Red Dog

by Willem Anker

  Any case. Go and wander around on Buyskop. Do you see what remains of the focking English’s blockhouse? Follow the dirt road cutting between the stone walls. Among the last traces of primordial stone kraals you’ll see the chipped-away rock face. The unfinished blocks of sandstone scattered around. A century after our siege the Christians come to cut the red stones for their Union Buildings. Cart it off in wagons to Pretoria. If you should ever find yourselves at the Union Buildings, sniff at the stones. You may just catch a vague whiff of Buys piss in the walls.

  Fed-up and hungry we struggle down the kopje, minus one horse. We swill ourselves silly from the fountain at the foot of the hill. Nobody pursues a sorcerer. We travel on without disturbance through the night following rumours of more hot-water springs a day’s journey or so along. Just before dawn somebody shoots something; we devour it half raw before setting off again.

  The following afternoon we see steam rising up from the hills in front of us. Buchanan kneels on the rocks next to the simmering water. He beckons us nearer. A streak of sulphur surrounds the eyes of the boiling springs. Strange bright yellow flowers growing on stone and smelling of rotten eggs. We scrape off the glittering brimstone with our knives and chop it fine and throw it into the saddlebags and get away from there. We take a wide detour back to Thabeng.

  Sefunelo is planning a plundering expedition. He says I and my guns must come along. He says he doesn’t look after my wives for free. I say he must wait a few days, we’re making the fire for our guns.

  Buchanan gathers the Buys nation and says Tonight we’re going to look for a cave where bats live. It’s Doors and Michiel who find the cave, an hour’s walk from the camp. They see a spurt of bats streaming out of an overhanging rock face. Run back to the camp and light the torches to summon everybody back. Buchanan, I and the two children walk to the cave. Buchuman looks around and nods. He stamps his foot hard on the sand floor, places a white stone next to the footprint. If the print is still here tomorrow, he mutters, we have to keep looking. At dusk the following day he walks to the cave and comes back and says the print next to the stone is almost gone. He says that when the tracks disappear so quickly, the soil is rich in saltpetre. The following morning we are standing in the cave and scooping up the floor of the cave and throwing the sand in bags lashed to the pack ox. Above our heads hundreds, thousands of bats are hanging asleep. Now and again one craps on us, but for the rest they take no notice of the shit stealers.

  Back at the camp Buchanan instructs a few of my Hottentots to go find the nearest willow and to cut it down. They have to burn it and make charcoal. As finely ground as the charcoal that wily women smear around their eyes, he says. He calls me and Lusk and says:

  An now, boys, I’ll show you the fuckin alchemy of nitre.

  We build a lye pit, which Buchanan calls a hopper: a solid funnel with a trough at the lower end. The two Scotsmen drill holes in the planks and carve wooden pegs, nail the frame together with a wooden hammer. I find a thick log and with a small hatchet chop a deep furrow along the length of the trunk. The V-shaped frame of the funnel is balanced on top of the trough. We pack twigs along the bottom of the funnel vat, and scatter straw on the twigs and along the side planks to seal the pit.

  The soil from the bat cave is poured into the lye pit until it’s almost full. We empty buckets of water over the soil to leach it of its saltpetre salts, or, as Buchanan refers to it affectionately, the mother liquor.

  The mother liquor drips down the sides of the hopper and into the trough. I call a few children and they skim the decoction from the trough into the pots and calabashes and Buchanan says Pour again. They keep on leaching the same liquid through the bat soil, to dissolve all the saltpetre in the shit.

  Captain sayd ye have to keep leaching till the solution’s thick enough for a fuckin egg to float on.

  To one side we stoke a fire of camel thorn. Buchanan says you use only hardwood for the ash you need here. Once the logs are burnt out, I leach the ash in a vat. We add the ash decoction to the mother liquor until there are no more deposits of white curds. Lusk puts the solution into kettles and makes a fire under them. Buchanan keeps an eye and adds a dash of oxblood to the boiling mixture. Fragments of whatever float to the top. The surface of the kettles starts foaming like beer. While it simmers, Lusk keeps skimming off the foam and flotsam.

  By evening Buchanan says it’s boiled long enough. I feel intoxicated. The Scotsmen are grinning too much. I suspect the crazy clouds from the kettles. I ask Buchanan why they call it mother liquor. He laughs and grabs my sore shoulder and says Well it shure as shit ain’t the milk from your ol’ ma’s teets and I say What knows you.

  We empty the kettles through cloths. The foam and the bits of solid matter remain behind on the cloth. As it cools, fine, bitter, needle-shaped crystals form on the cloth.

  Fuckin nitre, says Buchanan.

  We skim off the crystals and lay them out on cloths to bake dry in tomorrow’s sun.

  The next morning a crowd gathers to witness the critical mixing. The ground willow charcoal is spread out on a torn-open bag and next to it the mound of ground saltpetre crystals. We spread open a blanket. I help Buchanan add the charcoal to the saltpetre and to mix it. Then we add the sulphur. We squat and blend the stuff with our fingers, guarding against too much friction, so as not to be blown sky-high. Buchanan gets up and dusts his hands and knees over the blanket and takes off his shirt and breeches. I stand up and retreat from the mad Scotsman and look at the crowd, my nation and Sefunelo and his nation.

  My captain said ye piss on it, it airs it out, he sayd. Make it stick together like cookie dough, he sayd. Didn’t fuckin question the captain, the man spoke true in all else. An so, Buys, yer piss be the secret ingredient.

  I open my breeches and stand with my pizzle in my hand. I think of printing presses.

  Break the seal, Buys!

  Buchuman crawls on all fours in front of me into the pile of precious, stinking gunpowder meal.

  Lusk, bring forth yer staff an piss, my friend!

  Lusk is at hand immediately, and his prick has no problem. The torrent next to me calls forth my own water as well. At our feet Buchanan is kneading like a demented baker with the piss splashing on him and the meal turning into dough. He hollers for more. Presently there are other streams next to ours until the baker shouts For fuck sakes rein in yer cocks. The filthy black meal stinks like a hell of unmentionables and overripe eggs.

  The crowd is as silent as a single congregation. Buchanan arises from the dough. He glistens and he stretches himself and every muscle tenses, with the sun a halo behind him. Then he kneels next to his brew and watches it drying and every now and again pokes around in it with his knife. Nobody leaves. When the dough has been baked dry and become gunpowder, the Scotsman gets up and takes a pinch of it between his fingers. He walks over to a little fire where a few Caffres are sitting cooking something and he tosses it into the coals and new flames explode. He throws his head back and screams something wordless or Scottish and the congregation gasps for breath; then all rejoice. Buchanan walks into the crowd and somebody hands him a kaross to cover his shame. In passing he touches my shoulder.

  Thanks be to ye, Buys, I fuckin needed this day.

  He disappears into the background, never again to emerge from it.

  Bring your horns, men! I shout.

  My men file up and hold out their empty horns and receive from us the life-giving powder, like crazed communicants.

  5

  All year long Sefunelo has been sitting on his posterior blunting his assegai with looking at it, but as soon as my gun can shoot again, I have to shoot where he aims. We go to plunder the Bakwena on the Harts River, but don’t come away with very many cattle. The locusts have already stripped their lands bare. Believe me, the Bakwena round up the ravenous pestilences, pound them fine and then make flour of them. The Bakwena are tall, with hawk-shaped faces. They see us coming from far away. The warriors are hard and hungry and fig
ht like men who have nothing to lose. The people’s stone walls collapse. Sefunelo loses his best warriors.

  The defeat is of course my fault. When I get home and bash open my head against the door and yank the thing out of the doorframes and decide to move on, I must accept as my portion that I will forfeit my cattle. So that’s said and done: once again I possess nothing on this earth. There isn’t much that I want to take with me. Accordingly I leave my host, apart from my flocks of almost one-and-a-half thousand, a wagon to temper his temperament. See, another house ablaze. I leave Thabeng behind me. This place that I am leaving, that I totally renounce, perdures absolutely in my absence, absolutely itself.

  We trek past people who are spreading themselves wide over the open veldt. They drive game to a vast plain full of pitfalls. Buck and zebras and wildebeest tumble in and disappear and break their bones at the bottom of the pits, where they lie bellowing and waiting for the death blow. We ride past people who build their huts in underground caves to escape the eternal warfare on the surface. We gape at people who live in huts on stilts, since the surface has been usurped by lions and desolation. We trek past the horizon. In March 1820 my family and I are once again settled in the kloofs next to Karechuenya. I introduce the baby born in the meantime and her mother, the young Hurutshe woman from last spring, to the rest of the family. We trek past all sense of family and connections. I am told that Campbell is on his way to subjugate the Hurutshe and their majestic city to the power of quill and ink. I greet the people who have been good to me. I load the Hurutshe woman and the baby into the wagon with us and in April make shallow tracks from there and am gone.

  Sweet thorn, rooibos, the tallest giraffes these eyes have ever beheld, the spots darker than those in the south; blue wildebeest, red rocks. A black bird-creature that spreads its wings around itself like an umbrella, the deep and bright blue under the wings flashing forth a lure to the fish. Monkeys, red buck, tambotie everywhere. See, a young giraffe with the umbilical cord still dangling like a second, unnatural pizzle. Warthogs. The vulture toying with its food. The sighing and groaning and huffing of hippopotami. Zebras, the fish eagle’s plaintive call. Black and brown stones. Whirligig beetles. Long after dark still the copper glow between the undulating kopjes. Even the sun is sometimes scared of following its fate to the bitter end.

  Makaba, the dreaded warrior chief of the Ngwaketse, invites me and my nation to come and stay with him. He shuttles constantly between Kanye, when peace reigns, and the hills a few miles to the north, when things get heated. The hills are barricaded, like his eyes under his beetling brow, and from there he wages war against the surrounding world. He gathers splinter groups of other tribes like the spoils of war, the Buys nation merely the latest addition to this assembly. He offers his friendship to the Briquas and the Hurutshe, and when they distrust his smile, he attacks them anew and with renewed vigour. He loots women and prisoners of war and these, too, are inducted into the community. When Makaba doesn’t seize what he wants, he barters with his neighbours. Tobacco, hides, feathers, ornaments and tools of copper, iron and tin. And ivory, always ivory.

  Like everybody else in this desert, the Ngwaketse barter women for cattle and cattle for labour and loyalty. The more cattle and women you have, the richer you are. Once I, too, was rich like he. With Makaba I eat and drink myself to ruination. My gut grows and my muscles shrink. I don’t walk around if I don’t have to. In these days I have a seizure. The cramps take over, one of these days very soon I’m going to crumple and shrivel up like a dried-up chameleon. I lie down for a few days and when I get up, my left leg is stiff. For a few days my left hand refuses to obey me. Elizabeth swears she won’t tell anyone how I struggle in bed.

  Buchuman’s home-made gunpowder in my horn gives me fresh marrow in my bones. As long as I’m seated in my saddle, nobody can see how stiff my leg is. My sons and I and my army melt bullets and we are at Makaba’s side when he goes to plunder the Bakwena and Malete all along the brown waters of the Madikwe.

  The first shot cracks. See, that one feels with both hands where his lower jaw used to be till a moment ago. We’re massacring them; from all sides we descend on them. A first flight of arrows and spears. People fall and lie pinioned to the ground like impaled insects. Then the horsemen charge. See, here right in front of me: blood pours from the nose and ears of the naked Caffre; he rocks on his feet, brandishes his knobkerrie at the sky and at the flies. Then I am on top of him and over him with four horseshoes. Throats gape; blood vomits from these new laughing mouths. To one side a wounded Caffre is rammed by two warriors and then beaten to a pulp with knobkerries. Lusk and Buchanan anoint a cow with lamp oil and set light to it and drive it shrieking through the straw huts. The cow drops down and lows and her eyes roll and somebody kills her with a cleaver. Son-in-law Jan stands on the edge of the kraal with a few guns. A Hottentot next to him reloads while he takes the weapons from the loader one by one and takes aim and shoots a distant person. Two assegais meet and sheer past each other in Buchanan’s belly and he pirouettes and dances for a moment, comically and unconvincingly, before he drops and dies. Shots, smoke; people perish as well as a child or two who get in the way. My horse stumbles and dies under me. I’m on my third gun already and have to reload. I stoop into a hut and sit crouched up in the dusk and ram in the bullet while the woman and her children cower wailing in the corner. I take aim through the door opening and flatten a Caffre and load the other two guns and once again walk out to face the blood-stained daylight.

  After everybody who wanted to take issue is dead and the vultures have alighted around us, we round up the women and children and cattle and trek back home. Jan rides next to me, his eyes misted over, his mouth open and empty. He retches. Vomit on the flanks of his horse. He wipes his mouth. Rides on.

  I’m going to the Colony, Father, he says after a few miles. I’ve spoken to Bettie.

  That is in order.

  I do not want to take your daughter from you.

  You look after Bettie well.

  I am glad Father understands.

  That is not what I said. You are the one who seems to understand something of all this. That is why you have to get away from here.

  The tracker and interpreter is called Vyfdraai. His tongue knows the clicks of many languages. Makana’s people say that their grandfathers said that Vyfdraai was sitting in wait for them way back when they arrived at their dwelling place. Even then he was as old as the stones. He has for ever gone without a name. For ever they have called him just Vyfdraai – a kudu bull too headstrong to die. They say his flesh is biltong already and he hasn’t bled in years. Vyfdraai shows us where the elephants roam. See, the gigantic bull, the trunk that yaws skyward and the dust that he sprays over himself. Jan is the first one off his horse.

  He is mine, Father.

  Go get him, I say.

  He loads his gun, another one, and walks towards the bull. The bull’s ears flap, it lowers its ears and raises its trunk. The trumpeting and then the charge. Jan waits until the elephant is right in front of him, fires at the centre of the forehead, hits; the bull retreats. He seizes the other gun, fires again. The elephant crashes to the ground, the front legs crumple first, the head hits the ground. The animal grazes the ground dying and breaks branches and uproots a tree and comes to rest by Jan’s feet. A few men clap hands and applaud him. Jan ignores us, drops his gun and walks to his horse, takes out a hatchet and walks back to the carcase. He hacks at the left tusk without a word. We watch him, we let him be. He chops off the tusk. Now he starts hacking away at the hind foot. He starts weeping and when he gapes open his mouth threads of snot and drool web his lips. Vyfdraai takes the hatchet from his hand and starts hacking further at the foot. We escape the perturbation and lend a hand with chopping up the elephant. Like proud new fathers or hairy and terrible midwives with bloody forearms and with the fat still on our fingers we load the tusks and feet onto the wagon and leave the rest of the elephant to the creatures of the veldt.
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br />   I wash the slaughter off me and walk to Bettie’s tent. I perch my daughter on the horse in front of me as of old and we ride into the wilderness. We sit down by a broad and quiet stretch of river. See how the fish eagle cleaves the water and with a fish in its talons soars up again. It’s only on sitting down that I realise how tired I am. There isn’t much to say. I ruffle her hair, that beloved red bush that charmed the entire interior. I kiss her on her forehead and tell her I’ll miss her. That if one day I return to the Colony I’ll teach my grandsons to hunt. She says that’s Jan’s job. I say I’ll teach my granddaughters the names of the wild flowers. She says that what I taught her, she’ll teach her daughters in turn. I ask her what then remains for me to come and do. She says I must come and take off my shoes on her stoep and soak my feet in warm water and gaze across the yard and tell her all the tall tales of my exploits. I ask what shoes. She says I must come and lie and brag as old men do and fart in company.

  What is that tree? I ask her.

  Tambotie. Everybody knows that, my little father.

  And that one?

  Knobthorn.

  I have no more to teach you, my child.

  One day you must teach me how to say good bye.

  The trick is not to make any promises.

  She hugs me and cries a bit and then I lead the horse with her on its back to the camp. I make sure that my daughter has a proper seat on a horse before I let her go. She sits in the middle of the saddle. Stirrups on the ball of her foot, heels down, knees in. Reins light in the hands, as if she’s holding two chicks.