Kate took to riding like her father and eldest brother before her. She was a natural, and soon she would join Paul and Pat at the local equestrian events and paper chases. Seeing her in Frisky’s saddle, I often thought back to that cheeky little pony Ticky and how he had put me off horses when I was a girl. I wondered what I might have been like if I had had the same childhood as Pat, running wild on a Rhodesian farm with a beloved horse underneath me.
One morning, Pat and I saddled up Frisky and three other horses and set out with Jay and Kate to check the fences around the farm. The ride was long, and the sun was blistering overhead. As we approached the Munwa River, Jay reined in and gestured for Kate to do the same. They were looking, almost longingly, at the crystal waters. Jay gave me the same pleading look I’d seen before.
“Can we go for a swim?”
The horses, too, looked as if they needed a rest, so we dismounted and Pat held the reins of all the horses while I helped Jay and Kate undress.
As the children were preparing to run into the waters, Pat loosened his hold on the reins—but Frisky, covered in a sheen of glistening sweat, only looked nervously at the riverbank, refusing to go near. Pat and I exchanged a curious look and no sooner had we done so than Frisky released a desperate whinny and began to stamp her feet.
Pat, as he had done ever since he was a young boy, put his arms around Frisky, patting her neck and rubbing her flank, whispering to her so that she might calm down. Yet, no matter how much he consoled her, Frisky could not be calmed. As Jay and Kate scrambled out of their socks and headed for the water, she picked up her front hooves and smashed them back down. There was something desperate, almost pleading, rolling in the back of her throat.
I turned to Jay and Kate. They were almost at the water’s edge. Only then did I see what Frisky had seen. The dark eyes of a crocodile glimmered menacingly, just above the surface of the water.
Yelling for Pat, I hurtled down to the riverbank and grabbed Jay and Kate to drag them back. From the water, the croc looked at us, shifting its malevolent eyes.
Back at Frisky’s side, listening to her gather her composure, I shuddered.
“No swimming today,” I said.
Terrified at what might have happened, we hastily turned the horses from the Munwa River to make the ride back home, but for days afterward I could not stop imagining the look of terror in Frisky’s eyes: not that anything might happen to her, but that something terrible might befall one of our children. It is not for nothing that people say they can see keen intelligence shimmering in a horse’s eyes. If I had never seen it before, Frisky was the one to teach me that lesson: the horse sees, the horse knows, the horse cares and remembers. We think we are their guardians, but sometimes—just sometimes—they turn out to be our guardians as well.
It was a lesson we would keep coming back to throughout our lives, for reasons none of us could begin to imagine.
The lands were cleared, plowed, and treated. The irrigation pipes stretched for long kilometers from the rivers that encircled us. The grading sheds were ready, the curing barns waiting eagerly for their first crop; the tobacco seeds were germinating in the seed beds, waiting to be transplanted to the land.
All we needed was the rain, but the rain wouldn’t come.
Between 1993 and 1995 only fourteen inches of rain fell. The rivers disappeared, the game looked emaciated, and the waters in our neighboring Two Tree Hill Dam fell imperceptibly each day, until they were only a brown shimmer in the bottom of the basin, the dam wall standing high and exposed.
In those droughts, tomatoes were all that we had. The farm was telling us that she could do no more. They grew in the fields all year round, so all that year I was setting out after dark to sell them, running long circuits around Harare and, now, into the villages and townships, too. Along the way I could see other Zimbabweans selling tomatoes, maize, and bush fruits on the sides of the road. It did not come to this for us, but as I looked into the grading sheds and saw the poor, wilted leaves of tobacco we had managed to harvest, I wondered what we had done. Had we sacrificed our children’s future by gambling on clouds in the sky?
Those skies were endless expanses of blue, cruel in their blank simplicity. Beneath them, Crofton baked. I walked along the narrow channels between the tomato vines, lifting leaves and cupping each green fruit in my hand, turning them gently to look for signs of infestation or disease. Along the edge of the field, Pat and Frisky followed one of the trails, calling out to workers in the opposite fields. Every time I saw a mottled leaf or serrated edge showing the telltale signs of some hungry insect, I called out. Pat turned to acknowledge me. When he did not hear, I shouted louder. Here, I said. Here, and here. In silent fury, he swung from the saddle. He wanted nothing more than to ignore me, to go back to wrestling with blighted tobacco in the fields or opening another stretch of bush in the deranged belief that the rains would shortly come. Instead, he strode over to lift the same leaves I had lifted, to see the early signs of disease. He exhaled, his face breaking into a muted grin as he realized how full of fire he had been, and called over one of our workers. In minutes they were there to spray the vines.
Opening up a farm, I constantly reminded him, was not only about driving back the bush. There were smaller, more insidious enemies to beat back as well.
“I’m sorry, Pat. There’s nothing else for it. It really would be the kindest thing.”
We stood in the garden of Crofton farmhouse. Dave, one of our local vets, crouched beside me. In front of us, the little foal Deja-vous, only recently born to Paul’s mare Imprevu, lay with her head in ten-year-old Kate’s lap.
“It’s deep, Dave,” I said, “but isn’t there anything you could do?”
“With an injury like this, it’s often better to put them to sleep,” Dave said.
Pat bristled. “No, David. Let’s give her a chance and see.”
As the vet said his good-byes, promising to come back if we needed him, Kate nuzzled Deja-vous. The little foal’s eyes revolved in their orbits and fixed on her. For a moment, the foal seemed to want to stand. Then, realizing the pain in her leg was too great, she simply laid her head back down.
She had been in the paddock with her mother when she had become entangled in a length of wire fence. By the time her panic had roused the attention of a passing worker, she had struggled against the wire so much that it had tightened around her front leg, cutting her so that the bone was exposed. When Pat arrived, Deja-vous was in a weak, depleted state. Her mother stood guard over the trapped foal, and when Pat got near, it was to find the foal spent from her exertions, torn muscle glistening where the wire constricted her leg.
After cutting her free, Pat had carried the tiny foal into the garden at Crofton, where Kate attentively lay down with her. When I called for the vet, I knew already what he would say. Deja-vous, I thought as I put down the phone, didn’t stand a chance.
Back in the garden, I saw Pat crouching over the ailing foal, dressing the wound.
“You wouldn’t let him, would you, Dad?”
“Sometimes it is the kindest thing.” Pat stroked the little foal’s head. “But not this time, Kate. Not for this little thing …”
“What do we do for her?”
Pat was silent for only a second. “We don’t give up on her,” he said. “You don’t give up on her, Kate. The bone isn’t broken. She’ll walk again. But the cut’s deep. Her leg’s torn up. She’ll get infected. She’ll get a fever. She’ll need us. Need you.”
Kate’s eyes were open wide, but her arm lay