Red Dog. Willem Anker
pocket. The other hunters soon cotton on to the fact that I don’t have much truck with money. I’ll swop tusks and hides with them for a better gun. Sometimes I keep some of the hides for my hut. The hunt itself is enough for me. Mostly I go hunting on my own. After I’ve spent a few days in the veldt on my own, horseless and shoeless, everyone says I’m easier to get along with. Geertruy tries to get me to give up blundering into the bushes on my own, but without much conviction. She knows it’s better for everybody’s peace of mind. If they keep me in the yard for too long hauling butter barrels or thatching roofs, then everyone gets to know about it. Even Saterdag is given it good and hard if he nags at me on such days. Back from a hunting trip, I’m usually invited to supper straightaway, because apparently I’m then well behaved at table. Of course on such days there is also for a change enough meat to share. My first lion? A mangy male, an aged loner, kicked out of the pride. Was almost as if the beast wanted to be shot.
Geertruy dishes some more meat for David the Dreck and asks if I’ve had my fill. No, Sister, on the contrary.
On the hunt on my own my circles around the yard become ever wider. If my duties on the farm permit, I nowadays stay away for a week or more. In the hunting ground my ears prick up at every branch that snaps. Every drop on a blade of grass is perilously suspended. My sweat and the sweat of the quarry. The twittering in the trees. The piss against the trunks and all the thresholds of demarcated territories in which loud-mouthed males rule. I criss-cross it all with my gun. I know the rules of the veldt. The better I get to understand the rules, the freer I become. In the veldt I can mark, bark, fight and piss out the limits of my own life among the other creatures. In a Christian home you are coddled while you are small and stupid, but you gradually become ever less free the better you get to learn what is expected of you. In a whitewashed house every little copper jug must be polished and every little carpet must be beaten every morning, but all around you as far as the eye can see and further it’s just dust and stone and bush. In the veldt nothing is dirty. A grey stone does not need polishing. A thorn tree does not need dusting.
I excuse myself from the table, go and sit on the kaross with the children and the minder with the skin smelling of fat and herbs. I unpack the wooden blocks on the dung floor. Geertruy and her Appointed Master pretend not to see me at their feet. They talk more loudly and chew with more conviction. The conversation stumbles and bumbles, they struggle to stuff my springbok meat down their gullets. I pick up the little one, who starts bawling. Geertruy sends out the children and their minder to the back room. I take my seat at table again. My godparents eat in silence. The thighbone in the dish still has quite a bit of meat on it. I start carving off the meat; then I take the bone and push my chair back. I put my crossed legs on the table, my clodhoppers under my godfather’s nose. I tear a bit of meat off the bone, smile. The father of the house jumps up, slams the door behind him. Geertruy shakes her head, follows her husband out of the room. My springbok is delicious.
Saterdag and I are sitting and smoking near the herd of cattle in a stretch of gnawn-bare pasturage. It’s too hot to talk. We’re sitting under a large protea bush, our eyes swollen from the previous night that turned into morning and the sun that rose more blindingly than ever.
At night we steal karrie, the honey beer of the Hottentots. We make a fire and nobody misses us. We squat on our haunches and sometimes the one-eared dog comes to sit with us before the hordes of eyes like stars in the undergrowth recall the dog to the pack and they fade into the brushwood. There are evenings when we lose fist fights and start them, evenings when the beer emboldens us to walk across to gaggles of giggling Hottentot girls.
I scratch at my first growth of beard. Clumsily and showily I clean my pipe with a long thorn. The headache throbs behind my eyes. Snot-slime Senekal’s shepherd dog, goddam good-for-nothing Ore, is lying in the grass. The only sign of life the tail that flicks at a fly now and again.
Among the leaves of the protea above us a spider is spinning in a bee. The legs of the red-bellied spider move fast and featously. It spins threads around the bee’s wings, avoiding the sting. The bee’s abdomen aims its useless poison dart at the spider. Every movement enmeshes it further. The eight-footed attack is launched simultaneously from all quarters and on all fronts. The wings vibrate faster and faster the more restricted their space becomes. The humming of the bee becomes ever more frantic, ever more furious, until the quarry’s last counter-attack comes to nothing and the bee subsides. The sting is no longer trying to sting. The wings go still. It can’t move any more. It’s not that the bee gives up. The bee never gives up. It fights and weakens until there is nothing left of it. Saterdag leans forward, puts out a hand to release the bee from life. I push a hand to his chest.
Let be.
Saterdag looks at me, then looks away, straight in front of him. Intently I watch the slow and purposeful cruelty until the spider is satisfied that the bee will never escape and, after a last caress over the cocoon of the quiet quarry, hoists itself up a thread of its own creation. I start loading the rifle, pour in the gunpowder and, instead of a lead pellet, a stone. I get up, stretch myself and look down at Saterdag.
Run.
What?
Run.
Saterdag jumps up, runs. I fire a shot into the air. The sheep scatter in all directions, the herd all of a sudden hundreds of individual sheep. Saterdag does not look around, runs faster. I carefully put down the gun, race after him. Saterdag swerves left and right through the undergrowth. I storm straight through the slangbos and cat thorn, my leather pants soon full of snags. Sodomite Senekal’s Ore charges along, an imbecile frenzy over the sudden excitement. Just before the tree line I plough the Bushman into the ground. I catch up with him at a run and without slowing down I run into him from behind and end up on top of him. Saterdag starts struggling free. I push his hands against the ground until our breaths stop racing. The farm dog comes closer inquisitively to make sure the game is over. The tail is wagging and the tongue is hanging out. The slavering fool tripples around us. I sit up straight and smack the brute across the snout so that it retreats yowling.
Let the dog be, Buys. What’s he done to you?
It’s no dog.
He’s the best sheepdog we have.
That’s because it’s more sheep than dog.
Ore is a good dog.
A dog with a name is no goddam dog any more.
Saterdag shakes his head and walks behind me. We start herding the sheep.
What’s eating you?
We can’t sit around on our butts all day.
Like every year, the Senekals attend the cattle auctions. Apart from Communion it’s the biggest agglomeration of the year: three days of chitter-chatter with everybody from all over, three days of grubbing and boozing and swopping and cheating and here and there a smidgeon of adultery. I’m foreman and have to go along to see to the cattle. David Dumbwit and I steer clear of each other, speak only when necessary. His blatherskite buddies are there; I have my affairs to see to. It’s good to get out among other people, people you don’t feel you want to murder.
At the auction grounds there’s a fellow in the saddle fresh from France who does things with a horse I’ve never seen before. Look, it seems as if the horse isn’t even conscious of the rider, so liquid its movements and so subtle the rider’s commands. Man and horse merge into one new and strange animal. The hoofs are lifted high, are put down firmly, as if the horse wanted to expend all its power and passion in the lightest footfall, as if its whole being depended on each step, as if all movement were display and all movement were totally subjected to an invisible force that brooked no blemish. The rider is without past or future. He is sheer arms and legs, stirrups and saddle and reins, everything attuned to the tiniest tremor in the horse’s body.
Just see how cockily he stands there, the young Buys, the stuff-strutter with the feather in his hat and his hand in his side. Just see them