The Great Karoo

by Fred Stenson

  “Why do I have to do that last part?”

  “Because five and two is a secret medicine. A medicine the officers use when they get sick. If you say five and two, it’ll get us in trouble. Just say you got sunstroke. They’ll give you something, and that will be the end of it.”

  “I thought you had the sunstroke.”

  “I do, damn it! It’s just simpler if you say it’s you.”

  It took quite a while, but Eddy came back with a vial and an envelope of powder. No one had been at the medicine chest. What had taken so long was having to strike matches to find the right pigeonholes and then filling the envelope with powder in the dark.

  While Eddy was gone, Pete had been thinking hard about what to poison. His first thought was to poison Davis’s horse. It would certainly hurt Davis to have his blue cayuse killed, and would neatly settle the score. But Ovide Smith had the horse tonight, so it wasn’t possible.

  Pete’s next thought was to poison Davis himself, but there were problems there too. At mealtimes, they were just grabbing chunks of mutton off a fire or scooping mush out of a bucket. He couldn’t poison Davis without killing half the squadron, and possibly himself.

  Then Pete had an exciting thought. To hell with poison! Jeff Davis was out there in the dark tonight, all alone and not far away. Pete could leave the camp and sneak past that wall Davis was guarding from. He could sneak past it and then come back toward him just like a Boer. There wasn’t much moon, but probably enough to see Davis’s hat against the sky. Pete was a marksman. If he could see the hat, he could shoot Davis dead.

  The problem, as usual, was Eddy. He could wait for Eddy to go to sleep, but by then it would be too dark to see Davis against the sky. And if Eddy woke and found Pete gone, he’d probably come looking for him. If Pete was out shooting Davis at the same time as Eddy was telling somebody he was missing, it could get him caught. Pete decided he had to tell Eddy about his plan.

  After he finished explaining why he wanted to shoot Jeff Davis tonight, Eddy was stone still, barely breathing. He had no toughness. He never wanted to hurt anyone.

  “Course you don’t want to hurt Davis. ‘Cause it wasn’t your horse. My horse and I’m getting even.”

  “What about the baboon?” Eddy asked.

  Pete was about to sock Eddy for never keeping his mind on one thing when he realized Eddy was right. If they started sneaking out toward Davis, and the baboon was as smart about hearing things as the New Zealanders said, the bastard would start yelling and stir up the camp. Pete could be taken for a Boer and shot.

  Then Pete had it. He really had it this time! He had thought up a way to kill Davis, to quiet the baboon, and to use the poison—all three!

  “First thing, Eddy,” Pete said, “we’ll give the baboon the medicine. The medicine puts you to sleep. It’s why it works for every kind of ailment. Makes you sleep so sound you don’t know you’re sick.”

  The brothers went first to where they’d eaten supper. There’d been a box of apples for dessert. They were wormy and fellows had either left them or taken them for their horse. There were a few left, and Pete grabbed two. At their camping spot, Pete pulled his oil sheet overtop of him and Eddy, and got Eddy to strike a match. By the light, he cut a hole in the apple and poured five and two in the hole. Then he corked it with the piece he’d carved out and shook the apple hard.

  “Don’t forget to save some for yourself,” Eddy said.

  “I’m better now. Shut up.”

  Pete emptied the vial and envelope into the second apple.

  At the platform, the baboon was a hunched shape by the centre pole. His body was pointed in the direction Davis had gone. Pete rolled the first apple across the platform toward him. The baboon grabbed it with a sudden motion, threw it in his mouth, and crunched. Same thing with the second one.

  They stayed and watched until the baboon groaned and threw himself down on the platform, shuddering.

  “He don’t look to be sleeping very well, Pete.”

  “Maybe it’s too strong for a baboon. Hell with it, he’s quiet anyway.”

  Then Pete went and got his rifle and they began sneaking out of camp.

  The whole night was a place of concealment. Who would stay in one place behind a wall so his enemy would know where to find him? Never assume that a hat showing behind a wall has a head in it. That was the way Red Crow had taught Jeff Davis to think.

  Jeff stayed at the little wall long enough to rebuild it. The stones had been piled without mortar and had fallen. After he had repiled them, he found a dead branch and wedged it into the rocks, then set his Stetson on the branch’s end. He spoke to the baboon every little while, as he did these things.

  The night had a sliver of moon showing yellow through wisps of cloud. The noise of the river was distant. The insects chanted but there were no other wild sounds, of kills or kills defended. It was a quiet night for Africa. Davis walked back into camp. The baboon had been silent for some time, and he wanted to know why.

  At the platform, he saw that the baboon was lying on his side. Every few seconds, his legs came up in a jerk toward his barrel gut. The baboon’s teeth ground inside the grimace of his face.

  Davis struck a match and hid it in his hand. He ran the light along the animal’s hair. He saw bits of vomit, bits of apple with a chemical stink.

  Davis left the camp. Rather than toward the pale spot that was the wall, he went fifty yards to its right. He was beyond the wall when a rifle fired from still farther out. He saw the flash and heard the bullet go toward his wall. Bent low, he ran and let the sliver of moon show him a way through the scrub. He ran for the gun flash, but wide to the right. It was the only shot. He could hear men shouting behind him in the camp. Sergeants were blowing whistles.

  When Davis stopped, he heard his heart pounding. Once his heart slowed, he heard a drag of cloth through the hard brush on his left. He heard ragged breathing.

  Jeff twisted his mouth and said, “Didja kill ‘im, Pete?”

  “Shut up, Eddy.”

  “I didn’t say nuthin,” the real Eddy said.

  “I told you shut up.”

  The wall was about fifty yards away, between them and the camp. The smaller shape in the dark was Pete. Eddy’s larger form was to Pete’s right. Davis was behind Pete now and tapped the mouth of his Colt on the bone of Pete’s neck.

  “Rifle on the ground.” He tapped again.

  Pete bent and set his rifle down. Coming up, he grabbed for his revolver. The holster was empty. The Colt was already in Jeff’s waistband.

  “Goddamn you. Who are you?”

  “The one you just killed.”

  “Davis? That can’t be. I shot you in your goddamn head. I saw your hat fly.”

  “Pete?” It was Eddy calling to his brother, wanting instruction.

  Pete said to be quiet.

  “You’ve got a Colt revolver in your hand, Eddy Belton,” Jeff said. “Put it away in your holster.”

  Davis heard this happen. More commotion was coming from the camp. Voices approaching. He could hear Lieutenant Davidson calling his name, appealing to him to answer.

  “What you gonna do with us?” Pete asked.

  “Come here, Eddy Belton.”

  The big man stepped closer, dragging himself through the brush. Davis took him by the arm and pulled him close to his brother.

  “Both of you, kneel down.”

  “He’s gonna kill us now, Pete.” Eddy said it without emotion, a statement of fact.

  “Shut up!”

  Davis laid his rifle barrel on Pete’s shoulder.

  “Go on, you bastard.”

  “You tried to kill me, Pete Belton,” Jeff said. “It didn’t work. Now you’re going to serve me. Both of you will do what I ask. You’ll guard me all the time.”

  “You’re letting us live?”

  Davis told them to get up. He told them to take their rifle with them. They were to go twenty paces north and lie down under the scrub. They were not to
move.

  “I’ll guide them around you.”

  Davidson’s voice kept appealing. “Davis? Can you hear me? Answer if you can.”

  Davis imagined that he was a Boer, come to ambush. The next bullet would go into that voice.

  When Frank and Ovide rode into camp at dawn, they were unaware of what a wild night it had been. They had heard one shot, and had assumed it was a sniper, but the whistles and the rest had not carried to them.

  The story they were told over breakfast was that the sniper had come within an inch of killing Davis; had put a bullet hole in the crown of Davis’s Stetson. Jeff had taken after the Boer but had not found him.

  A strange part of the story was that the baboon had died in the night. They thought maybe the sniper’s bullet carried into camp after going through the hat; that the baboon had been shot. But there was no blood and no hole in the animal’s hide.

  The baboon had been damn sick. There was vomit and shit all over the platform. Bits of apple, for some reason, though no one admitted feeding him one.

  A fanciful few said they smelled poison, but why on earth would a Boer sneak into a British camp, poison a baboon, and leave without doing further damage? The ones who said poison were laughed at, and that was the end. It was too bad, though. The baboon had been an interesting animal.

  Frank thought the baboon’s death would bother Jeff Davis, but when Frank finally saw the scout, it was as if he did not care.

  Road to Bloemfontein

  The crooked beaks of the vultures were painted red but they were too sated to eat. They coiled their elastic necks and clutched their feathers around themselves; hopped on and off the gutted bodies, competing to be inside the zone of strongest stench: the roaring signature of plenty. Better this than all the droughts and plagues of history: this paradise of war.

  Relieved at Norvals Pont, the Canadian Mounted Rifles were on the road to Bloemfontein. From the road itself, they learned the scale of operation they were about to enter: how many wheels and hooves it must have taken to tear this miles-wide swath and chew and pulverize this dirt to flour.

  The road to Bloom reminded Frank of a cattle drive, when every rider would try to avoid the drag, the position at the rear where you lived inside your wiper and moved through never-ending dust and putridness. The road to Bloom was all drag, a dust that would lift at a whisper; a rank powder added to every minute by every form and stage of death. In the joyous intervals when Frank left the road, the smell travelled with him. It was there when he woke and after a wash. It figured in his dreams.

  The land itself had changed entirely since the Orange River. There had been a subtle lifting, some change wrought of altitude and ancient events that created grass across an endless plain. Having baked in summer and endured the first strangulations of fall, the prairie was pale blond as far as the eye could see.

  This was more the sort of place Frank had dreamt: a prairie like home but in sweeps more endless. But Frank had imagined it full of wild animals, and that had been wrong. This prairie was a waving silence. With the exception of some quick herds of antelope, the odd ostrich, the observable life was domestic. Sheep and goats, a few odd-looking cows.

  Their new wagon-Boer liked to talk in English, and Frank asked him questions. Had this been a place of wild animals once? Did they die off gradually or in big slaughters? The Boer described and shaped with his hands all kinds of animals. He claimed they were still there, but so wary and earth-coloured only the practised eye of a Boer hunter could spot them.

  And, in their extreme cleverness, they don’t even shit, Frank said, but only to himself. Off in the grass and brush, there was not much variety in the scats. Sheep, goat, equine, bovine—little twists of turd from skittering creatures.

  Frank was reminded of Kootenai Brown guiding Billy Cochrane into the mountains above Kootenai Lakes. They would go after mountain sheep, and, finding none, Kootenai always said it was strange, since just a week ago the slopes had been covered.

  One trouble with the sparseness of wild animals was that there was no other legal thing to eat. The Orange River had proved to be a boundary beyond which supply convoys seldom moved. There were umpteen theories why the war had stopped at Bloemfontein. Some said General Roberts had pursued the enemy with such vigour he had played out his horses and men. Others said he had outraced all hope of supply, especially given the number of bridges the Boers had blown. There was also a typhoid epidemic among Roberts’ troops.

  Roberts and Kitchener had deemed the old way of supply—each battalion looking after itself—outmoded. They had replaced it with one big system: the smooth-functioning one that kept their army sick and hungry, and in one place.

  On the march, the Mounted Rifles had no army food. On the second day of marching without, a train pulled up beside them, and the black railway crew kicked about a hundred hardtack biscuits off a flatcar onto the ground. The train moved on. That helped them make a decision. Unless they were content to eat a dirty rock-hard biscuit every couple of days, it was probably time to go back to first principles: Feed thyself, being one.

  They limbered their ropes and honed their knives. A few rode out into the prairie and started moving sheep along until a herd was gathered.

  Jeff Davis’s run of scouting had ended at Norvals Pont. He was told that Hutton’s brigade and Alderson’s MI battalions had their own dedicated scouting troops. Casey Callaghan, who had made corporal, was picked for an Alderson scout troop, but Jeff was left behind.

  Now, Frank saw that Jeff was one of those out drifting with the sheep, weaving out from time to time to steer in another one or two. Andy Skinner, Jim Fisher, Cletis Delisle, Gil Snaddon, Waldron Hank, Pete and Eddy Belton, Jeff Davis—it was all cowboys out there. The townsmen, ranchers, ranchers’ sons, and everyone higher ranked than private, stayed back. Fred Morden did not cross the divide this time.

  Frank took a long look at Lieutenant Davidson before he acted. Though Hugh Davidson had told them yesterday about a Tommy court-martialled for a stolen chicken, he was looking elsewhere while the cowboys worked.

  Frank tapped Dunny, and they cantered out of line. Ovide still had no horse and was riding a wagon beside its black driver. Frank waved as he rode past. He also passed Fred Morden, and they touched their hats to each other.

  As if Frank’s arrival was the signal, the riders started corralling the sheep, and the ropers walked their horses inside the flock. In no time flat, sheep were roped, killed, and bled—and started coming apart on the insides of their hides.

  The march had already stopped. Bits of wood had been gathered and fires were licking. Not one officer said boo. Everybody ate that night, and when they got up to go, many thanked the cowboys for the meal.

  Norvals Pont to Bloom was just a six-day ride, but the Mounted Rifles became famous during it. Now that it was loot or starve, it came down to ability. As not everybody in Lord Roberts’ army was gifted at roping and transforming sheep into mutton, the non-cowboy colonials showed up at the Mounted Rifles’ night fires wanting to barter for meat. They offered all kinds of loot: liquor, tobacco, ornately carved Boer pipes, baked goods. It wasn’t that they could not possibly rustle for themselves, but more that they would be awkward at it and have to use guns. That kind of display might bring the Boer rebels—or a British officer—down on everyone. Why not simply do what people had always done—start a black market where everyone got to play to his strength and no one looked a fool?

  When a troop of patrolling Aussies came by not long before Bloemfontein, and paid in English pounds to eat, one of their horses, a pretty chestnut gelding, buddied up to a mare in the Rifles’ free pool. When it was time to go, the Aussie owner could not find his horse in the dark. The Canadians said, “We’re going the same direction as you. Drop by tomorrow and look in daylight.”

  Overnight, by lantern, Jim Fisher clipped the chestnut’s Queensland Mounted Infantry brand (QMI) into one that read CMR. Andy Skinner bobbed the horse’s tail and roached his mane.

>   When the Aussie returned the next day on a borrowed horse, they invited him to have a look. He slowly rode up one side of their extended order and down the other. He entered the free pool and looked at every horse. At least three times he rode by his own horse and did not recognize him.

  Right to the end, nobody was sure if it was a joke, a trick, or a theft. But they let the Aussie ride away.

  Starting with the first sheep killed, Frank noticed a strange thing about the Beltons. He had gone out that first day with the idea of helping Jeff, but Jeff already had his crew. Pete and Eddy Belton were waiting for him to rope a sheep. When he dragged it in, they took care of it. They handled every other catch he made.

  Each time the drovers and ropers went out to get more food, Pete and Eddy worked for Jeff and carried his meat home to the cooking fires.

  Fischer’s Farm

  They could see the hills above Bloemfontein when a British officer on a coughing horse appeared from the dust cloud and told them to get off the main track and follow a branching trail around the town. Six miles east of Bloom they would find Fischer’s Farm, where they would bivouac with other soldiers, including Royal Canadian Dragoons.

  Andy Skinner was angry about the diversion. He was an American who had ridden in cattle drives north from Texas. When you came to a town on a cattle drive, he told them, your cattle boss was supposed to grant you time—to get drunk, gamble, and whore. To be diverted around a substantial town after this long a ride was an insult, and Andy would not stop talking about it. Morden tried to reason with him and so did Reg Redpath. This was a Boer town, they said. There would be a big church, probably no saloons, and certainly no whores. But Andy was convinced it was his right to go in and be disappointed.

  Word of this got back to the officers, but in such a way that the officers supposed Andy had followers. After they had made camp and set their fires, a purposeful knot of lieutenants and sergeants arrived. Each lieutenant took a fire and gave the men around it a stiff talking to. It started with how lucky they were not to be in Bloemfontein. Typhoid was raging there, an epidemic that had started when Cronje pushed dead horses and oxen into the Modder River at Paardeburg. The Boer General, De Wet, had captured Sanna’s Post, the waterworks for Bloom, and had sabotaged it, making the situation worse. The disease was killing soldiers every day, Canadian infantrymen among them. The Mounted Rifles were not likely to be at Fischer’s Farm long. When they left, they would be headed for the war. They had better stop bitching and get ready.