The next morning he dragged in bagfuls of river sand to spread over the floor. He split flat stones from the hillside strata and built up the front wall, leaving himself only an irregular slit through which to wriggle. He made a paste of mud and dry grass which he stuffed into the cracks between roof and walls. Over the roof he spread gravel. All day he did not eat or feel any need to eat; but he noticed that he was working more slowly, and that there were spells when he simply stood or knelt before his handiwork, his mind elsewhere.
As he was prodding mud into the cracks and smoothing it flat, it occurred to him that at the next hard rain all his careful mortarwork would be washed out; indeed, rainwater would come pouring down the gully through his house. I should have laid a bed of stones beneath the sand, he thought; and I should have allowed myself an eave. But then he thought: I am not building a house out here by the dam to pass on to other generations. What I make ought to be careless, makeshift, a shelter to be abandoned without a tugging at the heartstrings. So that if ever they find this place or its ruins, and shake their heads and say to each other: What shiftless creatures, how little pride they took in their work!, it will not matter.
In the shed there remained a last handful of pumpkin and melon seed. On the fourth day of his return K set about planting these, clearing a spot of ground for each individual seed in the sea of veld-grass that waved over the cemetery of the earlier crop. He no longer dared to irrigate the entire acre, for the greenness of new grass would betray him. So he watered the seeds one by one, carrying water from the dam in an old paint-tin. After this labour there was nothing to do but wait for the seed to shoot, if it would. In his burrow he lay thinking of these poor second children of his beginning their struggle upward through the dark earth toward the sun. His one misgiving was that by planting them in the latter days of summer he had not provided well.
As he tended the seeds and watched and waited for the earth to bear food, his own need for food grew slighter and slighter. Hunger was a sensation he did not feel and barely remembered. If he ate, eating what he could find, it was because he had not yet shaken off the belief that bodies that do not eat die. What food he ate meant nothing to him. It had no taste, or tasted like dust.
When food comes out of this earth, he told himself, I will recover my appetite, for it will have savour.
After the hardships of the mountains and the camp there was nothing but bone and muscle on his body. His clothes, tattered already, hung on him without shape. Yet as he moved about his field he felt a deep joy in his physical being. His step was so light that he barely touched the earth. It seemed possible to fly; it seemed possible to be both body and spirit.
He returned to eating insects. Since time was poured out upon him in such an unending stream, there were whole mornings he could spend lying on his belly over an ant-nest picking out the larvae one by one with a grass-stalk and putting them in his mouth. Or he would peel the bark from dead trees looking for beetle-grubs; or knock grasshoppers out of the air with his jacket, tear off their heads and legs and wings, and pound their bodies to a pulp which he dried in the sun.
He also ate roots. He had no fear of being poisoned, for he seemed to know the difference between a benign bitterness and a malign one, as though he had once been an animal and the knowledge of good and bad plants had not died in his soul.
His retreat was little more than a mile from the track that passed through the farm and then looped back to rejoin the secondary road leading into the farther reaches of the Moordenaarsvallei. Little frequented though the track was, there was still reason to be wary. Several times, hearing the faroff drone of a motor, K had to duck and hide. Once, walking idly in the river-bed, he chanced to look up and saw a donkey-cart passing within hailing distance, driven by an old man with someone else, a woman or child, beside him. Had they seen him? Afraid to stir and draw attention to himself, he stood frozen in his tracks in full view of whoever cared to see, watching the gentle progress of the cart down the track and behind the next hill.
As irksome as this incessant watchfulness was the restraint on the use of water. The vanes of the pump must never be seen to be moving, the dam must always seem to be empty; therefore it was only by moonlight, or else anxiously at dusk, that he dared release the brake, pump a few inches, and carry water to his plants.
Once or twice he came across hoofprints of buck in the damp soil, but gave no thought to them. Then one night he was woken by snorts and a clatter of hoofs. He crawled out of his house, smelling them before he saw them: the goats he had thought fled forever when the dam dried up. Stumbling after them, shouting abuse, throwing stones, fuddled with sleep but driven by a desire to save his garden, he fell and drove a thorn deep into his palm. All night he patrolled the acre. The goats emerged in the early-morning light, dotting the hillsides in twos and threes, waiting for him to go; and all day he had to remain on guard, making sorties after them with stones.
It was these wild goats, which not only threatened his crop but by their presence rendered the acre conspicuous, that decided him: henceforth he would rest by day and stay up at night to protect his land and till it. At first he could work only on moonlit nights: in the dense blackness when there was no moon he would stand rooted, stretching out his hands, fearful of the looming shapes he imagined about him. But as time passed he began to acquire the confidence of a blind man: with a switch held before him he would make his way along the track he had worn between his house and the field, release the brake on the pump, open the cock, fill his can, and carry water to one vine after another, folding the grass aside to find them. Gradually he lost all fear of the night. Indeed, waking sometimes in the daytime and peering outdoors, he would wince at the sharpness of the light and withdraw to his bed with a strange green glow behind his eyelids.
It had grown to be late summer, and over a month since he had left the camp at Jakkalsdrif. He had not searched for the Visagie boy, nor did it seem he would ever do so. He tried not to think of him, but sometimes found himself wondering whether the boy might not have dug a hole for himself in the veld, and somewhere else on the farm be living a life parallel to his own, eating lizards, drinking dew, waiting for the army to forget him. It seemed unlikely.
He avoided the farmhouse as a place of the dead, except when he had to visit it to hunt for necessities. He needed means of making fire, and in the suitcase of broken toys had the good fortune to find a red plastic telescope, one of whose lenses would focus the rays of the sun sharply enough to coax smoke out of a handful of dry grass. From a buckskin he found in the shed he cut strips and used them in making a catapult to replace the one he had lost.
There was much else he could have taken to make life easier for himself: a grid, a cooking-pot, a folding chair, slabs of foam rubber, more of the feed-sacks. He scratched among the odds and ends in the shed and there was nothing for which he could not imagine a use. But he was wary of conveying the Visagies' rubbish to his home in the earth and setting himself on a trail that might lead to the re-enactment of their misfortunes. The worst mistake, he told himself, would be to try to found a new house, a rival line, on his small beginnings out at the dam. Even his tools should be of wood and leather and gut, materials the insects would eat when one day he no longer needed them.