Willem Anker - Red Dog - A Frontier Novel

The dog is motionless, except for the waves of breath rippling through its body. I am dizzy, my shirt and trousers heavy with blood. I walk backwards, lift the reeds, and carry on walking backwards into the full sunlight. Only when I reach the bushes do I turn my back on the hut and the dog inside. I walk back to the farm, my legs and arms covered in bruises and bite marks. The blood prickles and pumps in every lesion, separately and simultaneously. The sun grows cold and small behind the mountains, but I am still far away from the homestead. I make a fire in the clearing before the moonless dark prevails. I scrabble the soil loose so that I can lie softer, scatter sand over myself. The sand scratches my wounds, but it is warm. I hear a rustling outside the firmament of firelight. I see the glowing eyes of a dog in the bushes. Ore? I murmur. I want to get up but can’t. The red dog comes closer, sits down just outside the circle of fire. I lie back and then I see nothing more behind the thousand eyes of the flames.

By milking time I’m back in the yard and collapse and the maid rinsing bowls by the house screams and a Hottentot runs out of the kraal and carries me into the house and I hear Geertruy exclaiming and I only wake up the next day. For days on end my godmother follows me around, watching for signs of rabies. I see her looking. I don’t tell a soul about me and the dog in the hut. I am not rabid, but note well, I now move differently. The stronger I grow, the lighter my step. Do you see how I sniff the morning air, my noise raised like a snout? How I perk up before anybody else hears anything? At night I no longer open the door to that yard dog. The wounds do not fester, but blood is blood and blood has mingled. Listen to Geertruy talking to the house maid:

The child’s been bitten badly. He’s caught something from the animals, but what , Mientjie, that I couldn’t say.

Two weeks later I’m in the veldt again with the cattle. The cattle look around uneasily; then I notice the red dog with one ear. He doesn’t come any closer, but makes sure that he is seen. This time the rest of the pack are with him, in the underbrush behind the red one. The one-eared male ventures out of the trees on his own and stands in the long grass and gazes at me before once again slinking into the dusk.

I grow bigger and stronger. The house also grows. The more the Senekals realise they’re not going anywhere, the more cramped the little house feels with its four-foot walls and its reed roof. Pasturage is not bad here, they say, water not scarce. A new, bigger baking oven is in due course added to the house. A room is built on and yet another later on.

At the age of fourteen I move out of the Senekal homestead. I build a hut on the edge of the yard. I steal a few planks from Duffer David. Reeds and clay from the river. Rocks that I go and hew out when I feel the urge to beat up somebody. Geertruy is starting to show again with a second child. Klein Christina, named for her grandmother the runaway bitch, has turned six and is all over the house, already with the Buys bloody-mindedness. My hut is full of bulges and eruptions like the pimples on my face. The rocks and planks form straight lines; intersected by the arches of reed and tumid clay. A house it is not. Geertruy says I haven’t grown into my long fingers yet. Dim David says I’m a carpenter’s arse. He’s right: I can shoot and climb mountains, but hammers and nails are dumb and dangerous in my paws. I am ill at ease in the homestead; ill at ease in my body. On horseback I have a good seat, but even in my own hut I am antsy. As soon as I’m inside, I want out, and as soon as I’m out, I miss my den. Every few weeks I demolish part of the hut, build a new section and another bit collapses. I can never decide where the window should go. Every day or two I bash another window hole into the reed-and-branch wall facing onto the rocky hills. After three months I break out the whole wall and plant a thick wagon-tree trunk to take over the load-bearing function of the wall. Now I can see what I want to see. In the hut is a low table of leftover planks at which I can sit cross-legged on the ground. I dig a hollow in one corner in which I cover myself with hides at night.

I’m forever fiddling with the framework of the hut. The roof sinks ever lower. A cracking sound at night, a few thin branches snap. An almighty crash, the whole lot shudders, and a portion of roof settles on the ground. Geertruy replaces the hide blinds in front of the homestead windows with wooden shutters – unglazed, but more in keeping with the standards of the neighbours. Before the onset of winter I plaster the outside of the hut with clay to keep the heat inside and the rain outside. At the homestead the door opening makes way for the chimney shaft of stone. The door moves to the side of the house. Inside the hut I’m forever digging away at the hollows to make them deeper. Dipshit David builds his walls higher, plasters them, whitewashes them. I visit the homestead less often; it turns into more of a permanent residence by the day. Officials journey past and they inspect and record and approve.

The Senekals’ house arises in the course of months, inconspicuously and prudently the thing burgeons and bulges like a whitewashed anthill. The walls whiter by the day, until one morning you could swear that there were two suns rising, one on each side of me; my hut sinks ever deeper to the level of a jackal lair.

I crawl into my hut, curl myself up and look at the stars. Orion looms overhead. I grow fast and go to sleep quickly. When I’m not too tired I measure my shaft. One of these days an ell! Believe me, I can squirt up to six feet already. The Hottentots give me dagga. At times I miss company, but as soon as I find it, I want to get away as fast as possible. I take long walks till far into the night. On my way back I usually loiter past the extinguished dung-and-bush fires next to the Hottentot huts. The grass is showing yellow already one early morning when I crawl in among Saterdag and his people where they’re all lying in a heap snoring and fighting for the few hides on the floor. The next morning they go their way as usual, as if I’d always been sleeping there. Three weeks later it just seems simpler to go and lie among them again when my jackal hole feels too big.

When I’m not hunting, I’m in the veldt with the cattle, and often there is no light in my hut for nights on end. Geertruy asks me now and again where I sleep, but gets no reply out of me. In the morning before daybreak I sometimes walk down to the stream and drill a hole in the river clay and take off my clothes and poke my prick into the hole and stretch myself out flat on the earth with arms and legs spread and when I shoot my load, I push my face into the soil. So there, you wanted to know it all, didn’t you. I wash myself in the river. After a particularly energetic clay-bashing there is a strange rash that leaves me feeling feverish and I pray all night for forgiveness and healing and the next day I’m even more feverish and I’m shitting water and I go back to the river and I bash my bride with conviction till I see visions and fall asleep on the clay body of the riverbank and when I wake up I can remember the dream and my fever is broken.

I’m sitting in the sun against the stone wall of Geertruy’s kitchen, oiling my rifle. Nowadays Geertruy has to invite me formally to a meal. I seldom turn down these invitations, but I never just turn up out of the blue. When I’m invited, I always arrive at the homestead early. Then I settle down outside and find something to occupy my hands while I watch the Senekal children playing with their minder. Maria, with the Malay eyes and the Hottentot hair. She’s younger than me, but her body is ripe and ready. I chiselled out the star of Diana on the butt of the rifle myself and set a copper star into it. As soon as I touch a gun, my hands get clever, smaller, slimmer. I oil the wood of the baboon-butt. I follow the grain of the stock, my nose pressed to the wood. I coat the barrel with a different oil and a different cloth. The trick is not to manhandle the barrel. Take your time. For a while just see how slowly you can do it. The cloth mustn’t press on the metal, it should just touch. And then again a vigorous polishing till the metal grows burning hot. I never speak to her. I clean the rifle or cure a hide or smoke. Especially when David Devil-cramp is in the offing, I smoke furiously and wait for him to say something. At table he will then slap at an invisible flea or make some comment about my clothes smelling like a Hotnot’s.