Red Earth

by Tony Park

  ‘Yes,’ she said, as he quickened the tempo.

  Water broke like waves over the back of her thighs and more was spilled, but she didn’t care. She was lost in this basic, primal act. He could do this so very well, take her to another place, and she ached for the sound of his exertions, his grunting.

  When he had finished they washed and dried each other and he led her to the bed. It was bliss to climb between the cool white sheets. Banger rolled over onto his back and within a few moments he was snoring softly.

  Nia was so exhausted sleep eluded her. She was still wired. She closed her eyes and slowly, so as not to disturb Banger, moved her hand between her thighs. She closed her eyes, thinking about him and their sex in the bathtub. In time she tensed as her body went rigid and the little tremors overtook her.

  Sated, Nia relaxed and finally drifted to sleep, but woke a few hours later, having dreamed of a baby lost in the wilderness.

  Chapter 11

  Themba woke up cold and confused.

  The moon was setting, and the night was entering the darkest, coldest hour, just before the dawn. He wished he had taken another blanket from the car. He had given his to Lerato and she was cocooned inside it, plus she had the blanket she’d taken for herself. In addition, she had the baby for warmth.

  The Fortuner had run out of fuel, its tank holed by a bullet. By that time they were close to the fence of the Hluhluwe–iMfolozi Park. Themba had been heading for the reserve, hoping it would be easier to lose the men there than staying on foot outside. Animals were a risk, but he had learned a good deal from Mike Dunn and others about staying safe in the wild. He had found a spot where a warthog had dug under the fence, so he scraped out more loose earth and rocks with his hands and shimmied underneath. Lerato had handed him the baby and then she, clearly nervous, had reluctantly followed.

  The baby, a boy, as they had established after the first nappy change, had cried for his mother for the first couple of hours, as dusk had turned to dark. He had calmed a little when they fed him some mashed banana from the stock of food they had found in the Fortuner. Themba had brought a wrap from the vehicle and Lerato had fastened the baby on her back after he had finished his food. The warmth of her back and the beating of her heart had soothed the child to sleep. He had cried again for a while after they set up camp, but Lerato had fed him again and held him close to her chest. She had looked at Themba, her eyes communicating the silent worry that he also felt, that the child might give them away to their pursuers. He had shrugged. What more could they do? They couldn’t abandon him in the bush for a hyena to finish him off.

  The little fellow with the light caramel-coloured skin and silky soft black curls had started to reveal something of his personality to them. They learned quickly that as soon as they set him down in the grass, if he was awake, he would start crawling away from them. He was an explorer. He picked up rocks and tasted them and at one point Lerato had shrieked and snatched away a big beetle he was about to eat. If they hadn’t been so scared, the child’s antics would have made them laugh. Even as it was the little one gave them something other than their fear to concentrate on.

  Themba had found a good place for them to sleep while he thought about their next move. It was near the top of a kopje, a granite-studded hill with a slight overhang of rock to give them shelter.

  ‘I wonder if people slept here in the old days,’ Lerato had said in a thick voice, trying not to let her fear and exhaustion show as she rocked the little boy in her arms.

  He looked down at Lerato now. She was even more beautiful asleep, her face serene, her skin flawless. The baby gurgled a bit, but stayed asleep.

  Themba shivered and wrapped his arms around himself. He thought about making a fire, but, again, the fear of giving away their position made him reject the idea. He had no clue if the men from the Audi had moved through the night. He had pushed Lerato onwards until it had become too dangerous for them to continue, lest they fall or drop the child. The last sign he’d seen of their pursuers was a glow in the west and a pall of dark smoke. Themba had seen enough car fires to know that they had found the Fortuner and torched it. That told him the men following them didn’t want the police taking a close look at the car, which was not surprising given what he had found inside it.

  Themba knew he had to get somewhere safe where they could explain everything that had gone on, but in order to do that they had to stay ahead of whoever these crazy guys were that were following them.

  Themba’s eyes were drawn to the tote bag into which he’d stuffed the rhino horn. It made him sick and scared just to look at the package. He tried hard not to think about what he could do with the money the horn was worth, but he failed. In his mind’s eye he saw himself and Lerato in a big house, maybe a lodge on a game farm, with a black Range Rover out the front for him and a BMW for Lerato. They wore fine clothes and his belly was full of good food.

  Lerato had been horrified when he had shown her the rhino horn and she had argued that he should just dump it. She had told him of her father’s outspoken stance against poaching. ‘You’re not going to sell it yourself, I hope!’

  ‘No,’ he had told her. Themba had given up on crime. He’d been convinced that he could make it through life without hurting people, without stealing from them, and without needlessly killing animals. He looked up at the sky, which was still studded with stars but showing the first, almost imperceptible traces of lightening. He remembered his first night out in the bush.

  He had been terrified.

  ‘What are you scared of?’ Mike Dunn had asked when he had locked eyes with Themba across the campfire.

  Themba, full of anger, hatred and resentment, had stared the man down through the smoke and flames. ‘Nothing.’

  ‘You are.’

  Eventually he had broken, looking away. ‘It’s just not natural,’ Themba had replied, almost immediately realising how stupid his reply had been. ‘I mean, people have moved on, in the world, we live in houses, towns, cities, we drive cars. We don’t need to live like this in the bush.’

  Mike had nodded. ‘I get that.’

  ‘You get it? If you really did, we wouldn’t be here.’

  ‘Then where would we be?’

  Themba had felt the anger well up in him. ‘We wouldn’t be poor, we wouldn’t be sleeping in tents; we’d have parents, jobs, futures …’

  ‘Or you’d be in prison.’

  Themba had hated Mike back then. Others in the group had looked at him, and he’d felt singled out, belittled. The fact was that he was on the wildlife ambassador and future rhino guards’ camp because of the man staring him down across the fire, and because he’d been arrested for, and convicted of, being an accessory to a car theft, thanks to his cousin. Joseph himself had escaped when he had crashed the car that they’d been driving. He had abandoned Themba to face the music. This man thought he was doing Themba a favour, or perhaps he was just trying to unburden himself of his English-speaking white South African liberal guilt. Either way, Themba had felt like leaving then.

  ‘This is what it’s all about,’ Mike had said. ‘The bush. We all make mistakes in life but out here, it doesn’t matter who you are, what you’ve done – right or wrong – what you’re worth, or how useless you are. Here we’re in our natural state, and the fact is that without our cars, our guns, our houses, our lies, our money, or our pride, we’re at the bottom of the food chain. Just about anything that wants to can kill us. All we have is one thing.’

  Themba had let the words sink in but the proposition unnerved him. The man was right; Themba felt more scared now, out here in the bush, than he had ever felt riding in a stolen car with Joseph, being shot at, or jumping fences to get away from the police. Here he felt … naked. Out of his depth. Close to panic.

  ‘OK,’ Themba conceded. ‘What do we have?’

  ‘Choice.’

  It wasn’t the ans
wer he’d expected. ‘What do you mean?’

  The man was tall, skinny, not muscled, but his eyes were hard, much harder than his body. ‘I mean you can choose to be a tsotsi, a criminal, or you can choose to work.’

  ‘Yeah, right.’ This was more familiar territory.

  ‘I don’t mean you choose to get a job,’ the man had said.

  ‘Then what do you mean?’ Themba said, challenging him.

  He had taken a sip of his brandy and Coke. Themba had felt no respect for the man at that point. He was just another old man from a lost, forgotten tribe, trying to curry favour with the new administration by helping disaffected young people. It was laughable.

  ‘You choose whether to be a man or not.’

  Themba had rolled his eyes towards the moon. ‘Who says I’m not a man?’ he’d asked.

  ‘The wife of the man whose car you and your cousin stole; their children, the ones who cry themselves to sleep remembering the horror of the man with the gun. Your mother, if she was still here, would weep with shame for what you’ve become. Look at yourself. You are nothing.’

  Themba had stared back at him, open-mouthed now, full of hatred. It wasn’t right for this old man to talk to him in such an insulting way. He’d felt his hands ball into fists at his side.

  ‘You call yourself a man, but you inflict pain on people for what, a few thousand rand? You’re nothing. You probably carry a gun, but you’re not man enough to fight for your country, South Africa.’

  Back then Themba hadn’t known that Mike Dunn had been in gunfights in the defence of wildlife, and had killed. Mike had changed his own life. Themba had joked with some of the other boys on the course about what it would be like to learn from a weedy wimp who spent his time with birds. But no, Mike was a warrior, and Themba had felt nervous anxiety as the older man had stared him down. He had relaxed his hands, partly because he’d wanted to hear what the man had to say, and partly because he’d feared that if he did take a swing at the old man he would be bliksemed by him.

  ‘Do you know where we are, right now?’ Mike had asked him, across the fire.

  ‘The middle of nowhere.’ A couple of the others had laughed in the darkness and Themba had felt emboldened.

  Mike had slowly shaken his head. ‘No, not nowhere. This is hallowed ground, royal land. Did you know that this park, Hluhluwe–iMfolozi, was once the private hunting ground of the king of the Zulus?’

  Themba had not known that. He’d thought of national parks as places reserved for whites in the old days, and still largely visited by them these days. This was land whose resources were fenced off, denied to the rightful owners, who lived outside the reserves. He had shrugged.

  ‘This is your land, my China,’ Mike had said. ‘Being here is your birthright. A hundred and fifty years ago you would have done anything to be here, to take part in one of the king’s hunts, to corner a lion or a buffalo on foot and bring it down with your assegai. You would have been prepared to die to prove your manhood and impress the king – and maybe even be rewarded with a young woman or two.

  ‘And today, how do you prove your manhood? By stealing cars and pointing guns at helpless old ladies.’

  Themba had seethed. ‘Why are you singling me out, old man? There are others here for the same reasons as me. You are being racist.’

  Mike had snorted at the suggestion. ‘You think I’m singling you out? You think I care about you?’

  Themba stood up. ‘I’ve had enough of this bullshit. I’m leaving.’

  Mike had nodded. ‘Fine. Head due south. You’ll come to the tar road in about five kilometres – that’s if you make it that far.’

  ‘You think I’m too scared to walk at night.’

  ‘No, just stupid to walk here at night without a firearm.’

  Mike had reached behind the log he was sitting on and picked up a big-bore hunting rifle, bolt action. He’d hefted it, one handed, and held it out towards the fire, towards Themba. ‘Take this.’

  ‘You’re kidding, right?’

  ‘You want to be a man. You want to carry a gun. I don’t want to be responsible for a dead runaway child.’

  ‘I am not a child.’

  ‘You’re acting like one.’

  Themba was tiring of the old man’s jokes, but he was ready to call his bluff and make the old man look stupid in front of the others, to undermine him and his stupid do-gooder program. He walked around the fire, slowly, and held out his hands. Mike let him hold the rifle, but did not let go of it.

  ‘If you take this, you’ll never come back here.’

  Themba had nodded.

  ‘If the recoil doesn’t knock you on your arse, and if your night vision is good enough, you might be able to take out a buffalo, perhaps a lion. If it’s a hungry pride you won’t stand a chance, though. You probably won’t see an elephant before you bump into him. A white rhino you could kill, comparatively easily, if you’re quiet, but if you come across a black rhino he’ll try his hardest to kill you. A leopard … if there’s an old or hungry or sick one it will be eating you before you even know it’s there. Still want to go?’

  Themba did not let go of the rifle. ‘You want me to become a criminal, to die a criminal?’

  Mike had shrugged. ‘I don’t care. You’re already a criminal, Themba. Like I say, the choice is yours. I’ll get my gun back, whatever you decide.’

  ‘What’s the other option? To become one of your rhino guards? To inform on my brothers, on my community, to do your job, to find the poachers where you can’t?’

  Mike nodded. ‘That’s part of the job, but not all. We can’t stop poachers just by arresting people or shooting them dead. We have to educate people, the old and the young. That requires young men and women who are not afraid of change, who are brave enough to take a stand, and to take on traditional beliefs, and even their elders. Are you brave enough to do that?’

  Themba had still held the rifle, but the words had resonated with him. He had done things he regretted because of beliefs that had been instilled in him by others. He had taken muti, medicine, to protect him from bullets, yet he had a friend who had been shot dead by the police after taking the same potion. He’d seen his sister, Nandi, raped by their uncle because he believed having sex with her would cure his disease.

  Themba vowed to himself that if he survived this mess he had fallen into that he would fulfil the promise he’d made to her when she had been taken away, that he would build a life for them and come for her. The thought of her with strangers still burned his soul, even though he knew she was with a good family.

  Themba wondered if he could create that new life by working in conservation, if he would be able to live in a proper house one day, and care for Nandi. Mike Dunn had held out that hope to him.

  ‘There is more. We hope that some of the rhino guards will use the knowledge they gain to better themselves, to find jobs as rangers, or researchers or in other fields of conservation,’ Mike had said.

  Themba knew he could make more money stealing cars than he could working for the Ezemvelo KZN parks board, but he was also more likely to die or go to prison if he did. There was also a chance he could die protecting wild animals; rangers had been killed by wild animals while on patrol and the rhino poachers they fought were usually armed with AK-47s.

  ‘There’s a war going on here,’ Mike had continued, as everyone around the fire sat silently, transfixed. ‘You guys becoming rhino guards won’t win it. If you do your job we might stop one poacher, one gang, but it won’t win the war. The only way we win this war is if we all come together, like an army. And these days, make no mistake, armies don’t just employ people to pull triggers. We need teachers and public relations people and lawyers and doctors and cooks and mechanics and we even have people undercover, in your communities, infiltrating gangs. We all work together here in the game parks. We look after each other and we
watch each other’s back. It never ends, and it may not be winnable, but without you,’ Mike cast his gaze away from Themba for the first time in a while, to make eye contact with every young person around the fire, ‘we will not win, and there is no point in trying.’

  ‘Without me?’ Themba had asked. At that moment, Mike had relinquished control of the rifle. Themba had felt its weight and for a second thought he might drop it. His heart had lurched as he stopped the weapon from falling to the ground. He’d looked at it.

  ‘Yes,’ Mike said. ‘Without you and everyone else here, there is no point to any of this. Do you want to leave?’

  Themba looked up and saw that the question was once again addressed to him, directly. ‘I don’t want to go back to the life I had.’

  ‘Then where do you want to go?’ Mike asked.

  Themba had glanced down at the rifle again, felt its smooth, oiled wood against his fingertips. He held the rifle away from him, back towards the older man. ‘I don’t know, but I don’t want this to take me there.’

  ‘Don’t want to be a ranger on anti-poaching patrol, hunting poachers?’

  Themba shook his head. ‘No. I want to be a warrior, but I don’t want to kill. I’ve seen enough death.’

  He had looked into Mike’s eyes then, ready to stare him down, and he had seen the white man blink, twice, then look away. Mike had started to say something, but the words had caught in his throat. Themba thought the man looked different now, and Themba had wondered, just then, if Mike was there because he had problems as well.

  ‘You don’t have to kill to be a warrior, Themba,’ Mike had said.

  ‘I want to learn how to survive out here, in the bush.’

  ‘You will,’ Mike said. ‘But your first job is to be an ambassador for the rhino, to spread the word in your schools and communities that these animals are valuable to you, the local people. Tourists come from all over South Africa and around the world to see our parks and our animals. They bring money that should go towards making your lives better.’