One Hundred and Four Horses

by Mandy Retzlaff

  “We can’t risk marching them through the mountains.” Pat’s hands tightened on Shere Khan’s reins, as if he did not mean to let her go. “We didn’t save them from those farms just to lose them here.”

  I looked up. Perhaps we had been fooling ourselves, thinking we could lead the herd through the mountains unnoticed.

  “What now?” I asked, my hands tangled in Grey’s mane.

  “Now,” said Pat, “we round up the herd. We take them to the border crossing.” He reined Shere Khan around and pointed her to a sloping mountain road, back to Mutare. “And we pray, Mandy. We pray the fates are with us.”

  Two years ago, the idea of abandoning Zimbabwe forever had been a distant dread. Now that it was real, I got to thinking about how the past two years had changed us and the herd, the exact circumstances that had brought us to this. I could hardly believe how wildly our lives had transformed since the day we brought our young children to River Ranch and Crofton. That we were about to lead the horses into the unknown again scarcely seemed credible.

  After being driven off Biri, we had found a home at another friend’s farm while he marshaled his resources to find a new home in Australia. The farm was in Headlands and called Bushwazee, but we had been there a scant four months when Mugabe’s war vets descended again. Once again, we were left rustling our own horses off the farm. Headlands had been east of Biri, and then we traveled even farther east, until the dark spine of the Bvumba Mountains promised us sanctuary. We set up house high in the hills at Partridge Hill, found Kate a new school in the town of Mutare—where she could live with us through the weeks and stop boarding—and began to make alliances with all the local farmers so that we could bring our horses with us, too. In the end, the herd was divided and taken to a dozen farms around Mutare. Pat threw himself into working with the horses, establishing training grounds as we had done at Biri Farm, and approached schooling all the foals in the herd as if it was not only his profession but his very calling. I had never seen my husband so energized since the earliest days of Crofton, when we were trying to found the farm. Pat was no longer a farmer; he was a horseman through and through, rising at dawn each day to go out training with Brutus, Lady, and all the other foals we had gathered.

  And, meanwhile, the phone just kept on ringing as people called to tell us about their horses.

  Rob Lucas was a farmer who had first contacted us while we had the horses at Headlands. He was not the only one. The rumors of what we were doing seemed to have gone before us, and the calls began to come from farther afield. Fanta, a fifteen-year-old chestnut, came from a prominent farming family in the Marondera area, along with a group of older horses, some of them lame, whose owner insisted they had to accompany the beautiful mare. Fanta was one of the most delightful horses I have ever come across, and her friendly nature and wonderful personality instilled confidence in the many children who learned to ride on her. There were others too—but by far the most intriguing plea we heard came from Rob Lucas. For Rob, like us, had turned his home into a refuge for abandoned horses.

  Here was a man we simply had to go and see.

  We drove back along the winding Bvumba roads, through the wide, floral streets of Mutare and past the site of Kate’s school, Hillcrest. Mutare did not seem as barren and run-down as the rest of Zimbabwe, for its shops were lined with goods smuggled over the mountains from Mozambique. Here, people did not have to go hungry while watching their hard-earned wages evaporate in a mist of hyperinflation. We stopped, briefly, to look in at the farm where Grey, Fleur, Duchess, and the other Two Tree horses were grazing in their paddock, before taking the road deeper inland.

  We reached Rob Lucas’s farm, leaving the highway to follow a dirt road up to the farmhouse. Just like in Zimbabwe’s towns and roadways, there was a sense of decay about the place. The fields sat empty, devoid of all crops, and in places the trees had been felled and carted away.

  We saw the horses in the field before we reached the farmhouse. There must have been fifty of them, including ten foals. From the look of them, some of them must have been stranded on jambanjaed farms for long weeks or months before being spirited away. A strawberry roan appeared to have a sunken back, much like Pink Daiquiri, and his withers were thin and ragged. The silvery mare at his side looked weak and rangy, and when a dark gelding turned to shuffle away from our oncoming car, I saw that he was trailing behind him a lame leg.

  Pat climbed out of the car and hung over the fence for a moment, gazing at the herd.

  “They’re huddling together,” Pat observed.

  He was right. The herd seemed skittish, moving as one to shuffle away from us. The only one who did not move was a tiny blue roan foal, its eyes wide with bewilderment.

  “There’s something wrong here.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Pat moved to swing back into the car. “Not even Princess is as spooked as those horses, and think about what she went through.”

  We rolled on up to the farmhouse, where Rob Lucas was waiting to meet us. Rob was a big man, in his fifties, with the same harassed look we had seen on countless others from whom we had taken horses. He shook Pat’s hand vigorously.

  “That’s a big herd out there,” I said, wondering just how many Pat thought we might take.

  “It’s been a nightmare,” Rob admitted, tramping around the corner of the farmhouse as I hurried to catch up. Curiously, we were walking away from the horses. “The war vets came a year ago. We fought them off. We even managed a court order . . . but what does that matter in Zimbabwe?”

  “What changed?” I asked as we rounded the corner.

  “Oh, everything.”

  At the back of the farmhouse, tall fences marked the edge of a small game park, just like the one Nick Swanepoel had kept on Avalon Farm. In front of the gates, Rob’s Land Rover was parked. He slipped behind the wheel and gestured for Pat and me to climb up front.

  “Just make sure you keep the windows wound up,” he said.

  “Why aren’t we going toward your horses?” I asked.

  “You’ll see.”

  One of Rob’s workers pulled back the gates and we rolled within. The game park was wild and fairly wooded—though, in truth, it did not look so very different from the rest of the farm, now that so many of the fields had been ceded. Once we had driven through, I looked back. There was something ominous about the blank expression of the man on the other side as the gates came together and sealed us within.

  We drove along a meandering, dusty road, potted with deep holes, and ground to a halt in the shadows cast by a stand of msasa trees. In the front seat, Pat moved as if to step out of the car, but Rob reached out and held him back.

  “Just look,” he said, lifting a hand to point. “Over there.”

  I squinted through the trees. On a great mound of red ringed with small bushes lounged a lioness. The sunlight spilled around her, but she was not asleep. I could very clearly see one eye open, methodically considering her surroundings.

  I saw a flash of yellow in the corner of my eye and turned suddenly.

  “There!”

  The lioness on the mound was not alone. Now I could see a huge lion, perhaps the leader of this pride, coming up out of dense scrub. My eyes must have become attuned, as suddenly I could see other patches of scrubland moving; long grass and thornbushes resolved themselves into the forms of other lions. We were, I decided, quite surrounded.

  “They’re rescue lions,” Rob explained, “from the droughts in the 1990s. You remember?”

  “Oh,” I said, remembering Crofton withering under that interminable sun, “we remember.”

  “I’ve kept them here for so long, done everything I could for them . . . They’re happy. Strong. Free of disease. You see how well they look? But it’s coming,” Rob said, his eyes still trained on the king of the pride. “I’m getting out.”

  Rob looked suddenly downcast, and my heart went out to him. I know only too well what it was like to feel trapped, that you c
ouldn’t just pack your bags and flee, no matter how difficult the circumstance. Rob had the same look in his eyes as Pat sometimes had, as I sometimes saw staring back at me out of the mirror. Just as we could not abandon our horses, Rob could not abandon his lions.

  “We had friends,” I began. “Neighbors of ours where we used to farm—Rory and Lindy Hensman. They took their elephants south, tried to get them into South Africa.”

  “I have it in mind to do the same. Botswana, Tanzania, South Africa . . . It’s all the same.”

  “Mozambique?”

  Rob weighed it up. “They don’t have lions there. They don’t have anything. They massacred it all during their war. No, I think I’m heading south as well.”

  “Rob,” Pat suddenly interjected, “where do all those horses come from?”

  “Well, Pat, during normal times farmers used to send carcasses of animals that had died on farms to the lions. This included old and sick horses. Since the land invasions, desperate farmers who have to leave in a hurry have been loading up their horses and dumping them here.” I heard the exasperation in Rob’s voice. “We’ve had ten mares foal down in one of the pens.” He looked at Pat in despair. “I can’t just shoot them all.

  “I can’t just leave them to the war vets, either,” Rob went on, “and I don’t want to have to put them all down. I was hoping you might . . .”

  Rob brought the engine back to life and we trundled on. In the long grasses at the edge of the mound, a giant, broken rib cage sat, stripped of all meat and slowly being bleached by the sun. No farmer, no horse trainer, no man who had studied animal sciences could mistake that rib cage for anything other than what it really was.

  “You release the horses into this game park?” Pat’s voice was cool, but I wondered what was happening inside.

  “No!” Rob gasped. “I shoot them, Pat. When the lions need to feed, I go out into that field and I shoot one of them.” He paused, shaking his head in disbelief. “I mean, I’m not a monster!”

  The horror of it struck me hard in the face. That was why the horses had seemed so skittish. Yet, when I looked at Rob, the way his face was creased, the horror seemed to evaporate. There was horror of a different kind in the modern Zimbabwe—the war vets, the government-sponsored violence, the murders on the doorsteps of once happy farms; that Rob had been reduced to this was not something to hate him for.

  We drove back up, circling the wary lions and leaving the game park by the same gates. In the paddock, the horses were waiting. When we climbed over the fence, they seemed to turn in nervous circles against one another.

  “They can smell it,” I said. “They’re petrified.”

  I noticed a beautiful gray horse with a silvery mane staring at me from the middle of the herd. I felt close to tears. I did not want to imagine what these horses might have been through, only to wind up here, their grisly end delayed but not forever. If things had been different, any one of our herd might have landed here. I pictured Deja Vu, Princess, Brutus, and regal Shere Khan—all of them, lining up to be shot and served up.

  Pat and I drifted into the herd. A string of blue roan foals scattered at our approach. Behind us, Rob Lucas lingered at the fence.

  “Pat,” I tentatively began, “I know what you’re thinking, but . . .”

  Pat was not looking at me. He had his eyes fixed on the smallest foal, pushed up against the flank of a big gray mare whose eyes flashed back at us.

  “How can we not look after them?” he asked.

  “Because we have more than we can cope with already. Because we don’t have a farm. Because our horses are scattered on smallholdings that might be taken away any minute. Because, the more horses we have, the harder it’s going to be to get over those mountains and escape, if the time really comes. That’s why, Pat.”

  “You said it yourself—they’re petrified. What would you do if it was Grey here? Deja Vu? Shere Khan?”

  He had me tied up in knots, spinning a web with the very same fears to which I dared not give voice.

  “How much money do we even have, Pat?”

  Pat would not answer.

  “How are we going to keep them?” I stopped. I could see that the gears were grinding in his head; he knew that I was right. “What if we can’t look after them properly? You’re going to have to shoot them, Pat. When that day comes, you’re going to have to line up the horses we love so much and put bullets into each of their heads.”

  Pat stopped dead. “Better a bullet then or a bullet now?”

  I looked at him, hopeless.

  “Let’s get a truck.” He paused. “Load them all up, Mandy. Every last one . . .”

  On a smallholding outside Mutare, we stood among ten terrified blue roan foals and a mother mare who would not let us near. Getting a halter onto her had been an ordeal, heaving her onto a truck even worse, but now she stood here, among the foals who might easily have ended up as lion food. They milled hopelessly in a makeshift corral. At the rope, Pat and I considered them closely. Kate, who had the week off from Hillcrest school, was trying to coax the tiniest foal, a feeble little thing we had named Texas, to the rope, but Texas only huddled by the mother mare, Montana.

  The land belonged to Sally Dilton-Hill, and most of the Crawford horses were already grazing here. In fact, every time I came here, there seemed to be more: Viper, a purebred Arabian whose owner had been forced to find him a new home when he had somehow managed to nip off a groom’s nipple; a big gray mare named Megan; and Spicegirl, a young bay mare with a Thoroughbred-type gait and a sweet, gentle face. We had brought the Lucas foals here, from the jaws of the lions, because Sally was renowned as an expert trainer, and we wondered if she might help us get them over their instinctive terror.

  The arenas that had grown up here dwarfed what we had built at Biri Farm. Here was a great training ring of gum poles where horses could be isolated from the outside world and have their join-up performed; here was a field where dressage routines could be practiced and drilled in; here was a gymkhana arena where a horse ready for riding could be put through its paces. Many of the Crawford foals and the youngest horses we had taken from Two Tree were being saddled and schooled—and, with the herd having swollen to many more than a hundred, training them was a full-time occupation. Indeed, we had taken to treating it like a business. Along with Sally Dilton-Hill, we employed many people to help with the training; perhaps Pat’s favorite was the eighty-year-old veteran who had been a significant figure in the Rhodesian military, back in the days before Mugabe and Zimbabwe had ever begun.

  Sally climbed tentatively into the corral. The horses, sensing danger, moved as if to scatter—but there was nowhere to go.

  “What do you think? He must have just been shooting them in front of each other,” Pat said.

  “A horse is never lost,” said Sally. “Certainly not a foal.”

  We had first learned about Sally’s skill in training animals when we met her donkeys. By some strange enchantment, Sally had taught her donkeys how to count. I could see them, even now, in a paddock on the other side of the corral. All Sally had to do was lift up her fingers to illustrate a simple sum, and Arabella the donkey, with her wonderful black eyes and long lashes, would scratch out the appropriate answer in the dirt with her hoof. A woman like that, we thought, could do wonders with our most unruly horses.

  In the roped-off corral, Sally tried to get close to the mother mare, Montana. Around her, the foals—Texas, Arizona, California, Indiana, and Colorado—scattered, but Montana stood firm. She rolled her head angrily, eyes shaking. Then she released a vicious snort, rising slightly from her forelegs as she did so, as if to box Sally back. Sally lifted her open palms, as if to convince Montana she was no threat, but the big mare was not convinced. My heart sank. What had this horse been through on her jambanjaed farm? How many of her old herd had she seen shot down and carted off to the lions?

  One eye on Montana and one eye on us, Sally backed away.

  “I think we have our work
cut out for us here, Pat.”

  Among the foals, Montana threw her head back and glared.

  The peaks surrounding Partridge Hill were home to other families as well, many of whom had abandoned their farms and come for sanctuary here, just the same as we runaway Retzlaffs. One morning, as Pat prepared to take Kate into Mutare for school and run a circuit of the surrounding farms, checking on all our horses, one of those neighbors appeared on the doorstep with a plaintive look in her eyes.

  The visitor introduced herself as Colleen Taylor. She lived just down the mountainside, her little smallholding—a tiny flower farm, replete with greenhouses and tunnels—besieged on all sides by the dense Bvumba woodland. Colleen was tall and dark, and almost as regal-looking as Shere Khan.

  “It’s Pat Retzlaff, isn’t it?” she began.

  Pat nodded stoutly.

  “Pat, I wondered if I could beg your help. You see, I’d heard you were the horse people . . .”

  Colleen Taylor’s smallholding sat lower in the Bvumba than Partridge Hill, a wide basin of open land between fringes of forest, from which several gullies climbed and others dropped away. Though it was not very far, the way between the two homes was treacherous, so Pat and Colleen traveled there by road. As they turned from the sheer mountain pass along which Kate and I were hurtling, already late for school, they were flanked by Colleen’s greenhouses and tunnels. Aloes grew in great banks along the sides of the track, mingling with wafts of coffee from a plantation deeper in the mountains to make a curious scent.

  In a paddock outside the small farmhouse stood three horses: a beautiful dark bay mare, a similar gelding who could easily have been the mare’s brother, and a smaller, lean foal, a bay who seemed to be forcing his head between the sparring adults.