Willem Anker - Red Dog - A Frontier Novel

With the money that I at last get out of David Doddle-dick, I sign a leasehold on a piece of fallow land near the Kammanassie Mountains, to the north and inland through the poort. It’s not quite far enough from my family, but I don’t expect very many visits. My brother Johannes abandoned the land recently when he packed up for the eastern frontier. I called there from time to time and liked the black soil, the grey underbrush, the sudden spaces opening out from the ever-stifling Cloof. I don’t tell anybody; why should I? Of my being a father I don’t say much either. What can one say? It makes Maria happy. The baby’s hair is red like my beard.

I wake Maria one morning and tell her to start packing. I fetch Windvogel and we go and herd my cattle and sheep.

Go fetch your bundle, I say. Tie it up good and fast.

The rain is on its way. I saw it the previous evening by the meagre light of the crescent moon and by morning the mist from the sea is pouring over the southern mountains, all along the Cloof like milk boiling over. Surging cold churns over the mountain until the grey mountainside disappears. The shimmering mist settles behind the trees at the foot of the mountain like a second mountain, a solid spectre. The buttermilk clouds join heaven and earth and undo both.

I fetch my saddle in the house and cart the thing on my back over the fields to David Deathwatch. I tell him that Windvogel is coming along. Bumcrack-boil Senekal is not impressed. The Bushman who grew up among his Hotnots and guzzled his food and nowadays calls himself Windvogel Whatever can’t just bugger off at will, he says. The sooner I clear out from under his feet, the better, is his decision. But if I trek, I trek alone. I smile. I have my own land. Scurvy Senekal is no longer my boss. He prattles on about how he raised me and how he fed me and that he deserves better than being dragged in front of the magistrate for a few barrels of butter. I look down at my godfather, then up and into the distance.

Windvogel wants to come along.

He can want what he wants, he’s my Hotnot or Bushman or Godknowswhat and I decide where he puts his flat feet, I don’t care what the creature calls himself nowadays.

I smile.

So what’s so bloody funny now?

I’m just thinking what you’re going to look like soon.

I was like a father to you.

I was your tame Hotnot, I was never your child.

David Damnation loses his temper and then two of his teeth when my fist meets his face. He staggers, stoops to pick up his hat, then comes upright again. On his head here below my chin I see the sunburnt bald patch.

I’m done with you. Take your stuff. Hotnot-humper.

I’m not done with you , I say.

The smile again. Then the fists again until he’s lying flat and doesn’t get up again. I chuck his saddle off Horse’s back and cinch my own. Li’l Senekal mumbles something on the ground.

I ride to the homestead and take my leave of Geertruy.

Did you say good bye to David?

After our fashion.

Go well, Little Brother.

Go well, Sis.

She doesn’t press me to her and doesn’t cry and watches me riding away on her husband’s horse in my makeshift wagon with my common-law wife and my bastard child and my Bushman friend till she can no longer see me and then, I know, she stays watching the wagon trail. I ride on and look back.

What was to follow in my wake on that yard is all too predictable: The maid who screams as Shit-shanks Senekal walks into the kitchen. Geertruy whose eyes narrow when she hears the screams. My sister who turns around in the gravel, back to her husband’s house, to face the wrath awaiting her there.

A red dog with one ear and the hair bristling on its back comes walking out of the brush into the wagon trail, sniffs the air and watches us moving past. It puts out its tongue to taste the first few drops. It trots behind the wagon. Something rustles in the bushes on the road ahead. Maria points at two more dogs trotting along in the grass. The rain sets in. Further along in the bushes another ten or so of them, spread out in front of and next to and behind the wagon in the veldt; a whole pack.

The farm has a name already, and I don’t mess with it. De Brakkerivier, The Brackish River, lies over the first ridge behind Ezeljacht, but here the soil is already of a different kind, harder, barer. It’s a part of the world that changes its nature like day and night every half-hour’s ride on horseback. The coastal forests are not far behind me; beyond the Kammanassie Mountains in front of me a semi-desert lies far and wide. Look: slangbos, thorn trees low to the ground, slate and a few ostriches pecking at the stones. We outspan and instantly form part of the background.

The wattle-and-daub hut that we devise with frames of lathing covered with clay merges with the ridge. It’s a stronger and bigger construction than the nest in which Maria and I have been living for the past few years. Windvogel and Maria help and scold and eventually take over the building when I start nesting again instead of building. I stand watching them, how nimbly their hands work, how they can plait reeds and plaster clay. I rub my hands, scratch at the calluses, but the fingers remain blunt and stupid.

A month or so later a few runaway Hottentots arrive who beg for work and they also build huts for themselves and herd my cattle and slaughter a sheep as needed. I sit and smoke and contemplate the limits of my world and do absolutely nothing.

In summer I’m thirsty all the time. I wander into the veldt and return with a skin pouch full of honeycomb, some larvae still in the comb, and a body swollen and red from bee stings. I chuck the lot into a dish and go and sweet-talk Maria to make karrie. She puts water on the fire, pours lukewarm water on the honey. She comes to sit outside with me against our reed house like an upside-down basket. She takes the clay pipe from my hand and smokes. I try to smile with my swollen face. She takes a strong puff before returning the pipe.

You must build us some walls, she says.

What for, come winter we’ll be gone again.

For what do we have to trek along with the sheep? Can’t we just send the shepherds? Settle down here good and proper?

You come and sit here. I can’t stare at those accursed kopjes year after year.

I press her to me and we kiss and I let her go and I scratch at the bee stings on my cheek. Her skin is tight over her belly again. I stroke the oiled stomach. Look how those forearms squeeze out the honey into the bowl. Look how the point of her tongue sticks out while she’s straining the karrie must through a gauze cloth into a flask.

Do you want to go for a walk? My feet need to get out.

I scratch at the blisters.

I’m waiting for the karrie.

The stuff has to ferment for days, Buys.

I’ll wait.

She walks into the veldt and disappears over the ridge, buttocks tight with umbrage. The naked child comes out of the hut. My daughter is two years old and has her mother’s mouth and her mother’s rare slave name: Elizabeth. She never cries, hasn’t really started talking yet. I try to pick her up, but she struggles free. She sits down in the dust and looks at me. Later she moves closer into the shadow of the house. Now and again she looks round and smiles; as soon as I get up and come closer, she runs into the house.

When the karrie is ready at the end of the week, Windvogel and I start drinking in the morning and by the afternoon we are racing around on two wild ostriches until Maria comes to harangue us.