If the farms kept falling, there would soon be no place for them to go.
We arrived at Partridge Hill, late at night, to a meal of leftovers from the night before, Pat and I both longing to fall into a deep sleep and not wake up for days. Kate was waiting in the living room, her schoolbooks splayed out around her. Her eyes looked heavy, ink stained her fingers, and I doubted very much that she had eaten properly tonight.
I hated this country then. If none of this had happened, if we still lived on Crofton, if we hadn’t had to take Kate away from Lomagundi School . . . how different her studies might have been.
“How’s it going, Kate?”
Kate nodded. “It’s okay.”
“Are you sure?”
“Actually, Dad . . .” Kate stood. “Tell me if I’m going crazy, but I was in the library today, and I swore I could see . . . Brutus, out on the playing fields. I thought I was seeing things, but when I looked again, there were Duke and Duchess, too. Black Magic. Deja Vu . . .”
“Kate,” said Pat, “there’s something we have to tell you.”
Kate slumped in the sofa. “I think I get the picture . . .”
“They announced they were taking the game park,” Pat went on. “We couldn’t risk them being there when the park falls. But”—he paused, sensing Kate’s amazement—“the school has land. All the land beyond those playing fields and tennis courts.”
Kate nodded, sadly. “But they can’t take the school, right?”
“Not even Mugabe can steal a school,” I explained. “It’s a last resort, Kate. Hillcrest School might have the final piece of grassland in the whole of the district that Mugabe can’t take for himself. There’s enough grazing there to buy us some time. That’s all it is. We’re moving them all there over the next few days.”
Kate breathed the information in, seemed to weigh it up, and nodded sharply.
“I don’t know how I’m going to live this one down.” She grinned.
“Just pretend we’re not your parents?” I said.
“Mum, I’ve been doing that for years . . .”
I pulled up at the gates of Hillcrest School, and all I could see were horses.
The fields were not much larger than ten tennis courts—and there, more than a hundred horses were packed, the grass around their hooves already bitten down to scrubby stubs. Along one side of the fences keeping them in, three farmers’ trucks were parked. They were not only from the farms on which we had kept the horses, but from farms and smallholdings farther afield as well. Figures were unloading bales of hay from the backs of the trucks, carrying them over to where the horses might feed. These were acts of selflessness and generosity to make me certain there was still so much good in the world, even in the madness of Zimbabwe.
It took me a moment to pick out Pat in the throng. He was standing with Shere Khan and Jonathan, who was wearing his backpack for spraying the horses with a dip solution. When Pat saw me, he weaved through the herd to meet me at the fence.
“They’re bringing the last ones up from the game park.”
“How are we going to fit any more in?”
Pat gazed around. Lady’s head had appeared to root in his armpit, and he fought her down. Even after long months of training, there were some habits that would not be broken.
“Mandy, we’re not.”
I was not surprised. A piece of me had known he would say this, ever since I returned.
“Where, then?”
Pat’s eyes drifted east, to the peaks of the Bvumba and beyond. “It’s time.”
I nodded. We had rallied against it too long: Crofton and Palmerston, Biri and Headlands . . . and now here. Pat looked at the bales of hay lined up at the fence. We could not rely on it forever. Mutare’s farmers would soon be disappearing. Some of them might even flow over the mountains into Mozambique. It was where we would have to go too, we wild-eyed Retzlaffs and our horses. Even in spite of the two years’ peace we’d had in the Bvumba, that, I reminded myself, had always been the plan.
“How long have we got?” I asked.
“Days, Mandy. Maybe a couple of weeks.” Pat pushed Lady’s head away; she was getting far too impatient—but then, so were we. “It’s time to make a plan.”
I made my way back to the car and sat behind the wheel. Across the herd, I could see the front facade of Hillcrest School. A shrill bell rang, and moments later the girls began to stream out. Among them, I saw Kate emerge. She looked smart and proud in her school blazer, but at the top of the steps, she stalled. She gazed out across the fields filled with her father’s horses and I saw her visibly squirm. In the middle of all this, Pat and I had become Zimbabwe’s most embarrassing parents.
Yes, I thought, it really was time to leave. My eyes drifted to the mountains, and thoughts of the lush country of Mozambique sitting beyond. Tomorrow we would go up into the mountains, Pat with Shere Khan, Kate with Deja Vu, me in Grey’s saddle, and search for a way through. We would look down on the valleys of Mozambique, those untouched lands, and it would suddenly be very real: after years of struggle, we were fleeing Zimbabwe, and taking one hundred and four horses with us.
MOZAMBIQUE
Chapter 12
THE TOWN OF CHIMOIO, where we had found a small house, sat one hundred kilometers east of the Bvumba, in the heartland of Mozambique. Pat and I sat at traffic lights in town, sweating in the blistering heat, dry dirt caked across the windshield of our Land Rover. In the back, Jay lay with his head rolled back and his mouth gaping open. How he could sleep in this heat, I had no idea.
Taking the horses through the Mountains of the Mist had proven a bigger ordeal than I might have imagined. As I looked at Pat in the driver’s seat beside me, I could distinctly see the toll it had taken on him: his hair seemed to have turned gray overnight. I could tell how the lines had deepened in his once-youthful face, but I knew he wouldn’t have taken it back for a second. We had made it out of Zimbabwe alive, and we had brought one hundred and four of our precious rescued horses with us.
It had not been easy. In the end, we had decided not to risk driving them through some secluded mountain pass, for fear of meeting soldiers and bandits along the way. Instead, we had faced the tyranny of the official checkpoints. There were enough obstacles to getting ourselves over the border, what with Mugabe’s border guards keen to clamp down on any little irregularity and bleed some kind of bribe money out of it, and for the horses the challenge had been almost insurmountable. It had taken weeks. Each day we had loaded our precious horses into the backs of trucks and taken them to the border crossing, nestled deep in the heart of the Bvumba—but every time, we had been turned away, told that our paperwork was not correct, that we did not have authorization to take grass across the border, that the horses needed passports, that the passports were incorrectly bound, that we had to pay fees and charges—and yet more bribes. Time and again our horses were sent back. Time and again we tried. Then, just as the lines deepened in Pat’s face, as we began to talk at night about the very real possibility of abandoning half of our herd, we tried one last time. We loaded up the whole of the herd and approached the border. By some strange mercy, that day the border guards smiled kindly on us. We sailed into Mozambique unharmed, and with us came Grey, Deja Vu, Shere Khan, Black Magic, Lady, and every other horse to whom we had devoted our lives.
In the column of cars behind us a chorus of horns started to sound, but they were not making the lights change any quicker.
We had been in Chimoio three months, but I had not yet gotten used to the heat. It seemed a world away from the other side of the Bvumba. Lower and less temperate than the Zimbabwean side, Mozambique’s very air had a different flavor. Chimoio was the fifth-largest town in Mozambique, the capital of Manica Province, which bordered the Bvumba. The town seemed to have lived a multitude of lives. In some areas, the evidence of its old colonial days was clear, with Portuguese architecture still standing and the language plastered across billboards and street signs; in others, the
old town was derelict and slowly being reclaimed by new businesses and homes. The streets, wide and dusty, put me in mind of some frontier town of old, and as we navigated and got used to the town’s backstreets, I began to understand that though we were only a hundred kilometers from Zimbabwe, this was an Africa like no other: a Portuguese Africa, a Communist Africa, a postrevolution Africa in which the rule of law still felt like only a guideline to most.
“Jay,” Pat barked, “wake up. We’re here.”
We had come to the very outskirts of town. There, beyond the shell of an old Portuguese building that was slowly being rebuilt and patched up with new fences, walls, and wire, I could see the heads of Grey, Shere Khan, and Black Magic grazing on their bales of dried grass. Lady’s head lifted from behind a bale to greet us.
“Thanks, Dad,” Jay muttered, “I was having a bad dream. I dreamed that we lived . . .” Jay stopped and stepped out of the car. “Oh, wait . . .” He grinned. “That wasn’t a dream.”
We had timed coming over the mountains into Mozambique well; perhaps, I reflected, it was one of the only things we had done properly in the whole of our journey. Having just graduated from Hillcrest School, Kate was accepted to study chemistry at university and had gone down to South Africa to earn her degree. Jay, meanwhile, had graduated from his hunting apprenticeship and accepted a post in Mozambique’s premier national park, Gorongosa, where he was training guides and introducing the first tourists to the wonderful park. Mozambique did not have much big game left, most of it having been slaughtered to feed soldiers in the war that had finished a decade ago, but season by season it was returning, and a private philanthropist named Greg Carr was financing the return of elephants, lions, and all kinds of antelope to Gorongosa.
We left the Land Rover and crossed the dusty street, eyeballed by a billy goat chewing on a small bush at the edge of the road. On the other side of the fence, we met the horses.
“Dad,” Jay began, “they look . . . terrible.”
Of the one hundred and four horses we had brought with us, forty lived in the paddock here, while the remainder were out on Zimofa, a farm thirty-five kilometers beyond the town limit. We had found the property soon after coming over the mountains, and it was here that we had founded our riding school. As more and more Zimbabweans poured into town, bringing businesses and agricultural ambitions with them, so too had foreign NGOs begun to populate the town. Chimoio had become a melting pot of southern African, Portuguese, English, Dutch, American, Canadian, and even Chinese and Indian immigrants. Many of them brought families with them, and our fervent hope was that, at last, the horses could start working together with us, helping to pay their way. Now, whenever we could, we gave riding lessons and led rides out into the wild, untamed bush of Mozambique.
Yet what Jay had said was true. All was not well in the herd. I walked over to Philippe and put a hand on his muzzle to stop him grazing. At first he seemed to be in good health, but when he turned his head to look at me, I saw the dark, ugly cavity where his right eye used to be. The grooms had led the herd out grazing one morning, and come the evening, Philippe had wandered back to his paddock at the riding school blind on one side.
He was not the only one who had suffered. In the corner of the paddock, Grey stood with dark pink lesions coloring his withers and the underside of his neck, while Black Magic wore the dark boil of ringworm around both her eyes, along her muzzle, and creeping around her hairless lips. Others wore the marks of the fungal infection deeply scored into their hides. With so little veterinary support in Mozambique, we were struggling to keep on top of all these ailments.
“Ringworm’s the least of it,” said Pat. “Come this way.”
Jay trudged after his father into the stables at the center of the riding school. In the first stall, Princess was contentedly being dipped for ticks by two of our grooms. Against all the odds, the wound in her withers had finally sealed—and, though she would forever be sensitive when anybody touched her, it had not festered and opened up again as it had done so many times before. In the next stall, however, stood a different story.
Little Fanta looked bereft. She hardly looked like a horse any longer. In the stall, a creature of skin and bone looked up, not a single hair left anywhere on her body. Her rib cage showed, stark and grisly, through her skin; her teeth were ugly yellow protuberances from the tip of her muzzle.
“It’s like an allergic reaction to the heat,” Pat explained. “She started losing her hair and then lost the ability to sweat. Everything just shed away.” He paused, putting a tentative hand out so that Fanta could nibble at it. “By rights, she should be dead.”
I stroked Princess’s muzzle. By rights, she should have been dead, too.
“She just won’t give up the ghost,” said Pat.
“Dad, you should get a vet.”
Pat gave Jay a withering look. “Nice idea, genius. You tell me—where are we going to find a vet for these horses?”
We explained that there were local vets, that much was true, but not one of them had any experience in treating horses. We had found that out as we came across the border. When, at last, we made it through to the Mozambican side, huge crowds gathered to see the horses led from the trucks and watered and fed. Hundreds of people had flocked out of the border buildings and houses to catch a glimpse of the herd. Horses, we were told, had not been seen in Mozambique since the dawn of the civil war—and that was more than thirty years before, in 1974.
“They thought they were big dogs,” I said, as Jay and I left Fanta wheezing and returned to the open air.
“Big dogs?”
“You know, big dogs you could ride. Dogs who eat grass . . .”
Across the riding school, Lady bounded up to the edge of the paddock. “That one is like a big dog,” Jay muttered.
In the paddock, Lady was standing with a collection of tiny foals.
“Someone’s been busy,” Jay said with a smirk.
“They’re . . . accidents,” I said.
One after another, I introduced Jay to the illegitimate foals who had started to appear in the herd. One of the problems with maintaining such a big and disparate herd, especially in Mozambique—where the veterinary aid was almost nonexistent—was managing unexpected births. Because our horses came from such checkered backgrounds, and because we could not often determine their real ages, we had not always performed the necessary geldings in time. The horses we had taken from Rob Lucas and his lions had, it turned out, been a little older and friskier than we had imagined. It only took one boisterous young stallion to come of age more swiftly than expected, and suddenly the younger mares across the herd had come into foal.
Pink Daiquiri was one of those mares. She had given birth to a beautiful colt we had named Ramazotti. They stood together now on Lady’s left side, Pink Daiquiri with her sunken back and soft, beautiful features, Ramazotti with dark markings on each of his flanks, with pronounced facial bones and shimmering eyes.
“She’s better-looking than that one,” said Jay, indicating another colt.
Some of the other illegitimates were not as blessed with good looks as Ramazotti. On the farms outside Mutare we had been keeping the foals together in a kind of equine nursery where they could learn to play, get to know the social structures of their herd, and go through the first stages of their training together. One of the downsides of this arrangement was that young stallions, just reaching maturity, could mate with their sisters. The foal that Jay had pointed out was named Vaquero, and he was the result of just such a union. As far as inbred accidents go, he was very healthy—but he had a disjointed, gangly look about him, and his eyes seemed to wander.
“Any horse would look ugly next to Ramazotti,” I began, following Vaquero’s roaming eye.
“That isn’t a horse, Mum.”
Vaquero must not have sensed the insult, for he pushed his muzzle over, eager to inspect these two gawking figures on the other side of the fence.
“One day, Jay, you might kno
w what it feels like to have an ugly little brute of a son and still love him.”
I was halfway across the riding school, hurrying to join Pat at the car, when Jay figured out what I meant. Jay and Vaquero, I thought, were going to get on just fine.
In the afternoon, Pat and I rode out to Zimofa Farm. Though the rest of the herd was grazing contentedly in the pastures, we were not there to inspect them or medicate their ringworm for the hundredth time. Zimofa Farm was one of the many farms in the area we were hoping would help us get back on our feet, provide us and the horses with a permanent home once again. We were here to look at paprika.
Chimoio was in the middle of a gold rush. There were no mines in the hills, no gold panners in the riverbeds, nor any great stamp mills scoring the land. There were gold mines in the border country between Mozambique and Zimbabwe, but there was another kind of gold in Chimoio as well: the land itself.
For farmers like Pat and me, Mozambique was untouched, virgin land. There was agriculture in the country, but not on anywhere near the same scale as we had known it in Zimbabwe. Here, farmers kept smallholdings or grew crops simply for subsistence—but there was land aplenty here, waiting to be opened up, irrigated, and transformed into healthy, functional farmland. As Mugabe drove commercial farming out of Africa’s breadbasket, it was inevitable that some of those farmers would turn their eyes toward the open country to the east and dream of what the land might look like if people with ancestral knowledge of farming poured their lives into it. High up in the Bvumba, the same thoughts had occurred to Pat and me.
One Hundred and Four Horses Page 19