by Fred Stenson
The situation liberated Frank to doff his boots and pocket his socks. The wet sand squished like dough between his toes. The surf rose on his shins and the bursting bubbles tickled the leg hair. Little shells rolled in the outbound waves. Tiny crabs scuttled for cover when the water unclothed them.
That night, when Frank got back to the tent he shared with Ovide, he described what he’d seen. Ovide listened with eyes closed. He had let himself be picked for duty as a shoeing smith—putting shoes back on the horses who had toughened up enough to stand it. Because horses were healing all the time, the job became heavier every day. Hot as Green Point camp was, Ovide had found the hottest place in it: pumping bellows in a black canvas cave, carrying red-hot shoes from forge to anvil.
When Frank finished telling about the beach, he urged Ovide to declare himself heat-struck come reveille tomorrow. Take a break from the infernal forge. Join him on the beach with the horses. Frank had little hope of Ovide agreeing, but, come morning, Ovide did go to his sergeant and say he wanted the day off from the forge. He wanted to exercise lamers down on the sand.
With the sun rising and banging off the mountains behind them, the two cowboys led a dozen horses. The tide was in this time, and they had to walk above the black rocks instead of below. Frank worried that they would not see any of the things he had advertised. He went scouting and found a place where a path led down through the rocks to an exposed rim of sand, then guided Ovide and the horses there. The tide had turned and every hour there was more shore to play on.
Ovide rolled his trousers to uneven heights. His thick white shins, laced with pink and purple scars, looked foreign in the water. His shirt hung out on one side. His Stetson was cockeyed. He kept picking things up and pocketing them until his pockets sagged.
Ovide glanced up and saw Frank looking, took a step onto a slippery rock, lost his balance, and fell. The horses near him pretended shock and went plunging in all directions. Ovide staggered upright, and the shells in his pockets and the ocean streaming from his pants pulled his trousers off his wide flat ass. Strangled at the ankles, he tripped again.
Frank had never seen Ovide so much as grin. Now he was laughing. Floundering in the surf and laughing. Frank looked at what he was seeing and tried to trap it in a picture. Keep this, he said to himself. Take it with you when you go.
The Great Karoo
The tracks behind the Cape Town train station swarmed with men and horses. Sergeants barked orders, trying to mask what was mere confusion. The Mounted Rifles officers took turns marching off to “sort things out,” returning red-faced. Twice, they ordered the men to pick everything up and move it elsewhere on the maze of tracks—for no apparent gain or purpose.
For Frank’s Squadron D, part of the problem was that their commanding officer, Maj. Gilbert Sanders, had sickened on the ship and now remained behind in a Cape Town hospital.
What broke the stalemate was a furious Brit riding into them like charging cavalry. He jerked the mouth on a wild-eyed horse, yelled and pointed. They followed his gestures to an empty length of train. Three kinds of car: high-walled open cars for the horses; a flatcar for the saddles; third-class compartments for the men.
When the train left the shadow of Table Mountain, Frank was one of the soldiers hanging on the outside like flies on a tent. He wanted to see where they were going and to feel the breeze. Others rode on the roof or stood on the short porches between cars.
They passed through a series of lowland farms, white houses with white fences on velvet green. In the gardens, the leaf vegetables were fleshy and fighting for space. The bushes flowered pink, purple, and yellow.
For a brief while, the train went through an orchard, and the opening tree rows gave glimpses of black pickers gathering wind-fallen fruit. Frank saw people on ladders with baskets, catching fruit that children on higher branches were throwing down.
When the country opened up, the sun-gleaming land rucked into hills, and more workers followed vineyard and garden rows in long upward sweeps.
The images fluttered through Frank’s eyes and mind, something new every minute. Emotions popped inside him at the same j utter ingrate. All of it was so green, so rich with decorative colour: neat, gardened, groomed. Even the horses looked slicker than at home and the cattle tamer with their clunking bells. His own world, that tenderly nursed idea of prairie beauty, was in danger of being reduced for all time.
The train began to climb. The hills became steeper and the houses fewer, and the cows on the velvet hills were more beef than dairy. Through the window Frank was hanging beside, he saw an alarming rush toward him, men yapping and pointing. He twisted himself and saw a massive boil of rock swelling smooth out of an ordinary hill. Never had he seen anything so flesh-like come from the earth.
The big rock marked a frontier beyond which the land’s green hide was often split to expose the rocks inside. They entered the mountains through a narrow twist of canyon that rode beside a copper-coloured creek, and the NCOs and sergeants came yelling for the men to get inside before the more rugged terrain shook or brushed them off.
Frank held on a little longer because the sun was dropping and setting the orange rocks aflame. Black birds with pink jewels on their wings sprang up and flew hard to escape the train’s intrusion. Higher up, sleek rodents flowed like water.
When the sun dunked in the crags, the blackened cliffs split into rough knuckled fists whose beating had strewn a boulder field below.
Come night, Frank returned to his allotted compartment. He was the last of eight who were supposed to sleep there, an enforced intimacy worse even than the Regina barracks. A two-pound bully beef tin with a rolled-back lid was making the rounds, and Frank got to his pack and unearthed his spoon in time to catch two greasy lumps. He filled his mess tin twice with tea. Before this eating was done, four men had stretched out on bunks and a fifth on the floor, and all remaining space was taken up with gear. Frank’s pack had a berth, but he did not.
He popped out and the fresher air of the corridor felt and smelled like escape. He joined a tribe of wanderers who walked and climbed the train’s length in vain hope of a nook to settle in. Some said they were going to bed down with the horses, and he thought Ovide was probably doing that, and maybe Jeff too. But, before he got to the horse cars, Frank found a porch with a space he could squeeze into. Pete Belton was there, and Eddy. Pete was chewing and spitting at the clitter-clatter of tracks, while big Eddy sat cross-legged on the floor, falling asleep and then waking himself when his head banged an iron bar.
Frank looked at the crags printed black on the blue-grey sky, at a litter of stars emerging. Known only to those who did not sleep, the train stopped several times. It huffed and wheezed, and finally, straining, broke the bond between wheel and rail and stuttered forward again.
The cloudy first light had a muslin quality that would not quite reveal, but when the first long stabs of sunlight ignited vistas, the mountains were gone and replaced by a new concept of nothing. Clay slabs rolled out, looking like they had flowed from a mountain yesterday; had only just frozen into pottery. When that vision was established, the rolling train crossed into a sea of dusty sage. Then came a grey, grubby floor strewn with shards.
All around Frank, men felt called upon to comment, or just to curse, the blasted land on whose back they rode—especially here in the protection of the train. The only ones not shocked, or even surprised, were the Beltons. As their parents followed gold rushes and settlement frontiers, and always arrived too late, they had often fetched up in dry places others condemned.
“Like southern Idaho,” Pete Belton proclaimed. “‘Cept the sage there is bigger.”
Frank hurt all over from standing through the night. He went inside and walked until he found a bench, and then watched some more through the window as sleep gained on him. He saw how rocks erupted the skin of desert, sparsely but in many forms. Like markers in abandoned graveyards. Slaggy piles whose mortar had washed away. Distant mounds of drab.
The sturdiest things in view appeared on the horizon as pyramids with their points lopped off, grey or blue. As they came closer, they turned yellow and sandy, less geometric and substantial. At close viewing, they were all seams and scars, and not much more than that.
A dry and starved kind of country, and when a goat or a sheep, or a hut with outbuildings and a water dam, floated by the window—touched into motion by motion—it was a surprise that registered as a mistake. That should not be there, Frank told himself, while knowing he had no experience from which to draw that conclusion.
The sage rose in height and fell, bunched and fled itself. Then for a time there was no widespread cover but a vision of flowers left separate on lifeless gravel. Each was perfectly round as a bride’s bouquet. Snow-white. Pink as a forge’s heart. Sunset orange.
Frank pinched his cheek and twisted, for he thought he must be asleep and dreaming. But the cheek felt pain and the flowers remained.
When a small antelope with elaborately twisted horns crept down a rocky slope, a fellow yelled out, “Where the hell are we, anyway?”
Another soldier had a map spread on his lap. He made a big circle on the sheet with his finger and yelled back, “The Great Karoo Desert!”
So at least they had a name for what bewildered them.
Frank did sleep then until awakened by the train’s slowing and squealing and coming to a stop. The same blasted blankness spread to a brushed horizon, and the only sounds left were the engine’s puffing and the wind’s hitting the walls with fistfuls of grit. Some soldiers stuck themselves out the windows to see ahead, to see what obstacle blocked them. One remembered it was a war and thought rebels must have blown up the track. Then a sergeant came walking beside the train, rattling his stick down the metal sides, meaning they had arrived where someone meant them to be.
Frank fetched his saddle off the flatcar and saw Ovide doing the same. The old cowboy looked rumpled, even for himself, so might have slept with the horses after all. They fell in together and set their saddles on the horns in a patch of sage or gorse or heather—Frank had heard it called all those things by the plant experts on the train. Not far away was a homely scrap of town.
Ovide led Frank back to their horse car. They gave their mares turns at the water barrel before jumping them down, there being no other water in sight.
A few Boer wagons had come with them on flatcars, and the sergeants told them to load these full. Their lieutenants had gone into the Boer town and its African village to hire more wagons and blacks. Frank and Ovide’s troop sergeant told them they were making camp a mile away, because the town, Victoria Roads, had a reputation for being rebel.
When they got to camp, Aussies, New Zealanders, and Derbyshire yeomen had already made a tent town. Their own D Battery was camped among them. All total, they were the Carnarvon Field Force, and their job was to reclaim villages west of here. Boer rebels had come down from the republics to stir the Cape Boers to rebel. If the Cape Boers joined, they could attack the lowlands, maybe even Cape Town. Lord Kitchener had chased the interlopers already, pushing them across the Orange River near Britstown. But it was decided more should be done to frighten and win back the people of the desert.
Colonel Herchmer demanded they form up so he could make a speech. He repeated about the Cape Boers and going into the desert to show the flag. He added that they should not be so stupid as to think the rebels were only in the distant desert and not here. This very morning, D Battery had seen heliograph flashes in the low hills. The night previous, snipers had fired at their sentries.
Herchmer asked if there were questions. A private asked if Maj. Gilbert Sanders would be back soon. Herchmer did not care for the question.
“Do you see anywhere on me the tools of a necromancer?” he roared. “A crystal ball?” He swept his hand across the dismal Karoo desert, to emphasize what a stupid question it was, but his hand passed in front of telegraph poles that contradicted him.
During this gather and speech, Frank had seen Jeff Davis. He was standing with Casey Callaghan, the Irish teamster from Maple Creek who had stood up for Jeff against Pete Belton on the train in Canada. They had shared a tent at Green Point. They were friends now, thought Frank, with an embarrassing pang of loss.
The new arrivals were spared sentry duty that night, but Frank might as well have done the job for all the sleep he got. He sat up like a jack-in-the-box every time a hyena cried, and every time a rifle cracked. By the long spaces between the shots, it seemed the Boers wanted the British camp to fall asleep and then be awakened, to keep them all on edge.
Toward morning, there was a much bigger eruption. It started with a bucket of horse brushes being kicked. The fellow who did it dodged back and tripped on the picket rope, which touched off the horses. It looked to Frank like half the Mounted Rifles leapt up at the same time to calm the pulling horses. The instigator was a skinny black youth, one of those hired yesterday for the baggage convoy. He had snuck home overnight to celebrate and was drunk.
There was a good moon in a clear sky and, by it, Frank saw a Boer come striding in baggy trousers, his slab of chest bare. He had a whip coiled in one hand. Frank saw two soldiers draw their Colts at the sight of this big Dutchman. A D Battery lieutenant told them sharply to put them away.
“That’s Case,” the sergeant said. “He’s our Boer.” Wagon boss on the supply convoy.
Ovide, who had slept through the sniping and hyenas, was awake now. Frank and he stood together and watched Case jabber a weird lingo at one of the black drivers. The skinny youth was tied to a wagon wheel, then gagged, though he made no sound.
Case let go his whip beyond its handle. He took a few steps away from the wheel, dragging it behind.
“That’s rhinoceros hide,” said a D Battery bombardier, probably having seen it in action already.
Case barked for everyone behind him to clear away. He reared the whip back and sailed it at the skinny back. It struck and the boy stiffened. Methodically, Case continued to flog.
The light was not good enough to see what was happening to the boy’s back, but Frank could hear how hard the whip laid into him and the grunt the boy made in his chest each time. It was easy to imagine red ropes of weal and blood. It went on too long, before the boy was untied and ungagged and let stumble away. Among the wagons, hands reached out to help him.
When Frank lay down again, he looked at Ovide, who was wrapping himself in his blanket. “Will they do that to us if we get out of line?”
“No.”
Frank’s mother, Madeleine, started up in his mind, talking angrily about how Halfbreeds and Indians were treated in ways whites never were. Frank thought about Lige Abel, one of three black people he’d ever met. Lige was a huge cowboy who worked on the Waldron; who had once carried a heavy iron bar a mile to win a bet with another cowboy. Before he slept, Frank imagined Lige ripping himself free of the wagon wheel and taking Case’s whip out of his hand.
Victoria Roads/Victoria West
A train arrived next morning carrying the rest of the Canadian guns, as well as mules and more horses. Since reveille in the dark, some of the Canadians and Englishmen had been preparing to leave. Under Major Hurdman, they departed when the new train arrived.
This cavalcade, including Mounted Rifles C Squadron, was still visible as dust in the sky when D Squadron started getting ready to go. D Squadron would be led by Colonel Herchmer, and he let them know he was only doing so because Major Sanders was inconveniently sick. Sanders, their major from British Columbia, was well liked; Herchmer, less so.
Like everyone else, Frank left the saddling as late as he could. When it was time, he put his two sleeping blankets on Dunny and thumped the heavy California stock saddle on top, gave the cinch its first pull. He rolled the oil sheet and greatcoat together and tied them behind the cantle. Then he repacked his haversack. Some things you had to carry, like emergency rations and a full water bottle. The hairbrush and shaving mirror were optional, but he put the
m in. Frank gave the cinch another tug, swung the sack onto his back, grabbed his stupidly heavy Lee-Enfield, and clumsily mounted. Sergeant Brindle ordered them to place the rifles across their laps and hook them to their belts. Dunny looked back at Frank in disbelief. Ovide was lined up beside Frank on his small mare. Both Ovide and the mare wore looks of misery at the weight they were carrying.
Frank and Ovide stayed together as the troops were ordered into lines. Jeff and Casey had been picked as scouts and went ahead with the machine guns; then D Squadron, then some other colonials. The last Frank saw of Victoria Roads was Case dragging his rhino whip and Colonel Parsons, commander of the Carnarvon Field Force, sitting in a canopied Cape cart, having a last cup of tea.
At the start of the ride, Frank heard fellows venture that this was better than Green Point. The morning was cool and no sand was flying. Within an hour, the sun had become fierce with a light so powerful you could not look anywhere near it. As the air heated up, the wind gained velocity and the rock grit started to move. Ahead, everything swam, even the hills. They had a Cape Boer for a guide, and he told them the hills were called kopjes (pronounced like copies). Frank had studied these already and had decided they had little purpose but to shimmer and turn colour. Take that away and they were slag heaps, big and useless. Far behind them now, the train that had arrived this morning huffed a black billow and crept away. When it disappeared between hills, Frank felt lonely for it.
After the elaborate start-up, the journey was short, ending in just a few miles at a town called Victoria West. The day had been a dress rehearsal, dipping them in the Great Karoo before they were fully plunged. They camped on stony ground within sight of the Boer town and its adjacent African village.
As night came on, the sound from the sleeping camp was swallowed by the African night. A chant of insects came in waves that never stopped. The hyenas, which looked like mad dogs, had tracked them from a distance during the march. Their sound in the night was weirder than a coyote’s. A big beetle entered the tent and skittered across Frank’s face.