One Hundred and Four Horses

by Mandy Retzlaff

  Pat looked up, his eyes settling on Echo. The silvery horse looked almost smug, standing in the shadow of Shere Khan.

  “Did you see him do it, Shere Khan?”

  Shere Khan made no response, her nose held haughtily aloft.

  “You two are too much trouble,” Pat began, turning to Echo and Jazzman. “You can’t stay here. I think we’ll need a truck . . .”

  That night I returned from the ride through the fishing village, belly full of fresh crab and cassava leaves, to find three horses back from the grazing fields. Echo, Jazzman, and Evita were tethered in the shade at the far end of the stable.

  I brought Duke around as Kate and the grooms brought Black Magic, Lady, and the other horses we had been riding back in on lead ropes.

  “They’re too much trouble to leave in the grazing fields,” Pat said, grinning as he put his arms around Echo. “This one unties the knots, so this one”—he thrust a thumb in Jazzman’s direction—“can slip away.”

  “What about poor little Evita?” I said, swinging out of Duke’s saddle.

  “I don’t know,” said Pat. “I just don’t trust her out there; she’s so much like Brutus.”

  Brutus looked up, the creases deepening around his eyes.

  At the start of the summer, just as the sun was flexing its muscles for months of searing heat, we drove out to the airport to wish Kate a fond farewell. She was bound for London. She would be able to see her brother and visit Granny Beryl in St. Ives—but, more than anything, she would be able to make a life for herself. Lifting her bags from the Land Rover was bittersweet. Pat and I stood at the edge of the airstrip as the tiny plane jerked awkwardly into the air. We watched as it dwindled and disappeared. Our children were grown and gone out into the world, and we had reached our final home.

  We drove back along the bustling main street of Vilanculos, where the markets were overflowing and street hawkers mobbed us each time we stopped. At last, turning from the main highway, we wove our way through the local villages to reach the coast and our own little hut.

  Jonathan was waiting in the garden, two of the beach dogs who roamed the sands basking in the sun at his feet.

  “Pat,” he began, “I think you’d better come.”

  In the stable, one of our local grooms, Luka, stood holding Vaquero and another small gelding.

  “What are they doing here?”

  “They are not good, boss,” said Luka, summoning up his few words of English.

  I did not have to get close to Vaquero to know that he was throwing a temperature. Pat ran a hand up and down his muzzle, but Vaquero simply let out a low, despondent snort. His eyes, usually a little wild and roaming, looked dark, discolored even, and his flanks had a sheen of sweat. I ran my hand down his haunch. When I brought it back, it was dripping wet.

  The gelding at his side was much the same. His chest rose and fell heavily, a succession of rapid breaths.

  Pat screwed up his eyes, as if weighing up the symptoms. “African horse sickness, perhaps?”

  African horse sickness was endemic across southern Africa, and Vaquero was showing the classic symptoms of its most vicious strain. With his fever, the strange rattle he made when he breathed, and his downcast eyes and lack of engagement, it was little wonder that African horse sickness was on the tip of Pat’s tongue.

  Pat looked at the other horses contentedly waiting in the stable yard.

  “Let’s get them away from the herd,” he began. “Come on, Vaquero, this way . . .”

  It was only a short walk along the beach from the stables to our rondavel home, but rather than risk weakening Vaquero and the other gelding, we loaded them into a truck and took them along the back road, running parallel to the bay. Once we arrived at the rondavel, we opened up the back. Inside, Vaquero and the other gelding shifted uneasily. It seemed to take an age to coax them out.

  Pat strode into the open kitchen area beside our hut and opened one of the fridges, powered by a noisy generator, that we kept there.

  “One of those times you wish you were in Zimbabwe,” he muttered, darkly, “with a vet on the other end of the phone . . .”

  After rifling around, he produced a box of medication and returned to where Vaquero and the other gelding were standing. There was no treatment for African horse sickness, but we could deal with the symptoms. After administering shots to both horses, he went in search of antibiotics and, promising Vaquero he would be well again soon, gave him a good pat.

  We sat with them through the afternoon, listening to the rasp of every breath, waiting for some sign that the medication might soothe their fevers. Vaquero looked at me with the same roaming eyes I remembered from that day in Chimoio when I had tried to trade him away. You can’t get rid of me that easily, he seemed to have been saying. I found myself wishing he would say the same thing today.

  The next morning, Vaquero and the gelding showed no signs of recovery. Pat stayed to nurse them, even though there was nothing he could do. I tried to push them from my mind as I took riders along the beach, north through sweeping red dunes and across an undulating expanse of crimson sand. In Duke’s saddle, I led them on a canter along the sweeping bay, but it was late in the afternoon by the time we were trotting back toward the stable, up through the mangrove flats and sandy beach road.

  When I arrived, it was to find the stable area empty but for a groom who indicated the next-door plot. Here in the plot, Pat tended to Marquess and Arizona; a little farther along, Jonathan was standing with Tequila’s sister, Kahlua.

  I rode Duke into the plot. Instantly, Pat looked up.

  “It wasn’t just Vaquero and the gelding. We had to bring Marquess and these others in from the fields, too. They have the same symptoms.”

  I pushed Duke a little farther but saw the caution in Pat’s eyes and reined him in. That was why the rest of the herd had been roped off out in the bush; this plot was under quarantine now.

  “Same symptoms?” I asked, looking at Marquess.

  Pat nodded.

  “That isn’t all, Mandy. It’s Vaquero.” Pat stalled, his face a mask of stone. “Mandy, he’s gone.”

  Long after midnight, starlight bathed the trees.

  Pat and I drew the truck off the road and into the bush. Once we were far enough from the road, we killed the lights and stepped out. In front of us lay a great maw in the hard earth. A shovel was propped by its side.

  When I had gotten back to the rondavel, Vaquero and the other gelding were lying, stiff and cold. Pat had covered them in sheets, but something compelled me to take a look. I stepped forward and lifted a corner, just enough that I could see Vaquero’s head, his eyes still open, his tongue still lolling out. Pat said he had been the first to go. He simply took a deep breath, held it in his chest, and then he was gone. The other gelding followed only moments later, the two gone together to join that ancient herd in the sky.

  “What was it?” I asked, knowing we had no answer. “We should have a vet here, Pat.”

  “We’ll send for one. Fly one up from South Africa.”

  I beat a retreat from Vaquero’s cold cadaver, unable to look at his glassy eyes staring. No longer would they roam around their orbits. No longer would they glimmer at me knowingly, as if sharing some mischievous joke.

  “What are we going to do with him, Pat?”

  “You’re thinking of Grey, aren’t you?”

  Now we stood at an open grave in the dead of night, as Jonathan and Luka helped us lower Vaquero down to lie, his legs entangled with those of the gelding he had died alongside. There was no time for sentiment. There was no time to say any words or lament the loss. By the light of the stars, we poured the dirt over poor Vaquero and knew we would never see him again.

  As we drove back to snatch a few hours’ sleep before embarking on another day’s riding, I told myself that, at least in death, Vaquero was safe. No local Mozambican would be there to dig up his body and butcher him for a fire.

  I told myself all that, but it wasn’t
nearly enough to quell the ache in my gut.

  In the days that followed, more and more horses came in, showing similar symptoms to Vaquero’s. Soon, Marquess followed him into the ground. Then Arizona. Drummer Boy. Ratz. Roulette and Aurora. Sabi Star. Comet. At dusk, we walked through the stables and listened as the terrible rasp began in our horses’ throats. Engulfing their lungs. Eyes drooped, sweat shimmered—and, one after another, the horses we had rescued from Mugabe’s war began to die.

  Pat stood with Shere Khan, while I ran my hand through Fleur’s mane. November had turned into a cruel, scorching December. It had been three nights since the last death, but those nights had been fitful. The bush between our rondavel and the stable was now an unmarked graveyard, haunted by the ghosts of our herd. When I closed my eyes, I could see the graves picked out across the backs of my eyes, like sparkling stars in a planetarium.

  On the other side of Shere Khan, a figure crouched with his ear pressed up against California’s chest. A little case was open at his side, with vials of blood placed carefully within.

  “Any idea, Allan?”

  Allan had arrived on the morning’s plane, along with a family of French riders for whom we would have to paint on smiles and pretend our world was not falling apart. He was a tall South African with brown dreadlocks, who had been a veterinarian with his own practice in Rustenburg. Now, as he crouched between Shere Khan and California, his face betrayed nothing. My insides churned; his, I knew, was a practiced face, designed to put his own clients at ease. I felt as if I could see straight through it to some yawning horror on the other side.

  “We’ll know more when we’ve done some tests. It isn’t African horse sickness. I can promise you that.”

  He stood up, closed his case, and ran his hand along Shere Khan’s mane.

  “She really is a beautiful horse,” he began. Shere Khan flicked her mane dismissively. “And she knows it, doesn’t she?”

  Allan flew back to Johannesburg the very next day, but it seemed an interminable wait for the laboratory results to come through. At last, as one dusk drew over Vilanculos in the deep of December, the phone rang.

  “Tell me you have a cure,” I began.

  Allan’s tone was somber. “I’d love nothing more, Mandy, but . . . I can’t tell you what the cure is when I can’t tell you what’s wrong with your horses.”

  His voice trailed off, but I had no words to replace it.

  “How many have died, Mandy?”

  “Ten,” I uttered.

  “I’m sorry . . .”

  He seemed broken too, but there was no way he could understand just how we felt.

  “What can we do?” I breathed, not daring to dream there might be an answer.

  “There are other things we could look for,” Allan began, “but I’d need more samples . . .”

  “We can do it,” I cut in. “Pat can draw more blood . . .”

  “Not blood,” Alan interjected. “It has to be tissue.”

  “Tissue?”

  “Mandy, we’d need a slice of brain.”

  All we could do was wait for another of our dearest horses to die.

  Early in the morning, I was kneading the sleep from my eyes when Jonathan appeared, looking ragged and starved of sleep, to bring the news. With the steam from my tea beading on my face, I saw him whisper to Pat. Then he turned to walk back along the beach, the gentle susurration of waves behind him.

  “Who is it, Pat?”

  “Fleur,” Pat breathed.

  We brought her to the rondavel to die. There had been too much death in those stables. On the same grass where Vaquero had breathed his last, Fleur lay down. We brought her water, but by fall of night she was too weak to stand and drink. Instead, I lay with her head in my lap, listening to each stuttering breath, brushing back the sweat that beaded in her mane and trickled down her muzzle.

  When death came, it came suddenly. She opened her eyes, seemed to be desperately searching for something; in that moment, I knew that she understood. Her forelegs gave tiny, almost imperceptible kicks; she breathed in, exhaled softly—and then Fleur was gone.

  “She was so frightened,” I breathed as I lifted her head from my lap and, my body numb, took Pat’s hand to stand.

  “So am I,” Pat admitted.

  It fell to Pat to conduct the grisly business. I could not bear to see it done. While he was readying Fleur’s body, I headed for the airport to organize the tissue sample’s delivery to Allan in South Africa. Yet, as I explained what we needed to the relevant authorities, their faces turned to stone: there was no way, I was told by the airline operator, that they could transport such a thing on their planes, not without a veterinary license, and that might take many months to receive. I left with tears in my eyes. There had to be another way.

  When I got back to the rondavel, Pat’s work was done. He was scrubbing his hands, though I could still see the red stains in the webbing of his fingers. We sat down and thought about our options. I can barely remember the moment it occurred to me, but there was a very simple way of getting the tissue sample into South Africa. A slice of brain matter was simply a slice of meat. We would put it inside a sandwich and ask one of our clients to deliver it to a wonderful lady named Meryl who kindly offered to rush the samples to the veterinary department. She would be waiting for our clients when they stepped off the plane on the other side.

  Pat looked at me, his eyes glowing with the absurdity of it all.

  “Only Africa would make us do a thing like that.”

  I couldn’t help but laugh.

  That night, we buried what was left of our beloved Fleur on the edge of a cliff under a baobab tree with a view of the sea. Back at the rondavel, I took down a chopping board and laid out two slices of bread. Like some mad scientist engaged in a midnight experiment, I cut two pieces of plastic film to the exact shape and size of the bread, and laid one on top of each slice. Then, I picked out the cold, gelatinous slices of Fleur’s brain from the refrigerator and laid them on the plastic. Even after I had set them down, I thought I could feel a tingling on my fingers, and I hoped that Fleur might forgive us.

  After laying another piece of plastic film on top of one slice of brain, I closed up the sandwich and wrapped it in yet more plastic, hoping that it might remain fresh throughout the short flight. Then I joined Pat outside the rondavel.

  “Eleven dead already,” I said. “He has to find something, Pat.”

  Pat nodded, refusing to give me any crude consolation. Then he left to see our most recent clients and their illicit sandwich off into the skies.

  In December, Mozambique baked. Jay had come to Vilanculos to spend Christmas with us, but this year there would be no celebrations. We spent Christmas Day in the stables. In the evening, we left Jay to look over the horses while Pat and I joined our clients for a braai on the beach. I filled my plate with steak and the rich South African sausage we called boerewors, but it took me an hour to poke it down.

  “You have to eat,” Pat whispered to me, as the sounds of revelry crowded us from all sides.

  “I’m not hungry.”

  “You look like a rake.”

  From somewhere, there came the sound of a guitar. People were dancing in the sand, and a chorus of voices rose to join the song.

  I wanna be in the cavalry, if they send me off to war

  I want a good steed under me, like my forefathers before

  I want a good man when the bugles sound and I hear those cannons roar

  I wanna be in the cavalry, if they send me off to war

  Now that the party had started, the singing did not stop. The guitar was passed around and more songs poured into the night. Over the ocean, the starlight sparkled, and I could tell from the gleeful look in their eyes that our clients would remember this Christmas for the rest of their lives.

  “Do you ever get bored of it?”

  It took me a moment to register the question.

  “Mandy,” one of the clients asked, bouncing his ex
hausted daughter on his knee, “do you ever just wake up and realize how lucky you are, to be here, to have all of this . . . this beauty, all around you?”

  I felt Pat’s leg tense against mine underneath the table.

  “Every morning,” I said, through a painted smile. “Darling, it’s like that every single time I wake up.”

  Early in the New Year, Pat picked up the phone, a call from pathologists at Onderstepoort Veterinary Institute. I had been bickering with Jay outside but heard him conversing in a low whisper. When he finally hung up, he came down the rondavel step and sank down to sit there, kneading the phone in his hands.

  I broke from my argument with Jay. “Was it Allan?” I began.

  Pat shook his head.

  “It was Onderstepoort. They’ve found out what’s killing the horses. We took them straight into it.” He paused. “They’re poisoned, Mandy. It was in their grazing. Crotalaria . . .”

  “Crotalaria?”

  “Sun hemp,” Pat said, flinging his arms back. Realization seemed to be dawning. “It must have been out in the field, along that lake. They didn’t know. They ate it. And now . . .”

  Sun hemp had been introduced to Mozambique during the country’s earliest days as a Portuguese colony, as part of an attempt to enrich nitrogen in the country’s soils. Grown properly and harvested at the right time it is a wonderful plant, perfect as food for livestock; but when it is seeding, the plant is toxic. Horses are usually so intelligent and watchful. Instinct drives them away from toxic plants. Instinct drives them to graze on the rich grasses that they need. Instinct takes care of them where their owners cannot. But instinct cannot protect a horse forever. Perhaps the instincts of our own herd had somehow been scrambled by their long flight from home. Perhaps the sun hemp in the field seemed too good to turn down.