Red Dog

by Willem Anker

  Does it look as if I plant anything?

  He looks around him and sees the arid bushes and the aloes and low kopjes and the cattle way over there and the few Hottentot huts hardly distinguishable from the veldt or from my hovel. I splutter at his confusion.

  You can harvest just what you like, my dear fellow.

  The preacher starts orating about how the Lord nourishes each one of his creatures and how for weeks he’s been preparing meals from the Garden of God. I have an elephant rifle in my hand and I march towards the man. He grabs the whip from a Hottentot and lashes out clumsily at the oxen.

  I am going, good Sir! I am on my way, the narrow way, as indicated by you! he shouts at me.

  I take aim and riddle the back of the wagon with the gravel with which I’ve loaded the gun. The oxen trudge on. While reloading, I bethink myself, put the gun down, run after the wagon, jump on. In a great voice I start preaching at the dumbfounded missionary and his Hottentots. I proclaim long stretches of fever dreams from Revelations that Geertruy taught me to recite. I shout:

  And when he had opened the fourth seal, I heard the voice of the fourth beast! And it said, Come and see! And I looked! and behold! A pale horse! And his name that sat on him was Death! And Hell followed with him! And power was given unto them over the fourth part of the earth! To kill with sword! And with hunger! And with death! And with the beasts of the earth!

  I carry on harrowing the little congregation hearkening to me gobsmacked. I caution them against the forest paths leading off the strait and narrow, the black women lurking in pools in this country ready to leap upon you and the cannibals and the extirpation of the Christian by the Heathen and monsters and the beasts straight from the clefts of Hell. I castigate them in advance about the dagga and the liquor that will rot their souls and the buttocks of the women and the breasts upon which they will perish. The leader of the bedraggled little team forgets about the oxen and the ramshackle outfit limps to a halt in the middle of the road where my voice starts resounding among the kopjes. I spread my arms and square my chest and once again resort to High Dutch:

  And the kings of the earth! And the great men! And the rich men! And the chief captains! And the mighty men! And every bondsman and every free man! Hid themselves in the dens and in the rocks of the mountains! And said to the mountains and rocks: Fall on us! And hide us from the face of him that sitteth on the throne, and from the wrath of the Lamb!

  I fall silent. Only the cicadas and the last sentence respond in the kopjes. Then the last blast of the trump:

  For the great day of his wrath is come! And who shall be able to stand?

  The four men look at one another. The wagon groans into motion. I sit down flat on my arse in the wagon and laugh. The Hottentots look at me. The top hat and tails realises the peroration is over and starts mumbling to himself about blasphemy and the dissolution of the soul. I remain sitting, snorting, drunk all over again, on my way along with them in the wrong direction deeper into the wilderness, until they’ve rounded the bend at the drift. Then I jump down and go and pick up the gun and fire a last shot low over their heads and trot home. Geertruy was right: The right words and a loud voice are stronger than a whole team of oxen and pack more of a punch than an elephant gun. Maria comes walking towards me. I can barely hear what she’s shouting, but I can guess that she’s not happy with my way of receiving the men of God. I rush at her, push my head between her legs, lift her backwards over my shoulders and run straight to the conjugal bed.

  If your name appears on the official list for commando service, you have to attend the annual military manoeuvres at the nearest landdrost’s offices. The business drags on for a whole week. For someone from De Lange Cloof like myself that means being away from home for more than a fortnight; to Swellendam and back is more than a week on horseback. If you have a decent horse. You have to ride your own horse half to death on the way there and take your own gun and go and blast away your own lead at a bunch of targets and consort companionably with the burghers of the district and try not to beat anybody up. Only illness or incapacity serves as an excuse – sad souls like Jacob Senekal whose poor old eyes could never see all the way to the targets.

  I’m very happy sitting on De Brakkerivier. Nobody bothers me, I bother nobody and around me everything perishes and flourishes. Days dawdle like seasons. I don’t wander far from the house. Every thorn tree looks like the next one. I do, though, find it impossible to pass an anthill without churning it up with a stick.

  I have no desire to ride to Swellendam to establish who’s got the prize pizzle or who can shoot straightest. Brandy is scarce and I prefer to have mine on my own. I have no desire to horsewhip old Horse, unshod and cantankerous, all the way to Swellendam. Maria’s hardly washed the blood from the new baby and I have to be on my way again. The gun I leave with Maria; if they want me to shoot, they can lend me a Company musket and melt the candlesticks on their groaning drostdy tables to provide me with bullets. I slip a dagger into my belt in case somebody decides to stalk me at night. Horse is old and crotchety but he can outrun any creature, Bushman or lion. The Buys men turn up regularly for these manoeuvres, perhaps I’ll bump into one or more of my brothers there. But I’m not going to go looking for them.

  When I ride into the straggle of buildings they call Swellendam, there’s a brawl in front of the taphouse. The two farmers have both had their fill of fighting, both of them are on their knees in the street. They trade blows with long and heavy arms. Not a single blow misses its target, they’re both too tired to duck. A few churls of the civilian militia loiter around till both of them are flat on their backs and then drag them off to the cells. I go and report for the manoeuvres. The clerk charged with filling in forms realises I have no weapons with me apart from the rusty dagger. I’m fined twelve rix-dollars and this far and no further will they push me. I get onto my elderly horse and ride out of the miserable little whitewashed outpost. Only after my mortal demise and my rebirth as Omni-Buys will I read in the moth-eaten minutes what I missed. For instance that Petrus Ferreira of De Lange Cloof that year at the manoeuvres won a brand-new tobacco casket as second prize in target shooting. May the plague rot his bones.

  Back among the grey bushes of De Brakkerivier I tell Maria to bundle up and tie together our domestic effects once more. I go to fetch Windvogel from under a willing and able young woman and tell him to inspan our oxen. The Hottentots see that I’m preparing to clear out. They also start gathering their few belongings. Most of them will wander further to neighbouring farms for work, but a few young ones without ties of women or children opt to take their chances with us. I fling a torch on the roof and watch the reed house go up in flames. Elizabeth dances around the house and is transfigured to a shimmer in the flames. Maria settles the baby securely in the wagon. She takes up position on the wagon chest and cracks the whip. In the year 1785 I leave behind everything I know and trek to the eastern frontier.

  2

  We trek through the interior, track the well-worn routes of earlier migrations to the far ends of the Colony. Sometimes the grooves of wagon tracks are clearly visible, sometimes they disappear for days on end and we simply drift from one fountain, spruit or watering hole to the next. We stop as seldom as possible, only when the wagon breaks down or I spot an eland and gallop into the drifting mist on Horse and don’t return without a carcase. Most days drag by monotonously, others begin on a barney and end in bedlam. The baby, still nameless, bobs along on the voyage, wrapped in a kaross, lulled by the creaking and groaning of the wagon never to recall any of it, and laughs and sleeps and cries and for the rest lies there gazing at the wagon tilt that is the limit of her world.

  Maria sits on the wagon chest, cracks the whip over the bone-weary beasts and curses them by name as soon as they flag. The Hottentots drive the little herd of cattle, Windvogel for the most part on the back of the ox he got from me as payment the previous year. I sit with Elizabeth in front of me on the horse. She doesn’t sit in the saddle
, she finds it too close to another human body. Her little naked body is draped around Horse’s neck. If I touch her to make sure she’s seated securely, that the sun isn’t scorching her, she screams or growls. It’s just she and the horse, but if I tell her the names of animals and plants and stones as we go, she repeats the names in a whisper from within the tangled depths of the horse’s mane. It’s only when she’s on the verge of sleep that she sits by me tugging at my beard, the red furze a forest for her fingers to forage in. Her complexion is not as fair as her father’s, but lighter than Maria’s. The sallow skin and red hair render her an object of open interest to the few passers-by. As soon as they register her grey eyes, they cease their greeting and their blathering and look away and then lift their hats to me and my own grey peepers. At night we sleep in the wagon. On cold evenings the baby lies curled up against the mother-belly as if hankering back to it. When the jackals call in the hills and the hyenas laugh next to the wagon, the red-haired child sits up straight, arms around the knees, watching over us.

  From the saddle I survey the bushes and the grasses and the thorn trees and the anthills like towers of Babel. Sometimes I pull up next to a rock formation or a plant that claims my attention, but while there is still sun, the wagon stops for nothing and nobody. I follow the wagon on horseback, my thoughts already straying to other rocks or leaves or wandering off into the distance. I’m not here on a voyage of discovery. I’m on my way to the border. The few people who call this region home have no use for me here: the Christians hunt the likes of them, and they in turn rob and murder the Christians in that old cycle of devastation without beginning or end. Here you keep a low profile and you don’t stay in one place for too long. The Bushmen must never think you want to settle in.

  Sometimes we cross the paths of other wagons, sometimes people on foot or on horseback, but nobody makes a lasting impression on anybody else. We don’t outspan at other farmhouses like most people. The customs and the conversations in there are what I’m getting away from. When supplies run low, we sometimes stop over at a kraal. The Hottentots readily barter sheep and edible bulbs and honey, and treat Maria well, this diminutive queen with her gigantic white husband and her Hottentot underlings.

  In one kraal of an evening the Hottentots are dancing. When Elizabeth comes to sit by me near the fire, in no time at all there are several figures squatting around her in wonderment. They can see she shies away from human contact. They approach slowly, careful not to startle her. One presses a finger gently against her shoulder. She looks at the finger. He presses an ochre-tipped finger to her nose. She giggles, presses her own finger to the Hottentot’s nose. After a while she allows the enchanted Hottentot to stroke her hair. She climbs onto my lap, but allows them to mark her little body all over with ochre hands like the hands they press against the walls of caves. Eventually the little crowd win her over; she scrambles down from my lap. They lift her onto their shoulders and dance around the fire. She looks like the afterthought of a flame, red and lambent but less so, as if fire had a shadow that could dance with humans without consuming them.

  Sometimes I do call at homesteads to angle for news. As the trek wends its way eastward, you need to look ever more closely to identify a hut as Christian turf. Heathens live in round huts; Christian wattle-and-daub huts are rectangular. The news is never good. The Christians I talk to are mainly refugees who abandoned their farms on the eastern frontier and crawled back deep into the embrace of the Colony, only to be robbed and slaughtered here as well. The accounts of these fearful god-fearing folk are as void of meaning as the cairns on graves.

  One afternoon one of these gormless Christians crawls out of his mud hut to greet me. A broad-brimmed hat on his head and the tatters of what were once military shoes are the sum total of his apparel. His whole body is peeling with sunburn. He babbles on about Caffres and locusts and his failed crops and this is what he knows and this is his life. How could he know what Omni-Buys knows and what would it be to him that Louis the Sixteenth in this year of our Lord 1785 signs a proclamation declaring that henceforth handkerchiefs must be square?

  When the wind blows through the grass or the shadows of clouds tumble over the slopes and kopjes, the whole moribund landscape seems to come to life and race past underfoot. The eye plays games in this endless place where days of trekking feel like standing still, and an hour or so of seeking shelter from a thunderstorm feels like growing old. By day the veldt is dead as dust. We trek past lions lounging under thorn trees, not bothering to bestir themselves for a whole herd of cattle. At the times of transition from night to day and from day to night the veldt is a deafening discord of life calling and cawing and rustling and racing as if aspiring to destinations beyond the multitudinous cycles intersecting here in the softly luminescent spaciousness.

  By day I’m never alone with Maria. Our conversations are instructions to each other, schemes to keep the wagon in motion and the children in good health. At night when the offspring are asleep, we can love each other cautiously. If one of the children wakes up from the rocking of the wagon, we lie down giggling between the wheels or steal off into the veldt.

  By day it’s just me and the flatness. Usually I ride off away from the team and the wagon, where I can feel the openness and be afraid. On the plain there is nowhere to hide. My chest tightens and the soil binds my feet and pours lead into my veins. I race out over the plain with the thunder rolling and crashing and furious in the black clouds. The lightning bolts set fire to the horizon. There is no hiding place when the heavy drops and the hail start pelting down. It is there that I want to be. That is what scares me. Then I have passed under it and my breast fills with air and my feet become light; then everything is open, in front of and around and in me.

  After such a storm the open spaces stir up something in me. I grab Maria from the wagon chest and throw Windvogel the whip, shout a few commands and race into the veldt with my darling wife who is trying to find her seat on the saddle until the wagon shrinks to a spot in the distance. As if the whole world is watching me, I make a great show of every movement. She just happens to be the woman with me; I am strutting my stuff to the veldt. Afterwards I lie against her and drink from her while she strokes my head.

  Close your eyes, I tell her. Close them, nobody may see.

  I shut my eyes tight and we lie in the darkness and her milk spills into my beard. The team is trundling along slowly, we need not hurry to catch up with it. Back at the wagon the children are crying and Windvogel mocks us until I clout him.

  The sun is a lidless eye on the day that the big book with the drawings is found lying on the wagon trail. I read in it: ink sketches of giraffes, the long necks implausibly long, asses, leopards, then horses with rhinoceros horns, water maidens. The further I page, the more freakish the drawings. The lines blur into blotches. On every few pages there are maps in the finest detail and shading repeated over and over again in the book and sometimes scratched out. Every map stranger than the one before. I stuff the book into my saddlebag. I fill my pipe and smoke in the saddle. Before the fill is done, a white wig is lying in the road. Minutes later a black tricorn hat on a walking stick with an ivory knob, planted in the ground. Further along two worn black shoes with shiny buckles, neatly arranged next to each other. Around the next bend a jacket draped over a thorn tree and then some distance along the white shirtsleeves fluttering from a branch. The black velvet culottes we find spread out over a desiccated bush and then a naked man sitting under a waboom next to the road, legs spread, with his head on his chest. The sun-scorched fellow doesn’t look up when he’s hailed and doesn’t stir when I place a skin pouch of water next to him. He pretends to be asleep. I shake him. He snores louder, rolls over and curls up with his hands under his head. I shake again; he draws his head in between his shoulders. I nudge him with a boot. He wriggles his body as if I’m a fly bothering him and snores furiously. The devil take him. I pick up the water pouch and we travel on.

  And always, at a distan
ce, the dogs. At night their lamentations and by day they are nowhere to be seen, except the one-eared male who takes up position next to Horse when I lose track of the wagon trail and cut into the veldt. Life and her perils, the miracles and death itself are not to be found on the wagon trail. I don’t go far, I keep my people in sight. Old One-ear pants next to me, his legs less limber than a few years ago. I stand in the stirrups, survey the surrounds. You set yourself up as a target if you don’t check behind the nearest bushes next to the road. Away from the wagon tracks you find signs of life. Other tracks and traces, warm ash in holes where last night small fires were made. A broken rifle, the butt end full of black blood. A man wandering feverishly with vacant eyes, bent under the guilt from which he fled, dying for the water he drank too quickly.

  We come across wandering Hottentot families looking for work, who no longer know how to live off the veldt, young people who no longer know the songs of the old. One of the families stops and talks and pleads and the following day I notice them a mile or so behind us. A week later another family following us with little bundles. Everything they have managed to gather on this earth wrapped in hides, cherished close to their meagre bodies. People who are not deterred by shots and curses and threats and eventually trudge along behind the ramshackle ox wagon. Tracks of lion and kudu and dry river beds. Deserted yards with carcases in the dust and skeletons swinging from trees in nooses, the clothes and meat long since redistributed. Burnt-down wattle-and-daub huts, occupied wattle-and-daub houses and huts and shelters that we pass by without entering, especially those where the invitations are too cordial and the eyes have too faraway a gaze and the words wash up against us in feverish stutterings. The solitude of the veldt becomes quite tolerable when you consider the potential danger in any encounter. This land is an open prospect where people burrow into crevices and hollows when they see somebody approaching.