Willem Anker - Red Dog - A Frontier Novel

When I ride into the straggle of buildings they call Swellendam, there’s a brawl in front of the taphouse. The two farmers have both had their fill of fighting, both of them are on their knees in the street. They trade blows with long and heavy arms. Not a single blow misses its target, they’re both too tired to duck. A few churls of the civilian militia loiter around till both of them are flat on their backs and then drag them off to the cells. I go and report for the manoeuvres. The clerk charged with filling in forms realises I have no weapons with me apart from the rusty dagger. I’m fined twelve rix-dollars and this far and no further will they push me. I get onto my elderly horse and ride out of the miserable little whitewashed outpost. Only after my mortal demise and my rebirth as Omni-Buys will I read in the moth-eaten minutes what I missed. For instance that Petrus Ferreira of De Lange Cloof that year at the manoeuvres won a brand-new tobacco casket as second prize in target shooting. May the plague rot his bones.

Back among the grey bushes of De Brakkerivier I tell Maria to bundle up and tie together our domestic effects once more. I go to fetch Windvogel from under a willing and able young woman and tell him to inspan our oxen. The Hottentots see that I’m preparing to clear out. They also start gathering their few belongings. Most of them will wander further to neighbouring farms for work, but a few young ones without ties of women or children opt to take their chances with us. I fling a torch on the roof and watch the reed house go up in flames. Elizabeth dances around the house and is transfigured to a shimmer in the flames. Maria settles the baby securely in the wagon. She takes up position on the wagon chest and cracks the whip. In the year 1785 I leave behind everything I know and trek to the eastern frontier.

We trek through the interior, track the well-worn routes of earlier migrations to the far ends of the Colony. Sometimes the grooves of wagon tracks are clearly visible, sometimes they disappear for days on end and we simply drift from one fountain, spruit or watering hole to the next. We stop as seldom as possible, only when the wagon breaks down or I spot an eland and gallop into the drifting mist on Horse and don’t return without a carcase. Most days drag by monotonously, others begin on a barney and end in bedlam. The baby, still nameless, bobs along on the voyage, wrapped in a kaross, lulled by the creaking and groaning of the wagon never to recall any of it, and laughs and sleeps and cries and for the rest lies there gazing at the wagon tilt that is the limit of her world.

Maria sits on the wagon chest, cracks the whip over the bone-weary beasts and curses them by name as soon as they flag. The Hottentots drive the little herd of cattle, Windvogel for the most part on the back of the ox he got from me as payment the previous year. I sit with Elizabeth in front of me on the horse. She doesn’t sit in the saddle, she finds it too close to another human body. Her little naked body is draped around Horse’s neck. If I touch her to make sure she’s seated securely, that the sun isn’t scorching her, she screams or growls. It’s just she and the horse, but if I tell her the names of animals and plants and stones as we go, she repeats the names in a whisper from within the tangled depths of the horse’s mane. It’s only when she’s on the verge of sleep that she sits by me tugging at my beard, the red furze a forest for her fingers to forage in. Her complexion is not as fair as her father’s, but lighter than Maria’s. The sallow skin and red hair render her an object of open interest to the few passers-by. As soon as they register her grey eyes, they cease their greeting and their blathering and look away and then lift their hats to me and my own grey peepers. At night we sleep in the wagon. On cold evenings the baby lies curled up against the mother-belly as if hankering back to it. When the jackals call in the hills and the hyenas laugh next to the wagon, the red-haired child sits up straight, arms around the knees, watching over us.

From the saddle I survey the bushes and the grasses and the thorn trees and the anthills like towers of Babel. Sometimes I pull up next to a rock formation or a plant that claims my attention, but while there is still sun, the wagon stops for nothing and nobody. I follow the wagon on horseback, my thoughts already straying to other rocks or leaves or wandering off into the distance. I’m not here on a voyage of discovery. I’m on my way to the border. The few people who call this region home have no use for me here: the Christians hunt the likes of them, and they in turn rob and murder the Christians in that old cycle of devastation without beginning or end. Here you keep a low profile and you don’t stay in one place for too long. The Bushmen must never think you want to settle in.

Sometimes we cross the paths of other wagons, sometimes people on foot or on horseback, but nobody makes a lasting impression on anybody else. We don’t outspan at other farmhouses like most people. The customs and the conversations in there are what I’m getting away from. When supplies run low, we sometimes stop over at a kraal. The Hottentots readily barter sheep and edible bulbs and honey, and treat Maria well, this diminutive queen with her gigantic white husband and her Hottentot underlings.

In one kraal of an evening the Hottentots are dancing. When Elizabeth comes to sit by me near the fire, in no time at all there are several figures squatting around her in wonderment. They can see she shies away from human contact. They approach slowly, careful not to startle her. One presses a finger gently against her shoulder. She looks at the finger. He presses an ochre-tipped finger to her nose. She giggles, presses her own finger to the Hottentot’s nose. After a while she allows the enchanted Hottentot to stroke her hair. She climbs onto my lap, but allows them to mark her little body all over with ochre hands like the hands they press against the walls of caves. Eventually the little crowd win her over; she scrambles down from my lap. They lift her onto their shoulders and dance around the fire. She looks like the afterthought of a flame, red and lambent but less so, as if fire had a shadow that could dance with humans without consuming them.

Sometimes I do call at homesteads to angle for news. As the trek wends its way eastward, you need to look ever more closely to identify a hut as Christian turf. Heathens live in round huts; Christian wattle-and-daub huts are rectangular. The news is never good. The Christians I talk to are mainly refugees who abandoned their farms on the eastern frontier and crawled back deep into the embrace of the Colony, only to be robbed and slaughtered here as well. The accounts of these fearful god-fearing folk are as void of meaning as the cairns on graves.

One afternoon one of these gormless Christians crawls out of his mud hut to greet me. A broad-brimmed hat on his head and the tatters of what were once military shoes are the sum total of his apparel. His whole body is peeling with sunburn. He babbles on about Caffres and locusts and his failed crops and this is what he knows and this is his life. How could he know what Omni-Buys knows and what would it be to him that Louis the Sixteenth in this year of our Lord 1785 signs a proclamation declaring that henceforth handkerchiefs must be square?

When the wind blows through the grass or the shadows of clouds tumble over the slopes and kopjes, the whole moribund landscape seems to come to life and race past underfoot. The eye plays games in this endless place where days of trekking feel like standing still, and an hour or so of seeking shelter from a thunderstorm feels like growing old. By day the veldt is dead as dust. We trek past lions lounging under thorn trees, not bothering to bestir themselves for a whole herd of cattle. At the times of transition from night to day and from day to night the veldt is a deafening discord of life calling and cawing and rustling and racing as if aspiring to destinations beyond the multitudinous cycles intersecting here in the softly luminescent spaciousness.