Twenty Chickens for a Saddle

by Robyn Scott

  She smiled appreciatively, and Dad, relieved to see the last of it, dropped the spider in the dustbin.

  The woman spoke quickly to Maria.

  “She wants to take it home,” Maria informed him. “To show her family.”

  Too tired to argue, Dad knelt down beside the dustbin and fished out the spider, which was handed to the delighted patient in a plastic packet along with her antibiotics, ointments, and tonic.

  Dad told us stories like this all the time, and bizarre, medically illogical beliefs had long ago ceased to be shocking. So none of us was particularly surprised when Dad said he’d been visited by a middle-aged man who insisted that ‘snake in my belly’ was the real cause of his main symptom, which was pain while peeing.

  Dad prescribed him a course of antibiotics, which, he explained, would quickly sort out the bladder infection.

  The man refused to get off the examination couch.

  “He wants you to take out the snake,” said Maria.

  “Tell him there is no snake in his belly,” snapped Dad. “It’s just an infection. Which will be cured by the antibiotics.”

  Maria spoke to the patient. “He says there is a snake in his belly.” The man, byway of explanation, grimaced and patted his stomach.

  “Oh, for goodness sake,” said Dad. “Well, if he doesn’t believe me, someone else can tell him.” Dad duly wrote a letter to the government hospital requesting an ultrasound, and the patient, placated, left without further protest.

  “It’s the only way to deal with these crazy beliefs,” Dad told us, sighing deeply as he relayed the story. “You’ve got to just play along with all the nonsense.”

  Several weeks later, the man returned with the results of his ultrasound. The scan revealed a ten-centimetre tapered object in the bladder: a severed snake’s tail, according to the hospital surgical record. Only possible entry point: the penis.

  Dad, stunned, asked why and how the man had got the tail in his bladder.

  The man said, “Ga ke itde.”

  “Maria,” persisted Dad, “why on earth would someone stick a snake’s tail into their bladder?”

  “Ga ke itde.”

  “For goodness sake,” said Dad, exasperated, “guess! You must have some idea. Is it something from the witch doctors?”

  “No.”

  “Then why?”

  Maria looked at the floor. “To widen his penis inside,” she said. “So he can pee better. But he forgot to hold on when he stuck it in there.”

  The man had a urethral stricture, often caused by scarring folio-wing poorly treated STDs. The orthodox treatment is also dilation, albeit with sterile, non-disappearing instruments.

  ∨ Twenty Chickens for a Saddle ∧

  Thirteen

  Lessons

  Whatever the unfortunate de-tailed snake had been – and this Dad couldn’t tell us – it wasn’t a puff adder. Even as babies, these fattest of snakes had girths that would have made the most ambitious urethra-stretcher quail.

  The fully grown ‘puffie’ that lay thrashing before us on the workbench was, at its vast middle, the circumference and shape of a squashed grapefruit. Moving towards the tail, the body narrowed slightly, but reached finger width only a few centimetres before quickly tapering off altogether. Because of the dramatic wedge shape, the pattern on its bumpy skin changed quickly too, from alternating dark brown and orangey V shapes to what, at the stubby tip, looked more like rough horizontal stripes.

  I knew exactly what the tail looked like because I was studying it, intently, following the Vs up and down, counting the white flecks, and trying desperately to ignore the horrible sensation of the contorting muscle in my hand.

  “Hold it properly, Robbie,” ordered Dad.

  “I am.”

  “Then keep it still. Don’t be a wimp.”

  I gripped harder. “I’m not a wimp.”

  “That’s my girl. Now let’s turn it over. Hold it steady so I can cut straight.”

  Accusations of wimpishness had been less successful in soliciting help from Damien. Disgusted by the metallic flesh smell that clung to the still air, and impervious to taunts, he had retreated to a nearby thorn tree, which he leaned against, neck craned towards the makeshift biology lab. Lulu stood beside Dad and me, her head reaching only just above eye level with the twitching body, her face striped with dust and tears. Occasionally, she stuck her hand out and stroked the writhing body, and then returned to stroking the two dogs that stood at our feet, panting with heat and excitement at the smells. Lulu, the least squeamish of the three of us, was just miserable – as she was always in the presence of any animal death.

  The fat, flat, severed head – crocodile eyes frozen in death – watched blankly from the back of the workbench. I felt a wave of guilt and quickly looked away.

  With the decapitated neck in his left hand, the scalpel in his right, Dad sliced one shallow line lengthwise – from the throat to the cloaca, snakes’ multifunctional pooing, weeing, and mating opening. And, in the case of female pu If adders, which hatch baby snakes instead of eggs, the hole from which the babies emerge.

  Putting down the scalpel, Dad tugged and yanked the skin away from the body. Beneath the colourful coat appeared slippery white muscle: thousands of thin fibres moving in synchrony, tiny movements mirroring the bigger movements of the undulating body. The muscle, Dad explained, could keep going like this for hours. Whereas, he continued – momentarily pulling a gruesome immobile face and standing rigidly – when humans die they get rigor mortis, turning temporarily completely stiff from total muscle contraction, before becoming floppy again.

  Having removed the skin, Dad cut through the belly towards the organs. The most colourful of these were the orangey liver and the round green purse of the gall bladder. This he pierced with the tip of the blade. “Not much bile in here,” he said, squeezing out a few drops of greenish liquid. “Oh look here. Somebody’s just had dinner.”

  He seized the long, bulging stomach sac. “Any guesses?” he asked. But before we’d had a chance to answer, he thrust in the blade in and sliced quickly along the sac.

  Lulu let out a sob. Nestled in the folds was a whole mouse, bedraggled and bigger but other-wise no different from the baby mice in the cardboard box in the schoolroom.

  “One less of the little brutes,” said Dad. And then, looking at Lulu’s tearful face, he added, “Come on, Lu, that’s Africa for you, everything’s got to eat. And it’s dead now…Don’t waste this opportunity…Now, what sex do you think it is? If I’m not mistaken, these are testes…Damien, come over here and take a look at this. This’ll really make you squirm.”

  Damien edged forwards, watching reluctantly as Dad dug below the cloaca and exposed two small red penises. They were joined at the base. “Hemipenes,” Dad muttered triumphantly as Damien retreated to his tree with a look of disgust.

  After we had finally examined everything of interest – gingerly at first, then boldly prodding and palpating – Dad scraped the last of the insides into a bucket and laid the still-wriggling muscle beside the repugnant head at the back of the workbench.

  “We can bury it all later,” he said, brushing aside Lulu’s pleas. “Once we’ve seen how long the muscle keeps moving.” He held up the beautifully patterned sheet of skin. “Now come on, we can’t waste this. Follow me.”

  Warming to his occasional role as teacher, Dad continued to lecture as we traipsed after him, past the shed and the horses’ pens and along the dusty path leading to Grandpa Ivor’s old caravan. “Now salt has two functions in preservation. First, it absorbs water, so it helps to dry the skin quickly. Second, it kills most of the bacteria and fungi that cause dead tissue to rot. The technical terms for these properties are hygroscopic and antimicrobial…”

  Following Dad into the musty, dimly lit caravan, I could at first only just make out the jumbled piles of wood and pipes. Then he pushed aside a roll of plastic that had fallen across a window, and bright light streamed in, catching thousands
of dust particles as they floated across the beams, and illuminating the cluttered room.

  “We could pin it on that,” he said, pointing to a large, rectangular piece of chipboard in the corner. The wood lay unevenly across the tilting caravan floor, one end resting on a pipe, the other on the old, decaying carpet. “Now, remember, you never know what to expect,” Dad continued, still in his lecturing voice. “This is just the sort of warm, dark place that snakes love.” He squatted down and grabbed the edge of the wood nearest to him. “Always lift things away from you,” he said, looking back at us with a stern expression. “You can never be too careful.”

  We’d all heard this advice many times before. But Dad was on a roll. “You must never pick up anything this way,” he said, still eyeing us as he raised the wood towards himself, “or whatever’s underneath will go straight for you.”

  Something stirred beneath the wood.

  Then a soft hiss, and a crash, as the board clattered to the floor.

  “Shit,” yelled Dad. Leaping back beside us, he paused and wiped his forehead with the back of his hand. “I don’t bloody believe it,” he said, shakily.

  After a few deep breaths, he grabbed a thin metal fence pole and, keeping well back, slipped the end of the pole underneath the wood, easing it upwards.

  Slowly writhing, and hissing irritably at the repeated disturbance, a coiled puff adder again came into view.

  “You see, chaps,” said Dad, his voice steadier, his tone once again lecturing, “exactly my point. This is Africa. You never know what to expect.”

  The snake muscle ‘writhed determinedly for more than four hours. It was almost sunset before Lulu and I buried it, together with the guts, in the hole Dad had dug for us in the animal cemetery under the knob-thorn tree. Kneeling down, Lulu patted the last of the dirt back in place and erected a small cross of twigs. Then she propped up some of the old, fallen crosses, placed a brilliant pink and green bouquet of bougainvillea and mopane leaves across the freshly dug earth, and whispered a soft apology to the puff adder.

  After fewer than three years in Selebi, this oft-used graveyard, which stood in the bush a few metres from the house, had become the resting place of an extraordinary menagerie.

  Beneath the dark green canopy was my first dog, Fawn, one of the earliest arrivals. There too lay my beloved pet squirrel Impy, adopted by me when he dropped through the roof onto Damien’s bed, only to suffocate six months later as he slept in my hair, curled beside my neck one terrible night. Then there were the baby shrews, baby mice, baby birds; a fatally injured hornbill; a half-eaten dead hare, dropped by a careless hawk. And finally, for no creature was too small for Lulu’s grief and attention, lizards, dung beetles, bright butterflies picked off windscreens, and long black jhongolola millipedes, hundreds of tiny legs retracted, bodies coiled tightly in death.

  This burial was, however, unique.

  Preceded by several other snakes we’d found squashed on the road, the dismembered body wasn’t the first of its kind. But everything else had died either before we’d found it, or despite our best efforts to keep it alive. The unfortunate puff adder Dad had decapitated with an axe that morning, breaking his no-killing-snakes rule, when the huge creature, hissing angrily from between the horse feed barrels, had been impossible to retrieve safely and intact with the pole-and-looped-wire snake catcher.

  The second snake, cornered in the caravan, proved easier to lasso. Dad stuffed it in an empty horse feed sack, which we put in the bakkie and drove far out into the bush. We lowered the sack to the ground and then pulled it away, tipping out the snake. For a moment, it lay still and surprised, its orange-and-brown skin melting into the sand and leaves. Then quickly – too quickly for such a cumbersome body – the long, fat bump on the sand morphed back into a puff adder, which slithered under a thornbush, there disappearing, altogether, beneath the green fingerlike leaves and sharp grey hooks.

  The skin of the first snake we salted, stretched, and pinned on the piece of wood from the caravan, which Dad then placed on the roof of the shed to dry. The head, the only thing remaining, I put on a plate in the back of the fridge, determined to keep it fresh until Saturday, when several of our snake-phobic friends from Kopano were due to come out from to Selebi to spend the night.

  After a ‘great day for homeschooling’, Mum was extra cheerful. She protested just briefly, allowing the gruesome head to remain in the fridge on condition I put it in a plastic bag. Dad, who would never spoil a good practical joke, applauded the plan and requested only that I didn’t inform Ruth about its whereabouts lest dinner be compromised.

  The more normal form of our occasional and unplanned lessons with Dad was this: last-minute ringside seats to some life-and-death – or, if not death, gory – drama, where we never knew what we’d learn, only that it would be interesting.

  Like the ostrich, which had slit its throat on barbed wire.

  The vet couldn’t be reached, so the farmer phoned Dad.

  “I’d better get going,” said Dad, when he’d explained. “It’s not like Clinton to exaggerate. Must be a bad one.”

  Dad went to fetch his doctor’s bag, Mum the sun protection. Lulu, Damien, and I, assuming our invitation, were already waiting in the backseat. Mum said, “I hope you’ve got your hats.”

  Clinton and Cecile Rice ran a small ostrich farm on the banks of the Macloutse River near Phikwe. We’d seen their ostriches before, but only from afar, and as Dad sped along the bumpy road to the river, Lulu, Damien, and I speculated excitedly about what the massive bird would look like close up, and how much blood there’d be. Dad, for once, couldn’t help – “New territory for me too, chaps.”

  The Rices’ farm, transformed by its river, was a different world from the bush we knew so well. Surrounding the house were wide lawns of thick, lush grass; above it was a canopy of dense knob-thorns, which even on seasonal waters grew to almost double the size of Selebi’s trees. There were unfamiliar trees too: grey, rough-trunked leadwoods, wide-canopied mashatus, river bush willows, and monkey thorns, sometimes with monkeys themselves, small grey vervets, springing through the branches. And hundreds of birds: at any moment these trees held more species than we’d see in weeks. Occasionally, most enviably of all, the stirring call of the great fish eagle rang above the gentler birdsong.

  For the first few minutes of our visits, I’d usually just gaze and listen, awed by the magical effects of water in this dry country.

  But today I thought only of the forthcoming veterinary drama, and, hurrying after Clinton, lawns, trees, and littler birds passed unnoticed.

  “Thanks for coming so quickly,” he said as we strode to the field. “There she is, poor girl.”

  I stopped and studied the huge bird, feeling mildly disappointed. She looked entirely healthy: standing firmly in the corner of the field, rich brown feathers gleaming and enormous eyes alert, greedily – and amazingly, for a bird that had ‘slit her throat’ – chomping at alfalfa.

  “Doesn’t look like she’s at death’s door,” muttered Dad.

  “Hang on,” said Clinton, continuing along the fence. “Come closer.”

  Reaching the bird and for the first time seeing the other side of her long pink neck, we cried out in disgust.

  Unperturbed, she gave us a mild wide-eyed glance before gulping another mouthful of alfalfa. A moment later the alfalfa dropped onto the dirt, pouring out of the gruesome twenty-centimetre vertical slit down her neck. She took another beakful, with the same hopeless outcome.

  Dad prepared a syringe of Valium. Then Clinton and two of his Batswana farm workers sprung on the ostrich, pushing her to the ground and pinning down her huge wings, which could easily break an arm it it got in the way. The restrained bird nevertheless managed to kick out furiously as Dad plunged the needle in her thigh.

  “That should do the trick,” said Dad, leaping back.

  Released, she at once began eating again. Five minutes later, she was still gobbling alfalfa. She seemed no less alert.
Dad approached ‘with his needle and sutures, only to have a two-toed, clawed foot fly out at him. Scrambling back, he refilled his syringe and ordered the three men to restrain her once more.

  “That’ll definitely work,” he announced, after injecting the second batch in another flurry of legs and feathers.

  After round three, Dad said, “I’m not sure what to do. This is enough Valium to make a man comatose.”

  The ostrich blinked beautiful lashes over cartoon-huge eyes, and took another mouthful of alfalfa.

  “You’ll just have to hold her down,” said Dad.

  So Clinton and his workers wrestled the struggling bird to the ground. Once she was down, Mum, Lulu, Damien, and I joined them, pressing our hands down firmly to keep her still.

  After wiping away the alfalfa and sterilising the wound, Dad began to stitch: first the gaping gullet, and then the skin, knotting carefully after each loop.

  The bird, once pinned down, stared ahead with a vapid gaze. But for a few twitches, she kept still, and Dad began to relax, chatting to us as he worked at the painstaking task.

  “Pity I didn’t have laughing gas. Would’ve had her in stitches immediately.”

  Mum said, “Better than being tied up in knots.”

  “Real name – nitrous oxide,” Dad continued, smiling. “Mild euphoria-inducing anaesthetic.”

  “Normally used in dentistry,” said Mum.

  “Also as an oxidiser to increase power in rockets.”

  “Also a greenhouse gas.”

  “Explosive at high temperatures,” said Dad, winking at Damien. “Blast!” he muttered, as the ostrich suddenly shook her neck and a half-finished knot unravelled.

  ♦

  Dad may have braved stitching a fully grown ostrich, but several months later, when Quartz appeared from the bush with a five-centimetre gash on his bottom, even he blanched. Ever since a botched gelding – which had left Quartz, a ‘rig&rsquo, with half his testicles – he’d been petrified of needles. Simple vaccinations, during which he’d smashed poles and jumped over four-foot fences, could take hours.