Barely an hour’s trek from where we struck camp this morning, the yellow grass of the plain feels like a long day’s journey away, as if time itself got snagged here in the long thorns that claw and clutch. The water, thick and strong as Maria’s coffee, winds through the kloofs where the thorns grow lush and kudus appear and disappear in tracks that only they can see. In these thickets you could disappear very quickly, for ever if that was what you wanted. To cajole the cattle through this lot is a bloody manoeuvre, even where the water is shallow. There are hiding places aplenty; here everything happens mysteriously. I don’t hear the shell of the tortoise crack under the wagon wheels in the drift, only see the river floating the shards of shell and limbs downstream. This primordial creature that for thousands and thousands of years has been scrabbling unchanged under the indifferent sun. How do I know this? you ask. When I wonder about the soul, I read about vertebrae and magma.
The stream is powerful. It takes what it will. It doesn’t ask before it takes. You have to heed it, even though you don’t heed laws. I frequent the river. I know the river almost as well as the Caffres know it. See, the two groups are standing on opposite banks of the Fish. They don’t look at each other. They are standing on opposite sides of the border watching the border between them coming down in flood and swallowing a sweet thorn and swirling it along and calving a chunk of clay soil into the water. The bartering of cattle and tobacco and copper proceeds without violence. The Christians and the Caffres are wary of each other and joke coarsely among themselves to cover up the tension, but the Hottentots riding with the Christians are taciturn and watch both groups with narrowed eyes.
I pick up words readily as they drop around me. A year or so after my arrival on the border I’m fluent enough to laugh with the Caffres about the Christians who have foreskins and nothing else. If you want to survive here, you buddy up with folks. Farmers of the area who know with whom and how cattle can be bartered. If they turn up on your farm to hear if you want to go and barter cattle with the Caffres, you saddle up and trot along. You must first learn the rules of the game before you can play on your own. Before you can rewrite the rules. Eight or ten armed horsemen are better than one Christian and his gang of Hottentots. This doesn’t mean that you have to strike up bosom friendships. It doesn’t mean that you can’t laugh with the Caffres about the lot on your side of the river. The Christians laugh too, because they see me laughing. I wink at my white pals and I nod at the Caffres.
When both groups have taken from the other what they can and both groups are satisfied that they’ve screwed over the other, they return in opposite directions to their respective wives and children and their just about identical homes of reed and clay.
At home we all sleep next to one another on a pile of hides. The baby is swaddled separately in a hide against the wall. Maria lies in the middle, Elizabeth and I on either side of her, each with the head on one of her breasts. Somewhere in the night Elizabeth crawls over Maria and comes to lie between her parents. The hides don’t cover us properly. I lie awake, uncomfortable with the child half across me. The little body is thin, I feel the skeleton under her skin. I think of how easily the little bones can break. I can’t settle. If I change position, Elizabeth will wake up. Then Maria will wake up. Then all repose will be shattered. I lie dead still and stare at the rush ceiling above me. I listen to the wind buffeting the house, how the rafters gnash and the reed door hammers at the thong tying it down. The wind inhales through every crack and then exhales again in a great sigh as if we’re lying inside an organ of a larger animal of wood and reed and stone. I take one little arm in my hand, lift it up, feel it, the fine frangible bones, the soft flesh, the little hand seeking my hand and clamping a finger. The child huddles up against me, the little head pressed into my stomach, a soft sigh, then a gurgle. Elizabeth has caught a cold. Tomorrow she’ll be ill. The child is weighing down my arm, but I don’t change position. If I were to move now, she’d wake up and start crying and turn around, away from me. She’s never before lain against me like that. Even if to her I’m just a warm object she snuggles up against and even if she doesn’t know what she’s doing, it’s something that must last as long as possible. I don’t move. I listen to the child and watch the little body slowly inhaling and exhaling and now and again twitching in a dream. We lie like that till the sun rises. I get up stiff and sore, and the day begins.
They pay me almost a year’s rent to supply wood for the new extensions in Graaffe Rijnet. In 1787 I borrow a few wagons and load them with yellowwood planks – more than a thousand-five hundred feet of wood – and five Hottentots and two Caffres and trek to the settlement that the Cape periwig-pansies transmogrified a few months ago from farm to town. Word is that they offered one Dirk Coetzee a shit-sack of money for his woebegone farm in a horseshoe bend of the Sundays River and baptised the place Graaffe Rijnet, for the bibulous governor and his wife who between them pour and cram the contents of the Company’s coffers down their gullets.
As we travel, the mountains multiply slowly, one calf at a time, like elephants. The dogs turn up the day after I leave Brandwacht. The red dog takes up position by my side and trots next to my horse. The rest of the pack spread out around the wagons, at a distance from the wagon trail, glimpsed only here and there and now and then. The dogs make the Hottentots uneasy. They are used to the phantom dogs that always hover somewhere around me in the veldt, but normally the dogs keep their distance. This trip is different. We are far from home and from any habitation. By the time we outspan, the dogs are around the camp, usually eight or ten of them, sometimes as many as fifteen. They lie around the camp in groups of two or three. A few venture as far as the fire, where the one-ear is lying by my feet. I don’t touch the dog. He doesn’t snool for attention like tame dogs. The dogs gobble up the bones that are thrown in their direction, but for the rest keep their distance. It is as if the dogs are traversing the same territory as us, but in a different sphere. As if they’re moving across the same veldt, but in a different time, and would canter straight through you like ghosts if you didn’t get out of their way in time. A day before we reach Graaffe Rijnet, the dogs disappear: I wake with the first light, tightly wrapped in my kaross. The red dog is lying gazing at me. He trots along next to Horse till late in the morning and then suddenly swerves east and is gone among the low shrubs.
We cross the shallow river, the wagons creaking and screeching over the rock shelves. The trampled strip of soil would seem to be the street; the huts and clay hovels sporadically on either side then presumably the town. Horses stand tethered in front of the houses, here and there smoke drifts out of a chimney, more often out of doors and windows. The geese in the street heave and hiss at the oxen. Some curs trot up to the wagons and try to piss on the turning wheels. One of the thatched roofs is on fire. A few bystanders in the street are watching the inhabitants carrying out their possessions and dousing the roof with buckets of water. I ride past a wagon smith, a carpenter, advertising their trades and skills on the street. After the journey across plains that extend as far as the earth’s warping like rotting wood, it seems as if the town is huddled up against the mountainous mass emerging from the soil like a wall. As if you would sleep more soundly with a mountain at your back. Overripe quinces lie on the ground in front of a scanty hedge. Goats gnaw at everything they see. I ride past what I’m told was once Coetzee’s stable and shed, apparently now the jail and church and school. My wagons have to pull up when a Hottentot drives a herd of oxen along the street, heading out of town. A falcon sits on a roof tearing at a thing with a tail that is still quivering.