playing with their minder. Maria, with the Malay eyes and the Hottentot hair. She’s younger than me, but her body is ripe and ready. I chiselled out the star of Diana on the butt of the rifle myself and set a copper star into it. As soon as I touch a gun, my hands get clever, smaller, slimmer. I oil the wood of the baboon-butt. I follow the grain of the stock, my nose pressed to the wood. I coat the barrel with a different oil and a different cloth. The trick is not to manhandle the barrel. Take your time. For a while just see how slowly you can do it. The cloth mustn’t press on the metal, it should just touch. And then again a vigorous polishing till the metal grows burning hot. I never speak to her. I clean the rifle or cure a hide or smoke. Especially when David Devil-cramp is in the offing, I smoke furiously and wait for him to say something. At table he will then slap at an invisible flea or make some comment about my clothes smelling like a Hotnot’s.
There are fleas all over, David, Geertruy will then say.
But at least we try to smoke the creatures out. Once in a while. We try … He doesn’t try.
I want to brag to Maria. I want to tell her that I’m one of the best-known hunters in the area. I’m one of the big shots. For weeks on end I’m away with the men of the district who come to fetch me for the hunt. They always bring me a horse. There’s only one here at the Senekals’ and I’m not allowed near him. Sometimes they invite his excellency Sad-sack Senekal along, but mainly not. The two of us don’t ride in the same commando. As soon as Geertruy loses sight of us behind the first ridge, we’re at each other’s throats. When it’s a punitive expedition, we both of us have to go along, but for hunting they choose one of us at a time. And I’m the one who never misses a shot. I smoke my pipe and make showy smoke rings within smoke rings, but find no word to say to Maria.
While we’re eating, Maria sits cross-legged in the corner with the children. She teases Stienie and waggles a ragdoll in front of her face till the little one starts crowing and rolls face down on the kaross. Maria’s dress strains over her buttocks, oh her buttocks, and shifts up to where an inch of thigh shows above the knee.
At age fifteen I shoot my first elephant. Because I’m not of age I’m dependent on the big-dicks to dispose of the hides and tusks. I get a fraction of the payment for my own pocket. The other hunters soon cotton on to the fact that I don’t have much truck with money. I’ll swop tusks and hides with them for a better gun. Sometimes I keep some of the hides for my hut. The hunt itself is enough for me. Mostly I go hunting on my own. After I’ve spent a few days in the veldt on my own, horseless and shoeless, everyone says I’m easier to get along with. Geertruy tries to get me to give up blundering into the bushes on my own, but without much conviction. She knows it’s better for everybody’s peace of mind. If they keep me in the yard for too long hauling butter barrels or thatching roofs, then everyone gets to know about it. Even Saterdag is given it good and hard if he nags at me on such days. Back from a hunting trip, I’m usually invited to supper straightaway, because apparently I’m then well behaved at table. Of course on such days there is also for a change enough meat to share. My first lion? A mangy male, an aged loner, kicked out of the pride. Was almost as if the beast wanted to be shot.
Geertruy dishes some more meat for David the Dreck and asks if I’ve had my fill. No, Sister, on the contrary.
On the hunt on my own my circles around the yard become ever wider. If my duties on the farm permit, I nowadays stay away for a week or more. In the hunting ground my ears prick up at every branch that snaps. Every drop on a blade of grass is perilously suspended. My sweat and the sweat of the quarry. The twittering in the trees. The piss against the trunks and all the thresholds of demarcated territories in which loud-mouthed males rule. I criss-cross it all with my gun. I know the rules of the veldt. The better I get to understand the rules, the freer I become. In the veldt I can mark, bark, fight and piss out the limits of my own life among the other creatures. In a Christian home you are coddled while you are small and stupid, but you gradually become ever less free the better you get to learn what is expected of you. In a whitewashed house every little copper jug must be polished and every little carpet must be beaten every morning, but all around you as far as the eye can see and further it’s just dust and stone and bush. In the veldt nothing is dirty. A grey stone does not need polishing. A thorn tree does not need dusting.
I excuse myself from the table, go and sit on the kaross with the children and the minder with the skin smelling of fat and herbs. I unpack the wooden blocks on the dung floor. Geertruy and her Appointed Master pretend not to see me at their feet. They talk more loudly and chew with more conviction. The conversation stumbles and bumbles, they struggle to stuff my springbok meat down their gullets. I pick up the little one, who starts bawling. Geertruy sends out the children and their minder to the back room. I take my seat at table again. My godparents eat in silence. The thighbone in the dish still has quite a bit of meat on it. I start carving off the meat; then I take the bone and push my chair back. I put my crossed legs on the table, my clodhoppers under my godfather’s nose. I tear a bit of meat off the bone, smile. The father of the house jumps up, slams the door behind him. Geertruy shakes her head, follows her husband out of the room. My springbok is delicious.
Saterdag and I are sitting and smoking near the herd of cattle in a stretch of gnawn-bare pasturage. It’s too hot to talk. We’re sitting under a large protea bush, our eyes swollen from the previous night that turned into morning and the sun that rose more blindingly than ever.
At night we steal karrie, the honey beer of the Hottentots. We make a fire and nobody misses us. We squat on our haunches and sometimes the one-eared dog comes to sit with us before the hordes of eyes like stars in the undergrowth recall the dog to the pack and they fade into the brushwood. There are evenings when we lose fist fights and start them, evenings when the beer emboldens us to walk across to gaggles of giggling Hottentot girls.
I scratch at my first growth of beard. Clumsily and showily I clean my pipe with a long thorn. The headache throbs behind my eyes. Snot-slime Senekal’s shepherd dog, goddam good-for-nothing Ore, is lying in the grass. The only sign of life the tail that flicks at a fly now and again.
Among the leaves of the protea above us a spider is spinning in a bee. The legs of the red-bellied spider move fast and featously. It spins threads around the bee’s wings, avoiding the sting. The bee’s abdomen aims its useless poison dart at the spider. Every movement enmeshes it further. The eight-footed attack is launched simultaneously from all quarters and on all fronts. The wings vibrate faster and faster the more restricted their space becomes. The humming of the bee becomes ever more frantic, ever more furious, until the quarry’s last counter-attack comes to nothing and the bee subsides. The sting is no longer trying to sting. The wings go still. It can’t move any more. It’s not that the bee gives up. The bee never gives up. It fights and weakens until there is nothing left of it. Saterdag leans forward, puts out a hand to release the bee from life. I push a hand to his chest.
Let be.
Saterdag looks at me, then looks away, straight in front of him. Intently I watch the slow and purposeful cruelty until the spider is satisfied that the bee will never escape and, after a last caress over the cocoon of the quiet quarry, hoists itself up a thread of its own creation. I start loading the rifle, pour in the gunpowder and, instead of a lead pellet, a stone. I get up, stretch myself and look down at Saterdag.
Run.
What?
Run.
Saterdag jumps up, runs. I fire a shot into the air. The sheep scatter in all directions, the herd all of a sudden hundreds of individual sheep. Saterdag does not look around, runs faster. I carefully put down the gun, race after him. Saterdag swerves left and right through the undergrowth. I storm straight through the slangbos and cat thorn, my leather pants soon full of snags. Sodomite
