The following evening we arrive at Kolobeng and the Bakwena of paramount chief Motswasele. Only some ten Hartenaar Bastaards and runaway slaves are still trekking with me. The rest of the company is connected to me by bonds of bastardised Buys blood.
The kraal is just about deserted. An old man says the people are out trapping game. My sons and I walk into the veldt to introduce ourselves. Just outside the kraal we find the Caffres walking in a huge circle as far as the eye can see. The Caffres furthest from the kraal come closer and closer. The animals tire themselves out running hither and thither. Even the women and children walk up to the exhausted animals and beat them to death.
A few days after we encamped at Kolobeng, Vyfdraai peeks into my wagon tent. I ask him where he’s come from, how he knew to find us here. He says he’s going to unroll his sleeping mat under the wagon if it pleases me. With him you don’t ask questions.
We eat the Bakwena’s melon and millet. My red dogs laugh like hyenas in the night. One or two come to scavenge food when the camp is dozing in the afternoon. We sleep behind the six-foot stone walls of the Bakwena. I remember stories that these stone workers are the descendants of the people who built the palaces of Solomon’s concubine, the Queen of Sheba. The queen of Africa who spread her legs for the king of Israel; the wise king who carted off her treasures in royal caravans so that his buttocks could recline on ivory and his lips could sip the table wine from golden goblets. Of gold and ivory and Biblical riches not much remains, but their melons are sweet as honey. And they don’t mess with my goddam cattle.
Today, I tell my people, we’re hunting for a new pair of breeches for me.
Last week I was watching a clump of grass quivering by my feet and then being sucked into the ground. Vyfdraai is in attendance, ancient and sturdy as a baobab. He says it’s a mole rat. I say I don’t know such creatures. He jabs his assegai into the ground, a foot or so from where the grass disappeared into the earth. He digs around the planted assegai until he’s opened up the tunnel. I come closer. The tunnel is not deep, four or five inches, but wide, more than twenty-five inches in diameter, if I had to guess. Vyfdraai says he has seen tunnels more than half a mile long. At the tip of the assegai sprawls the thing. More rat than mole, if you were to ask me. Almost eight inches long, short sturdy legs, a tiny tail of not more than an inch. Vyfdraai yanks the mole rat off the blade and places it in my palm. About ten ounces. The fur is thick and short and soft. Almost as black as the tunnel. On the back of the head is a snow-white spot, hence the Dutch name of bles mol, bald mole, I guess. A repulsive little monster, but its fur is softer than any hide I’ve ever handled. As with other moles, this rattish beast has no ears. Little blue eyes peer unseeing from under heavy eyelids. Vyfdraai sticks his finger into the mouth and shows me the big incisors with which the mole rat tunnels. Behind the teeth are flaps of flesh like lips. My informant tells me it’s so that the soil shouldn’t spill down its gullet when it’s tunnelling.
That night I lie awake dreaming up a pair of breeches of soft black fur with white spots. I can feel in advance how it drapes my legs, how gently the saddle bumps my furred backside. When I get Vyfdraai on his own again, I ask him how one could get hold of a whole lot of the mole rats. He says they live in colonies, he says easily forty to a nest. He says the nest isn’t just there for the taking, it’s eight feet underground. You have to catch them when they’re active, when they’re tunnelling after the rains.
When I saw the thunderstorm starting to gather this morning, I knew my breeches were lying in wait for me buried deep, there where the grass disappears into the earth.
Today, I tell my people, we’re hunting for a new pair of breeches for me.
The rain sets in, great drops thud on the sand like fists. Every man and his mate find a stick or spade or axe handle or any blunt object that can hit hard, and follow me to the moles. I spread a tarpaulin in the rain and make a fire under it for the firebrands later. See, we’re a bunch of twenty or so armed men and women standing and staring at the ground.
The tunnelling starts. Molehills spring up, grasses and flowers sink away. There’s no end to the rain. I curse, but Vyfdraai says it’s a good thing, these rains. He burrows open a molehill. The waters of the heavens quickly flood the tunnels, the deluge drives the first mole rat to the surface. Vyfdraai clobbers it with his knobkerrie. We follow his example. Dig open the heaps, let in the flood, wallop a fleeing mole or two. Vyfdraai tosses the mole rat at my feet.
We must find the queen, he says.
Queen?
Vyfdraai says in the depths of the mole rat nest there are only one male and one female who mate, the others are celibate workers. If the queen falls, then the whole colony scatters.
What is a home without a mother? I ask.
He says when the whole lot disperse like that over the open ground, then every eagle and jackal in existence appears, and most of the little beasts are devoured. As soon as the queen cops it, they’re all buggered. It’s not for nothing they live underground. Above ground the creatures have never had a chance. I think of my jackal’s lair in Shit-skull Senekal’s yard. I smell once more the snugness, being cherished in the belly of the earth.
Vyfdraai and I kick open mole hills, jab sticks into the ground to find the tunnels and follow the tunnels to where they converge in one spot. I hand out firebrands and on all sides my people start smoking out and finishing off the vermin. We dig down to the shallowest tunnel and ram in the firebrands. I daydream about the smoke surging through the tunnels, ever deeper, into the store rooms, over the little ones lying asleep, all the way into the throne room. The mole rats swarm out, hordes of the creatures.
There’s the bitch! Vyfdraai shouts.
He scurries after a little fat one, clearly pregnant and clumsier than her slaves. Never thought such an old goat could still streak. He slips in the mud, gets hold of her and flattens her with his knobkerrie. It’s a massacre. Around me the yells and blows as we all exuberantly squash the forty or fifty, the goddam army, of mole rats.
With our bloodthirst quenched, we start gathering and skinning the moles. The skins are thrown on one heap, the carcases on another – a heap of crumpled fingers of giants, with teeth. When the sun starts setting, we make a mole rat casserole. The meat is fairly edible. You have to cook it for a long time and add some of Elizabeth’s leaves.
My wives and daughters bray the skins and prepare them, and it’s not a week or see, my new mole-rat-skin breeches. I put them on and strut around in them and wait for their reactions. Nombini and Elizabeth don’t say much. Toktokkie and Aletta think it’s lovely. Maria laughs herself off her feet and has to sit down.
My good Lord, Buys. You’re getting to be more of a clown by the day. Look at your tomato nose and the spotted breeches. Ai, my husband.
She gets up and hugs me and kisses my cheek and walks off grinning. I stand a polished dish against a wagon wheel and inspect myself from my belt down to my feet. To the devil with you all.
Here I stay and from morning to evening my sons and I practise until we’ve mastered the bow and arrow. I cut arrows until I have two quivers full, grease a few bowstrings well with fat. My moleskin breeches are already balding on my backside from all the sitting around, but they still keep the contents inside and warm. The rest of my wardrobe is karosses and thongs and raw hides. Buys, the Esau of Africa, attired in the skins of many creatures.