Maynier does not ride out in front of the commando as is usual for leaders, but gets the farmers who know the veldt and the bush to lead the way. He trots in the middle, shielded by the big men around him, on a huge bay that he can’t mount unaided. Every morning a Hottentot has to help him onto the horse. We jest among ourselves – but loudly enough for him to hear – that he should rather saddle one of his coiffured dogs. The nights are cold. Maynier wants to keep the fires small, as if all of the Zuurveld and Caffreland didn’t already know of us. At night I lie wrapped in two karosses and listen to the night. All that I hear are the hyenas and jackals and owls and the farmers around me who have been away from home too long and are too cold and then lie too close to each other and then the grunting. One night late Bezuidenhout slides in behind me and mumbles things I cannot hear. His beard is warm in my neck. He moves closer and in under my karosses and I let him have his way. He growls as he rams himself into me. Then it’s my turn and then I’m no longer so cold. I drift off for a while before we’re in the saddle again with the break of day and make raucous jokes about all that is tit and arse and cunt.
In the course of the next few days we don’t shoot many Caffres, but we do manage to plunder over two thousand cattle. Maynier looks both satisfied and terrified. He hasn’t fired a shot, has hardly issued an order and mostly just looked on in confusion while the Christians were doing what they’ve been doing since childhood. Then, one morning after shaving and putting on his outfit, which is already showing signs of wear and tear, he orders the commando to cross the Fish. Ferreira and other burghers whose callused palms mirror the landscape try to dissuade him. Maynier squirms uncomfortably on his horse. His foot slips from the stirrup but he keeps to his resolve. He wants to cross the drift at Trompetterskraal. Ferreira says the Caffres will see us trekking across and then simply drive their cattle over the river. With the whole commando in Caffreland, the Zuurveld will be undefended and the Caffres will be free to invade and lay waste the Colony once again. Maynier asks him if he’s clairvoyant and nobody laughs.
I know this land, is all that Ferreira replies.
Maynier pretends not to hear him and talks to the officer next to him. He flicks his horse too hard, the animal takes off in the direction of the drift, almost leaving him behind. Ferreira, small and squat and with a surprisingly loud voice, shouts after Maynier in God’s name to leave part of the commando on this side of the Fish to defend the goddam Colony. Maynier manages to rein in his horse, halts and returns to Ferreira. The two men glare at each other. Maynier grinds his teeth audibly, a muscle twitches in his cheek. I burst out laughing. Then some of the others also laugh. Maynier’s horse retreats from Ferreira and takes up position in front of the commando. He gives the order for Ferreira and me to be dealt lashes. Nobody moves.
We trek through the drift, over the border into Caffreland. In the bush I spot the red dogs once, but they stay out of the way of the raucous Christians. And behold, as soon as our last horse sets foot on the far bank, the Caffres drive their cattle across the river and over the border into the undefended Zuurveld and go and hide out with their cattle in the undergrowth along the Bushman’s River and Sundays River and murder and thieve as far as the other side of the Swartkops River and the remaining farmers in the area are once again in terror of their lives and flee.
The commando spans out. A few burghers set off to shoot game for the griddles. I sit to one side with Botha, Martiens Prinsloo, the two Bezuidenhouts, Campher and Van Rooijen and talk about hunting and women. I tell them the stories I have heard of baboons lazing about fat and contented on the farms where food is easy to plunder and the lions and leopards have long since been shot out. The young males no longer have to fight for survival and don’t have far to forage for food. They get bored and pursue antelopes and jump on them and rape them howling on the run and shriek like the four horsemen in the last book of the Bible.
A Gonna Hottentot named Hans turns up in the camp along with a group of peaceable Caffres. He convinces Maynier that they are of Ndlambe’s tribe and also want to bugger up the rebels Chaka and Langa. Maynier is overjoyed at the greater numbers and Hans and his Caffres join the ranks of the commando. The farmers smell a rat. Stoffel Botha says he recognises some of the faces; he says those mugs he’s seen with Chaka and those with Langa. He’s not happy with the Caffres that appear out of the blue and increase in number every morning and are welcomed into the commando. He tells his Hottentot to watch them at night. The Hottentot comes to report, out of breath and scored by thorns, that these Caffres leave the camp in the evenings and set fire to anthills and dry grass and other fires appear on the horizon and then disappear. He says that Hans’ Caffres are never from Ndlambe, they are warning Langa and Chaka. Botha tells us and we tell the commando leaders. Maynier says we need the trackers and they know the territory as we farmers don’t know it. He says Hans’ Caffres must stay and Hans’ Caffres stay. The glares of the farmers leave them in no doubt as to who invited them. Sometimes there’s a fight but not much and what’s the use. Hans’ Caffres trek with the commando until the commando is disbanded.
Three weeks long we yomp around in Caffreland. Up and down and to and fro, the trackers notwithstanding. Maynier spends eight days looking for a drift over the Keiskamma River, but there is nowhere that an ox wagon can cross. We decide to leave the wagons on the west bank of the river. The horsemen wade across the river mouth, deeper into the wilderness. I ride at the back and keep my trap shut and look around me and listen to all the nothing being spouted around me. I stroke Glider’s belly under me. How soft animals’ bodies are, hardly more than bags of blood, only just held up by hollow bones. See, the man next to me sits blond and upright on his horse and he doesn’t even notice that the mosquito is sucking the blood from his neck.
September is already unfurling its blossoms. The pen-pusher has now had enough of an outing and God knows it can’t carry on like this. I talk to the commando and once again my oration is mesmerising and persuasive. This time I use short sentences. Exclamations. Slogans and a joke or two. That’s all that’s necessary. By sunset there are more or less two hundred men standing in front of Maynier’s tent. I lift the flap and discover the chinless man inside, busy unlacing something like a corset. His little pallid belly, like something blind and unborn, wobbles over his belt. I say we want to speak to him. Maynier makes his appearance. The audience that he braves is furious and rebellious. A pace or two ahead of the rest I tower up above him insubordinately and grinningly and demand that he surrender command to Laurens de Jager of Swellendam. Maynier refuses and goes back into his tent and closes the flap. Oh, my mind’s eye bores through that tent: I can see him sitting on his cot, all night long, how he stares at the flap, how he expects every single moment that it will blow open and that I will stand there with something sharp and deadly.
And in the course of the next weeks there are a few skirmishes and a number of stolen cattle are claimed back and I mark my gun till the butt is a criss-cross of notches. Then I sand the butt clean and oil it properly and polish the copper star of the hunting goddess on the cheek side and don’t make any more marks on it. Believe me, when you’ve shot enough people the day comes when you have to stop counting. The commando calls at Ndlambe’s kraal. The fat regent promises to round up the rest of the stolen cattle and return them to us. This comes to naught and we trek deeper into Caffreland. In mid-October we attack the Caffres from two sides and shoot a horde of them and catch a few and loot more than seven thousand cattle.