The Great Karoo

by Fred Stenson

  Now Casey was strutting toward them with a dispatch bag in hand. Frank understood there was something amiss between Callaghan and Davis, the argument he had noticed at the beginning. Frank still did not know what it was about, because Jeff stayed quiet, and because everything Casey said in front of Frank was coded. One result was that Davis had quit Callaghan’s tent and slept in the open near Frank. Jeff and Frank usually worked alone, while Casey went with his own hand-picked four.

  Seeing the dispatch bag, Frank thought Jeff was meant to carry it. But what Casey wanted was for Jeff and he to carry it together. Despite their falling out, Casey still came to Jeff if a proposition was difficult; if he wanted an expert behind him.

  When he knew what was wanted, Jeff asked what the dispatch contained. The rumour about Botha’s army moving north was loose in the camp, and Jeff supposed it was that. The question caused—or allowed—Casey to erupt.

  “This,” he shook the bag, “is stale rubbish about Ermelo. Written before Botha even started to move. But because it’s Lord Kitchener’s stale rubbish, we’re meant to risk our lives delivering it to Smith-Dorrien before morning. Right through the middle of a battle, I expect.”

  Casey concluded by giving Frank a filthy look. He had revealed a confidence in Frank’s presence and blamed Frank for being there to hear it.

  Jeff asked how far, and Casey said forty miles. They had to go soon and ride all night. That led to a discussion of horses. They agreed they needed more horsepower than one. Casey wanted The General and The Sergeant. Jeff wanted all three of his, and he wanted Frank along to manage them. Casey did not want Frank. Jeff insisted. While the camp was having supper, the three men and five horses left together.

  The weather was changing. The horizons on the east and west were choked with mats of low-lying cloud, but the sky above was clear. When the moon rose, it would be almost full, meaning they could see and be seen. Along some ridges and down some valleys were remnant loaves of fog left from wetter days.

  They had gone maybe ten miles of the forty, and were navigating by the moon, when drifting fog along a ridge line blew off and exposed a stripe of Boer riders. Knowing they were revealed, the Boers came in pursuit. Casey darted out of the valley’s gut, making for a deep shadow under a hanging cloud. The two groups were less than a mile apart.

  Casey and Jeff had started the evening on their number-two horses, which meant that Frank was riding and leading a faster group. Casey signalled him ahead. With bullets singing, Frank and his three entered the trees and the relative dark. He slacked his pace and let the others catch up. The General and The Blue were saddled, and Casey and Jeff switched onto them and were off again, all without losing ground.

  Casey found a notch dense with night, the mouth of a descending coulee. He entered and they galloped down, whipped by overhanging branches. They went as fast as they could in the coulee’s twisting dark, and Dunny piled into The Blue when Casey slid The General to a halt and jumped off. He leapt across and climbed to the foot of a U-shaped tree. He pulled out his dispatch bag, scratched a hole among the roots, and buried it.

  They continued to the coulee’s bottom and spilled out on a dome grown over with moon-shiny sage. The new valley was broad and pocked, with a crooked serpent of black creek. Casey was riding The General. Wanting to take The Sergeant too, he jerked the reins from Frank. He pointed north, the direction he was headed. Casey signalled for Jeff to go the other way. To Frank, he gave no orders. Frank started to follow Jeff, but Jeff waved him back and galloped south on The Blue.

  The moon was still high and bright. The packed roan was coughing and Frank felt the long rise and fall of Dunny’s breath under his legs.

  It came to him that he was likely to be captured now, and that perhaps that was the plan: that Frank and his horses would be caught and this would buy time for the others to get away. It made him angry. How could Jeff save Dunny only to give her away again so soon? Frank determined not to let it happen. He was about to strip off the roan’s pack and leave him, but changed his mind. Frank’s job was the horses, and the roan was his horse to look after, same as the dun.

  Frank looked around for the darkest place and found it on the valley’s far wall. The blackness there could be another coulee or a bunch of trees; something to hide inside, at any rate. He took his horses fifty yards up the creek until their hoof irons knocked on a shelf of stone. Then he urged them across the black-snake creek. He touched Dunny up to a canter across the pocked flat, the roan following, and didn’t slow until they were inside the darkness.

  The place was a steep-sided notch outside of which some evergreens fanned. Frank pushed both horses into the kloof’s pocket and held them there. He watched the dome on the opposite side, the place where the coulee emptied.

  Minutes later, twelve riders boiled onto the shining stage and halted. The Boer horses were spooky in the strange light and began to mill. Confusion was evident. When they split, only two went in Casey’s direction; ten in Jeff’s.

  By the time Frank recrossed the flat and the creek, there was no sign or sound of anyone. He followed the path of the ten, easily visible on the moonlit grass. He kept on until the valley made a right turn, and there he left his horses and walked until he could see again. He could not see far, for the view was blunted where one side of the valley shadowed the rest.

  The last thing visible before this darkness was a game trail climbing the north flank. When he’d retrieved the horses, he took this trail and rose along it. Everything had the smell of arid country when wet. The dun seemed to see much better in the dark than Frank did, and he let her walk at her normal pace while he himself was blind. The trail rose almost to the top of the wall, then levelled and went in and out of the hill folds. Sometimes they were deep in brush, sometimes in the open.

  When the valley curved and went south again, the whole of it was in moonlight. Mausers began firing close by, and Frank ducked in his saddle, thinking they were aimed at him. All ten fired, almost at once, but there were no songs in the air near him, no snapping branches.

  Frank urged Dunny forward until Frank could see the hip of a Boer horse in the bottom. He got down, tied the roan to Dunny, and left them in the cover of trees. He went on alone, screened by bush, until he came to an open hill flank down which he could see.

  Jeff was still on The Blue. On his north side, the Boer horsemen had him half surrounded. It looked like a parley except that Jeff’s hands were raised. A long-bearded Boer kicked his pony in the guts and stepped toward Jeff. Probably he meant to collect Jeff’s guns: the carbine across his back and the two Colt revolvers shoved in his belt.

  Frank had his carbine and took aim across a crumbled rock. Though everything was murky and uncertain, he thought he had the front Boer in his sights. Frank was calming his breath when he heard a shot and the Boer slumped away. A rattle of pistol fire followed. Jeff had both of his Colts in hand and was firing. The Blue bolted through the Boer line. A Boer horse darted away, its rider grabbing mane to stay on. At least two Boers were down, having jumped or fallen—or been shot.

  Frank heard Dunny grumble. He looked to see what ailed her and saw that she was leaving, not urgently but tugging the roan along, the two of them crowded in the narrow trail. Without careful aim, Frank squeezed off a scatter of shots in the Boers’ direction. Then he ran for the horses. Dunny had never left him before, but then he understood. She had scented The Blue. In horse helio, the two mares were planning a rendezvous.

  Frank caught the stirrup and swung up. He held Dunny back long enough to get the roan trailing. Then he gave the dun her head, and she tore along as if it were day and the path wide. Frank put his arm over his face to shield against slapping branches.

  Every while, when Frank relaxed around the notion that they were clear, a rifle would crack. Bullets snicked the bushes or whined overhead. The Boers were still following and maybe saw their motion through the brush. But there came a time when there were no more bullets; when the hooves on the rocky path were
the only sound.

  By the time Dunny and The Blue found each other, the moon had dipped into a cream of clouds along the horizon. Without its light, the sky overhead was deep purplish and pricked with stars. The mares stood nose to nose, instantly becalmed, and Jeff and Frank could only laugh at the unerring constancy of buddied horses. Compared to it, human relationships were fickle and qualified.

  If he had spoken at that moment, Frank would have babbled in amazement at what Jeff had done. The bravest, most foolhardy thing he had witnessed in the entire war, or out of it. Frank had not been looking in the right place at the telling instant and therefore had not seen how Jeff drew his Colts and started firing. Frank had wondered all through the pursuit if he would find Davis whole or nursing wounds. But Jeff seemed not to have a scratch.

  The only sign of any disturbance was how fast he drained his spiked water bottle. Then he reached into his saddlebag and produced a second one. This time, he offered a drink to Frank before taking any more. It was rum, as Frank thought. Frank could see how Jeff was calmed by the drink. He leaned peacefully over his saddle rolls, his forearms crossed in The Blue’s stand-up mane, his long hands dangling.

  “Casey probably picked up that bag,” he said. “But we’re close enough, we better check.”

  “I can’t see,” said Frank.

  “The coulee we came down is just ahead. We’ll let The Blue find her way. If the dispatch isn’t there, we’ll camp until morning.”

  When the horses’ breathing had calmed, they rode on. Jeff was right, the coulee was there. They rode to the U-shaped tree. Frank would have ridden past, but Jeff stopped. There was a hole where the bag had been. After that, they climbed to a high bare place where the distant glows of a column’s bivouac fires were visible. They took turns sleeping, and it was soon morning.

  It was wet again, next day. As they covered the distance through a light drizzle, they could hear the deep booming of an artillery fight. By the time they found Smith-Dorrien’s camp, the battle had been over for an hour. They asked around and found Casey. He led them to a fire with a coffee can in the coals and asked an orderly for some cold meat and hardtack. Then he told his story.

  After picking up the dispatch, he’d gone most of the way to Chrissie Lake. He waited in a blue-gum forest for light. The battle started at dawn, and he came the rest of the way down seams between Boer commandos. He was just about to cross the space from the Boer to the British side when a Boer caught sight of him. Not just saw him but was willing to leave what he was doing to try to kill Casey.

  “I got him to follow me. I led him into a kloof and got above him. Shot him when he came in.” Casey threw up his hands in imitation of the shot Boer.

  After that, he waited until the Boers started to withdraw. As soon as it was only Smith-Dorrien’s guns firing canisters, he raced in. Smith-Dorrien could not believe a dispatch had made it to him through the battle. He said he would make sure Callaghan’s feat was recorded in the day’s dispatches.

  “What about the message you were carrying?” asked Jeff.

  “Smith-Dorrien read it, scrunched it, and put it in his pocket. What about you? Not many followed me, so I figured you’d drawn a crowd.”

  Jeff nodded.

  “There were ten,” Frank said.

  Jeff looked at Frank mildly, but still as if he had done something wrong.

  “But you got away,” said Casey.

  “I didn’t,” said Jeff “They caught me.”

  “Go on, you bugger,” said Casey. “You wouldn’t be here.”

  “They had me but I got away.”

  Frank waited for Jeff to elaborate. He did not. After listening to Casey fluff his story as high as it would go, Frank could not believe Jeff would leave it at that. When he looked at Casey sitting there, assuming that the silence meant Jeff’s adventure had been inferior to his own, Frank could not stand it.

  “All ten were around him,” Frank said. “Jeff had his hands up. One came for his guns. Jeff drew his Colts and shot him. He rode right through them, firing.”

  Jeff had closed his eyes. Casey’s face turned dark. “How could you see that?” he challenged Frank.

  “I followed him. I was above on a trail. I saw it clearly.”

  A few minutes earlier, Casey had given Jeff his cigarette makings. Jeff had twisted a smoke, and now he lit it. The cigarette’s end was a leaf of fire. He detached it carefully from his lip and blew out the flame.

  “Frank shot at them,” Jeff said. “That helped me get clear.”

  “No,” Frank said. “You were through. You were long gone.”

  “You helped hold them” Jeff said, looking at no one. He wasn’t building the story up. He was still trying to make it smaller.

  Casey was studying Jeff with bug eyes.

  “That was stupid,” he said.

  Jeff did not react to the blunt insult. Again, Frank could not stand it.

  “What do you mean, stupid?”

  “Now listen, you,” Casey said. He stuck his pointer finger out in Franks face. “You stay out of this.”

  Then to Jeff, Casey said, “You want to get yourself killed? Is that it? Too much pride to surrender? A surrendered man in Boer hands loses his tunic and his boots. For Christ’s sake!”

  Jeff turned to Casey. He had his cigarette between his knuckles. He reached and touched the finger ends on Casey’s shirt.

  “White men.”

  This seemed to anger Casey even more. “Goddamn that nonsense! You don’t look like any nigger to me.”

  Jeff leaned back, sipped his smoke. Closed his eyes. “Tell him about Young Sam again. Tell it all.”

  Frank did not want to. He’d already told both of them, and wasn’t sure what Jeff was after. But, finally, clumsily, he did as he was told. He emphasized that Brooke had told Von Roster that Young Sam was an American Indian, a Nez Perce. The Boer said it made no difference to him. Then they took Young Sam away and shot him twice. Then Frank remembered the part about Jim Whitford.

  “Von Roster said he’d kill Brooke’s old nigger too, if he found him. He meant Jim Whitford. Jim’s a Crow Halfbreed.”

  “The hell with this,” said Casey when Frank was done. He stood and planted his hands on his hips, his thick arms angled like pot handles. “To make sure you don’t get shot for a black, or a half-black, you’re going to get yourself shot. It makes no sense.”

  Jeff leaned back and looked at his one-time scouting partner. “It’s the difference between shot and executed. I don’t want to be executed.”

  “Then you” said Casey, and he was pointing out of a fist at Frank again, “you can scout with him. Because I won’t. Neither will anyone else.”

  Casey walked away in the direction of the other fires.

  Frank had given their horses to Smith-Dorrien’s campies. The horses were picketed where Jeff and Frank could see them, eating hay out of nosebags. When Casey was gone, Jeff stood and walked to them. He passed between Dunny and The Blue and came back with something clutched inside his tunic. He sat and checked around himself, but he and Frank were creatures of little interest in the angry celebration of the battle. They were calling it a victory, but an officer and more than twenty soldiers were dead.

  Jeff moved his tunic back and pulled out a bottle. It was something clear and unlabelled. The day they’d been attacked north of Ermelo, he and Frank were first into a farmhouse. Jeff had not shown the bottle to Frank then, but said now that’s where it came from. He opened it and handed it across. Frank took a long burning swallow. Jeff took it back and dropped the level a couple of inches.

  “Casey doesn’t like how I do things. That’s why I don’t tell him.”

  Frank apologized for saying so much, though he could not imagine having left it unsaid.

  Jeff shrugged. “Would have happened anyway.” He was already a little dreamy from the white liquor. “Maybe you won’t be a horse orderly for long.”

  Frank felt slow, behind the pace of things. He did not understand.


  “If Casey thinks you should be my partner, maybe he’ll tell Gat to make you a Scout.”

  Frank had the bottle. He wondered whether it would happen, and whether he wanted it to.

  “You don’t have to be my partner,” said Jeff. “Casey doesn’t want anyone scouting with me. He thinks I’m dangerous. He doesn’t like you so he doesn’t care if it’s you. It’s true, you know. I could get you killed.”

  Frank and Jeff bedded down near the fire; killed the rest of the bottle after they were in their blankets. Jeff threw it onto the coals and a blue flame shot out the mouth.

  Frank liked the idea of being Jeff’s partner, of having days like today that passed in a minute. But, while he waited to sleep, Frank considered what it would mean to Alma. What would she think of him in the role of a scout? When he started this drive, he’d been certain he could avoid the violent things. But then they made him cudgel all those sheep. He remembered the old woman’s hand gripping his sleeve. He believed Alma would be able to sense what he did while he was away from her; that she would smell however much char and death was on him.

  Frank thought of Jeff too, and how Ran After was no longer part of his story; how, for all these reasons taken together, Jeff was right to warn him.

  By the time his stomach settled and allowed sleep, Frank knew he would not try to become a Canadian Scout. If it was pushed on him, he would try to refuse it. Being Jeff’s horse-holder was enough, maybe too much.

  Piet Retief

  General Alderson’s column and the rest of French’s huge army crawled southeast, with the town of Piet Retief near the Swaziland frontier as a rough target. No matter how many Boers spilled out of the trap (usually past Smith-Dorrien’s left shoulder, as Botha had done), the idea remained that a significant number of the enemy were still in flight ahead and would be caught between the rock of the eight-column army and the hard place of Swaziland—where the Swazis were said to hate Boers and be willing to kill them.

  As the British got closer, several captures and plunders proved the Boers were there in the squeeze. Smith-Dorrien captured a Boer convoy. Rimington’s cavalry charged a commando at Klipfontein. Dartnell destroyed Boer supplies. French, with Knox and Pulteney closed in on Piet Retief.