The Love Potion
From Mafeking Road
by Herman Charles Bosman
You mention the juba-plant (Oom Schalk Lourens said). Oh, yes, everybody in the Marico knows about the juba-plant. It grows high up on the krantzes, and they say you must pick off one of its little red berries at midnight, under the full moon. Then, if you are a young man, and you are anxious for a girl to fall in love with you, all you have to do is squeeze the juice of the juba-berry into her coffee.
They say that after the girl has drunk the juba-juice, she begins to forget all sorts of things. She forgets that your forehead is rather low, and that your ears stick out, and that your mouth is too big. She even forgets having told you, the week before last, that she wouldn’t marry you if you were the only man in the Transvaal.
All she knows is that the man she gazes at, over her empty coffee cup, has grown remarkably handsome. You can see from this that the plant must be very potent in its effects. I mean, if you consider what some of the men in the Marico look like.
~
One night I was out shooting in the veld with a lamp fastened on my hat. You know that kind of shooting: in the glare of the lamplight you can only see the eyes of the thing you are aiming at, and you get three months if you are caught. They made it illegal to hunt by lamplight since the time a policeman got shot in the foot, this way, when he was out tracking cattle-smugglers on the Bechuanaland border.
The magistrate at Zeerust, who did not know the ways of the cattle-smugglers, found that the shooting was an accident. This verdict satisfied everybody except the policeman, whose foot was still bandaged when he came into court. But the men in the Volksraad, some of whom had been cattle-smugglers themselves, knew better than the magistrate did as to how the policeman came to have a couple of buckshot in the soft part of his foot, and accordingly they brought in this new law.
Therefore I walked very quietly that night on the krantz. Frequently I put out my hand and stood very still amongst the trees, and waited long moments to make sure I was not being followed. Ordinarily, there would have been little to fear, but a couple of days before two policemen had been seen disappearing into the bush. By their looks they seemed young policemen, anxious for promotion, who didn’t know that it is more becoming for a policeman to drink an honest farmer’s peach brandy than to arrest him for hunting by lamplight.
I was walking along, turning the light from side to side, when suddenly, about a hundred paces from me, in the full brightness of the lamp, I saw a pair of eyes. When I also saw, above the eyes, a policeman’s khaki helmet, I remembered that a moonlight night, such as that was, was not so good for finding buck.
So I went home.
I took the shortest way, too, which was over the side of the krantz – the steep side – and on my way down I clutched at a variety of branches, tree-roots, stone ledges and tufts of grass. Later on, at the foot of the krantz, when I came to and was able to sit up, there was that policeman bending over me.
‘Oom Schalk,’ he said, ‘I was wondering if you would lend me your lamp.’
I looked up. It was Gideon van der Merwe, a young policeman who had been stationed for some time at Derdepoort. I had met him on several occasions, and had found him very likeable.
‘You can have my lamp,’ I answered, ‘but you must be very careful. It’s worse for a policeman to get caught breaking the law than for an ordinary man.’
Gideon van der Merwe shook his head.
‘No, I don’t want to go shooting with the lamp, he said, ‘I want to …’.
And then he paused.
He laughed nervously.
‘It seems silly to say it, Oom Schalk,’ he said, ‘but perhaps you’ll understand. I’ve come to look for a juba-plant. I need it for my studies. For my third-class sergeant’s exam. And it’ll soon be midnight, and I can’t find one of those plants anywhere.’
I felt sorry for Gideon. It struck me that he would never make a good policeman. If he couldn’t find a juba-plant, of which there were thousands on the krantz, it would be much harder for him to find the spoor of a cattle smuggler.’
So I handed him my lamp and explained where he had to go and look. Gideon thanked me and walked off.
Half an hour later he was back.
He took a red berry out of his tunic pocket and showed it to me.
For fear that he should tell any more lies about needing that juba-berry for his studies, I spoke first.
‘Lettie Cordier?’ I asked.
Gideon nodded. He was very shy, though, and wouldn’t talk much at the start. But I had guessed long ago that Gideon van der Merwe was not calling at Krisjan Cordier’s house so often just to hear Krisjan relate the story of his life.
~
Next morning I rode over to Krisjan Cordier’s farm to remind him about a tin of sheep-dip that he still owed me from the last dipping season. When Lettie came in with the coffee, I made a casual remark to her father about Gideon van der Merwe.
I didn’t take much notice of Krisjan’s remarks, however. Instead, I looked carefully at Lettie when I mentioned Gideon’s name. She didn’t give much away, but I am quick at these things, and I saw enough. The colour that crept into her cheeks. The light that came in her eyes.
On my way back I encountered Lettie. She was standing under a thorn-tree. With her brown arms and her sweet, quiet face and her full bosom, she was a very pretty picture. There was no doubt that Lettie Cordier would make a fine wife for any man. It wasn’t hard to understand Gideon’s feelings about her.
‘Lettie,’ I asked, ‘do you love him?’
‘I love him, Oom Schalk,’ she answered.
It was as simple as that.
~
When I saw Gideon some time afterwards, he was elated, as I had expected he would be.
‘So the juba-plant worked?’ I enquired.
‘It was wonderful, Oom Schalk,’ Gideon answered, ‘and the funny part of it is that Lettie’s father wasn’t there, either, when I put that juba-juice into her coffee. Lettie had brought him a message, just before then, that he was wanted in the mealie-lands.’
‘And was the juba-juice all they claim for it?’
‘You’d be surprised how quickly it acted,’ he said. ‘Lettie just took one sip at the coffee, and then jumped straight onto my lap.’
But then Gideon van der Merwe winked in a way that made me believe that he was not so very simple, after all.
‘I was pretty certain that the juba-juice would work, Oom Schalk,’ he said, ‘after Lettie’s father told me that you had visited there that morning.’
Potchefstroom Willow
by Herman Charles Bosman
‘The trouble,’ At Naudé said, ‘about getting the latest war news over the wireless, is that Klaas Smit and his Boeremusiek orchestra start up right away after it, playing Die Nooi van Potchefstroom. Now, it isn’t that I don’t like that song.’
So we all said that it wasn’t as though we didn’t like it, either. Gysbert van Tonder began to hum the tune. Johnny Coen joined in, singing the words softly – ‘Vertel my neef, vertel my oom, is dit die pad na Potchefstroom?’ In a little while, we were all singing. Not very loudly, of course. For Jurie Steyn was conscious of the fact that his post office was a public place, and he frowned on any sort of out-of-the-way behaviour in it. We still remembered the manner in which Jurie Steyn had spoken to Chris Welman the time Chris was mending a pair of his wife’s veldskoens in the post office, using the corner of the counter as a last.
For that reason we did not raise our voices very much when we sang Die Nooi van Potchefstroom. But it was a catchy song, and Jurie Steyn joined in a little, too, afterwards.
Not that he let himself go in any way, of course. He sang in a reserved and dignified fashion, that made you feel he would yet go far. You felt that even the Postmaster General in Pretoria, on the occasion of a member of the public coming to him to complain about a registered letter that had got lost – well, even the Postmaster General would not have been able to sit back in his chair and sing Die Nooi van Potchefstroom in as elevated a manner as Jurie Steyn was doing at that very moment.
Before the singing had quite died down, Oupa Bekker was saying that he knew Potchefstroom when he was still a child. It was in the very old days, Oupa Bekker said, and the far-side foundations of the church on Kerkplein had not sunk nearly as deep as they had done today. He said he remembered the first time that there was a split in the Church. It was between the Doppers and the Hervormdes, he said. And it was quite a serious split. And because he was young, then, he thought it had to do with the way the brickwork on the wall nearest the street had to be constantly plastered up, from top to bottom, the more the foundations sank.
‘I remember showing my father that piece of church wall,’ Oupa Bekker continued. ‘And I asked my father if the Doppers had done it. And my father said, well, he had never thought about it like that, until then. But all the same, he wouldn’t be surprised if they had. Not that anybody would ever see the Doppers kneeling down there on the side-walk, loosening the bricks with a crowbar, my father added. Whatever they did was under the cover of darkness.’
At Naudé started talking again about the news of the war in Korea, that he had heard over the wireless. But because so much had been spoken in between, he had to explain right from the beginning again.
‘It’s the way the war news gets crowded by Klaas Smit and his orchestra,’ At Naudé said. ‘You’re listening to what the announcer is making clear about what part of the country General MacArthur is fighting in now – and it’s hard to follow all that, because it seems to me that sometimes General MacArthur himself is not too clear as to what part of the country he is in – and then, suddenly, while you’re still listening, up strikes Klaas Smit’s orchestra with Die Nooi van Potchefstroom. It makes it all very difficult, you know. They don’t give that General MacArthur a chance at all. Die Nooi van Potchefstroomseems to be crowding him even worse than the Communists are doing – and that seems to be bad enough, the Lord knows.’
This time we did not start singing again. We had, after all, taken the song to the end, and even if it wasn’t for Jurie Steyn’s feelings, we ourselves knew enough about the right way of conducting ourselves in a post office. You can’t go and sing the same song in a post office twice, just as though it’s the quarterly meeting of the Mealie Control Board. We were glad, therefore, when Oupa Bekker started talking once more.
‘This song, now,’ Oupa Bekker was saying. ‘Well, as you know, I remember the early days of Potchefstroom. The very early days, that is. But I would never have imagined that someday a poet would come along and make up a song about the place. Potchefstroom was the first capital of the Transvaal, of course. Long before Pretoria was thought of, even. And there’s an old willow-tree in Potchefstroom that must have measured I don’t know how many feet around the trunk where it goes into the ground. It measured that much only a little while ago, I mean. I am talking about the last time I was in Potchefstroom. But I never imagined anybody would ever write a poem about the town. It seemed such a hard name to make verses about. But I suppose it’s a lot different today. People are so much more clever, I expect.’
Oupa Bekker would have gone on a good deal longer, maybe, if it wasn’t that Jurie Steyn’s wife came in just about then with the coffee. Consequently, Oupa Bekker had to sit up properly and stir the sugar round in his cup.
‘I heard that song you were singing, just now,’ Jurie Steyn’s wife remarked to all of us. ‘I thought it was – well, I liked it. I didn’t catch the words, quite.’
Nobody answered. We knew that it was school holidays, of course. And we knew that young Vermaak, the schoolmaster, had gone to his parents in Potchefstroom for the holidays. Because we knew that Potchefstroom was young Vermaak’s home town, we kept silent. There was no telling what Jurie Steyn’s reactions might be.
Oupa Bekker went on talking, however.
‘All the same, I would like to know how many feet around the trunk that willow-tree is today,’ Oupa Bekker said. ‘And they won’t chop it down either. That willow-tree is right on the edge of the graveyard. You can almost say it’s inside the graveyard. And so they won’t chop it down. But what beats me is to think that somebody could actually write a song about Potchefstroom. I would never have thought it possible.’
Oupa Bekker’s sigh seemed to come from very far away.
From somewhere a good deal further away than the rusbank he was sitting on. We understood then why that Potchefstroom willow-tree meant so much to him.
And the result was that when Gysbert van Tonder started up the chorus of the song again, we all found ourselves joining in – no matter what Jurie Steyn might say about it. ‘En in my droom,’ we sang, ‘Is die vaalhaarnooi by die wilgerboom.’
Beneath Its Spell
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From No Outspan
by Deneys Reitz
During the first few months of 1926 I attended Parliament in Cape Town, where our Nationalist opponents accused us of being imperialists and traitors to the True Cause, and we charged them with racialism and with exploiting Afrikaans sentiment for vote-catching purposes.
This sort of thing has gone on since 1912, and will no doubt continue for another generation or two until we realise the futility of it all.
In spite of our wrangles, I was on terms of personal friendship with some of our enemies, chief of whom was my successor, the new Minister of Lands, Mr Piet Grobler. He was a relative of the late Paul Kruger and he was a gentleman of the old school, liked by everyone regardless of party cleavages.
I lost no opportunity of attacking his government and his party, but, in spite of this, he asked me one morning to undertake an investigation into the question of the ‘bontebok’, a rare antelope that was almost extinct.
Mr Grobler was interested in the protection of wild life in South Africa, and on the strength of my previous efforts in the Sabi country, he wished me to look into the matter. I gladly accepted the task. I was furnished with a car and a couple of officials, so leaving Parliament to its talking, we set out at once.
The bontebok (Damaliscus Pygargus) are large, white-faced, white-bellied antelopes with chocolate-coloured backs and flanks, and they carry lyre-shaped horns. In former years they roamed the coastal belt of the Cape Province in countless thousands, but they were by now so reduced in number as to be very near vanishing point.
In the face of the wanton slaughter of our game that has gone on for more than two centuries, it is fortunate that so far only the quagga (a species of zebra) has become extinct, and neither money nor tears will bring him back to life again; now we were threatened with the loss of an even more interesting type.
This was largely due to indiscriminate hunting, but also to the fact that the bontebok die out if they have to share their grazing with domestic stock; and of late years, sheep farmers had increasingly invaded their ancestral haunts.
With my two companions I made a survey of the position. We examined the long strip of country that lies between Cape Agulhas and Algoa Bay, for in this area alone were a few of them said still to survive. It was hard work over the hills and dales of the south, and after careful search we found that, all told, there were less than seventy bontebok left in South Africa, and therefore in the world, so narrow had the margin of safety become. These were running in small groups mostly in the neighbourhood of Cape Agulhas (the southernmost point of Africa) and it was clear that if immediate steps were not taken, they would soon join the quagga in oblivion.
In the end I was able to find a suitable tract of land in the district of Bredasdorp. We had it enclosed by an eight-foot wire fence and, enlisting the help of neighbouring farmers, sixteen bontebok were, with difficulty, shepherded through a V-shaped approach and driven into the sanctuary. Today the rest of the bontebok have gone, but from those sixteen animals a herd of over two hundred has been bred up, and the continued existence of Damaliscus Pygargus is assured.
When I returned to Parliament I was glad to find that Mr Grobler had introduced a Bill to turn the Sabi into a statutory game reserve, to be called the Kruger National Park. Under his Act a Board of Trustees was established, and I was appointed one of their number.
This was a handsome gesture and while it in no way diminished my antipathy to the Nationalist government, I was sincerely pleased – for it opened a new vista.
From now onward I was enabled to journey to the Low Country at frequent intervals, and more and more I was to come beneath its spell.
Young Man in Love
From Jurie Steyn's Post Office
by Herman Charles Bosman
‘You won’t listen to me,’ Oupa Bekker said. ‘You never let me finish what I’m trying to say. Always, you just let me get so far. Then somebody says something foolish, and so I can’t get to the important thing.
‘Now, what I wanted to say is that At Naudé is quite right. And Johnny Coen will come here. He’ll come this afternoon because he wants to know what we think. A young man in love is like that. He wants to know what we’ve got to say. But all the time he’ll be laughing to himself, secretly, about the things we’re saying. A young man in love is like that. And his titivating himself – with the short blade of a pocket knife and a handful of dry grass – well, you’ve no idea how vain a young man in love can be.
‘And he’s not making himself all stylish for the girl’s sake, but for his own sake. It’s himself that he thinks is so wonderful. He knows less than anybody what she’s like – the girl he’s in love with. And it’s only the best kind of pig’s fat he’ll mix with soot to shine his bought shoes with. Because he’s in love with the girl, he thinks he’s something. Oh yes, Johnny Coen will come here this afternoon all right. And what I want to say –’.
At this point, Oupa Bekker was interrupted once more. But because it was Jurie Steyn who broke in on his dissertation, Oupa Bekker yielded with good grace. The post office we were sitting in was, after all, Jurie Steyn’s own voorkamer. There was something of the spirit of old-world courtesy in the manner of Oupa Bekker’s surrender.
‘– you, Jurie Steyn,’ Oupa Bekker said. ‘You talk.’
Several of us looked in the direction of the kitchen. We were relieved to see that the door was closed. This meant that Jurie Steyn’s wife had not heard the low expression Oupa Bekker had used.
‘What I’d like to say,’ Jurie Steyn said, ‘is that I had the honour to drive Juffrou Pauline Gerber to her home in my mule-cart, that day she arrived here at my post office, getting off from the Government lorry and all –’.
‘What do you mean by “and all”?’ Gysbert van Tonder demanded.
Jurie Steyn looked around him with an air of surprise.
‘But you were all here,’ Jurie Steyn declared. ‘All of you were here. Maybe that’s what I mean by and all. I’m sure I don’t know. But you did see Pauline Gerber. You, each one of you, saw her. When she alighted here that day from the Zeerust lorry, on her return from the Cape finishing school. You saw the way she walked around here in my voorkamer, picking her heels up high – and I don’t blame her. And her chin up in the air. And as pretty as you like. You all saw how pretty she was, now, didn’t you? And the way she smelt. Did you smell her? You must have. It was too lovely. It just shows you the kind of perfume you can get in the Cape.
‘And I’m sure that if a church elder smelt her – even if he was an Enkel Gereformeerde Church elder from the furthest part of the Waterberge, I’m sure that the Waterberg elder would’ve known that Pauline Gerber had class – just from smelling her, I mean. I’m sure that the scent that Pauline bought at the Cape must have cost at least seven shillings and sixpence a bottle.
‘Take my wife, now. I once bought her a bottle of perfume at the Indian store at Ramoutsa. And I can assure you – you can smell the difference between my wife and Pauline Gerber.’
Chris Welman, who had not spoken much so far, hastened to remark that there were other ways, too, in which you could tell the difference.
It was an innuendo that, fortunately, escaped general attention.
For it was at that moment that Johnny Coen came in at the front door of the post office. In one way it was the Johnny Coen we’d always known; and yet it also wasn’t him. Somehow, in some subtle fashion, Johnny Coen had changed.
After greeting us, he went and sat on a riempie chair, and he sat very upright.
From his manner he seemed almost unaware of our presence as he whittled a matchstick to a fine point, and commenced scraping out the grime from under one of his fingernails.
Gysbert van Tonder, who always liked getting straight to the point, was the first to speak.
‘Nice bit of rain you’ve been having out your way, Johnny,’ Gysbert remarked. ‘Your dams must be pretty full.’
‘Yes, indeed,’ Johnny Coen answered.
‘Plenty of water in the spruit, too, I’d imagine,’ Gysbert continued.
‘Yes, that’s very true,’ Johnny Coen replied.
‘New grass must be coming along nicely in the vlakte where you burnt,’ Gysbert van Tonder went on.
‘Yes, very nicely,’ Johnny agreed.
‘What’s the matter with you, man – can’t you talk?’ Gysbert demanded. ‘You know very well what I’m trying to say. Have you seen her at all since she’s been back?’
‘I saw her yesterday,’ Johnny Coen said, ‘on the road near their house. I had to go quite a long distance out of my way to be passing by there, at the time.’
Gysbert van Tonder made a swift calculation: ‘About eleven miles out of your way, counting in the short cuts through the withaaks,’ he announced. ‘Did she have much to say?”
Johnny Coen shook his head. ‘Please don’t ask me,’ he almost implored Gysbert, ‘because I really can’t remember. We did speak, I know. But after she’d gone, there was nothing we said that I could recall. It was all so different after she had gone. I wish I could remember what we said. What I said must have all sounded so foolish to her.’
Gysbert van Tonder was not going to allow Johnny Coen to get off that easily.
‘Well, how did she look?’ Gysbert asked.
‘I also tried to remember that, afterwards,’ Johnny Coen declared. ‘How she looked. What she did. All that. But I just couldn’t remember. After she’d gone, it was as if it had all been a dream, and there was nothing that I could remember. She was picking yellow flowers, there by the side of the road, to stick in her hair. Or she was carrying a sack of firewood over her back for the kitchen fire. It would’ve been all the same to me, the way I felt. But I don’t know. Afterwards, all I was able –’.
‘That’s what I was trying to explain to them, Johnny,’ Oupa Bekker interjected, ‘but they never let me finish anything I start to say. They always –’.
‘Afterwards,’ Johnny Coen repeated, ‘after she’d gone, that is, there was a kind of sweetness in the air. It was almost hanging in the air, sort of. At one stage I even thought it might be a kind of scent, like what some women put on their clothes when they go to Nagmaal. But, of course, it couldn’t have been that. Pauline wouldn’t wear scent … I mean, she’s just not that kind.’
‘What I wanted to say earlier on, when you all interrupted me,’ Oupa Bekker declared, then – with an air of triumph – ‘is that a young man in love is like that.’
The Worst of Times, the Best of Times
From Commando – Of Horses and Men
by Deneys Reitz
As I still had a limp, I gradually fell behind and, to make matters worse, my poor little mare was delivered of a stillborn foal. With this travail coming upon her, she had borne the long treks so unfalteringly that I had not even known that there was anything wrong with her, but now her strength was gone. After a while she staggered to her feet and, as I could not risk remaining in too close proximity to the English camps, whose fires were still visible in the distance, I led her slowly forward. By this time the rest of our men had long since vanished into the darkness, and I had to plod on alone for an hour or two, dragging my horse behind me, until she could go no further, when I decided to halt until morning. It was bitterly cold – so cold that earlier in the evening I had heard men say that it was the coldest night they had ever known. As I could find no fuel for a fire, I wrapped my blanket around my shoulders and sat with chattering teeth until sunrise. When it grew light, I found myself on a cheerless expanse, with a view that extended for many miles, but there was no sign of the commando.
By a distant thorn tree, however, I found four of my German friends, huddled together against the cold. They said that they had missed me during the night and, knowing that I was crippled, they had generously remained behind to wait for me.
After collecting what fuel we could in such barren country, we built a small fire to fry some meat, and then set out on the spoor of the commando, making slow progress, for my companions’ horses were not in very much better condition than my own. By nine or ten o’clock in the morning, ominous pillars of dust rising in the rear warned us that the English columns of last night were returning in our direction.
The troops were not as yet in sight, but considering the state of our animals, we stood a poor chance of keeping ahead of them once their scouts topped the skyline, so we hurried on as best we could. Just as we were beginning to see an occasional horseman far behind us, we providentially came upon the Harts River. It was more of an earth-crack across the plain than a river. No trees stood on its edge, and fifty yards off the banks were invisible, but it was our salvation, for we and our horses were hardly out of sight in the dry bed below when the troops came swarming towards the river. All went well, however. The English, when they reached the bank, set to digging gradients for their guns and wagons, and, although it was hours before they got their transport through, during which time we anxiously peered over the top in fear of discovery, we had the satisfaction, before dark, of seeing the tail of their convoy vanish over the horizon.
This was good as far as it went, but the question was how to catch up again with our own people, though the fact of being temporarily cut off was not of vital importance, having regard to the fluid nature of guerrilla warfare, and we were not greatly troubled on that score, our worst anxiety being the weak state of our horses.
~
The four Germans were a mixture. The eldest, Herman Haase, was a man of about forty-five, in looks the typical sausage-eater of the English comic papers, but, as I found out, a kindly, good-natured gentleman, a Johannesburg merchant, who had been in the field from the beginning. He was the last man one would have suspected of a liking for war, as his talk was all of his wife and family, and of the joys of home life.
Next came W Cluver, a clever, cynical Berlin student, who told me many interesting things of life in the old world. Then there was Pollatchek, also a Berlin student, who had come out to fight for the Boers, as on a crusade. He told me that his initial ardour had long since evaporated, but that he liked the life of adventure, and so had remained – a pleasant, cheerful fellow whom I grew to like very much.
Lastly, there was a farmhand named Wiese, a clumsy, slow-witted rustic, but brave enough. With these four men my lot was now cast. Wiese and Cluver did not get very far, but with Haase and Pollatchek I was long associated, although they turned back in the end.
Our preparations for going to the Cape were quickly made. We slaughtered a stray sheep, and cut the meat into strips for drying in the wind (as we had no salt), and we ground a quantity of maize into meal in a small coffee-mill that Haase carried on his saddle-tree, and next morning we started.
~
For several days we were unable to travel in a direct line, for we found the countryside alive with British troops moving in all directions, and we calculated that we saw twenty-five thousand of them before we got clear. It was plain from the way in which they swept forward on an enormous front that they were conducting another of their drives, but as we did not see a single burgher, or the vestige of a commando during all this time, they must have had little to show for their activity. Clearly General De la Rey was resorting to his usual tactics of avoiding these huge concentrations of troops by scattering his men until the blow was spent.
My knowledge of veldcraft brought our party safely through to the Vaal River, for my early experience was of value, and we threaded and twisted successfully between the enemy columns, never having occasion to fire a shot. Once we were held up for half a day while a body of English troops camped within hail of where we lay hidden in a patch of thorn. Another time Cluver and I tried to ambush two officers, but he showed himself too soon and they got away. In the course of these operations we had to jettison Heinrich Wiese. His horse gave in and he himself had blistered feet, so we abandoned him near an English column, where he was sure to be picked up and cared for.
My leg was on the mend, but we suffered a great deal from cold at night. Otherwise, we almost grew to enjoy the excitement of dodging the enemy forces and patrols, and the Germans said that it was the best time they had had in the war.
Grander Designs Than That
by John Lister-Kaye
Let me be clear: I am not sentimental about my animals. I love them as much or more than anyone else, and can be as soppy as the next man, but I will not stand by and watch them suffer. I have shot my dogs and my horses when there was no way out of their pain; blown out their brains in a final act of respect and oblation – a personal covenant I cannot and would not delegate to another. So when one day I noticed Tumble straining unnaturally to defecate, my heart sank. I knew where we were headed. I had lost Hobson to a horrid bowel problem and I didn’t like the look of this at all. We tried laxatives to no avail. Volcano-like and ominous, a bulge appeared around his tail. To begin with it was soft and painless – not like a tumour – so I guessed it was a rectal hernia.
Town or country, when your dog is ill, it’s a crisis, in our case made worse by living up a remote Highland glen. John Easton, our friendly local vet, is only twelve miles away and regularly comes to attend to our horses and cattle. He confirmed my suspicions: thankfully not a tumour, but two hernias not just a single, one on either side of his tail. ‘Sorry,’ John shook his head, ‘there’s nothing I can do. There’s no medical treatment or cure. Your only hope is a risky and complicated operation with no guarantee of success.’ Worse still, John couldn’t attempt the surgery himself, it would have to be Glasgow: the highly respected University of Glasgow Veterinary Hospital, on busy summer roads a drive of four gruelling hours.
Tumble had become my dog. Once again I had a shadow, always there, always pleased to see me, always keen to join in with whatever I was doing. And in the evenings he would curl up on my lap in my fireside chair, snoring and dreaming in the oceanic slumber of contentment only a dog can know.
All summer the condition worsened. We kept him going on liquid paraffin. In front we had an alert, happy, healthy, fun-loving terrier; behind he was pained, distorted, grotesque, eventually unable even to wag his little tail. When I took him out it was taking him up to half an hour to evacuate pathetic little caterpillars of excrement, and then only with my help containing the obscene bulges on either side of his tail with my hands. Daily they grew larger. Incontinence followed, the internal pressure overcoming him so suddently that he wallowed helplessly in the pathos of his own distress.
‘Do we risk the surgery?’ I asked Lucy and Hermione, now eleven, who had hijacked both puppies five years before and, although she had reluctantly conceded Tumble to me and made Rough her special dog, her own constant companion, she had always doted on them both.
‘Daddy,’ she said to me, fighting back tears and in a voice I had not heard before, ‘you are to try everything.’ I phoned for an appointment in Glasgow.
A few days later we were there, Tumble and I, face to face with a smiling young Australian surgeon named Ross. I stood Tumble carefully on the stainless-steel examination bench. Ross was pulling on surgical gloves. ‘I need to investigate the extent of the hernias. Will you hold him firm?’
‘Sure,’ I said, and to Tumble, ‘Sorry, little man, he’s going to stick a finger up your bum.’ It hurt and he yelled, and I felt a traitor for having to hold him so tight. ‘Sorry,’ I murmured again, when it was over, burying my face in his velvet ears. ‘Please don’t stop trusting me just yet. Can you fix it, Ross?’ I asked.
He promised he would do his best but warned that if it failed there would be only one outcome. There was a moment of silence, broken only by the slap of the rubber gloves springing off his fingers. Hermione’s words swirled round my brain. ‘Do we give it a go?’ he asked at length.
I liked his honest eyes, and his bare, scrubbed forearms seemed to evince an inner strength. This young man had the air of a real professional. Sometimes I think Aussies are more straightforward than us Brits; I trusted this one instinctively. I nodded. Just for a moment I had no words.
I had to leave him, of course, and trail back up north through the wide, empty mountains to our lonely Inverness-shire glen, the lonelier for Tumble’s absence and made more poignant by Hermione’s tears and Rough’s whining restlessness. Three days passed, then the phone call.
Ross said that it was much worse than he had expected. When he opened Tumble up he’d found the whole bowel distorted and doubled back on itself in an S-shape. He’d had to straighten it by hitching it permanently to the abdomen wall. Then he darned the splits in the ruptured muscles where the hernias bulged, stitching them together in a mesh of zigzagged sutures. The little dog had come round, but he was sedated and drowsy. They wanted to hold on to him until the bowel moved, to see if it was going to work – the crucial test. It would be another day or two perhaps.
The next day a friendly Glaswegan nurse phoned: Tumble had eaten a little, but still no movement. Another twenty-four hours dragged by. It was the same the following morning – still nothing. It might be better, she suggested, if I came down and took him home … ‘Some dogs are very particular about where they go.’ That’s my Tumble, I thought, and ran for the car.
In three and a half hours I was there, pacing the corridor, like a prisoner awaiting sentence. The door opened. I knelt to greet him. The same small, blotched black and white face with tan eyebrows, the little black nose, the same eyes of polished oak, ears cocked in woozy recognition, only a bald patch on his neck where the anaesthetic had been. For a moment I held his head in my hands, staring into those deep, unreproving eyes. Could he possibly understand why I had abandoned him?
It was just as well I was braced for his rear end to be a mess. His underbelly, tail and backside were shaved to the pink, the whole region angry and swollen, sutured like a Christmas turkey right down his belly and round his unhappy tail. Gingerly I carried him out to the car. ‘We need a good movement to know if the bowel is working properly,’ smiled another kind assistant as I left. ‘Please give us a ring and let us know.’
On the way home I stopped to stretch my legs on the one thousand five hundred and eight-foot high-point of the Drumochter, the high mountain pass that separates mellow Tayside from rugged old Inverness-shire where the treeless hills veer skywards to the clouds on both sides of the road. Tumble looked up from the blankets as if he wanted to do the same. ‘OK,’ I said, ‘gently does it.’
He wobbled out onto the deer-cropped sward, looking round at the fragrant, cooling hills of late summer, as if to say, ‘This is more like it.’ He stood still for several minutes, occasionally lifting his nose to test the air. Then he glanced up at me for reassurance before sniffing a tussock of rushes. He eased forward, went to cock his leg, winced with pain and thought better of it – after all, he had been gutted like a fish. He looked back to me for guidance.
‘What a good boy,’ I said reassuringly, in the voice I have always used when my dogs perform their functions satisfactorily. I wanted him to have another go, however sore he was. I know how vital kidneys are. But something bigger was on his mind; he had grander designs than that. For a moment he looked nonplussed, eyeing first the mountains and then me before moving stiffly and purposefully to a place of his own particular choosing, an intimate amphitheatre of lawn encircled by a lilac pastel haze of fading heather. Awkwardly and painfully he bent to a faecal crouch. I held my breath.
A moment later the finest, glossiest, roundest, most spectacular four-and-a-half-inch polony of healthy terrier excrement launched itself triumphantly into upland Perthshire. I never dreamed that I would be so thrilled to see a dog turd. Smiling broadly, I reached for my mobile phone.
Kalahari Roving
From No Outspan
by Deneys Reitz
I was returned unopposed for the Low Country and my wife, who is more politically-minded than I am, was returned for Parktown North, an important constituency of Johannesburg. She was the first woman Member of Parliament in South Africa.
The election being over and won, Parliament met in Cape Town for a brief session; and then, as when I first became a Minister, I set out to visit a portion of my kingdom as yet unvisited.
I decided to inspect the Kalahari, which lay under my control. This desert lies between German South-West on the one side and the Transvaal and Southern Rhodesia on the other, a breadth of four hundred miles or so; and lengthways it stretches from the Orange River in the south to the Okavango swamps six hundred miles northward.
Much of it is good cattle country, it contains plenty of game, and there are roving tribes of bushmen – the most ‘primitive’ of all human beings.
Some officials who were to accompany me went on ahead to Kuruman, the mission centre where the Moffats and David Livingstone had laboured a somewhat unfruitful vineyard in years gone by, and I followed by air. At Kuruman I had cars and a lorry with petrol and water; and sending the plane back to Pretoria, we started off.
Using the dry bed of the Kuruman River, we travelled for two hundred miles to its confluence with the Molopo, another dead river that flows at rare intervals after heavy rains, perhaps twice in a century.
In this country of eternal sand we ploughed along at about ten miles an hour. After days of heavy going, we reached a point where the Nosop and the Oup, two more fossil rivers, join together, and now we lumbered up the Oup to Mata-Mata on the southwest frontier.
Some time before, the Trustees of the Kruger Park had set aside a triangle of ground in this area, a million acres in extent, as a sanctuary for gemsbok (Oryx Gazelli) and the true hartebeest (Bubalis Cama). These varieties had nearly been exterminated by nomad poachers and bushmen hunters. We had selected the land by looking at the map, for none of us had ever visited this part of the world before; indeed, very few people in the Union had ever heard of it.
Now I pushed cross-country from the Oup to inspect the Reserve, and I was the first member of the Board [of Trustees of the Kruger Park] to see it – a waste of dunes, which we navigated by compass. We developed a technique of our own for crossing the sand-hills. The secret is to deflate one’s tyres to half-strength, and never to attempt a dune on the slant; to accelerate and run straight ahead, so that the impetus carries the car eight to ten feet upwards and the engine stalls; then to go back along the ruts the wheels have made, and make another charge that carries one a short length beyond the first attempt. Continuing the process, the rise is topped at last. It is a cruel strain on mechanism and chassis, but we crossed a long succession of dunes in this way, and went right through the Reserve in a few days at an overall pace of about two miles per hour.
We saw gemsbok and hartebeest, and an occasional bushman running at the sight of these strange monsters invading his ancestral hunting-grounds; and we saw several Kalahari lion, a smaller and less yellowed species than those of the Transvaal.
I had arranged for a camel patrol to await us, and here again I learned something new about lion. We emerged on the Nosop River one evening, and as we pitched our tents I was surprised to see the camel drivers hobble their animals and turn them into the bush for the night. We had seen a lion slinking at dusk, and to me it seemed wanton cruelty to send the camels thus helpless into the dark; but the drivers were easy. They said a lion will never attack a camel, hobbled or otherwise; that a lion only attacks from the rear and, as a camel always faces round, they are not molested. My own belief is that lion cannot bear their musty smell, but at all events our camels grazed unharmed. I rode a camel now and then, but on the whole I preferred to walk.
Having inspected the Reserve, we continued, travelling up the bed of the Nosop River to a point shown on the map as Union’s End. Here we found a tribe of half-breeds that had been marooned for over two years, a subsection of Simon Kooper’s nation, about a hundred strong. They had come to Union’s End to hunt, but a drought had cut them off and they had been obliged to remain at this spot ever since, for here was the only water within a hundred and twenty miles.
Luckily for them the South African Government had put down a borehole for our troops during the 1915 campaign. The hole was a hundred and seventy feet deep and as there was no pump or windmill, the only way they could reach the water was by letting down a gallon paraffin tin at the end of a long line of gemsbok riems. It was a full-time job, and they worked in relays night and day. Had the thong broken, the tin would have fallen down and blocked the borehole, and they would all have perished. They had never seen a motorcar. I offered to send back for lorries to evacuate them, but they were too terrified of these strange vehicles; so I left them there. I learned afterwards that they got out in safety with the next rains.
Animals in these parts do not drink, for there is no surface water. They obtain moisture from the Tsama melon and other herbage.
As for lion and other carnivora, they are said to drink the blood of their prey, but according to the bushmen they quench their thirst from the liquid in the large intestine of the beasts they kill. I was told that hunters in the Kalahari find enough water in a gemsbok’s paunch to have a drink and a wash; and that, once they become used to it, fresh water is insipid and tasteless to them.
As we returned down the river we came on two honeybadgers. We have an Afrikaans saying, ‘tough as a badger’, and I would add ‘brave as a badger’, for as we passed them I saw a pair of cubs, the size of hedgehogs. I was on the driving seat of the water lorry at the time, and the badgers thought we had designs on their offspring. To them the lorry must have looked about twenty times the size a mastodon did to a paleolithic hunter, yet they were unafraid. They charged forward in defence of their brood, and the valorous creatures actually bit and hacked into our tyres, squealing with rage the while. I ordered my driver not to injure them, and the brave creatures trotted off in triumph to collect their young.
