Red Dog

by Willem Anker

  There’s colic here, brethren, he calls out from inside the carcase. Did the horse cough?

  They cough, yes, master, says Ngei, Faber’s Hottentot.

  Ah, of course. The midriff is irritated by the inflamed colon.

  The thing has copped it, Kemp, let it be now. I don’t want to have to snuggle up to you in the mountains tonight.

  Dear Buys, tonight you’ll snuggle up to your wife … to any or all of your wives. I know what’s wrong here. We have to bleed the horses as soon as they fall ill. Bleed them well.

  That evening we devise a new plan. The Tambookies will have to wait until we’ve got fresh horses. Ngqika has horses. We must shoot an elephant. I volunteer for this. One of us will take the tusks to Ngqika as a gift to show we are still his chums and we don’t at all think that he’s crazy and dangerous and we have true as God all this time merely been trekking after elephants. A few of us will then follow the man with the tusks into Caffraria and filch the Caffres’ horses while Ngqika and his captains are receiving the guest. Nobody faults the plan. There is no other plan.

  The next morning most of the company walk up the mountain to witness the great bloodletting. We are halfway up the mountain when we hear branches snapping as some creature comes charging down at us. I’ve got my gun at the ready; as the shrubs open up before me, it’s Ngei who blunders into me and collapses. I make him stand. The man’s body is covered in arrow wounds. The Hottentot convulses and vomits on the ground in front of him till he can’t breathe any more. He stands for a few moments with his hands on his knees and gasps and then he vomits again. He comes upright and clings to me. He starts babbling in his own language and in Dutch and nobody understands a word he’s saying. He sees Kemp and totters towards him and falls on his neck and says something again and drops down dead at his feet.

  The scumbags can’t be far! I shout.

  I run up the mountain to the horses.

  I come upon the body of another Hottentot, also grazed with the arrow wounds that spread death through a human body within a quarter of an hour. I shout at the men further down the mountain to load their rifles, calamity is upon us. At the place where the horses were kept, I count fourteen carcases riddled with arrows. A few of the large bodies are still sighing and groaning and don’t know they’re dead already. I chase away the over-hasty vultures. After a long search we find three horses and two stallion foals indulging in the juicy grass stalks that will shimmer with dew for a while longer in the shade of the mountainside.

  With our horses gone and dead we decide that in future we’ll keep close to the northern border of the Colony. Unless you’re an animal or a Bushman you need decent transport and bags of munitions to brave the untamed other side of the border. On 30 March we strike camp and trek west by north. That night I sit up with Glider, my beautiful, dear, beloved and faithful bay who has held up through it all, but is now also ailing. Before daybreak I shoot him. Yes, I cried.

  It’s a cold April in this arid land when we arrive at Haazenfontein. The veldt shrinks back under the frost, but there is enough water for a desert people and it is high here. Some people say all the rivers of the country have their source here.

  The wretched Kemp is shivering with cold and fever, but on Sunday morning he’s ready with three sermons, one for the Dutch, one for the focking English and then catechism for the Hottentots. The man’s flame is not quenched, but it seems to me as if he’s still not recovered his health after the major stomach ructions of a while ago.

  I trek into the Colony on the ox-cart to find out from the Tjaart person – Field Commander van der Walt, I have since been informed – what my chances are for a pardon. Since I can no longer rely on the goodwill of the Caffre king, I’m starting to test the waters of the English temperament at the Cape so long. Kemp writes a pack of letters for me to take along. There is one to Van der Walt asking him to send his wagon to transport Kemp to the Field Commander’s farm in Tarka, from where he’ll arrange transport to Graaffe Rijnet. Then also a moving plea pertaining to my outlaw status.

  In the course of the night before my departure a few hyenas tear our last horse to pieces and thirty jackals come to devour what the hyenas and a lone lion left behind. By morning even the bones have vanished. All that we find is a piece of skull with one eye regarding us milkily.

  I rejoin the nomadic tribe in time to watch in wonderment a host of locusts swarming past northwards. A thundering immeasurable cloud, a mile wide and how many long. The leading hoppers descend and settle and devour everything that grows, to fall in again at the back when the cloud has streamed past darkly and deafeningly. The larvae have hatched in the frontier districts and mounted the wind and will rage forth until they’ve exhausted themselves or been blown into the sea. As they move they leave eggs behind and new storms arise. Never resting, they carry on hopping until the very dust is alive. I hear stories of how such swarms cross rivers, the floating drowned form a bridge for the rearguard. They smother the fires the farmers make to staunch them by hopping into the fires in their thousands. Those that don’t get burnt move on.

  The little lost band draws up and even the oxen turn their yoke-burdened shoulders to gaze at the locusts, how the things that were still larvae only the other day now denude the course of their migration of all that human or animal could eat. This track will remain visible for weeks, as if a monstrous harrow has moved across the land.

  We trek on through plains full of wildebeest, bontebok, springbok, jackal, leopard, wild dogs and my red dogs with their new wild blood, even more savage. At the foot of the Bamboesberg we swerve south and then west to cross the Colony border once again through a defile in the mountains. On 27 April we stop at a place called Schapenkraal.

  My days with Kemp draw to a close. Van der Walt had given me a letter for Kemp in which he says that the missionaries Read and Van der Lingen are already waiting for him in Graaffe Rijnet with a wagon at the ready. Van der Walt also offers his own wagon to fetch Kemp from us. Kemp writes back and thanks the zealous Van der Walt for his wagon. He also asks that, if possible, Van der Walt should bring along mission money to pay Kemp’s travel companions for their trouble in bringing him this far. I still don’t divulge to Kemp that the so-called Christians that he now wants to pay were the selfsame thieves who at Ngqika’s place systematically robbed him blind.

  Esteemed voyeur, do not begrudge me a break in my narrative. I have no desire to tell you what Kemp and I spoke about that night when we could have a last dispute in peace. See, my old friend is also somewhat cryptic on the subject in his diary of 30 April:

  By the mercy of the Lord I got an opportunity to converse freely with Buys on the concerns of his soul.

  There by the fire we were honest for once, with each other and especially with ourselves. We prattled for a long time about God and soul and that which no man ever dares utter to another or to himself. Our conversation took us to places far beyond the limits of the permissible, places that will never be revisited in daylight. If you want to know more, you can damnwell think it up. Go on, go as far as your imagination can take you. Believe me, that night we went further.

  On the 6th of May 1801 Van der Walt turns up with his wagon and the money Kemp asked for. On the 7th they’re gone. I shall never see Jank’hanna van der Kemp again.

  While I’m helping him load the wagon, I filch a little bag of letters. I’ll melt them down and cast bullets. The words of the press will spread through this land as my friend hoped. They will be lodged in many hearts and brains and I’ll assist a horde of Heathenish souls to escape from their mortal dungeons, so please it the Lord of missionaries. Amen.

  7 − 8 November 1814

  1

  Where once my houses stood, game parks and hunting lodges now lie. Where once I lived, you don’t live. My ferality has seeped into the soil. Where I staked my claim, where I pissed on the corner posts of my yard, there your bricks and your tar don’t grow.

  It is early morning, my house is dark. If you want
to see where you are, open the narrow casement window. Bang open the stuck shutter; the wood warped last winter. The light flows down the wall, over the floor. The window frames the mountains, all of the outside hovers before the window opening; then the landscape washes in, imprisoned in the room. The darkness inside frames the light on the dung-covered floor. The floor anchors your feet. This is the first mark we make on earth, the place where you scrabble open a seat for yourself by the fire. Once the soil around the floor has been trodden flat, the dance can begin. And see, the wall is a floor rising up. The wall frames the window. Walls divide up the floor, walls create rooms; as soon as there are rooms, time slows down. The wall separates us from the world and it creates a new world, a framed world. Indeed, the wall separates, thank God. We can coexist as long as the walls remain standing. The floor and walls and windows choose one another and separate one another and share one outside and together they bring about a last partition: a roof. In this country roofs are seldom flat; where else would the coffins go? The roof is dried rushes; it is cool; it burns easily.

  Do you hear the termites in the wood of the frames? The yellow-wood door frames are their mansions with a thousand rooms. They were here first. You are standing in a long house with one room opening into another. You are standing in the kitchen. Are you surprised that this is your entrance – the hearth? Open the back door. With the opening and closing of windows and doors you rule the routes of the wind. Against the outer wall is piled a heap of rhinoceros bush and hopbush for firewood. Can you still smell the bread in the built-out baking oven?

  The kitchen is my wife’s nest. See, the lanterns are calabashes into which she cut holes for candles. See, the last two porcelain plates are hanging against the wall, the relics of what my neighbours call civilisation. And you don’t besmirch civilisation with animal fat and sweet potatoes. The tin plates in the little wooden cupboard that I hammered together. The bowls of wood, the basins of earthenware. The cups and saucers mostly broken by children, by jolting wagons and by temper tantrums. Run a finger over any object here and you won’t find any dust. The copper gleams and even the wood strives to shine. She polishes every ladle and spoon until the things start sharing their own intimate light with her, as if they lose all happenstance and become more real. Every fork is inexorably here and hers. The house is brought forth from her callused hands. She takes care. She rebuilds the house from the inside. And I can hardly hammer together a rickety table. Her long fingers burnish the house to life every day anew. It is her house, it is egg and nest, it is country and universe. Every few years I tell a Hottentot to limewash the outer walls.

  Peek into the pantry, but keep your paws off my biltong. Look up, the purlins are festooned with bowls and tobacco. Do you see the massive ridge pole of mountain cypress? It’s the only wood in the house that has not yet invited in the termites.

  Step out of the kitchen into the back room. In the evenings we eat here. Step warily in the dusk, one or two of my offspring are always playing or sleeping here. My wife sets only forks on the table. In my world everyone carries his own knife. My blade has worn thin with whetting. Open the shutter, otherwise you’ll bump into the little table and six chairs that were in the house before us. Two of the chairs are held together by God’s grace and tolerated only for the sake of their beauty. They have been eaten hollow. A solid fart would reduce them to the dust whence they came. The furniture mirrors the house back to itself. The table is a floor on the floor. It is furniture that your body brushes against most often and not the floor and walls. Furniture has a more intimate knowledge of your body. Furniture brings the outside inside, because until recently it was still trees and driftwood. Furniture is the outside that has been sawn and planed and varnished. You will fit, but I have to stoop under the reed ceiling. Just as well my table does not stand here.

  Down the narrow passage, hardly room for a decent pair of shoulders, but the celling vanishes here and a man like me can keep his head upright between the roof trusses. To the right the two bedrooms. Keep going. Inside are hide rugs and cots strung with thongs and hide. For the rest you have no business here.

  You are standing in the front room, the front door next to you. Do you see how my wife has decorated the threshold with peach pips? The rifle above the door. The broom in the corner. The mattresses against the wall, stuffed with shrubs and klipspringer hair.

  Open the front door. I couldn’t have made these wooden hinges. Allow me to flick the termite off your arm.

  See, the great white stinkwood with the branches and twigs that ramify and ramify out of sight. When in the bare winters I sit under the tree and gaze heavenward, the delicate branch-deltas make the sky seem like a sheet of crazed glass.

  Look around you. Before you lies the bare yard. The turf walls that used to surround the homestead six feet from the house, the stone turrets with the loopholes on the four corners, those I all flattened when I moved in here. In these kloofs there’s no point in barricading yourself against the Caffres and the Bushmen. If they come, they come. Nobody’s going to hear you screaming here. All that the barricades do is trap the creatures invading your home and make them more bloodthirsty. No, your house must have a clear prospect. If you go out by the front door and you’re still not outside, there’s something amiss. Build your house in the open, so that you can see what’s happening around you. If Omni-I am nostalgic for these kloofs, I like reading about how other people lived here: As you build your temple, says one Couga sage, so your gods will be.

  Walk around the house. Careful, you’ve almost stepped on the lizard. My wife keeps the animals outside, but the chickens and ducks and pet lamb roam not far from the back door. You wouldn’t say so to stand here looking at the place, but the house grew out of the soil. The sandstone from the hills and the clay from the earth. Go and have a look at the stone kraal. Whoever built it knew that stone has a grain like wood; he knew the stone’s propensity. A stone reveals itself under the hammer. The Couga is the breeding ground of stones, say the Hottentots. But the house no longer has any dealings with nature. It’s the whitewashed – yes, washed whiter than driven snow – homestead of the legendary Coenraad de Buys, citizen of the Colony, married, father, grandfather, rent-payer. You can laugh, go on. Like a hermit crab did I move into another man’s house, did I withdraw from the world. Every house is a shell. A rectangular house on a surveyed and measured farm. Without marker stones there will no longer be a Colony and to the devil with the Colony. But without boundary markers also no farm, no house, no room, no bed with a pillow resting against a solid, whitewashed wall. Limestone is dead animals. Crushed, desiccated animals; desecrated shells. Shells that have been pulverised, ground, puddled by the subterranean violence; by the fearsome heat of the earth’s innards. Dead, compacted animals, I, Omni-Buys, read the other evening in a book of French verse. Truly, sometimes when I think back to this place, my throat constricts, words fail me and I am reduced to echoing the words of others.

  You’ve been through my house, the inside and the outside I have shown you, but you have not found me there. The house over there belongs to Maria and her children and that other one is Nombini’s shack. The one further along is where my flame-haired daughter Bettie lives with her white husband and my whitewashed grandchild. I managed to defend her honour against Ngqika’s attentions until we left Caffraria behind and she could marry Jan the Christian. Jan the most boring man on this earth. Jan who will cherish her. Jan who, unlike me and Ngqika, is content with one wife; Jan, for whom she is all women. In any case. Go and see for yourself by all means, those little houses are smaller and perhaps not so tidy; if you’ve seen one house, you’ve seen most of them. In those houses, too, I am not to be found. The huts you see against the western hills are where the workers live; it’s far from the homesteads, but over there they catch the morning sun in the cold winters.

  This yard will be coming to life soon and then you’ll have to stand aside. Come and stand here by my shoulder, here where I’m sitting at my
table under the white stinkwood on this already sweltering day. Come and stand at the table that I made, almost eleven years ago when I moved in here. The table with the crooked joints and the uneven top of mountain cypress. I went and chopped down the cypress tree myself. Almost sixty feet high that giant towered. Sawing it up and hauling it back was a business. One of the legs is a stinkwood beam, another of yellowwood and the other two are ironwood beams. This table that I built for my family, big enough for all the children and their mothers and their appendages. The table that, come hell or high water, refused to go in by the door. The table that has been standing under the tree for almost eleven years and is rotting gradually from beneath and is being devoured from the inside by the termites that do not tolerate any kind of structure in these kloofs. Under this table there is no floor, just the soil, the sand and stone ground down by my own feet. Here next to the tree I picked up a fossil, a shell, slumbering in its own shape. Come stand here by my side and watch the proceedings.

  See, my wagon is standing ready for its team. Twenty or so rifles, munitions, six elephant tusks, hides, a tin full of beads, anything to barter with there where money loses its value; the necessary coffee, sugar, corned meat, sweet potatoes. Brandy. My little trunk of clothes. I’m ready to shake the Couga dust off my feet.

  Pack your bags and be gone, Buys! Long Piet Ferreira sneered at me the other day at the cattle sale.

  My other neighbours shuffled their feet and looked the other way and offered no demur. Sometimes your enemies have a point. The last thing I was to do as citizen of the goddam Colony, the act that would sentence me to the desert, was when at the beginning of last year I went and spoke the truth about my neighbours.