Willem Anker - Red Dog - A Frontier Novel

That night I lie awake dreaming up a pair of breeches of soft black fur with white spots. I can feel in advance how it drapes my legs, how gently the saddle bumps my furred backside. When I get Vyfdraai on his own again, I ask him how one could get hold of a whole lot of the mole rats. He says they live in colonies, he says easily forty to a nest. He says the nest isn’t just there for the taking, it’s eight feet underground. You have to catch them when they’re active, when they’re tunnelling after the rains.

When I saw the thunderstorm starting to gather this morning, I knew my breeches were lying in wait for me buried deep, there where the grass disappears into the earth.

Today, I tell my people, we’re hunting for a new pair of breeches for me.

The rain sets in, great drops thud on the sand like fists. Every man and his mate find a stick or spade or axe handle or any blunt object that can hit hard, and follow me to the moles. I spread a tarpaulin in the rain and make a fire under it for the firebrands later. See, we’re a bunch of twenty or so armed men and women standing and staring at the ground.

The tunnelling starts. Molehills spring up, grasses and flowers sink away. There’s no end to the rain. I curse, but Vyfdraai says it’s a good thing, these rains. He burrows open a molehill. The waters of the heavens quickly flood the tunnels, the deluge drives the first mole rat to the surface. Vyfdraai clobbers it with his knobkerrie. We follow his example. Dig open the heaps, let in the flood, wallop a fleeing mole or two. Vyfdraai tosses the mole rat at my feet.

We must find the queen, he says.

Queen?

Vyfdraai says in the depths of the mole rat nest there are only one male and one female who mate, the others are celibate workers. If the queen falls, then the whole colony scatters.

What is a home without a mother? I ask.

He says when the whole lot disperse like that over the open ground, then every eagle and jackal in existence appears, and most of the little beasts are devoured. As soon as the queen cops it, they’re all buggered. It’s not for nothing they live underground. Above ground the creatures have never had a chance. I think of my jackal’s lair in Shit-skull Senekal’s yard. I smell once more the snugness, being cherished in the belly of the earth.

Vyfdraai and I kick open mole hills, jab sticks into the ground to find the tunnels and follow the tunnels to where they converge in one spot. I hand out firebrands and on all sides my people start smoking out and finishing off the vermin. We dig down to the shallowest tunnel and ram in the firebrands. I daydream about the smoke surging through the tunnels, ever deeper, into the store rooms, over the little ones lying asleep, all the way into the throne room. The mole rats swarm out, hordes of the creatures.

There’s the bitch! Vyfdraai shouts.

He scurries after a little fat one, clearly pregnant and clumsier than her slaves. Never thought such an old goat could still streak. He slips in the mud, gets hold of her and flattens her with his knobkerrie. It’s a massacre. Around me the yells and blows as we all exuberantly squash the forty or fifty, the goddam army, of mole rats.

With our bloodthirst quenched, we start gathering and skinning the moles. The skins are thrown on one heap, the carcases on another – a heap of crumpled fingers of giants, with teeth. When the sun starts setting, we make a mole rat casserole. The meat is fairly edible. You have to cook it for a long time and add some of Elizabeth’s leaves.

My wives and daughters bray the skins and prepare them, and it’s not a week or see, my new mole-rat-skin breeches. I put them on and strut around in them and wait for their reactions. Nombini and Elizabeth don’t say much. Toktokkie and Aletta think it’s lovely. Maria laughs herself off her feet and has to sit down.

My good Lord, Buys. You’re getting to be more of a clown by the day. Look at your tomato nose and the spotted breeches. Ai, my husband.

She gets up and hugs me and kisses my cheek and walks off grinning. I stand a polished dish against a wagon wheel and inspect myself from my belt down to my feet. To the devil with you all.

Here I stay and from morning to evening my sons and I practise until we’ve mastered the bow and arrow. I cut arrows until I have two quivers full, grease a few bowstrings well with fat. My moleskin breeches are already balding on my backside from all the sitting around, but they still keep the contents inside and warm. The rest of my wardrobe is karosses and thongs and raw hides. Buys, the Esau of Africa, attired in the skins of many creatures.

My hands cramp me awake. I tie up a few karosses in a bundle, take two bows, the two quivers of arrows, the extra strings and tie the whole lot to a pack ox. I hug Maria and Elizabeth and a few of my children and kiss one or two here and there. Elizabeth gives me a tied-up parcel with biltong and herbs for the rheumatism. Maria sighs and mumbles something and Nombini is nowhere to be seen.

I get onto the ox and head north by east and go in search of the country of the Ngwato.

My body aches too much to sleep and every day I ride for as long as the ox responds to the quirt. Alone on this endless plain a man thinks too much. Your thoughts wander far afield and return and then start chasing their own tails. I sniff at my hide attire. My sweat regenerates the sweat and blood of the previous owners of the hides. Am I my skin or do I have my skin?

In the long nights my red dogs howl around me. I catch sight of them every now and again. They keep their distance, wary in the wake of this hairy thing that looks like Buys, but smells like an uncouth concoction of creatures.

Next to my little fire I look at the stars, I look at the black bushes in front of me, I think back a long way. As soon as I try to think ahead, it’s just the flames and the bushes. I must go further, forward, to the horizon. But the horizon remains the border. There is no ultimate haven to look forward to. After every horizon another arises from the plains. Three days later I no longer think of anything. I hear my breath, I feel the belly of the ox beneath me rumbling, I smell the sand the hooves dislodge. The white sky and the anthills under trees. When of an afternoon the ox tires, I don’t walk on. My bare paws are not callused enough for this seething sand. I taste the melon and the last tobacco. See, I poke my prick into the moist and warm nostril of the ox.

After eight days, not far from the Tswapong hills, I find the Ngwato and their kraal. I get back onto the goddam ox and ride back ten days to Kolobeng and fetch my people and load the wagon and trek north and east back to the Ngwato.

A day’s journey from our new hosts the wagon wheel breaks, smashed to accursed smithereens. We drag brushwood in under the wagon and haul the ramshackle thing until the people spot us and help us along the last stretch to their huts. As we trek with the broken-wheeled wagon and the Heathens pushing and pulling and pothering at the overladen waddling house, the whole contraption breaks up more and more until towards the end of July 1821 we limp in between the fires of the Ngwato with a heap of firewood and splinters on two wheels and Chief Kgari comes to meet us laughing and shaking his head.

I want to get to the Portuguese, to Inhambane, to the land of linen and gunpowder, but with this wagon we’re going nowhere. The women like it here and complain when I talk of trekking on. While my sons and I try to fix the wagon, I tell the Hartenaars to devise a house in the meantime. Wattle-and-daub houses are no more than square huts and the Ngwato don’t take much notice of the building activity, but a house on wheels remains an oddity for them all. For the first week or three we work on the wagon every day. The thing has to be rebuilt from scratch. After a month we get to the wreckage hardly once a week. When we hammer away at the wagon there’s always a crowd of curious lookers-on. Sometimes they’re already sitting waiting for us around the wagon wreck when we come walking up with our hammers and saws.