Norman Rush - Mating

I was leading Baph by a rope attached to his headstall. Mmo was on a halter tied to Baph’s pannier rack. Mmo was the one who was being the most difficult. I thought I could improve things, as I had a couple of times before, by getting between my boys and leading them as a team. So I untied Mmo and in the process lost him. It was instantaneous.

It happened because I had brought only one compass with me and I had developed a recurring anxious need to reassure myself that it was where it had to be, in my left breast pocket. It calmed me to touch my pocket. I let go of Mmo’s rope for just the fraction of a second touching my pocket took. I must have done this before, without incident. Mmo shot away like a genius. I had never seen him move like that. It was fast and purposive. I was paralyzed. I thought I must have done something to him I was unaware of, hurt him. It froze me. What was he doing and what should I do? I had treated him well, I thought. I lost crucial time trying inanely to think what it was I must have done. There was also the feeling that it was unthinkable that he wouldn’t reconsider in a moment and come back. I started after him, but Baph was only willing to walk and there was no way I could see myself letting go of Baph. The idea of tying Baph to a tree and then running as fast as I could after Mmo was not accessible to me.

I even took time to stupefy myself with a moment or two of class rage. I could never have been one of those adolescent girls who deified the horse family. You had to have money for that. If I had ever been exposed to horses for more than ten minutes in my life I might have had a better idea of what to do now or what I should have avoided doing that led my boy to bolt, which might be dooming me. Probably it would be a wonderfully empowering thing for a young woman to get to clasp her legs around a powerful naked male beast and make it do things, jump over obstacles on command, and so on. This could be one of the sources of the self-confidence you envy in rich women, not that the sources of self-confidence in the rich are not as numberless as the sands of the Gobi. I had known a few equestrienne darlings in their little caps who rode in shows. Or rather I had been aware of them. In the meantime Mmo was a hundred yards away, looking back over his shoulder at me.

Finally I did tie Baph up and try to run in earnest after Mmo. It was too late. I was now terrified to get too far from Baph out of fear that something might happen to him in my absence. Each sortie drove Mmo farther out of reach. Baph acted frantic each time I left. Worst of all, I realized that I had no idea what the equivalent of Here kitty kitty is for a donkey. There had to be something that Batswana drovers used. In my state of pride and momentum I had never bothered to ask. This more than anything demoralized me. Even if I got inside his startle zone, what then?

Mmo cantered out of sight. I tried to reconstruct what portion of everything he was carrying. It was some of the feed, some of the water, and my tent. Never do this again, was my main brilliant injunction to myself.

I suppose what I should have done was take Baph and trail along in the general direction Mmo had taken in hopes that he would relent and come back. But this was inconceivable. Mmo was going away from Tsau, not toward it. I had no idea how long such a game might go on, either. In any case I was convinced that I would be unable to plan anything until I got out of the grove and into some less accursed part of the landscape.

After the Gray Place

We got clear of the gray place, as I was calling it to myself, and stopped. I was petting Baph insanely. We had a very modest amount of water left.

I was full of guilt. Whatever risk he had imposed on me by decamping, Mmo was dooming himself. I must have been being too routine toward these animals, not loving enough, not enough in rapport with them. These were beasts of burden whose cargo was my survival. I had failed them, or failed one of them.

Now what would I do, other than what I had been doing, except faster? It was about now that I noticed with disgust a trace of elation in my reaction to what things had come to. Apparently I was furtively pleased that the level of difficulty had gone up. I reject this tendency in humanity. I had always seen it as a specifically male pathology, yet here it was, even if dilutely. A young ne’er-do-well attempts to kill himself by shooting himself through the head and when he only succeeds in blinding himself is galvanized with determination to get into law school, overcome his new disability, and become a millionaire lawyer, which he does. This was the company I was finding myself in in the Kalahari.

Remember the hunchbacks, interpret nothing, I said to myself. You are going to be abnormal until this is over, because no one crossing the Kalahari alone is going to be normal after the second day. I felt superficially better. It helped that we were back in a more standard part of the desolation.

The thing to do was to get to Tsau immediately. This was my new solution for everything. Nothing interested me but that. Ostriches crossed our path several times that afternoon and I barely paid attention, even though this is one of the few birds I have any kind of curiosity about. One reason we had to get to Tsau faster than planned was because my tent was gone, which meant having to stop early enough each night to collect enough wood to keep major fires going throughout the night without fail. Being lax or nominal about this would not be possible. We picked up the pace considerably, and Baph was good about it at first.

We went too fast. Going faster meant needing to rest more. During one rest stop I fell asleep sitting against a tree and was awakened by being jerked over by Baph, to whose halter I had tied my hand. We resumed. I pressed us. I even got Baph to canter for short stretches.

I never whine but was whining then. We aren’t getting to Tsau, was what I was whining. It was as though I thought that by sheer urgency I could force Tsau to rise out of the ground. It irritated me that we would be unable to go in a beeline for Tsau because the remaining water points lay significantly south or north of our route. Why had I let myself make such cursory calculations of how much time would be consumed in deviations from our route?

Camping that night was macabre, What my map led us to was an abandoned cattle post, probably German, dating from the early protectorate and obviously derelict for years. There were tumbledown pens and stall fencing, a burst and heeling dip tank, piping, remnants of buildings, and at the center of the complex an ox pump, meaning a butterfly-shaped iron rig which two oxen could be harnessed to and then driven to turn, goaded to plod endlessly in a circle to raise the water. The nails I occasionally kicked up were antique. On the face of it this should have been a more sinister venue than the gray place, but it never registered that way with me. I was totally absorbed in hurrying.

I was manic. I threw myself into wrenching half-buried timbers out of the ground and dragging old planks and poles from the farthest reaches of the property to heap up in piles in a rough circle around the pump. Most of the wood went into a central dump which I would sleep next to and from which I would chuck replenishment into the barrier fires from time to time. What was left of the place, I virtually razed. This was arson, not camping. I hope the site had no historical value. Nothing could slow me, not even my cold fear about water. I had decided early on that very far down the well shaft something was glinting that must be water. How I would get it remained to be seen. The apparatus was rusted rigid, completely inoperable. But that problem was for the morning. Even when I sensed I had enough wood I went for more. I put off eating. I had failed to bring gloves of any kind, so in short order my hands had become rich with splinters I would have the pleasure of dealing with later. I know what I was doing. I was overpreparing the event because I dreaded my next task, which was to inventory my supplies and face what Mmo’s defection had done to them.