A few Bastaards turn up at our camp on the Harts River and say they’re also fleeing before Stockenström. I say Find yourselves a place to lie down. Their bed rolls remain tightly coiled behind their saddles and the horses are not unsaddled and they’re a bit too interested in everything around them and the following morning they’re nowhere to be seen. I pack my stuff and trek north to a Barolong kraal at Khunwana.
In every flower there is a bee with feet full of pollen and a sting. The air is filled with the bleating of lambs and young goats. The calves suckle their mothers dry. The last shred of moon burns through the tent. The shadows play on Elizabeth’s skin like seven veils. She sits on the edge of the mattress, combs her hair with her left hand while her right hand is handling me somewhat reluctantly so that I should leave her alone till this afternoon. She is close to a hundred strokes with both hands when there is a yelling outside. She’s a dear good wife and tries to bring things to a head quickly, but oh well, it’s a struggle nowadays. With breeches tenting out and rapidly subsiding, I go and see what’s the matter.
A Bushman woman is howling like a hyena on heat. I have to shake her by the shoulders a few times before I’m told that she went to fetch water when the dogs started barking. She saw the men and the horses and the guns by the watering hole. I grab my gun and lace up my breeches properly and bawl Arend awake. We leap onto two of the horses that are nowadays kept saddled in rotation.
At the watering hole the gang are sitting on their haunches drinking with their horses. Quenching their thirst before coming to kill me. We tether our horses to a blackthorn and walk through the undergrowth and out into the open and I have to clear my throat before they look up. I recognise the droll little cocksucker who jumps up and points his gun at me and says I must give myself up. I inform him that there are already two guns trained on him. Cornelis Kok gulps and looks at his pals and sees their empty hands and their pale visages.
You came looting cattle with me, Kok. You got rich yourself. So why so full of virtue now?
These are other times, Buys.
I’d forgotten how shrill the little guy’s voice is.
It’s two goddam months later, you dog’s dick! I shout at him. Idid you people no harm!
There’s no longer room for you here, he shouts back. Your time is past. We’re taking you to Stockenström. With you in the Castle’s pit, we can carry on with our lives, be safe from your kind.
If you shoot me in the back, Bastaard, you’ll be safe in neither heaven nor hell nor any damned mission station.
Arend and I turn around and walk back to our horses. Three of the newly converted geldings fire at us and miss by a mile and I tell Arend Just keep walking and a fourth shot splinters a branch in front of us. Arend swings around and shoots a Bushman hanger-on in the shoulder. The commando behind us falls silent. We charge back to the camp as if death itself is biting our butts because it is.
There’s no time to flee. Everyone who can get hold of a gun ensconces himself around the camp. The women and children cower behind tents and wagons and rocks and screens and bushes and anthills. An hour or so later I see Kok’s pudgy-cheeked countenance peering out of the undergrowth. I take aim at my leisure, can’t wait to pull the trigger. Arend puts his hand on the barrel, shoves the gun down to the ground firmly. Kok beckons another Griqua catechumen closer. They whisper and I see what Arend means. They are scared. There are twenty, perhaps thirty of them, and we are an army, an army of whites and Caffres and Bastaards and Hottentots and Bushmen, pissed off and armed.
We’re coming back, Buys!
The squeaky little tremolo calls in the wilderness as Kok and the other Stockenström acolytes trickle away. Weeks later I receive the glad tidings that my corpse is once again worth a thousand rix-dollars to the Colony.
Stockenström’s little commando didn’t get very far, but there will be others. My life beside the Hart is over. With the price on my head I no longer dare venture onto any wagon trail. Nobody dare sell me gunpowder any more. Once again as free as the birds of the heavens, as free as my friend Arend, the pared-down slave. I spread my outlawed wings and by October I’m fleeing before rumours of a second commando seeking my blood and bounty, but it never turns up. When summer and the cicadas descend upon us searing and shrill, I’m building a house at Thabeng. The kraal is perched on the hills, surrounded with springs and hartebeest, abundant as the grazing. When in later years the Christians come to mine gold in the area, they’ll name their town, as is the custom, for what they can see: Hartebeesfontein, the fountain of the hartebeest.
The people come and complain to me about red hyenas with ridged backs that are biting their calves.
What are you coming to me for? I snarl at them. Do I have dominion over the hyenas of the wild?
Sefunelo’s wobbling double chin could make one wonder if his mother was a turkey and he was hatched from an egg, but alas not. The double chin is his own achievement, his reward for his percipience and prosperity. He allows me to shelter with his Rolong-Seleka on one condition: My magnificent herds remain mine as long as I and my horde remain at Thabeng. Should I leave him, my cattle remain behind in his kraals. To show that I’m settling here, I build a house of stone. By ‘I’ I mean to say Arend. I lend a hand, but Arend says which stone goes where. See, the first white man’s home in the trans-Vaal. While we’re building, I tell myself that I don’t miss the Couga. The women create a vegetable garden, big enough to feed the Buys nation and quite a few Seleka. Sefunelo eats my mealies and inspects my house and calls me his friend. If from time to time I go off to linger or loot among the Hurutshe and the Ngwaketse and all that is a Kwena kraal, he is the one who sees me off, my concubines grumbling and grousing in the background. And my wives don’t turn up either. Lord alone knows what’s going on in Nombini’s head; Maria eternally scolding around the house like the general she is. She says she has a household to husband against famine and failure and has no time for my games. Elizabeth stays with me in our stone house.
I keep trekking. You leave marks behind you, stains of experiences that stick to you again every time you walk past them. Every time, in those eastern frontier years, that I rode past old Langa’s kraal, I was struck with blindness and my mind’s eye did the seeing: that day I went to fetch Nombini. The way she looked at me while her people were being manhandled and murdered in front of her, how I lost her before I could steal her. That kopje in Bechuanaland – this I’ve never told anybody – where I shot off the Caffre’s nose, and how he laughed as he fell. And the deadly Yese – this I’ve babbled about ad nauseam – how I lay on the plaited rug and stared at the reed roof of her hut and thought of the men before me who had lain with her on that exact patch of compacted soil. Things too good and too terrible to be reminded of: the blue dread of the mountains, the terror of the plains; the wind through the golden veldt, as if rippling muscles were playing under the earth’s grass hide. The little bit of fur and the wound in the cleft of every woman. Eland. Lions. My red dogs. Quill and ink. Elizabeth’s mouth. The fat around my children that I scrub off and the navel cord that I fold double and knot and cut with a whetted knife. Baobabs. Glider. Arend. Danster. Gun and powder. Bezuidenhout. Kemp’s ruined feet. Maria. Windvogel. Those little blue flowers. Elizabeth in our stone house. You keep trekking, pursued by your life.