John Coetzee - Scenes from Provincial Life

On the other hand, the venison, steeped in vinegar and then roasted (he watches his aunt cut slits in the dark flesh and stuff it with cloves and garlic), is even more delicious than lamb, tangy and soft, so soft that it melts in the mouth. Everything in the Karoo is delicious, the peaches, the watermelons, the pumpkin, the mutton, as though whatever can find sustenance in this arid earth is thereby blessed.

They will never be famous hunters. Still, he loves the heft of the gun in his hand, the sound of their feet tramping the grey river-sand, the silence that descends heavy as a cloud when they stop, and always the landscape enclosing them, the beloved landscape of ochre and grey and fawn and olive-green.

On the last day of the visit, according to ritual, he may shoot up the remainder of his box of.22 cartridges at a tin can on a fence post. It is a difficult occasion. The borrowed gun is not a good one, he is not a good shot. With the family watching from the stoep, he fires off his shots hastily, missing more often than he hits.

One morning while he is out by himself in the riverbed, hunting muisvoëls, the.22 jams. He cannot find a way to release the cartridge-case stuck in the breech. He brings the gun back to the house, but Uncle Son and his father are away in the veld. ‘Ask Ros or Freek,’ his mother suggests. He seeks out Freek in the stable. Freek, however, does not want to touch the gun. It is the same with Ros, when he finds Ros. Though they will not explain themselves, they seem to have a holy terror of guns. So he has to wait for his uncle to come back and prise out the cartridge-case with his penknife. ‘I asked Ros and Freek,’ he complains, ‘but they wouldn’t help.’ His uncle shakes his head. ‘You mustn’t ask them to touch guns,’ he says. ‘They know they mustn’t.’

They mustn’t. Why not? No one will tell him. But he broods on the word mustn’t . He hears it more often on the farm than anywhere else, more often even than in Worcester. A strange word, easy to misspell because of the silent t hidden in the middle. ‘You mustn’t touch this.’ ‘You mustn’t eat that.’ Would that be the price, if he were to give up going to school and plead to live here on the farm: that he would have to stop asking questions, obey all the mustn’t s, just do as he was told? Would he be prepared to knuckle down and pay that price? Is there no way of living in the Karoo — the only place in the world where he wants to be — as he wants to live: without belonging to a family?

The farm is huge, so huge that when, on one of their hunts, he and his father come to a fence across the riverbed, and his father announces that they have reached the boundary between Voëlfontein and the next farm, he is taken aback. In his imagination Voëlfontein is a kingdom in its own right. There is not enough time in a single life to know all of Voëlfontein, know its every stone and bush. No time can be enough when one loves a place with such devouring love.

He knows Voëlfontein best in summer, when it lies flattened under an even, blinding light that pours down from the sky. Yet Voëlfontein has its mysteries too, mysteries that belong not to night and shadow but to hot afternoons when mirages dance on the horizon and the very air sings in his ears. Then, when everyone else is dozing, stunned by the heat, he can tiptoe out of the house and climb the hill to the labyrinth of stone-walled kraals that belong to the old days when the sheep in their thousands had to be brought in from the veld to be counted or shorn or dipped. The kraal walls are two feet thick and higher than his head; they are made of flat blue-grey stones, every one of them trundled here by donkey-cart. He tries to picture the herds of sheep, all of them dead and gone now, that must have sheltered from the sun in the lee of these walls. He tries to picture Voëlfontein as it must have been when the great house and its outbuildings and kraals were still in the process of being built: a site of patient, ant-like labour, year after year. Now the jackals that preyed on the sheep have been exterminated, shot or poisoned, and the kraals, without a use, are sliding into ruin.

The kraal walls ramble for miles up and down the hillside. Nothing grows here: the earth has been trampled flat and killed forever, he does not know how: it has a stained, unhealthy, yellow look. Once inside the walls, he is cut off from everything save the sky. He has been warned not to come here because of the danger of snakes, because no one will hear him if he shouts for help. Snakes, he is warned, revel in hot afternoons like these: they come out of their lairs — ringhals, puff-adder, skaapsteker — to bask in the sun, warming their cold blood.

He has yet to see a snake in the kraals; nevertheless, he watches his every step.

Freek comes across a skaapsteker behind the kitchen, where the women hang the laundry. He beats it to death with a stick and drapes the long yellow body over a bush. For weeks the women will not go there. Snakes marry for life, says Tryn; when you kill the male, the female comes in search of revenge.

Spring, September, is the best time to visit the Karoo, though the school vacation is only one week long. They are on the farm one September when the shearers arrive. They appear from nowhere, wild men who come on bicycles laden with bedrolls and pots and pans.

Shearers, he discovers, are special people. When they descend on the farm, it is good luck. To hold them there, a fat hamel , a wether, is picked out and slaughtered. They take possession of the old stable, which they turn into their barracks. A fire burns late into the night as they feast.

He listens to a long discussion between Uncle Son and their leader, a man so dark and fierce he could almost be a Native, with a pointed beard and trousers held up by rope. They talk about the weather, about the state of the grazing in the Prince Albert district, in the Beaufort district, in the Fraserburg district, about payment. The Afrikaans the shearers speak is so thick, so full of strange idioms, that he can barely understand it. Where do they come from? Is there a country deeper even than the country of Voëlfontein, a heartland even more secluded from the world?

The next morning, an hour before dawn, he is woken by the trampling of hooves as the first troops of sheep are driven past the house to be penned in the kraals beside the shearing-shed. The household begins to awake. There is a bustle in the kitchen, and the smell of coffee. By first light he is outside, dressed, too excited to eat.

He is given a task. He has charge of a tin mug full of dried beans. Each time a shearer finishes a sheep, and releases it with a slap on the hindquarters, and tosses the shorn pelt on to the sorting-table, and the sheep, pink and naked and bleeding where the shears have nipped it, trots nervously into the second pen — each time, the shearer may take a bean from the mug, which he does with a nod and a courteous ‘ My basie! ’

When he is tired of holding the mug (the shearers can take the beans for themselves, they are country-bred and have never so much as heard of dishonesty), he and his brother help with the stuffing of the bales, jumping up and down on the mass of thick, hot, oily wool. His cousin Agnes is there too, visiting from Skipperskloof. She and her sister join in; the four of them tumble over each other, giggling and cavorting as if in a huge featherbed.

Agnes occupies a place in his life that he does not yet understand. He first set eyes on her when he was seven. Invited to Skipperskloof, they arrived late one afternoon after a long train journey. Clouds scudded across the sky, there was no warmth in the sun. Under the chill winter light the veld stretched out a deep reddish blue without trace of green. Even the farmhouse looked unwelcoming: an austere white rectangle with a steep zinc roof. It was not at all like Voëlfontein; he did not want to be there.