Red Dog

by Willem Anker

  I crawl into my hut, curl myself up and look at the stars. Orion looms overhead. I grow fast and go to sleep quickly. When I’m not too tired I measure my shaft. One of these days an ell! Believe me, I can squirt up to six feet already. The Hottentots give me dagga. At times I miss company, but as soon as I find it, I want to get away as fast as possible. I take long walks till far into the night. On my way back I usually loiter past the extinguished dung-and-bush fires next to the Hottentot huts. The grass is showing yellow already one early morning when I crawl in among Saterdag and his people where they’re all lying in a heap snoring and fighting for the few hides on the floor. The next morning they go their way as usual, as if I’d always been sleeping there. Three weeks later it just seems simpler to go and lie among them again when my jackal hole feels too big.

  When I’m not hunting, I’m in the veldt with the cattle, and often there is no light in my hut for nights on end. Geertruy asks me now and again where I sleep, but gets no reply out of me. In the morning before daybreak I sometimes walk down to the stream and drill a hole in the river clay and take off my clothes and poke my prick into the hole and stretch myself out flat on the earth with arms and legs spread and when I shoot my load, I push my face into the soil. So there, you wanted to know it all, didn’t you. I wash myself in the river. After a particularly energetic clay-bashing there is a strange rash that leaves me feeling feverish and I pray all night for forgiveness and healing and the next day I’m even more feverish and I’m shitting water and I go back to the river and I bash my bride with conviction till I see visions and fall asleep on the clay body of the riverbank and when I wake up I can remember the dream and my fever is broken.

  I’m sitting in the sun against the stone wall of Geertruy’s kitchen, oiling my rifle. Nowadays Geertruy has to invite me formally to a meal. I seldom turn down these invitations, but I never just turn up out of the blue. When I’m invited, I always arrive at the homestead early. Then I settle down outside and find something to occupy my hands while I watch the Senekal children playing with their minder. Maria, with the Malay eyes and the Hottentot hair. She’s younger than me, but her body is ripe and ready. I chiselled out the star of Diana on the butt of the rifle myself and set a copper star into it. As soon as I touch a gun, my hands get clever, smaller, slimmer. I oil the wood of the baboon-butt. I follow the grain of the stock, my nose pressed to the wood. I coat the barrel with a different oil and a different cloth. The trick is not to manhandle the barrel. Take your time. For a while just see how slowly you can do it. The cloth mustn’t press on the metal, it should just touch. And then again a vigorous polishing till the metal grows burning hot. I never speak to her. I clean the rifle or cure a hide or smoke. Especially when David Devil-cramp is in the offing, I smoke furiously and wait for him to say something. At table he will then slap at an invisible flea or make some comment about my clothes smelling like a Hotnot’s.

  There are fleas all over, David, Geertruy will then say.

  But at least we try to smoke the creatures out. Once in a while. We try … He doesn’t try.

  I want to brag to Maria. I want to tell her that I’m one of the best-known hunters in the area. I’m one of the big shots. For weeks on end I’m away with the men of the district who come to fetch me for the hunt. They always bring me a horse. There’s only one here at the Senekals’ and I’m not allowed near him. Sometimes they invite his excellency Sad-sack Senekal along, but mainly not. The two of us don’t ride in the same commando. As soon as Geertruy loses sight of us behind the first ridge, we’re at each other’s throats. When it’s a punitive expedition, we both of us have to go along, but for hunting they choose one of us at a time. And I’m the one who never misses a shot. I smoke my pipe and make showy smoke rings within smoke rings, but find no word to say to Maria.

  While we’re eating, Maria sits cross-legged in the corner with the children. She teases Stienie and waggles a ragdoll in front of her face till the little one starts crowing and rolls face down on the kaross. Maria’s dress strains over her buttocks, oh her buttocks, and shifts up to where an inch of thigh shows above the knee.

  At age fifteen I shoot my first elephant. Because I’m not of age I’m dependent on the big-dicks to dispose of the hides and tusks. I get a fraction of the payment for my own pocket. The other hunters soon cotton on to the fact that I don’t have much truck with money. I’ll swop tusks and hides with them for a better gun. Sometimes I keep some of the hides for my hut. The hunt itself is enough for me. Mostly I go hunting on my own. After I’ve spent a few days in the veldt on my own, horseless and shoeless, everyone says I’m easier to get along with. Geertruy tries to get me to give up blundering into the bushes on my own, but without much conviction. She knows it’s better for everybody’s peace of mind. If they keep me in the yard for too long hauling butter barrels or thatching roofs, then everyone gets to know about it. Even Saterdag is given it good and hard if he nags at me on such days. Back from a hunting trip, I’m usually invited to supper straightaway, because apparently I’m then well behaved at table. Of course on such days there is also for a change enough meat to share. My first lion? A mangy male, an aged loner, kicked out of the pride. Was almost as if the beast wanted to be shot.

  Geertruy dishes some more meat for David the Dreck and asks if I’ve had my fill. No, Sister, on the contrary.

  On the hunt on my own my circles around the yard become ever wider. If my duties on the farm permit, I nowadays stay away for a week or more. In the hunting ground my ears prick up at every branch that snaps. Every drop on a blade of grass is perilously suspended. My sweat and the sweat of the quarry. The twittering in the trees. The piss against the trunks and all the thresholds of demarcated territories in which loud-mouthed males rule. I criss-cross it all with my gun. I know the rules of the veldt. The better I get to understand the rules, the freer I become. In the veldt I can mark, bark, fight and piss out the limits of my own life among the other creatures. In a Christian home you are coddled while you are small and stupid, but you gradually become ever less free the better you get to learn what is expected of you. In a whitewashed house every little copper jug must be polished and every little carpet must be beaten every morning, but all around you as far as the eye can see and further it’s just dust and stone and bush. In the veldt nothing is dirty. A grey stone does not need polishing. A thorn tree does not need dusting.

  I excuse myself from the table, go and sit on the kaross with the children and the minder with the skin smelling of fat and herbs. I unpack the wooden blocks on the dung floor. Geertruy and her Appointed Master pretend not to see me at their feet. They talk more loudly and chew with more conviction. The conversation stumbles and bumbles, they struggle to stuff my springbok meat down their gullets. I pick up the little one, who starts bawling. Geertruy sends out the children and their minder to the back room. I take my seat at table again. My godparents eat in silence. The thighbone in the dish still has quite a bit of meat on it. I start carving off the meat; then I take the bone and push my chair back. I put my crossed legs on the table, my clodhoppers under my godfather’s nose. I tear a bit of meat off the bone, smile. The father of the house jumps up, slams the door behind him. Geertruy shakes her head, follows her husband out of the room. My springbok is delicious.

  Saterdag and I are sitting and smoking near the herd of cattle in a stretch of gnawn-bare pasturage. It’s too hot to talk. We’re sitting under a large protea bush, our eyes swollen from the previous night that turned into morning and the sun that rose more blindingly than ever.

  At night we steal karrie, the honey beer of the Hottentots. We make a fire and nobody misses us. We squat on our haunches and sometimes the one-eared dog comes to sit with us before the hordes of eyes like stars in the undergrowth recall the dog to the pack and they fade into the brushwood. There are evenings when we lose fist fights and start them, evenings when the beer emboldens us to walk across to gaggles of giggling Hottentot girls.

  I scratch at my first growth
of beard. Clumsily and showily I clean my pipe with a long thorn. The headache throbs behind my eyes. Snot-slime Senekal’s shepherd dog, goddam good-for-nothing Ore, is lying in the grass. The only sign of life the tail that flicks at a fly now and again.

  Among the leaves of the protea above us a spider is spinning in a bee. The legs of the red-bellied spider move fast and featously. It spins threads around the bee’s wings, avoiding the sting. The bee’s abdomen aims its useless poison dart at the spider. Every movement enmeshes it further. The eight-footed attack is launched simultaneously from all quarters and on all fronts. The wings vibrate faster and faster the more restricted their space becomes. The humming of the bee becomes ever more frantic, ever more furious, until the quarry’s last counter-attack comes to nothing and the bee subsides. The sting is no longer trying to sting. The wings go still. It can’t move any more. It’s not that the bee gives up. The bee never gives up. It fights and weakens until there is nothing left of it. Saterdag leans forward, puts out a hand to release the bee from life. I push a hand to his chest.

  Let be.

  Saterdag looks at me, then looks away, straight in front of him. Intently I watch the slow and purposeful cruelty until the spider is satisfied that the bee will never escape and, after a last caress over the cocoon of the quiet quarry, hoists itself up a thread of its own creation. I start loading the rifle, pour in the gunpowder and, instead of a lead pellet, a stone. I get up, stretch myself and look down at Saterdag.

  Run.

  What?

  Run.

  Saterdag jumps up, runs. I fire a shot into the air. The sheep scatter in all directions, the herd all of a sudden hundreds of individual sheep. Saterdag does not look around, runs faster. I carefully put down the gun, race after him. Saterdag swerves left and right through the undergrowth. I storm straight through the slangbos and cat thorn, my leather pants soon full of snags. Sodomite Senekal’s Ore charges along, an imbecile frenzy over the sudden excitement. Just before the tree line I plough the Bushman into the ground. I catch up with him at a run and without slowing down I run into him from behind and end up on top of him. Saterdag starts struggling free. I push his hands against the ground until our breaths stop racing. The farm dog comes closer inquisitively to make sure the game is over. The tail is wagging and the tongue is hanging out. The slavering fool tripples around us. I sit up straight and smack the brute across the snout so that it retreats yowling.

  Let the dog be, Buys. What’s he done to you?

  It’s no dog.

  He’s the best sheepdog we have.

  That’s because it’s more sheep than dog.

  Ore is a good dog.

  A dog with a name is no goddam dog any more.

  Saterdag shakes his head and walks behind me. We start herding the sheep.

  What’s eating you?

  We can’t sit around on our butts all day.

  Like every year, the Senekals attend the cattle auctions. Apart from Communion it’s the biggest agglomeration of the year: three days of chitter-chatter with everybody from all over, three days of grubbing and boozing and swopping and cheating and here and there a smidgeon of adultery. I’m foreman and have to go along to see to the cattle. David Dumbwit and I steer clear of each other, speak only when necessary. His blatherskite buddies are there; I have my affairs to see to. It’s good to get out among other people, people you don’t feel you want to murder.

  At the auction grounds there’s a fellow in the saddle fresh from France who does things with a horse I’ve never seen before. Look, it seems as if the horse isn’t even conscious of the rider, so liquid its movements and so subtle the rider’s commands. Man and horse merge into one new and strange animal. The hoofs are lifted high, are put down firmly, as if the horse wanted to expend all its power and passion in the lightest footfall, as if its whole being depended on each step, as if all movement were display and all movement were totally subjected to an invisible force that brooked no blemish. The rider is without past or future. He is sheer arms and legs, stirrups and saddle and reins, everything attuned to the tiniest tremor in the horse’s body.

  Just see how cockily he stands there, the young Buys, the stuff-strutter with the feather in his hat and his hand in his side. Just see them standing there talking to each other, the horseman in French and broken High Dutch and Buys in the ever-mutating Dutch of the Cape Christians. See how hand gestures take over when words fall short. How young Buys interrogates him until the man manages, after a few unsuccessful attempts, to excuse himself.

  The first morning back on the farm I saddle Sweat-stain Senekal’s horse. One of the farm women goes and tells the boss, who bears down upon me all shouting and swearing. Who the devil do I think I am to mount his horse? I bring the horse to a standstill, then take it through a few of the dance steps that the Frenchman showed me. David Dogshit falls silent. He stands for a while watching me. Before walking away, he mutters that I may borrow his horse once I’ve completed my day’s tasks.

  Every late afternoon I’m in the saddle and the moon is high before I walk the horse to cool it down. I’m informed that Soup-socks Senekal tells the whole world except me how surprised he is that he and this strange pipsqueak share an interest in horses. I can see how it pisses him off when the horse is more responsive to this uncouth hooligan than to him. I make sure that he’s present when with great fanfare I rechristen the horse as Horse. I make sure that he sees I’m watching when the beast no longer responds when he calls it by its old name. After a few weeks he’s inclined to forbid me once again to get near to Horse, but Geertruy says his word is his bond. I’ve practised and perfected a smile that I keep at hand just for moments like these, a smile specially crafted for my beloved godfather.

  During that year and the following you can come and look for me among the huts of the farm folk. On such a summer’s evening I’m sixteen and loitering among the fires. Children hang about me and I lift them up on my shoulders. They crow with pleasure and their parents call them in. I walk past the hut where I know she lives, a few times, and ask nobody about her and she doesn’t appear. I go and sit with a group of young Hottentots and we talk about the cow and her udder that started festering that afternoon. One of the Hottentots has a birthmark on his face and vomits on the fire and the others laugh and I see her nowhere.

  On a later, cooler evening you can find me next to a fire drinking beer with two old cattle-herds who talk of drought. Now and again they peek at me. I sit and drink what they have and promise to give them back the next morning what I’ve drunk and they laugh because they must and say I’m welcome and I don’t ask them about her and much later I get up and walk to another fire.

  In winter the wood is wet and the fires smoke and the old men are older and when they see me they slip into the nearest hut with their calabashes. I fight when I’m drunk and sometimes I pretend to be drunk so that I can lash out more savagely and on none of these evenings does she appear and on every one of these evenings I look up too quickly when her name is mentioned. Piccanins who should be in bed by now taunt me with her name when they see me approach. The young Hottentots laugh but not out loud. Early one morning the karrie makes me vomit and I take a young half-caste girl to my hut. I lie with a woman for the first time. I remember what she smelt like and how bony she was and that she didn’t want it and how quickly it was done. In the following weeks I jump two more and sit around with Saterdag who never talks about her.

  Towards the end of winter the fires are small and the people keep indoors. I still now and again sneak up to where I can see the shadows of her and her family moving around in their hut, but I don’t come out of the bushes. One night the sky is open and the stars shower down all around me when I get up from the fire where a few souls have elected to brave the cold. It’s freezing out here, but my jackal hole is too stuffy. The men around the fire all have their reasons not to be with their wives in their huts. They sit still, the only dance being the shadows in the smoky flames. I walk into the veldt with
a calabash. There’s someone walking behind me. I stop a few times, listen. The footsteps are light, but not accustomed to prowling in the dark. The figure stands still as soon as I sit down. The dark outline stands watching me for a while and then walks back in the direction of the fire. I drain the calabash. Snivel-snot Senekal’s brandy scorches my throat. I go home. As I walk I look behind me to see whether I don’t recognise one of the shadows. In front of my hut she’s waiting for me.

  My father is scared of you.

  Whatever for?

  He sees you walking up and down in front of our hut. He says you’re wearing a trench with your feet between your place and ours.

  I walk in many places.

  So I hear, yes. But nowadays you only walk in one path. Father says he’s going to beat me to death if he catches me with you. He says you can’t look after a woman. He says you can’t look after yourself.

  I look after myself. I built this house.

  My father says this thing is no house, he says ostriches build better nests.

  So let your father come and build me a house.

  If you tell him to, he’ll have to do it.

  What are you doing here?

  Why don’t you talk to me at the Master’s house?

  I talk.

  You never talk.

  What do you want to talk about?

  We sit out the night in my ostrich nest and she tells me about her life and her parents and her little sister who died the previous year and her father who paces muttering up and down in the hut and hits them if the pacing doesn’t help and the children of Geertruy whom she looks after and knows better than I do and I tell her nothing but I listen to everything she says and I don’t forget any of it. It is morning by the time she starts talking more slowly. The most important things that had to be said have been said. She allows me to touch her. The dress she starts taking off was my mother’s and was Geertruy’s. We kiss until she has to go and skim the milk for goddam David’s goddam butter. My prick isn’t having any. When she’s gone, I work up a hard-on by hand and harrow a plot of ground where I’m lying and wipe myself on the kaross. I walk past the dairy and see her there, fishing out the spoon that has fallen into the vat. Her arms are dripping cream. I turn away, walk in the direction of the veldt, stand still and turn around again and check behind me again. See, she’s coming towards me.