Twenty Chickens for a Saddle

by Robyn Scott

  The Phikwe vet had long since refused to treat him.

  Grandpa Ivor, seeing the excited gathering by the horse pens, hurried across. “Whaddaya mean, you’re not going to stitch?” he yelled. “Ya gotta close the bloody thing. What kind of doctor are you?”

  “I’m about to close it,” said Dad. “Hold your horses, Ivor.”

  “This is not a bloody joke.”

  Dad ignored Grandpa and turned to me. “Hang up a hay net, Robbie. And get him some treats.”

  By the time Dad returned with swabs and antiseptic, Quartz had eaten several pieces of Rescue Remedy – laced bread and ‘was munching happily through a bunch of carrots. He hardly flinched as Dad cleaned the dust and bits of bark from the broken branch that must have sliced the flesh.

  What he planned, Dad wouldn’t tell us either, and we watched expectantly as he dried the raw edges. He gave the wound a final dab, produced a small tube of Super Glue from his pocket, removed the cap, and quickly squeezed the glue along one edge before pressing the wound closed.

  For about a minute, Dad held the edges together. Then he let go, and patted Quartz on his flank.

  Quartz shifted, the skin moving across his hindquarters. But the glue held fast.

  It was one of the most impressive procedures I’d ever seen. Even Grandpa, who regularly argued with Dad about detailed medical concepts, was quite overcome. “You’ve blown me away,” he said. “Always loved that stuff – used it on many an aeroplane in my time – but I never knew you could do that.”

  “Useful in emergencies,” said Dad, enjoying our awe. “But I’m not the first to use it. There’s even a special medical version.”

  “Useful!” said Grandpa. “Notuseful. Bloody amazing. Betty!” he bellowed across the road. “Ya gotta come see this. Keith’s working miracles.”

  Mum said, “Our mission today is to identify that jolly tree.”

  Only on medical knowledge was Mum happy to be upstaged by Dad. On everything else, they conducted ongoing battles of intellectual one-upmanship. And just as we worked our way haphazardly through the dictionary following their dinnertime arguments about semantics and etymology, much of our most obscure knowledge arose from similar contests.

  Trees invoked some of their greatest competitive ferocity. On evening walks, the first to spot a new species would be triumphant for hours. A correct identification too, and we could expect at least a day ol gentle gloating.

  The ten-foot sapling beside Grandpa Ivor’s aeroplane shed, with its nondescript leaves and failure to produce any flowers or seedpods to help identification, had thwarted them for ages. To resolve the identity of this tree was the ultimate coup.

  With Dad safely away at work, we followed Mum across the road and sat down beneath it, carrying, between us, all four of our tree books.

  “Why don’t each of you take a book,” said Mum. “Remember: leaves – type, arrangement, and colour. And for the bark – colour, texture, and pattern.”

  Mum retrieved a magnifying glass from her pocket and began studying the leaves. She sniffed in frustration. Mum liked to say to people, “One of the reasons I’ve homeschooled my children is so they won’t be exposed to that horribly competitive classroom environment.”

  “Blast,” said Mum after several minutes, dropping the magnifying glass. “No idea. Blast! Blast! Perhaps it’s not indigenous after all.”

  None of us had made any headway with the books, and Mum picked up the biggest, Palgrave’s, and began leafing through it crossly.

  Damien at once held the discarded magnifying glass over a dried leaf and he’d generated a healthy flame by the time Grandpa Ivor came out to investigate.

  “Whaddaya up to, Linda?” And then, seeing the tree books, “Teaching the kids more Latin? Thought they were already fluent,” he said, grinning.

  Mum and Dad prided themselves on knowing and using the botanical names for trees. And some of our favourite bush trees we grew to love as much for these wonderful musical words as for their appearance: Boscia albitrunca, Commiphora mollis, and the most lyrical of all, Rhigozum brevispinosum.

  Lulu, who also obsessively drew pictures of trees, was far better than Damien and me at remembering the names. By six, she could recite at least twenty. At the golf club, Grandpa Ivor told everyone his little granddaughter was an ancient languages genius.

  Now he said, “I’ve toldya before. That tree’s a marula.”

  Mum smiled and didn’t bother to argue. Lulu said quietly, “Grandpa, it’s not a Sclerocarya birrea. The leaves are completely different.”

  “Nonsense,” said Grandpa. “Whaddaya know, anyway, Little Lulu? Just cause you can speak Latin doesn’t mean you know what you’re talking about.”

  ♦

  There was a marula tree in the horses’ paddock, behind the cowshed.

  The tall mottled-grey trunk was too smooth to climb to shake the branches. So we had to wait, frustrated, as the plum-sized green fruit became perfectly soft and yellow, and plummeted to the ground of their own accord.

  They were delicious. Sweet, and tangy – infinitely nicer than the tiny Grewia berries and astringent wild plums, which we ate simply because they came from the bush. After a few days, we couldn’t keep up with the marula fruit fall, and the hundreds of round balls fermented till you could smell the sweet alcohol several metres from the tree. Then we always hoped that baboons might appear and get drunk on the fruit, like the wonderful scene in the film Animab Are Beautiful People. But other than us, only the horses ate them, and got colic, not drunk.

  During marula season, we’d adapt the Space Game to allow for crucial marula refuelling stops during our intergalactic travels.

  The cowshed was the mother space station; the vast bush around us the universe, for infinitely varied exploration. But beyond these essentials, and a variety of space-travel-related props, the name was slightly misleading. Invented soon after our arrival – and though it would evolve to last in name for five years – really the Space Game was an umbrella description for endless hours of unadulterated playing and adventuring.

  Central to the technological elements of the game – masterminded by Damien – was the hi-fi in the lounge, with which we synced our homemade portable computers. These were oblongs of cardboard, onto which we’d carefully drawn all the normal buttons, plus beam, nuke, teleport, takeoff, speed of sound, speed of light, before laminating them with precisely applied thick strips of Sellotape. At the start of each day’s mission, we synced, and then set off to one of our satellite stations. Blurring technological eras, these included the shed, the wrecked Piper Colt, the collapsing lizard-filled caravans, and the ruins by the abandoned skull-and-bone-littered old abattoir, near the mine dump. The roof of the cowshed was a favourite too, and a vantage point from which we could follow the movements of Matthews, an obliging enemy, who’d hurl friendly abuse when we soaked him with homemade origami water bombs.

  Not a month went by without the addition of some new accessory to the game. Often this simply involved a more sophisticated version of the cardboard computers, and Damien reliably devised several new satisfyingly powerful functions for every rerelease: fusion, fusion, force field.

  There were material breakthroughs too.

  Like the time Damien convinced a friend to trade his broken walkie-talkies for a key ring that beeped when you whistled. Damien at once disassembled and fixed the walkie-talkies, and the Space Game entered a glorious new era of mobile communications.

  Or when Damien was given a motorised go-cart for his eighth birthday and built a tiny trailer for it, at once quadrupling our reach in the universe. Now the three of us would zoom far along the bush tracks, Lulu and I bouncing on the back, spitting out dust spun up by the wheels.

  Often we’d drive to the cattle posts, overtaking donkey carts on the way, stopping to buy prohibited boiled sweets, which we considered, by virtue of the long journey, almost as authentically from the bush as the Grewia berries. We also frequented the airport, where we’d watch
the planes landing, waving at the pilots and critiquing their skills. And sometimes, when the baobab pods were falling, we’d drive to the end of the dirt road, where the forbidden-to-the-go-cart tar began, and park under the marula tree hung with Mum’s homemade sign. This read ‘Scotts’ in big slanted letters, and ‘No through road’ in small ones, separated by her painting of a wily-looking yellow-billed hornbill.

  Leaving the go-cart under the marula, we’d walk across the railway line and across the main road, stopping at the base of one of the biggest baobabs for miles, which towered here on the roadside like a sentinel to the turnoff for the airport and the Selebi houses.

  We all longed for a baobab in our garden. The most splendid of Africa’s trees, it had once, according to local legend, grown only in the gardens of paradise, until the day the gods tired of the poor baobab, tore it out of the ground, and hurled it from the heavens to the earth, where it landed upside down and continued to grow, roots in the air, reaching skyward.

  But these great trees, with some of the biggest girths in the world, took hundreds of years to grow, so we had to settle for a neighbourhood baobab. We knew intimately the valleys and folds on the smooth, swollen grey trunk, which tapered and split into bulbous branches that seemed absurdly big for their sparse clusters of leaves. Beneath it, sitting in the shade of the enormous trunk, we’d crack the woody pods and suck the tart white flesh around the seeds until our mouths ached. When we could eat no more, and provided we weren’t already overloaded with spoils from our travels, we’d stuff our backpacks full with as many of the furry green fruit as we could carry, heading home armed with delicious snacks that would last us days.

  The small backpacks were a crucial part of our journeys.

  When we departed, they’d be half full with water, sandwiches, apples, the portable computers, a few thebe coins, and the walkie-talkies. On our return, they’d often be brimming with new additions, including snakeskins, colourful feathers, huge seedpods, tortoise shells, porcupine quills, sun-bleached bones, useful bits of metal, wire snares that we tore from bushes, beautiful pieces of gnarled wood for the wall unit, and almost always, dead or alive, a few of the innumerable wonderful insects of the bush.

  Sometimes on the way home, we’d leave some of the one-thebe coins on the railway line, to be flattened into pin-thin shiny discs by the train – another great, unspecific force in our high-tech, nature-rich, fantasy-reality universe. These, we’d collect during our next lesson. Which is really what the Space Game was: just a name for our most important class of all, in the art of endless, boundless discovery and imagination.

  ∨ Twenty Chickens for a Saddle ∧

  Fourteen

  Living on the Fringe

  “I’m warning you, Keith,” said Grandpa Ivor. “Ya shouldn’t mess with these people.”

  Dad laughed, shading his eyes and smiling as he surveyed the half-cleared field. Standing there now, Dad looked so much like Grandpa had looked when I’d watched him nearly three years earlier, staring at this field and talking about witch doctors: the sun-shielding salute, the large, unmistakably Scott jaw, the expression filled with the same dreamy expectation of seeing more than now lay before him.

  Except that, imposed on the bleak field, Dad was seeing a dense expanse of waxy green leaves and bright yellow jojoba flowers where Grandpa had been seeing spells and a witch doctor – whose existence, given that he’d stayed resolutely invisible, I’d long since begun to doubt.

  But now turning to Grandpa, and seeing his foreboding expression, I felt a quiver of uncertainty, and relief that Dad had left the termite-mound end untouched, potential mud weeds radiating out around the ant fortress.

  “There’s still lots left, Grandpa.”

  “I’m sure the old chap will forgive me,” said Dad. “He can even pick some of my jojoba if he wants. It’s wonderful stuff. He’ll probably be delighted.”

  Grandpa just shrugged. “Don’t say I didn’t warn you,” he muttered, stalking off.

  Dad had become so excited when he first read about jojoba oil that he and Mum, leaving us with Granny Joan for three days, had made an exploratory weekend trip down to South Africa to investigate a recently started plantation. They returned, even more enthusiastic, with bags of seeds. Dad immediately hired extra labour to clear the ground. And the following weekend Lulu, Damien, and I spent the day out in the field, helping Dad and Matthews plant.

  “Marvellous stuff,” said Dad, showing us how deep to sink the wrinkled brown seeds in the dirt. “Native to the Mojave desert. It’ll thrive in this place. Will be just like the pictures soon.”

  Which was hard to believe, looking at the clear red dirt. But Dad’s enthusiasm was contagious, and I believed, implicitly, that he could make happen anything he wanted.

  Mum, tapping away at her typewriter, was excited for another reason. While we were planting, she was already planning the new ‘Jojoba Farming’ pages in her book.

  Like the homeopathy book she and Dad had written, most of Mum’s book projects – ranging from a few paragraphs to several chapters – were guides to specific natural medicine subjects. Recently, however, she’d spent hours perched at the Olivetti, working on a real-life account of the triumphs and tribulations of alternative medicine and an alternative lifestyle.

  “I’ve got so much great material,” Mum would say distractedly as she banged furiously at the keyboard. “Complementary medicine, nutritional medicine, bush medicine, medicine bushes, biodynamic farming, home births, homeschooling…Crazy to let it go to waste. Someone’s surely got to be interested in this. Do you want to hear some?”

  And before we’d had a chance to respond either way, Mum would be reading out loud, pausing only to interrupt herself with her own amendments. By the time she’d finished the story in question, she’d have generally forgotten she had asked for our opinion, and would return immediately to her keyboard.

  We, the children, occasionally featured, and we’d smugly tell our friends in Phikwe that we ‘would one day be characters in a real book. As to the nature of our appearances, which generally involved us being plied with homeopathic elixirs for projectile vomiting or chronic diarrhoea, we remained vague.

  The book was called Living on the Fringe. – the fringe, according to Mum, being the boundaries of what was acceptable in conventional society. Mum and Dad, said Mum, were firmly on it, as, she added, were Ivor and Betty, in a different sort of way.

  The jojoba project, she explained, was another classic strand in the fringe.

  First, no farmer had yet attempted to grow jojoba in Botswana. Which alone made it irresistible to Dad. Second, the oil had potentially environmentally friendly uses, including as a biodegradable lubricant and a biodiesel fuel. Third, it could be used as a natural alternative to synthetic substances in cosmetics.

  Fourth – this sometime feature of the fringe Mum didn’t mention, but soon it became apparent – everyone else wiun’t doing it for a good reason. With a bit more reading and a few more calculations, Dad realised that with the current price he could get for jojoba oil, which was low because of the cheaper, less environmentally friendly synthetic alternatives, he would actually lose money on the crop.

  Just a few months after planting, having obsessed daily about the sprouting seedlings, Dad announced he would not be growing jojoba after all. As always, he immediately dispensed with regret and reinvented failure. “Now I can focus properly on getting a real farm,” he declared happily. “Our own land.”

  Dad stopped watering the jojoba. Mum said, “At least keep this lot going.”

  Dad said, “What’s the point? Can’t really do anything with them.”

  “I feel so bad just letting them die.”

  “If we keep them going, they’ll just die when they’re older.”

  “But come on, Keith,” said Mum, exasperated. “Aren’t you at least interested to see how well they grow here? You’ve invested so much time in them already.”

  “So” – Dad shrugged – “no
w I’m investing it in other things.”

  Mum sighed, but moments later regained her cheerfulness. “I suppose it’s actually really a good thing. If it means we get our farm sooner. Plus, you know, thinking about it now, it also makes for an even better chapter in the book. The more things don’t go according to plan, the better the story.”

  Mum’s optimism bordered on pathological. She regularly joked that she wanted her epitaph to be ‘Making wrong things right’ – words that six-year-old Lulu, with my help, had written on a homemade birthday card for Mum, as one of the things she loved most about her mother.

  Mum said Dad’s epitaph could be ‘Making things happen, and moving on swiftly’.

  Dad said, “You can put whatever you like. When I’m gone, I’m gone. Feed me to the lions for all I care.”

  Mum laughed. “See.”

  “You don’t need to discuss this yet,” I protested. “You’re not going to die yet.”

  “You never know,” said Dad. “Any of us could kick the bucket, any day.”

  “Dad!”

  Mum said, “That’s why the only thing that matters is that you end each day with all things resolved. That you never let the sun set on a sad or angry heart.”

  Which wasn’t difficult, when you gazed across the golden bush at the great red globe at once expanding and disappearing as the glowing horizon sliced it little by little to sleep. Then, as the sky grew alight with pinks and reds and everything in between, the scale and drama of the beauty seemed to reach deep inside, extinguishing all but the greatest frustrations and sorrows.

  “Smell that, chaps,” said Dad, scuffing his veldskoen against the sandy track. “Nothing in the world like the smell of a dirt road in Africa.”