Owen Sheers - The Dust Diaries

As she gets nearer, he can see that her coat is shabby and flea-bitten and she is short on one hind leg, as if she has injured her hip. More than likely, he thinks, another victim of the drought, forced to hunt for food in a town emptied of people for the day. She turns towards the knot of men standing on the stoep once more, her ribcage expanding and contracting as she breathes, then she looks away again, moving her head with the same slow deliberation. Movement behind Arthur indicates the arrival of Charlie. He can hear his heavy, panting breath and the sound of a gun breaking open.

But now the lioness is moving again too, stalking towards the veranda of the post office. And it is then, as he watches her slouch nearer the post office steps, that Arthur sees the dog. A bull terrier, tied by its lead to a pole on the stoep. Until now it has been quiet, crouched back in the shadow of the awning, but as the lioness approaches, her shoulders hunched high in hunting position, it begins to bark, pulling its lead taut and letting out explosive yelps of fear.

‘OK, stand back, give him room.’ McGregor again. Arthur feels someone push him to one side.

‘Shoot, go on, shoot!’ someone else says, and then Charlie’s voice, clenched, quiet, ‘I’m waiting for a clean shot, you idiot. I want that skin.’

But now the terrier’s yelps have become whines, and its lead has slackened as it retreats from the edge of the stoep. It’s what the lioness has been waiting for and with one sudden push of her hind legs she lunges forward onto the squealing terrier, crashing her heavy front paws, black claws extended, down on the dog’s body. In the same movement she clamps her jaw about the back of its neck and with one sharp tug breaks the lead from the pole. Spinning on her hindquarters she runs off the stoep and up the high street, the terrier in her mouth, its legs still kicking, and the broken end of the lead trailing in the dust behind her.

As she turns a rifle cracks from behind Arthur and one of the post office windows blossoms into shattered glass. ‘Shit.’ Charlie’s clenched voice again. Then another man’s voice: ‘The second barrel, the bloody shot!’

The lioness keeps running as Charlie fires the second barrel of the combination hunting rifle, firing a twelve-bore cartridge instead of the first.303 bullet. The lioness, at full gallop with the terrier limp in her mouth, corners around the last building in the street as the gun explodes again. A second later the rush and crackle of pepper shot streams through the branches of a tree like a plague of locusts. But the lioness has gone.

And then there is silence. Just the echo of the gunshot reverberating between the wooden buildings, and the dust, blowing up in eddies of wind in the empty street. And on the stoep of the post office, a splash of blood and a broken lead tied to nothing but air.

♦

That evening, as Arthur prepares for his evensong in the Dutch Reformed Church, he hears the men of the town outside making their own preparations, organising and setting off on a hunting party to track down the lioness. A rogue lion will not be tolerated, and he listens from his vestry to the yapping of the dogs, the clutter of ammunition belts being strapped on and rifles being shouldered. They are going to war with the veld, an invasion party to revenge the invasion of their own bolt-hole of civilisation.

Later, he preaches to a small congregation of women, children and old men only. He tells the parable of Daniel and the lion, and Pastor Liebenberg bangs out the hymns on the old piano. The singing is not as lively or joyous as his services in Wreningham. None of the women here shut their eyes when they sing, sway, break from the pews and shuffle a dance. But it still lifts his spirits to hear the hymns sung, each note marking out a territory of his own.

The men return with the lioness as Arthur is shutting up the church and padlocking the door to the vestry. The light has almost faded from the day and a streak of sunset lies across the horizon, setting off the trees and thorn bushes in sharp silhouettes. They return triumphant, the dogs barking at their heels and the body of the lioness slung across an old Scotch cart which they pull themselves, four at the front holding the shafts and two on either side, like a royal procession. Except in this procession, the queen is dead, shot through the heart, the stomach and the hip, dried blood caked on her golden coat. Her eyes are still open and her tongue hangs from the side of her jaw, a slab of pink flesh, shaking with the movement of the cart.

As the men pile into Vic’s Tavern taking the body of the lioness with them, Arthur can’t help feeling that he is witnessing a defeat, not a victory. He shoulders his satchel, and begins his walk out of town back to Wreningham. Walking down the street he passes through the gold bars of light cast across the road from the windows of the hotel. From inside he hears the chatter of happy men, the clinking of glasses, a tune winding up on a gramophone, and, as he walks on into the darkness, the faint click and heartbeat of billiard balls connecting and rebounding off the soft baize of the table.

Although he is only eleven years old, Tendai has been waiting outside Baba Cripps’ rondavel all night, ever since the n’anga appeared out of the thick bush behind the schoolhouse and announced he had come to see the white mufundsi . Tendai’s mother told the n’anga that Baba Cripps was in Enkeldoorn, but the n’anga said he would wait, striding over to Baba Cripps’ hut and crouching on his haunches at the side of the compound where the beaten earth became bush.

Tendai had seen the n’anga before at his aunt’s village. He’d once watched from outside a group of older men as he divined with bones and on another occasion he’d sat outside a hut where the n’anga was talking to a spirit that had possessed his uncle. The spirit had asked for goat’s blood and the n’anga had sent for a he-goat. Tendai remembered the white of its hair in the dim early morning and the sound of the blood gulping from a slash in its throat into a calabash bowl. Despite these occasions, he still couldn’t stop himself staring at the n’anga now: at the silver-grey baboon skin slung over his shoulders, the beads about his neck and the bangles round his ankles, his walking staff adorned with ostrich feathers and the skin pouches tied around his waist that jiggled on his hips when he walked.

His mother had told him not to stare, and giving him a gentle tap around the ear she’d taken him inside their rondavel to wash. But later, when she pushed him out again to go to bed, Tendai saw the n’anga was still there, sitting motionless beside Baba Cripps’ rondavel. So he did not go to bed, as his mother had told him to, but crept over to Baba Cripps’ rondavel and sat against its wall, just on the other side where the n’anga couldn’t see him. He would wait there for Baba Cripps to come back, and when he did, he would tell him the n’anga was there to see him.

♦

Tendai and his mother had been living at Wreningham for nearly as long as he could remember. In fact, there was only one clear memory Tendai had that was not of his life at Wreningham. It was his first and it was of his father dying.

He must have been just three years old. It was after the uprising and he and his mother were hiding with other mothers and children in a cave in the kopje near their village. He remembers the dark, wet smell of the rock that had never seen sun. The flapping and screeching of the bats above them. And then hearing the explosion. No, feeling the explosion in the cave next to them. Like a giant hand through the rock, pushing them away from the wall. The explosion in the cave next to them, in the cave where his father was hiding with the other men.