Mandy Retzlaff - One Hundred and Four Horses

I kept my eyes fixed on her face, heard Charl and Pat’s heated debate fade in and out, and felt the first twinge of a very real fear.

A few days later, before he returned to the hunting area to continue his apprenticeship, Jay reported seeing strangers in the bush. Saddling up Imprevu, Pat set out to investigate what Jay had seen: in the hills above the farm, where the bush was dense and men might remain hidden for days, huts made out of sticks had been hastily erected. Rings of black earth marked the places where campfires had been built, and the bush was thinned where men with pangas had taken to the trees. Pat and Imprevu made long circuits of the farm, moving in tightening circles, trying to scout out where the men were coming to settle and from which vantage points they could spy on our house.

I was glad to see Jay returning to his apprenticeship, and happier still when Kate could go back to school for the week. Though Paul and Jay had often been away at school for a term at a time, Kate was boarding during the weeks and returning to Crofton for her weekends—but, now, any time that she could spend away relieved a great welter of fear. Home had always been a place of safety for our children, a place to come and hide away from the world, but now it was beginning to feel as if they were better off staying far away. On Palmerston Estates, the situation was no better. Paul reported the same scraggly grass huts growing up near the railway crossing, with groups of ­people gathering around them, often drunk, seemingly stoned, raising their fists and chanting every time he rode along one of the winding farm tracks.

One morning, Pat, Kate, and I were eating breakfast in the Crofton dining room. The bright sun of early morning filtered through the curtains, and, as I helped Kate to eggs from a pan, Pat stood up to draw back the curtains.

On the grounds outside, twenty men were gathered, twenty stran­gers outside our gate.

If they did not look violent, if they were not drunk or stoned like the men we had been hearing about, they still inspired fear. Quickly, Pat pulled the curtains back into place. But it was too late; Kate had already seen.

Looking back, I believe that the only reason I did not panic was that I was thinking about Kate. For weeks now I had been making her do drills in how to respond if the war vets ever came to Crofton. She hated the drills—perhaps hated me for it too—but at least she was prepared. There was a hallway inside Crofton, a place with narrow walls that Jay and Kate had often made a game of shimmying up, one foot braced on either wall like mountaineers scaling a sheer crevice. If they got to the top of the passage, they could reach an attic crawl space there. It was in this hole that Kate was to hide should the worst ever happen. I turned to tell her to go, but before I could hustle her away, Pat was already striding out the farmhouse door.

Hanging back, I watched as Pat approached the men. This was not a baying horde of the type we had heard about. Pat stood, only yards away from them, and asked them what they were doing on the farm.

“It isn’t what we want to do, boss,” one of the men finally said. He shrugged, almost apologetically, and refused to meet Pat’s eyes. “But we’ve been told not to leave. They told us to make some noise. Shout a lot, cause some trouble …”

I ushered Kate back into the farmhouse, where she could not see. Outside, Pat continued to talk to the men. When, at last, he turned to come back inside, his face was set hard. I remembered how he had looked, all those years ago, as he walked into the brawl in the hotel bar, decked out in his ill-fitting suit and shoddy cowboy boots.

“Well?” I asked.

“Well,” was all he could reply.

It took some hours for the men to dissipate that day—but dissipate they did. Once they were gone, we ventured back out of the farmhouse. Their trails were clearly visible, as they had cut a path away from the farmhouse and back into the bush. Where they had come from, we did not know; why they were here was only too plain.

We were at Two Tree farmhouse with Charl and Tertia when we heard the news that the first white farmer had died. Charl and Tertia had had their own experience with war vets settling around their farmhouse—and though that crowd, like ours, had dissipated without violence, it had propelled Charl to thinking about their future. Tertia had just given birth to their son, baby Charl-Emil, and foremost in Charl’s mind was how he might protect his wife and children. Some farmers had already sent their families away, anticipating worse to come, and at Two Tree that day Charl admitted that he was thinking of doing the same—not just for his family, but for his horses as well.

Lady, Fleur, Grey, and the rest were loose in their paddock when we walked through the farm. Lady hurtled over as we approached, responding to the quiet burr of Charl’s voice. There was only one other animal that responded to him in the same way, an eland brought to Two Tree during the droughts. Em was perhaps the tamest of all wild creatures I had ever known. Fifty inches tall at her shoulder, with the eland’s two distinctive spiral horns, she seemed to have fallen in love with Charl. Whenever he was out on the farm, Em would somehow know where he was and canter over. Tertia was of the opinion that Charl, too, was a little bit in love with the eland. She had caught him, more than once, with Em’s head lying contentedly on his shoulder, Charl rubbing her gently between the eyes—and, whenever Tertia approached, Em would come to attention and push her aside, as if to say: Charl is mine; this is my time with him now .

“Where would you send them to?” I asked, my hands pressed against Grey’s flank.

“Do you know Rob Flanagan?”

I nodded. Rob Flanagan was a mutual friend, a horseman who also farmed outside Chinhoyi about thirty kilometers away. A polo player, he belonged to the same club where we would often go to watch matches. Charl had run into him only recently, at a farmers’ meeting in Chinhoyi. So far, Rob’s farm had not been affected by the roaming bands of war vets—and Charl, mindful that Two Tree was so close to the resettlement area, had begun to wonder: might there be room with Rob for some of his horses, if the worst came to the worst?

“There’s too many of them,” Charl said, looking into the distant bush where the war vets had begun to assemble their traditional huts. “And …”

Charl had cause to worry for his horses for, in the past, he had not spared the animals belonging to the men who came poaching on Two Tree land. Often, having chased the poachers away, he found himself compelled to shoot their dogs. It was a grisly business, for it was not the dogs’ fault that they were being used to kill game, but there was often no other choice. The idea of these men returning to Two Tree in force and meting out their revenge was all too easy to imagine.

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