake Morden and tell him to rouse his troop. They were all to come down and move horses.

  The twentieth stall in each group was left empty. They shifted the horses until the empty stall was beside Morden’s bay. Then they took down the wall and moved the crown block along the roof until it was above him. They slid the slings under the horse’s belly, connected them to the crown, and began winching. When the bay’s back was straight, they stopped. The idea was not to lift the horse but to put the support high enough so he knew he could rest if he needed to.

  But Morden’s horse refused to behave in a way that would save him. He threw his whole weight on the slings and hung there. The horse had a strong personality and it was working against him now. Some horses fight to live. The bay gelding was fighting to die.

  During the next night, Morden was still trying to save his horse, but Tracey and Ovide had rendered their verdict by shifting attention to other horses ailing in the heat. Morden’s bay still hu
ng in the slings, his head an iron weight on the long neck. His nose was practically on the stinking floor, snuffing circles in the putrid puddles. Eyes gone glassy; mouth slack and drooling. Morden squatted there by the hour, talking to the bay, patting him with a wet cloth, scooping the oily sweat from his face. He was still there next morning when the horse bucked in the slings, legs frantic on the floor, and died.

  Tracey lost no time. He yanked out the slings, put a long rope around the neck and a front shoulder. With the power of the deck engine, routed through blocks, the horse was dragged along the alley floor until he was under the hatches. The hatches were opened so the equatorial sky was framed. At the top, the rope was switched onto a swing sheer. The knot anchoring the loop around the horse was changed to a slip knot.

  Morden was rigid and sombre through all this work. Despite his arm still being weak, he insisted on taking a full portion of the weight whenever the body needed straightening. Every time the animal shifted into some undignified pose, Morden wrestled to restore a better appearance. Pulling the tail out from under. Combing the mane to the proper side. Trying and failing to close the eyes.

  Then Tracey nodded and Morden nodded back. A series of shouts went up the hatches. With a low growl, the deck engine took the weight. An improbable sight: the horse rising off the alley floor and up slowly through the decks. It was the opposite of the death of Pete Belton’s brute, but equally strange. Along each hatch, a row of heads moved with the ascent.

  Ovide saw every moment of the drama below decks. Frank watched the horse come through the final hatch, born dead into brilliant day. The body was wet down one side from sliding on the shitted floor, but it looked like a heavy sweat more than what it was. Even with its frozen eyes and the set position of the limbs, the horse still looked alive.

  “Hurry up! Get it off!”

  That was the deck sergeant, wanting the body swung over the side as soon as the last hoof cleared. The sheer was bending with the weight as it swung. Corporal Griesbach was the one in place to slip the knot, and he was ready with the rope in hand.

  Then there was a hesitation. Maybe Griesbach was wondering whether Morden was coming up, whether he should wait for that. The sergeant was furious, screaming, “Off! Now! Right now, damn you, corporal!”

  They were on a big rolling sea. Frank understood that the sergeant’s fury was because the ship had rolled just right, with the horse hanging out over the water. Finally, Griesbach yanked the rope as hard as he could—and nothing. He yanked again but the knot had bound.

  “Dammit!” shrieked the sergeant. “That’s what happens when you let the weight sit on the knot!”

  Griesbach kept yanking but the knot would not budge. When he’d lost hope of success, he gave the rope another yank and the knot gave. The rope sprang free.

  But, by now, the ship had rolled back toward the middle. At the instant when the rope fell off, the bay horse was over the hatch again. Down it went. On every deck, men saw it coming and shouted “Look out! Look out!” to the men below.

  Morden appeared on deck just as his horse dropped. He ran to the hatch and saw the gelding banging down. The men below scattered clear. The horse hit bottom. By the light of lanterns, what Morden saw far below was his bay gelding lying unnaturally flat because so many bones were broken. The gelding no longer had the shape of a horse at all.

  Morden flung about, his face disfigured with anger. He followed the rope that had let his horse fall, and at the end of it was Jeff Davis. Jeff had taken the rope from the sheer into his hands and was sliding it through his fingers. He was looking for the kinked spot that had caused the bind. Maybe he meant to cut that part out. Morden, gone mad in anger, saw it wrong.

  “You stupid Halfbreed bastard!” he roared.

  Frank was close to both men, and he felt like he himself had been slapped. Morden stared dumbly at the rope in Davis’s hand.

  Jeff acted as though he’d been expecting the words. He let go the rope so it swung back toward Fred. Then he turned and walked down the rail. He reached behind his ear where he had stored a cigarette. He felt in his trouser pocket for a match. He leaned his face close to his hands, struck the match and cupped it. He reared back and loosed a tail of smoke.

  Meanwhile, Griesbach had come hurrying to Morden, face stiff with shame and a manly determination to own up. Frank could not hear but saw the corporal mime what had happened. Over and over, he acted it out and apologized.

  Frank watched for what would come next. He knew it was important. He badly wanted to see it turn out right. He watched for Morden to look around for Jeff. He poised himself to help, because, where Morden was, he probably could not see Jeff at all. But Morden did not look. He left Griesbach, strode to the ladder, and descended to his ruined horse.

  Jeff was bent deeply at the waist, with his elbows hooked over the rail. His long hands were laced at the top knuckles and drooped from his wrists. The ocean wind was smoking his cigarette for him.

  Davis was looking at something in the water, and Frank looked too. Like pale slivers of moon, sharks were visible beneath the boiling surface. They had been robbed of their meat but were patiently coasting alongside. Davis pitched his cigarette among them, and a great mouth surfaced and took it casually.

  Part Two

  THE GREAT KAROO

  Aldershot, February 1900

  In the afternoon, General Butler burst from his brick headquarters and marched through camp. The same pressing need to walk overcame him every day. After lunch, an irritation would start, growing quickly until it was barely within his control. Before any truly embarrassing display of temper got away from him, he left to walk this practised route: through the overcrowded barracks and huts of North Camp, onto South Camp road, and along to the bridge over Basingstoke Canal.

  It had been one month since the War Office had found him in his sleepy Western District office. The hand-delivered letter was long-winded and saccharine, and asked him to come immediately to take command of Aldershot. His first response had been to fashion their flattery into an arrow and fire it back.

  “If I’m such a good commander, why am I not in South Africa leading troops?”

  That inspired an even more servile note about his long experience (you’re old) and who better to train our young men (than someone no longer trusted in the field)? Bored stiff and needing the better pay, Butler packed his bags. Arriving at the bridge over the Basingstoke, Butler took his usual position at the downstream rail. He trained his eye on a spinach-green riffle and took several round breaths.

  Aldershot was so familiar to him. He had trained here in the 1860s and had commanded infantry here in the 1890s. The parade grounds, the hoof-plowed fields, the pimple hills with their grand names. To his ears came the leather stamp of hundreds trying to be one. The halt, the whack of rifle butts; the whetstone ring of bayonets. In North Camp, cavalry recruits would be gouging their horses, wagging their sabres and swords, charging cloth dummies.

  But the thing about age—something he had commiserated about with Red Crow—was the way the familiar became unfamiliar; or, if familiar, more hideous for being so.

  What confounded Butler every day at Aldershot was the headlong pursuit and repetition of practices that had never worked. If battles were won (Sebastopol) and wars (Crimean), it was not because the strategies and generalship had made sense, it was because the enemy was even more daft than they had been. There was even a knowledge that this was so, and an acceptance. If it was tradition to do a thing badly, then, altogether now, let us continue.

  In this way, South Africa was turning into a classic British war. First Redvers Buller crawled after his rabbit prey, in close order so they could always hit him. Now, General Bobs Roberts, sent to take over from Buller, was pledging to be Buller’s opposite. He would race up the gut of Africa all the way to Pretoria, blinding the Boers with his speed. If Buller was too slow, Roberts would correct the flaw by being too fast. Roberts liked to outrun things—like his soldiers’ medicines and bandag
es, their food, their ammunition and gun parts.

  Butler had personally experienced this style of leadership on the Nile. The generals had goaded him for speed, so he had imported Canadian voyageurs and built Orkney boats to make better headway. He thought he had done well, but everyone in the world who watched as Britain’s grand adventure failed thought he couldn’t have. Too late for Chinese Gordon. Too bad for Butler, who was among the blamed.

  That had been the birth of Kitchener, who Bobs Roberts had now chosen for his second-in-command in South Africa. After the failed relief of Khartoum, Kitchener had blazed in from the coast and beaten up on some of the Mahdi’s fanatics: the first victory over the enemy since Gordon had been slaughtered. Hurrah!

  Kitchener had also been first at Omdurman, where he killed eleven thousand dervishes and wounded another sixteen thousand. He razed the dome they had built over the Mahdi’s grave and, with his ghastly sense of theatre, had tossed the Mahdi’s bones into the Nile. The troops awarded Kitchener the Mahdi’s handsome skull, and he kept the prize in his tent, and then on his desk—until Queen Victoria heard about it and instructed her favourite to put the poor man’s head in the ground where it belonged.

  The sound of boots on the bridge brought Butler’s attention back. Here came two of his young staff officers, bearing papers for him to sign.

  Before the young lieutenants could say anything, Butler launched into an anecdote.

  At Ladysmith, before she was besieged, it was decided to show off the town’s artillery to the Boers. They arranged the guns so they were pointing at a ridge, but, at the last minute, the officer in charge decided it wasn’t going to be much of a show. So they found twenty goats and led them up there, before the gunners let fly.