Twenty Chickens for a Saddle

by Robyn Scott

  “Robbie and I can do it.”

  “Someone who knows how to ride,” Mum persisted.

  “I’ve ridden before. And it’ll be the best way for Robbie to learn.”

  “1 want to, Mum,” I yelled from the backseat. “1 want to. I’ll learn quickly.”

  “Hmm,” said Mum, and then fell silent.

  ♦

  Dad estimated that it would take around four hours to walk the horses to Selebi. Six hours later, when the mopane trees were turning gold in the quickly disappearing sun, there was still no sign of them. I fished a few more struggling moths out of the water tub, fluffed up the hay nets again, and then climbed back on the concrete loading ramp beside the kraal to wait. Everyone else, even Keller, had got bored and gone back inside. But I was too worried and excited to leave. I read the Pony Club manual until it grew too dark to see the words, and then swung up and down along the rusty metal poles of the loading crush to stop the mosquitoes settling.

  In the silver-grey moonlight, seven hours after the ponies had set off, they came trailing down the driveway.

  I ran to meet them, greeting Matthews breathlessly. “What happened? Why were you so long?”

  “Ah! These are so naughty,” Matthews said in a disgusted voice. The mare jumped sideways as I approached, and he gave a savage tug on her halter.

  “You must be gentle, Matthews!”

  Matthews scowled and stuck his arm forwards. It was streaked with deep blood-covered scratches. I saw then that his legs too were covered in scratches, and one knee had a crust of congealed blood and dust.

  “Oh,” I said, feeling stupid. I kept quiet as I trailed after him and closed the gate. When the ponies were safely shut in the kraal and munching hay, and the boy who worked for Kobus had disappeared to a nearby cattle post, Matthews came to the house. Dad cleaned and dressed his cuts, while Matthews explained that the ponies had twice tried to run home and dragged him through the bush. Mum made Matthews tea and kept saying, “Oh, goodness, I’m so sorry.” She insisted he took the next day off, and when he left she gave him a bag of mealie meal and a handful of chocolates from the not-to-be-touched special-occasions cupboard, which alone seemed worth a few bad scratches.

  Afterwards, Dad said it was a one-off – “we only have to get them here once, Lin” – and Mum should for goodness sake stop feeling so guilty.

  The next morning I woke up at five, grabbed a handful of carrots, and ran out into the hazy blue dawn. The air was still cool from the receding night but already ringing with excited dove coos, weaver cheeps, and francolin shrieks. It was the time of day when the bush paraded its full quota of life in the sweet-sharp air; when the sun, appearing as a soft red tear between the tops of bushes and the sky, looked friendly and gentle. By ten o’clock, most sensible life would be in retreat: the occasional bird cry competing only with cicadas; leaves and tiny bush flowers folding up in the heat. This was the hour when you felt best in Botswana. And this, I thought as I ran across the still chilly sand, was one of the best of those.

  The kraal was completely empty. The only sign that horses had been there at all were a lew dewdrop-glistening piles of dung and the sagging empty hay nets. I yelled hopelessly as I ran towards the back fence, where one rickety post had been pushed over and the wires lay flat on the sand. There was no sign of the horses in the bush beyond the fence.

  “For God’s sake,” muttered Dad as I shook him awake and babbled hysterically that the horses were lost and possibly dead somewhere in the bush.

  “Come help me look for them.”

  “No way.”

  I began to cry. “I’ll go by myself then.”

  “You’ll be wasting your time. They’re probably already home.”

  “What?”

  “At Kobus’s. I’m sure he’ll call us later.”

  “Call him now,” I wailed.

  “It’s too early. Go back to sleep.”

  “I can’t.”

  “Then go and make us some tea, Robbie,” mumbled Mum.

  I ran to Lulu’s room, told her what had happened, and ordered her to come and help me make tea.

  Sitting on the kitchen counter, I listed the calamities that might have befallen the horses. Lulu, eyes wide and brimming with tears, lit the gas beneath the kettle, put rooiboj tea bags in the teapot, and poured long-life UHT milk into a little jug.

  “I’ll call him at seven,” said Dad, hauling himself into a sitting position. “No more nagging.”

  Mum and Dad sipped the steaming tea while Lulu and I, teary and miserable with worry, stared out of the ‘window. Redhead, the redheaded weaver, was working on his new nest. Every summer Redhead started a nest on the same tree outside Mum and Dad’s bedroom window. When the nest was nearly finished, a dowdy female weaver would start making regular inspections, flying in and out and tugging at loose bits of grass while Redhead cheeped and puffed out his red and white breast on a nearby branch. Every year, the female would reject the nest, and Redhead, his enthusiasm undiminished, would begin another.

  He built two wonky, loosely woven nests every season, and never succeeded in getting a female to lay her eggs, which Mum said broke her heart and Dad said served him right for poor workmanship and maybe it was a good thing he wasn’t passing on his genes.

  Usually I felt sorry for Redhead, but today his incessant happy cheeping was just irritating.

  “What if one of them has fallen in a hole and broken its leg and has to be put down?”

  Lulu gasped, and her eyes refilled with tears.

  “Stop worrying,” said Dad. “Go have some breakfast.”

  “I’m not hungry.”

  “Neither am I.”

  At six thirty Mum said, “I can’t bear this any more,” and staggered out of bed to call Kobus. A few minutes later he rang back to say all three ponies were there and, as far as he could tell, in one piece. Lulu and I bounced up and down on the bed in relief.

  “No. We cannot go and get them now.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because Matthews needs to recover. And I need to put up an electric fence.”

  I ate my breakfast in sulky silence.

  “Come on, Robbie,” said Mum. “It’s actually a good thing.”

  I stared at her in amazement.

  If the horses wanted to run back to a place where they had been so bereft of human attention, reasoned Mum, it wou Id be even easier to get them to love us. “Imagine what a little TLC will do.”

  I continued to eat wordlessly. Mum didn’t just see silver linings around clouds, she saw whole diamond-studded eighteen-carat-gold gilt-edged frames. Which could be infuriating, when you were still deep in the misery of the cloud.

  ♦

  Dad erected a tall electric fence and, several days later, Matthews and the ponies trudged once more down the driveway. This time they stayed. But despite lavish TLC, the two adult ponies continued to bite and kick us with relish. Cowering at the mere sight of a grooming brush or a hosepipe, they remained covered in a thick coat of dust. Mum declared that their names were almost comically appropriate and that in retrospect we really should have waited till we discovered their true temperaments and real colours before christening them. But Feste and Quartz stuck. Only the filly’s name became a little more reasonable, evolving from Black Beauty to just Beauty when she turned out, on closer inspection, to be dark grey.

  “It’ll just take time,” said Dad. “We’ll be riding them in a few months.”

  “It’s the latent stress of years without TLC,” said Mum, “compounded by the stress of the move.” This, she decided, required medicinal intervention, and she prescribed daily sugar cubes laced with drops of Rescue Remedy. When these produced no obvious improvement, she brought out the entire set of Bach flower remedies and made bespoke concoctions: ‘aggressiveness’ and ‘overprotectiveness’ for Feste; ‘nervousness’ and ‘fear of hurt’ for Quartz.

  “You guys want some too?”

  We all said yes. Homeopathy and Bach flow
er remedies meant either wonderfully sugary little pills, which were the closest we usually got to sweets, or delicious drops of diluted alcohol.

  Mum fished in little white tubs with names like mix vomica and arnica and handed us each a selection of sweet white pills to dissolve on our tongues. Mum and Dad had written a book on homeopathy, so for these she didn’t need to look up what to prescribe. For the Bach flower remedies, though, she studied a reference book with descriptions of what character problem each flower improved. Afterwards she listed the flowers she’d chosen on the label of each bottle, which meant it was easy for us to check the book to see what we were being treated for.

  Lulu’s bottle: Lack of confidence, excessive concern for others, worry.

  Damien’s bottle: Poor concentration, occasional moodiness.

  Robbie’s bottle: Bossiness, intolerance, impatience, irritability, excessive expectations of self and others, inability to cope with failure, highly strung, opinionated, overly judgmental, inability to compromise, desire to control others, inflexibility, stubbornness.

  “Why do I have to have so many?”

  “Because more apply to you, Robbie.”

  “They don’t,” I snapped.

  “Excessive sensitivity,” muttered Mum, picking up the book.

  Dad said, “I’m just sorry there isn’t one for ‘lacking sense of humour’.”

  I scowled at him.

  “Stop scowling, Robbie,” said Mum. “You’ll have lines before you’re twelve.”

  “I’m not scowling.”

  “You are,” said Dad. “You’re always scowling. We’ve established this before.”

  I started to speak, but shut my mouth crossly. The last time I’d tried to argue that I never scowled, Dad had made me wear a thick sticky plaster between my eyebrows tor a day. Every time I knitted my brow, I’d felt the plaster scrunch together.

  The memory still shocked me. I un-scowled my face and attempted a giggle. “Anyway, I do have a sense of humour.”

  Dad raised his eyebrows. “Whateveryou say, Robbie.”

  Dad had a theory that I was the only person in the world to be born entirely without a sense of humour. He said I was lucky I had him and Mum as parents because that would torce me to develop one. “You’ll have a nervous breakdown living with us it you don’t learn to take life less seriously,” he’d once informed me. Not sure exactly what a nervous breakdown was, I’d nevertheless spent several weeks convinced I must already be having one. Until Dad said that was a joke too, sort of. “Ha, ha, got you again, Robbie.”

  ♦

  Unannounced, Kobus appeared one afternoon, driving a listing, battered Toyota bakkie. “Just on my way to Phikwe,” he explained.

  “Thought I’d come check on my horses.”

  “They’re not bin,” I hissed to Mum as we traipsed after Kobus and Dad.

  “Course they’re not. But there’s no point getting upset.” But by the time Kobus had lumbered around the feed shed and the pens, firing a steady stream of criticism and advice, Mum and Dad were both tight-lipped and rolling their eyes at each other.

  The three ponies stood side by side at the far corner of their enclosure, heads hung, staring longingly through the electric fence – in the direction of Kobus’s farm. I bit my lip, wishing desperately they wouldn’t choose now, of all moments, to look so homesick.

  “Jirre, man,” said Kobus, shaking his head. “They don’t look so lekker, hey?”

  They didn’t, which made it even worse. I wanted to yell at Kobus and tell him that it was his fault for neglecting them; that normal horses wouldn’t be behaving like this. Mum was pink-cheeked and narrow-eyed: she took it as a personal affront that our TLC and her remedies had still failed to produce any great effect.

  Kobus leaned forwards to take another gleeful look at the ponies.

  Dad started to speak but stopped. Kobus had already shifted his tremendous bulk against the fence, hanging his arms over the top wire. For a few seconds he didn’t move. Then, suddenly, he gasped and started to vibrate – in slow motion, bouncing backwards and forwards but remaining firmly against the wires. A few more seconds passed, and he toppled back from the fence, stumbling for several paces and then coming to an abrupt halt. He said nothing and glared at us, his face blotchy red, his expression surprised.

  “Goodness,” said Mum. “Terribly sorry about that.”

  For a few moments, Kobus just stared at us in a slightly confused way, saying nothing. Then he took a deep breath and exploded. “Focking fence! Why the bloody hell didn’t you say you had a focking electric fence?”

  Mum and Dad listened, heads tilted, expressions sympathetic. When he had finished, Dad addressed him in a grave voice. “Shocking experience, isn’t it?”

  “I’m going,” muttered Kobus. He started to walk towards his bakkie.

  “Nice of you to pop in,” Mum called after him. “Sorry again.”

  But Kobus didn’t look back. He never returned.

  Dad later declared it was worth putting up the electric fence just to see the expression on Kobus’s face.

  ∨ Twenty Chickens for a Saddle ∧

  Ten

  Grandpa Ivor

  Grandpa Ivor, who never missed one of our attempts to train the horses, was waiting under the knob-thorn tree beside the kraal. He leaned against a fence post, chewing his matchstick, which stopped him missing cigarettes, and whispering to Feste, who watched him with a bored expression.

  Spotting us, she flattened her ears. Red-veined whites replaced soft brown centres as she rolled her eyes to the back of her head. Even the sight of Dad and me walking towards the kraal, saddles on our arms, was enough to induce her disgust. By the time the saddle was on top of her, she was shuddering frantically, kicking at the poles of the narrow cattle crush, and emitting regular furious snorts, flaring her nostrils to expose foam-flecked red insides.

  Breaking in was not going according to plan. Each day, Feste behaved in a similar manner. Except that she got progressively more, not less, demonstrative of her displeasure: the kicks harder, the snorts louder. None of the horse-training books mentioned this problem. Which meant, argued Dad, that Feste was an exception and, therefore, that we could ignore all the other breaking-in rules. Starting with Rule Number One: Do not mount until the horde fully accepts the saddle.

  Grandpa leaned over the fence. “It’s just bravado,” he yelled.

  “Shhh, Ivor,” said Dad.

  Grandpa ignored him. “She’s just trying to scare you, Robbie.”

  She was succeeding. Perched on the top horizontal pole of the crush, I watched the wide, shivering back and saddle below me – flat ears at one end, swishing tail at the other. I started to feel sick.

  On his previous attempt – his third – Dad had managed to stay on Feste without being thrown off. But now, as Feste smacked her hoof against the ground and dust rose around me, I regretted, again, insisting I was ready to ride her. However, it was too late to change my mind without looking like a wimp: Mum, Lulu, and Damien had joined Grandpa behind the fence, where all four looked on expectantly.

  Dad stood in the front of the crush, gripping the rope attached to Feste’s bridle, ready to hold her down or, if she behaved calmly, as he predicted, to lead her out of the crush into the kraal.

  “Come on, Robbie,” said Dad. “It’s not going to get any easier.”

  “Don’t hurry her, Keith,” called Mum. “Robbie, you must take as much time as you need.”

  “Ifyou’re too scared, I’ll do it,” said Dad.

  “I’m not! I’m going!” I climbed two poles down, bringing my feet almost level with Feste’s back. Very slowly, I extended one shaking, jellylike leg over her back and began to lower myself towards the saddle.

  “Shhh, girl. Shhh.” I stroked her mane as my bottom touched the leather. For a moment nothing happened. Then Feste reversed, with a crash, into the poles behind her. She immediately leapt forwards, frightened by the noise, and I slid to the back of the saddle, head a
nd body flung back, legs flying up either side of her neck. I yelled in fright and grabbed a pole beside me, straddling the gap between her and the crush as she paused, quivering.

  “Hold on to the saddle, not the poles,” instructed Dad in a calm voice. “And don’t shout. You’ll frighten her even more.”

  I grabbed the pommel, just in time lor Feste’s second rapid reversal. This time she didn’t stop to wonder what was on her back. For the next lew interminable minutes, she bounced, kicked, shook, and pawed the ground as I hung on, hunched over, certain that I was destined for premature, nine-year-old death. Crushing and trampling seemed equally strong possibilities. Perhaps both.

  “Steady, girl, steady…Ouch…Shit…Hang on, Robbie,” I heard Dad’s voice beside me and was vaguely aware of Grandpa Ivor shouting. But it was only as Feste’s acrobatics eventually subsided, and I realised I was bruised but not about to die, that I properly paid attention to the voices.

  “Well done. See – that wasn’t so bad,” said Dad. Feste, soaked in sweat, had come to a twitching standstill. Dad was covered in fine grey dried-cow-dung dust and had rope burns on his hands. Both of us were coughing on the inhaled grit. I continued to cling, speechlessly, to the pommel.

  “Brilliant, Robbie. Brilliant!” yelled Grandpa, clapping his hands. “But you’ve gotta use your wrists.”

  “Please stop shouting, Ivor,” shouted Dad. “What the hell are you on about anyway?”

  “The secret to riding is in the wrists,” bellowed Grandpa.

  “Since when do you know anything about riding?”

  “I know you’ve gotta use your damn wrists.”

  “Nonsense.”

  “You’re hardly a bloody expert.”

  “At least I’ve actually ridden before.”

  Feste tossed her head and began to paw the ground. I squealed.

  “About ten times,” yelled Grandpa. “Hardly counts.”

  “That’s nonsense, and you know it.”

  Feste kicked viciously at a pole. I bent forwards again and screwed my eyes shut.