by Peter Bowen
And that is how I met John Dunn, the White Chief of Zululand. He had forty Zulu wives and was the scandal of the entire colony ... the women, anyway. The men was green and dripping with envy. He talked for two hours, about how the Zulus form for a battle, how they divide into regiments so proud that they have to be quartered very carefully, for there are grudges between certain regiments and if they are camped together, they will fight each other.
The Zulus when attacking, he said, drawing figures on the ground, use a formation shaped like the head of a bull. The center of the formation is the bull’s forehead, and here the Zulus are concentrated, with other regiments corresponding to horns, which as soon as the forehead collides with the enemy, race out to each side and surround them. The reserves are seated behind the center, some distance away, with their backs to the fight, so that they don’t get excited. They fight with big oxhide shields and a short, five-foot spear called an assegai. Any Zulu who has a wound in the back is killed. Any Zulu who hangs back from a charge is killed. Their generals are called inDunas.
They raise cattle, he said, and they seldom hunt, and when they do they just march out the regiments and surround an area and then close in.
“How are they at tracking and such?” I asks.
“Poor,” says Dunn, “but some of them have Hottentots for slaves, and a Totty can track a bee through the air. No white man can ever track as well as a Totty—and they are amateurs compared to the Bushmen. But the Zulus can track some, and they can run sixty miles in a day. If you are being chased by the Zulus, care for your horse and give them the slip. If you just ride, they’ll run the horse down.”
He gave me a pamphlet written by a Bishop, of all people, name of Colenso, which described how the Zulu regiments was drilled and ordered, their tactics, and it had a phonetic dictionary of some of their language.
Dunn and I finished off the brandy. We parted and he went off, and I went to find something to eat—it turned out to be embalmed bully beef and some strange boiled greens.
I gave up on the dinner provided by the Frontier Light Horse, and went off to Helpmakaar to buy some tinned grub or what I could find. There was a couple of open-air cookplaces going full blast, and I got a dripping hunk of beef and a half a dozen ears of corn from some stout Boer woman who was doing a land-office business. There were some other stalls set up here and there, and I bought about ten pounds of jerky—they call it biltong in Africa—and some tinned honey.
By the time I got back to the camp of the Frontier Light Horse, Buller was bellowing orders and advice, in a stream of short words. We were to move out in the morning. I had yet to find out which of these jolly lads would be my responsibility—didn’t want to seem pushy and overbearing, what with my new sergeant rank and all. Buller concluded his speech—we were moving out in the morning, to go west and then north, ahead of the western column. We would be scouting. This was fine by me. If I have a choice between skulking and a pitched battle I will always take the skulking. I’m good at it and had good teachers.
“Adendorff!” I heard this beller, and though the voice was different it had the same note of gleeful authority I had come to hate in the voice of Colonel Nelson Miles. It was a voice which had decided something, something unpleasant for old Luther, er, James Adendorff.
Buller come striding through the camp, glancing this way and that. He saw me as I was starting to slide under a wagon. He bellered “Adendorff!” and stopped me cold. I managed my sickliest shit-eating grin.
“When I first saw you I thought to myself that here was a scout,” says Buller, beaming down at me, “and I have sent four junior officers to look for you. They couldn’t find you, although some of them were near to you. You had just left. You had just been seen. I am encouraged, sir, encouraged. Vastly encouraged. If a man can disappear in a camp one step ahead of four officers and god knows how many sergeants, why, how much better will that man be able to disappear in the countryside. You are leaving tonight. You will take a companion. You will ride west and north to the vicinity of the Zunguin Mountain, and scout for Zulus. You will find bivouacs for a large force, with ample water and wood. You will map the country. You will meet me at the upper Drift of the Tugela in three weeks to a month. If you are late, I will assume that the Zulus have skinned you alive and draped you over an anthill.”
“They do that sort of thing?” I says. “That’s not friendly at all.”
“Lieutenant Harford will go with you,” says Buller, beaming and red. “Draw your rations and ammunition.”
“Got my own,” I says. “Yours ain’t fit to eat.”
Buller laughed.
Buller sort of nodded his head over to a thin wisp of a feller who was standing in Buller’s considerable shade. This youth looked to be about fourteen on a good day. He was wearing a monocle. His hair looked like a bunch of grama grass been gnawed on by a big buffalo. He was wearing a canvas suit which was covered in buttoned pockets. He had on a sun helmet which was about six sizes too large for him.
He was holding a butterfly net.
“Now just a goddamn frost-fingered pluperfect fucking minute,” I began, preparatory to remarks of a more specific nature, “I am not ...”
Buller slammed his eyebrows together so hard they went thunk.
“Are you disobeying an order from a superior officer?” says Buller. “I hang men for that.”
“Well, goddamn it, it beats gettin’ peeled and the anthill. This pimply kid couldn’t find his way to the bathroom from the goddamn library, and I am damned if ...”
Buller beamed at me, he looked positively benevolent.
“You are very wrong, Mr. Adendorff,” he says, “but you will have to find that out. Arthur ...”
“Sir,” chirped the youth.
“Adendorff will be your companion.”
“Oh, dear,” says Harford. “Is he fit?”
Buller snorted and grinned and stomped off.
We saddled up and stowed map-making gear—pencils, paper, and a compass—in our saddlebags. Then Harford got a mule, and put a large packframe on it, and then he began to unpack a lot of tin boxes from a wooden crate.
“What in hell are those?” I said, not believing my eyes.
“For the specimens,” says Harford. “I am sir to you, Adendorff, and I will damn well have you address me thus.”
“SPECIMENS? WHAT IN THE HELL ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT?” I screamed.
“I am an entomologist and a Fellow of the Royal Society,” says young Arthur Harford, “and you are a sergeant and a lout.”
“Christ on a bent dingle,” I says, “this is ...”
Harford walked over to me and stared hard at me from down there somewhere for a while. His gaze was level and his voice had gone very soft.
“I know what I am doing,” he said, “and we have a great deal to do. Shall we?”
We rode out, past the encampment, and picked up a road that wound off toward the Drakensberg Range, the Dragon Mountains. We rode all night.
Arthur rode very well. Sometime before dawn I trotted up beside him. He was asleep in the saddle.
I turned my horse.
“Do check the pack on the mule,” said Arthur. “There’s a good fellow.”
I did. Wouldn’t do to have Harford’s goddamn bug-tins clanking. Wouldn’t do at all.
Jaysus kayrist, Kelly, I says to myself.
33
APPEARANCES IS DECEIVING THINGS, and by the end of the second day I was admitting to myself that I was dead wrong about this little feller with his monocle and bug boxes. He missed nothing.
We were headed far to the west of Zululand, and when it come time to turn north Arthur pulled up and hopped off his horse and commenced to sculpt a map in a sand patch. He modeled the mountains we would be going through—just like Jim Bridger had done for me a dozen years before—and he explained the rivers, how the clouds bunched when it was going to rain like hell, and how to spot the dry watercourses which would have twenty-foot walls of water moving down t
hem a few hours after the rain fell in the faraway mountains. I knew how to see that anyway, but I was damn impressed with his simple explanation of what we were likely to see. I have a good sense of distance and proportion, and I could picture the sand map in my eye long after we had left it. Part way through the lecture, Arthur spotted something in the sand, plunged his hand in, and pulled out a beetle. He gave it some Latin name and pulled out a small tin he had in one of the hundred or so pockets of his suit.
“How nice!” he said. “Jolly good!” The beetle was busy trying to chew off a finger, with some success. The bugger was about four inches long and had a set of choppers would of done credit to a weasel.
“Do the Zulus leave you alone because they think you are crazy?” I said. “Some American Indian tribes do, I know that.”
“Unwise to assume that,” said Harford. “I was raised among them and we are, after all, at war. I think perhaps that they should not see us at all.”
“Raised among them?” I says.
“My parents were missionaries,” says young Arthur. “The Zulus regard a converted tribesman as a spoiled Zulu, and we were on the fringes of the kingdom, and our Zulus were the disaffected ones. Still, Zulus they were, and fine people.”
“Except for a few bad habits, like skinning folks alive and pegging them out on anthills.”
“Or throwing them alive into crocodile pools, or pounding stakes up the rectum and leaving the unhappy victim to scream for a day and scream more when the jackals come at night, since the jackal or hyena always goes for the groin first, or perhaps impaling the victim—again through the rectum—on a thin stake, so that the weight of the body drives the point ever deeper, or giving the unfortunate to the women, who skin one slowly, or perhaps sewing the victim up in a raw cowhide and leaving it in the sun, or ...”
“Nice friends you got,” I says.
“You see why I prefer that we not be detected.”
“Couldn’t agree with you more,” I says.
“We will, of course, travel at night,” he says, “and you will do as I say. Or I’ll kill you. This information is of great value to the Army. The lives of many depend on it. I will meet any insubordination or even mere clumsiness with death. I didn’t want you along, Mr. Adendorff. I obey my orders. You obey yours.”
“Fine,” I says. “What do we do first?”
“We shall have to ford the upper Tugela. I will not, of course, take us to a crossing that is used often, since there will be Zulus watching it. Since it is late spring, the river rises late each day and then falls about the middle of the night, when the snows in the mountains freeze up. We shall have to get across and get away and erase the evidence of our passing and be well hid by daybreak.”
“That I know how to do.”
“Do you, Mr. Adendorff? And where did you learn?”
“Here and there,” says I.
Harford snorted. “Not in dime novels, I hope.”
We were stopped near a small rivulet which cut through a bank of clay. I scooped up a few handfuls and began to smear it on my horse, dab here and dab there. Harford raised an eyebrow.
“The plains here let a man see for many miles,” I said. “If you break up the lines of a horse or yourself, it might mean not bein’ seen. And if I were you I’d put a big dollop of mud over that damn monocle. Known quite a few fellers died ’cause the sun flashed off their field glasses or a bright bit of hardware. This gun,” I drew out my pistol, “has a soft, dull finish—and a bit of charcoal on your face is, I am told, the latest fashion among all good scouts.”
Harford nodded. “Not necessary to do that until tomorrow night,” he said. “We’ll cover the beasts’ feet with rawhide. Also if we have to make a run for it I have several pairs of horseshoes. We may have to reshoe our animals.”
We spent a few minutes trying to top one another and then gave up. Harford was small and thin, but wiry and strong. The one item of gear which he kept near to hand was a braided rawhide whip, thin, and from the way it hung in its coil, it must have been weighted.
At dusk we began to move, starting late, Harford said, because the Zulus could well have sent some Hottentot scouts out to live in the bush, pissing down a straw and living on a mouthful of water and a small shred of dried beef each day.
We traveled all night, keeping off the ridges. There was no moon and a cold wind came down from the Drakensberg, and the starlight was so dim that I once almost rode into a gully. The horse sensed it and stopped. We weren’t making good time, but then we were being cautious, and saving our stock. It might come to making a run for it later.
We spent the day in a cave halfway up a flat-topped mountain, a small cave where water dripped into a natural basin just inside, in the shadows. We had hid the stock below in thickets. For hours, we took thread heavy with beeswax and wrapped every bit of tack that could clank or jingle. Harford was thorough. I watched him and he watched me. We didn’t have much advice for one another, and I was by this time thinking that he would do to run with.
I could just make out the silvery flow of the Tugela River about ten miles away, lush and green on its banks, the sun shimmering on the water. The banks was deep-cut, as dry mountain rivers always are, and it was a considerable river, with a mixed rock-and-sand bottom, most likely, and too fast and high for crocodiles. The crocs don’t kill many folks, I had heard, but the hippopotamuses accounted for a fair number—more than all other animals combined—and it seemed that folks didn’t take them seriously because they were so funny looking. Me, I took them seriously.
Harford was snoozing, his hat over his eyes, and I walked toward the cave entrance. I kept well back out of the light. I was staring off in the distance when a movement caught my eye off to my left. I swung my head, and looked at a huge black snake which had reared up its head and was looking at me and swaying.
The snake and me stared at one another for what seemed a long time. I don’t like snakes, and this one’s head was a good six feet off the ground and god knew how much coiled on the flat. Then, moving so quick I knowed I could hardly get my gun out, it rushed at me.
I was raising my pistol, trying to sight on the head. The snake reared back and lunged at me, and as its head snapped forward, a thin brown line flashed by me. There was a wet crack, and the snake’s head fell off the long black body. The snake flopped and thrashed for a moment, and then arranged itself into quivering coils.
“Black mamba,” said Harford, behind me. “Bad snake. Dead in three minutes, if one bites you.”
My hair was standing straight up and I could feel cold sweat pouring down my spine. The damn thing looked to be fifteen feet long.
“They are the only snakes which will charge,” said Harford. “Very aggressive. In some tribes, a boy becomes a man only when he either kills a lion alone with a spear, or a black mamba.”
“They like any particular kind of country,” I says “or do you come across them any old place?”
“Open, grassy savanna,” said Harford.
“We are not in an open, grassy savanna, Harford,” I says, my voice a little raspy.
“Well,” says Harford, “all of the ones I have seen have been on open, grassy savanna.”
“I suppose that most of the country we will be going through will be open, grassy savanna,” I says.
“Quite,” says Harford.
“Got another one of them whips?” I says.
“Under the tins we packed on the mule.”
“Why didn’t you tell me earlier?”
“Well, old chap,” says Harford, “had you been a little less keen and had you disappointed me a bit more I should have let the mamba strike you. Apologies, and all of that, but this is, after all, serious business.”
34
MOST FOLKS WOULD HAVE brooded about what Harford said, but since it was just the sort of thing that I’d do in a similar situation I didn’t waste any time thinking black thoughts. I had to admire this skinny pup.
We took off an hour after dark,
walking for a while, then riding when there was enough cover. We come to the Tugela River about two o’clock in the morning, and swum across without incident. The water was icy cold from the melting snows high in the Drakensberg Mountains. We brushed over our sign where we come out, on a gravel bar, and moved off halfway up the side of the hills. Each time we would come to the end of what we had seen a mile back, Harford would stop and wriggle forward and stare real hard at the shadowed hills ahead of us. There was no moon and a high haze which cut the starlight. We found no sign.
’Long toward dawn we made a dry camp in a thicket of acacia trees, watered the stock out of an India-rubber bag, and took turns sleeping and keeping watch. Nothing moved on the dry hills but a couple of antelope. Harford had said that we likely wouldn’t see anyone until late the next day, as the border area had been in dispute for three generations and neither the Boers nor the Zulus pastured their cattle where they were likely to get stolen.
At this rate, ten or twelve miles a night, we would be a long time drifting in and coming back out. On the other hand, if we rode hard in broad daylight we would no doubt find all sorts of excitement, and I am a dull, peaceloving soul.
Four nights later, as we padded along toward the north and east, I spotted a fire maybe five miles away. We found cover for the beasts and went forward on foot. The wind changed and I could smell cattle stink.
“If we can get in front of them, the cattle will obliterate our spoor,” Harford whispered. “We are headed for the military kraal at Nodenwendghu.”
We made a long, wide circle, coming to rest finally in a grove of little poplars by a small stream. There was one large tree, a poison tree, the kind that drips sap that will take your skin off at night, Harford said. They don’t drip during the day. Harford climbed carefully up and scanned the countryside with a blindered telescope.
“Royal cattle,” he whispered. “Some of Cetshwayo’s own herds. All of the white cattle in Zululand are the property of the King.”