I am told the border is open once again, he says. Most of the people have moved away. The Caffres made it impossible for them there. We could trek back over the Fish and vanish into the bush there. The English wouldn’t know where to look for us.
I don’t hide.
We can’t bugger around in the wilderness for forty years like the Israelites, Buys.
The focking English think we’re trash. They don’t want us back in the Colony. The Caffres no longer want us in Caffraria. The Bushmen don’t want us in their hunting grounds. And the lot here are going to start murdering one another by next week if we don’t find something for them to do.
What do you suggest, he asks.
What is every man looking for in this land? What is all this fighting about?
Well, Buys, people do say that your head on a post would solve most problems hereabouts.
Exactly, Faber. Because a land of robbers asks for the main robber to be hanged, so that the other rascals can plunder in peace.
Buys, you’re stirring shit again.
No, listen. If in these parts you find a woman or a head of cattle, then you know it used to be another man’s. Everything is always already stolen. Let’s go and fetch ourselves some fresh cattle.
And women, Faber laughs.
And women, yes. We go and take ourselves fresh cattle and women and make a herd so strong that we can buy cannon to protect the kraals and velvet on which to nail our women.
Faber, grinning, scrabbles with a stick in the coals.
And where are we going to find these treasures, Buys?
I answer the question I’ve been waiting for all evening:
We bash our way through the Bushmen all the way to the Tambookies.
By the next morning the whole camp knows of my plan. Every Christian and Englishman walks with a bounce to his step and winks at me in passing. In the course of the next few days we start melting kitchen utensils for bullets again. Kemp gets to hear of the plan and starts trembling with dismay. His forehead blushes blood red when he faces me foursquare.
Buys, what are you doing with these people? You know you can’t do it. You can’t incite them to do evil.
You play your games, Kemp. I play mine.
Play? I don’t play, Buys, I am in service of the kingdom of God.
And I’m in service of the kingdom of take what you can before this place takes what you have.
A day or so before we were planning to start our campaign to the Tambookies the horses start pegging it. On the Monday two keel over, three on Tuesday and all the rest are ill. Some people think the disease keeps to the plains. We drive the horses up against the Stormberg. By Wednesday evening we are informed that three more have died. On Thursday morning Kemp accompanies me up the mountain to where the horses are kept. The missionary has recovered his health. Even though he’s much older, he keeps up all the way and doesn’t say a word when he stumbles or when branches scratch him. His jacket, which he still constantly wears without a shirt, shows white under the arms. He gabbles on incessantly about souls that he will save in Graaffe Rijnet, about the land lying fallow before him to convert. The Hottentot herders are glad to see us. They say they see Bushmen in the night. The scoundrels keep their distance, but make sure everybody knows they’re there. I give the herdsmen the lead and powder I can spare.
Kemp takes off his jacket and cuts open one of the dead horses. He messes around up to his elbows in the animal’s innards. With bloody forearms he shows where the guts are inflamed. Especially the colon and volvulus, he says. The good tidings, he says, is that there is no gangrene. He tugs at a gut, then he’s back into the horse with only his shoulders sticking out.
There’s colic here, brethren, he calls out from inside the carcase. Did the horse cough?
They cough, yes, master, says Ngei, Faber’s Hottentot.
Ah, of course. The midriff is irritated by the inflamed colon.
The thing has copped it, Kemp, let it be now. I don’t want to have to snuggle up to you in the mountains tonight.
Dear Buys, tonight you’ll snuggle up to your wife… to any or all of your wives. I know what’s wrong here. We have to bleed the horses as soon as they fall ill. Bleed them well.
That evening we devise a new plan. The Tambookies will have to wait until we’ve got fresh horses. Ngqika has horses. We must shoot an elephant. I volunteer for this. One of us will take the tusks to Ngqika as a gift to show we are still his chums and we don’t at all think that he’s crazy and dangerous and we have true as God all this time merely been trekking after elephants. A few of us will then follow the man with the tusks into Caffraria and filch the Caffres’ horses while Ngqika and his captains are receiving the guest. Nobody faults the plan. There is no other plan.
The next morning most of the company walk up the mountain to witness the great bloodletting. We are halfway up the mountain when we hear branches snapping as some creature comes charging down at us. I’ve got my gun at the ready; as the shrubs open up before me, it’s Ngei who blunders into me and collapses. I make him stand. The man’s body is covered in arrow wounds. The Hottentot convulses and vomits on the ground in front of him till he can’t breathe any more. He stands for a few moments with his hands on his knees and gasps and then he vomits again. He comes upright and clings to me. He starts babbling in his own language and in Dutch and nobody understands a word he’s saying. He sees Kemp and totters towards him and falls on his neck and says something again and drops down dead at his feet.
The scumbags can’t be far! I shout.
I run up the mountain to the horses.
I come upon the body of another Hottentot, also grazed with the arrow wounds that spread death through a human body within a quarter of an hour. I shout at the men further down the mountain to load their rifles, calamity is upon us. At the place where the horses were kept, I count fourteen carcases riddled with arrows. A few of the large bodies are still sighing and groaning and don’t know they’re dead already. I chase away the over-hasty vultures. After a long search we find three horses and two stallion foals indulging in the juicy grass stalks that will shimmer with dew for a while longer in the shade of the mountainside.
With our horses gone and dead we decide that in future we’ll keep close to the northern border of the Colony. Unless you’re an animal or a Bushman you need decent transport and bags of munitions to brave the untamed other side of the border. On 30 March we strike camp and trek west by north. That night I sit up with Glider, my beautiful, dear, beloved and faithful bay who has held up through it all, but is now also ailing. Before daybreak I shoot him. Yes, I cried.
It’s a cold April in this arid land when we arrive at Haazenfontein. The veldt shrinks back under the frost, but there is enough water for a desert people and it is high here. Some people say all the rivers of the country have their source here.
The wretched Kemp is shivering with cold and fever, but on Sunday morning he’s ready with three sermons, one for the Dutch, one for the focking English and then catechism for the Hottentots. The man’s flame is not quenched, but it seems to me as if he’s still not recovered his health after the major stomach ructions of a while ago.
I trek into the Colony on the ox-cart to find out from the Tjaart person – Field Commander van der Walt, I have since been informed – what my chances are for a pardon. Since I can no longer rely on the goodwill of the Caffre king, I’m starting to test the waters of the English temperament at the Cape so long. Kemp writes a pack of letters for me to take along. There is one to Van der Walt asking him to send his wagon to transport Kemp to the Field Commander’s farm in Tarka, from where he’ll arrange transport to Graaffe Rijnet. Then also a moving plea pertaining to my outlaw status.