Even my father was excited, oiling his rifle more than once in preparation for the hunting that was part of every visit to the farm. He even called me to come and see what he was doing so that I could learn to clean a rifle properly. Teaching me anything was a novelty and I followed his instructions closely. Although I have not touched a rifle in more than thirty years, I still remember what he taught me. How to oil it, the best oil to use, how to store it when not in use, how to check the sights: these were things a man needed to know and I paid careful attention to everything he told me.
Only Annie seemed unaffected by the hysteria that surrounded visits to the farm. She loved going as much as anyone, but the excitement had no effect on her until we were in the car and on our way.
The drive up the coast with the sugar cane rolling away on both sides took no more than an hour and a half. Uncle Stefan, Auntie Virginia and Abraham followed in their car. That was the way we drove when we went to the farm, my father leading and Uncle Stefan, who was a few years younger, coming behind. It was still daylight when we arrived, my father driving slowly to avoid the bumps and potholes in the farm road.
When we drove up, Oupa was standing in front of the house on the lawn to meet us, his hands on his hips. That is the way I remember him best. From my position in the back seat of the car, he was the king of all he surveyed. He was the centre of activity that covered the yard all the way past the poultry pens, right up to the workers’ quarters three hundred metres away, only stopping at the edge of the sugar cane.
He came to greet us, arms outstretched, first shaking hands with my father, then hugging Mama and the girls, and finally shaking hands with Abraham and me. The way he treated me like an adult always made me proud. ‘And you, old son, how goes it with you?’ I tried to grip Oupa’s hand as firmly as he gripped mine. ‘When are you coming to farm with your oupa? I need a man like you here.’
‘I wish I could,’ I stammered to Oupa’s unrestrained laughter, my face glowing with embarrassment at the invitation to be my grandfather’s partner. I wanted to believe that he was serious. The idea was wonderful.
‘Not yet,’ I heard my mother say. ‘You’ll have to wait a few more years, Oupa.’
Mama always tried to escape Oupa’s attentions, but I remember him grabbing her and wrapping a muscular arm around her shoulders. He kissed her on the cheek and grinned at her blushes. ‘My girl, I started farming when I was twelve,’ he told her.
‘Times have changed,’ Mama said. ‘It’s not 1900 any more.’
‘Nineteen eleven,’ he said. ‘I started farming in 1911.’
‘Just the other day,’ Mama said.
‘Sixty-three years ago and I’m proud of every one of those years.’ A moment later he was shaking hands with Abraham, who had jumped out as Uncle Stefan stopped behind us. ‘And you, old son?’ he said. ‘It’s about time you came to visit. You don’t do it enough. Your parents are only welcome because they bring the two of you.’ He laughed loudly at his own joke, glancing at me to include me in his remarks. ‘Your fathers only come when the need to hunt becomes too great. You better learn to drive so that you can come without them.’ He knew that we were much too young to drive, but treating us as if he believed we were older was Oupa’s way. ‘Then your oupa will be able to see more of the two of you.’
My father and Uncle Stefan were already unpacking the cars. Abraham and I helped them, while Mama and my sisters went into the house. From the kitchen I heard Ouma’s voice, ‘Here they are. Here they are. Oh, aren’t these girls beautiful?’
Michie and Annie clucked around Ouma like a couple of chickens while I carried their luggage. But then, I was not told to help with the cooking and they were.
As I was carrying my bag into the outbuilding where Abraham and I always slept when we were on the farm, Oupa caught up to me. He was smiling broadly, conspiratorially, I thought. ‘I heard about the motorbike. Your ma told me.’
‘Pa locked it up,’ I said.
He laughed again at that, taking my arm in one of his strong farmer’s hands and shaking me till I also laughed. ‘He just wants you to survive your teenage years. I’ll tell you what I’ll do. Next time I come to the city, I’ll bring the trailer and then I’ll bring your bike here. Then, when you come to visit, you and Abraham can ride around the farm. How does that sound?’ His smile was still saying how amusing he found the entire episode.
His offer was exactly what I had been hoping for. ‘Will Oupa really?’
‘I’ll talk to your father.’ He gave my shoulder another shake. ‘Don’t worry, I’ll persuade him. Next time we come to the city …’ He gave me a last smile over his shoulder as he went back towards the house.
It is not surprising that I had a special love for my grandfather. Despite his age, he seemed to remember what it was like to be a boy, while my father seemed to have forgotten. Or perhaps he had never known.
The farm workers were everywhere. Oupa and Ouma always seemed to have far more Zulu workers than they needed. Three women were ironing sheets on a broad table under the thorn trees, two others were in the kitchen helping Ouma prepare food, one teenage boy was sweeping the hard clay of the yard with a besembos branch, while another had climbed into a small tree and was shaking it vigorously. Ouma liked a neat yard. She expected the leaves to be shaken out of the trees and swept up before they fell of their own accord.
Out of a firebreak in the cane, one of Oupa’s tractors was coming towards the shed, pulling a trailer filled with Zulu labourers. Oupa’s dogs that must have gone out with the tractors came bounding towards Abraham and me, tails wagging. With only two old people in the house now, they were always looking for someone to have fun with. The four of them tackled us with an enthusiasm that had its roots in many past encounters. We were soon rolling on the grass with them, just as enthusiastic as they were.
The table had been laid outside, under the thorn trees. It was long enough to accommodate Ouma and Oupa, the eight family members from Durban and Uncle Pietertjie and his wife who had just arrived from Pretoria, twelve of us altogether.
Ouma’s kitchen servants had placed two pots in the centre of the table, a very big one containing the stew and another, almost as big, with the rice. The standard food of Afrikaner farmers in those days was rys, vleis en aartappels – rice, meat and potatoes – plenty of all three. Having left the food on the table, the servants retreated to the kitchen from where they would watch us discreetly.
The meat on Oupa and Ouma’s table came from the small flock of sheep they kept for that purpose or venison that Oupa had shot. A part of every kill, the internal organs usually, went to the servants. They would also be hoping for leftovers from our meal, but with a lot of hungry young Afrikaners around the table, there was not likely to be much of that.
There was a warmth at those dinners, when we were all gathered together on the farm, that I have not experienced anywhere since. At any one time around Ouma’s dinner table under the thorn trees there could be four or five conversations being conducted simultaneously. As always, my father was the one who said least, either looking passively at the faces of the others as they jabbered away excitedly, or just staring into the night or down at his food, as if the rest of us were not present.
I heard Ouma saying how wonderful it was that we were all together, that it happened too seldom, that a few times a year was not enough. ‘I’m so proud of you all. I can say to anyone that my children and grandchildren are all good people.’
The house and its garden was bordered on one side by the sugar cane and on the other by bushveld. In quiet moments, of which there were few, the yelp of a jackal or the occasional cackling of a guinea fowl would reach us. The peace that settled on our little gathering that evening seemed both to rise out of the night and to grow from within us. We all felt it, adults and children alike. It seized us in a way that no deliberate action could ever have done.
With only gaslight on the farm, the days were measured by the passage of the sun. Evenings e
nded early. When dinner was over, we stayed round the table for perhaps an hour or two, catching up on each other’s lives. Gradually, the fresh air and Oupa’s good wine, of which Abraham and I were each allowed a small glass, took effect. The conversations slowed, we murmured good night to each other and went to the rooms where we were to sleep, leaving the servants to clean away the remains of the meal and wash the dishes.
Abraham and I waited on the edge of Oupa’s vegetable garden until long after all traces of daylight had disappeared from the sky.
‘I like it here,’ Abraham said. ‘I wish I could live here with Oupa.’
‘What about Uncle Stefan?’
‘I wish my pa could come and live here too.’
‘There’s no movies anywhere near.’
‘I don’t care. I love it here.’
‘Me too,’ I said. ‘I don’t care either.’
The stars, undiminished by city lights, seemed to be multiplied both in number and intensity in the dry African air. While we stood there, the night settled slowly into the deep darkness of every other African night, disturbed only by the occasional cry of an animal or the sound of murmured conversation from the house.
thirteen
If that night’s dinner and the arrival of so many guests had taken some organising, it was nothing compared to the wedding reception the following day. I had understood that in some way I was related to the girl getting married, but those were the years of big families and I had never met her. I was related to a great many people I had not met.
The women who had washed the dishes after we had gone to bed were up before anyone else to make breakfast. On weekends like this one, the preparation of food and the cleaning up after meals was an activity that began before sunrise and ended mid-evening with few pauses in between. Ouma had particular ways of doing things in the kitchen and everything had to be done her way. If anyone, family member or servant, ever took a short cut or found an easier way of doing something, she was accused of laziness and immediately reminded of the right way to do it.
Breakfast was a brief affair. Despite Ouma’s protestations, the men were taking the bacon and eggs off their plates and eating them between slices of bread while they packed Oupa’s Land Rover with rifles and ammunition for the morning hunt. Afterwards, they would all change into their suits for the wedding.
I was first into the Land Rover, with Abraham not far behind. Uncle Pietertjie looked at our happy faces and turned to my father, who was also climbing up at the back. ‘Are we taking the children?’
‘They’re not children any more,’ my father said. ‘I’m taking Chris with me. It’s about time I taught him to hunt.’
Nothing my father had ever done or said had made me more proud than I was at that moment. He was going to take me with him to teach me to hunt. Just him and me. His rifle, in its case, was leaning against his seat, but I took it and held it, barrel upward between my knees, the way I had seen him do it. It felt solid and heavy. I hoped he would let me carry it.
Oupa’s farm straddled the line of hills that separated the moist coastal belt from the dry bushveld. All the way to the crest of the hills, the rich green of the sugar cane filled the landscape. Oupa had ten thousand hectares of cane and two thousand hectares of bushveld on the inland side of the hills. We were on our way to the bushveld hectares.
When Uncle Stefan dropped us at a long, sandy watercourse, I asked my father, ‘Can I carry Pa’s rifle?’
‘No. I carry my own rifle. Walk a little behind me and stay on the loose sand.’ He stopped to explain. ‘To carry my own rifle is a habit. It also means that when we come upon something, I don’t have to make unnecessary movements. You concentrate on what you can see. An extra pair of eyes is always useful. Be careful not to tramp on dry sticks or leaves.’
I already knew what a wonderful rifle shot he was. It was something Abraham could not argue about. He was with us the day when my father took part in a shooting competition at our school bazaar. You paid ten rands to enter and the winner got a sheep that he would donate to the school to be turned into braaivleis which would, in turn, be sold to raise more money for the school.
The target had been perhaps fifty metres away and you could not bring your own rifle. You had six shots with a rifle provided by Mister Odendaal, the teacher in charge of the school cadets. It was well known that he deliberately misaligned the sights before the bazaar every year. Before my father tried, Abraham and I had each taken a turn. I had not even hit the target, much less the bull. Abraham had hit the target once – down in the bottom right-hand corner. The best anyone had done up to that time was to put one in the bull.
My father paid the ten rands and took the rifle. He held it in both hands for a moment, seeming to be judging its weight, then raised the butt to fit into the hollow of his shoulder. He looked down the sights at the target for so long that I thought he was never going to fire. When he did, the bullet struck the bottom right-hand corner, almost exactly where Abraham’s bullet had hit.
Someone who was watching laughed, a crude, derisory sound from a young male voice. My father did not even look up. He continued to concentrate on the target, as if there was nothing else in the world, just him and the target. When he fired again, the next five shots came in quick succession. One of the Standard Six boys fetched the target and I rushed forward to see where the bullets had struck. The five little holes were all bunched tightly inside the bull. ‘Sights are out,’ my father grunted as he put down the rifle.
Mister Odendaal grabbed him by the hand. ‘I have to shake your hand,’ he said. ‘I’ve never seen anything like it – to shoot that way with a rifle with sights that are out is unbelievable.’
No one else even came close. Later that day Mister Matthews, the principal, made a speech in which he announced that my father had won the competition and had donated the prize to be used for the braaivleis. A number of the boys in my class came to talk to me about how well my father could shoot, wanting to know if he was teaching me. Even Abraham did.
It was not just his steady hand that made my father a great shot. He also had wonderful eyesight. No matter how well an animal’s colour blended into the bush, he could see it. The animal could be hundreds of metres away and almost completely hidden, but the slightest flick of a tail or even the blink of an eye and my father knew exactly where it was.
That morning the first game we saw was a herd of impala, two kilometres away on open ground. They were too far, even for my father. ‘No point in firing and scaring other game,’ he said to me. ‘We don’t want to alert the animals until the right instant.’
I knew enough about hunting not to speak unless he spoke first, and then only in a whisper. ‘Does Pa think we’ll find something?’
He nodded, then smiled at me. It was only a slight smile and before it had formed properly his expression changed. ‘I think something is moving up ahead and on your side. The wind is from the front so it doesn’t matter what it is, it won’t be able to smell us. Walk very slowly now and try to stay behind the bushes.’ He stopped speaking and looked at me with what seemed to be an appraising eye. ‘You walk well, Chrissie,’ he said, as if this was a new discovery. ‘You walk like a real hunter.’
I would have walked all day after that – like a real hunter. It turned out not to be necessary. Another twenty or thirty paces up the watercourse, my father suddenly stopped. With one hand he waved me into the shade of a stunted tree that was growing out of the bank on my side. His eyes were fixed on something on the same bank, exactly where he said it would be. I tried to follow the direction in which he was looking, but all I saw was the yellow-brown of the dry bushveld scrub.
He moved very slowly closer, until he was almost touching me. ‘Now,’ he whispered, and his voice was so soft that I might have imagined the words, ‘when you move, take each step in the way that a buck does it when grazing: two or three steps, then stop. Then wait a moment and two or three steps again.’
I took each step as carefully a
s I thought a buck might, pausing every few steps. Seeing my father move, filled me with admiration for the smoothness of every step. It was as if he too was a creature of the bushveld.
He stopped as smoothly as he had been walking. One hand, raised very gently, not even reaching waist height, directed me to stop. Now he lifted the rifle to his shoulder, so slowly that I was not sure at first that he was doing it at all. He slotted it into the hollow of his shoulder, just as he had done at the school bazaar. He had not yet lowered his head to look down the sights. My father had old-fashioned gun sights. He always said that telescopic sights did not give the animal a fair chance. He said that he was a hunter, not a killer.
Ahead I could see only hard thorn scrub, nothing else. It was almost ten o’clock by now and the day was already hot, the way the bushveld can be that early in the day. I had pretty much decided that there was nothing ahead and that he must be mistaken, when my eyes picked up the smallest possible movement. A branch had moved, the slow waving that a stiff breeze might cause, but I could feel no breeze and only one branch moved. A moment later the biggest eland bull I have ever seen broke cover no more than thirty metres away, moving with the studied elegance that comes naturally to these greatest of all African antelopes. It looked to be about one-and-a-half times my height. Its horns were gleaming black daggers, thick as my forearm at the base and long enough to impale a lion. The great muscles in its rump and shoulders moved beneath the skin like an ocean swell rising over a sandbank. It must have weighed more than a ton. I think I stopped breathing.
My father had the rifle steadied against his shoulder. He was as unmoving as a statue. I knew that the smallest movement from either of us and the eland would vanish in the time that it took my father to squeeze the trigger.
The report of the rifle and the eland’s sudden leap seemed to come at the same moment. The great antelope fell heavily on its side closest to us. A leg twitched, then his body was still. My father was running towards him, knife in hand, in case he needed to finish the job.
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