We come across wandering Hottentot families looking for work, who no longer know how to live off the veldt, young people who no longer know the songs of the old. One of the families stops and talks and pleads and the following day I notice them a mile or so behind us. A week later another family following us with little bundles. Everything they have managed to gather on this earth wrapped in hides, cherished close to their meagre bodies. People who are not deterred by shots and curses and threats and eventually trudge along behind the ramshackle ox wagon. Tracks of lion and kudu and dry river beds. Deserted yards with carcases in the dust and skeletons swinging from trees in nooses, the clothes and meat long since redistributed. Burnt-down wattle-and-daub huts, occupied wattle-and-daub houses and huts and shelters that we pass by without entering, especially those where the invitations are too cordial and the eyes have too faraway a gaze and the words wash up against us in feverish stutterings. The solitude of the veldt becomes quite tolerable when you consider the potential danger in any encounter. This land is an open prospect where people burrow into crevices and hollows when they see somebody approaching.
We never see a shadow or a spoor of a Bushman, but at all times we are aware of the little yellow eyes on us and the little fires in the middle of nowhere that burn low every night and the next night a little nearer until one night a few of the creatures come and create havoc among the cattle and we shoot at them. Windvogel wounds one and leaps up from his station and starts crowing about his first Bushman and an arrow lodges itself right next to him in a branch and he pisses himself and starts crying.
We trek past more trees festooned with people like decorations, the rotting flesh, bits of copper on the swinging skeletons reflecting in the sunshine. We trek past lovely mirages. As we trek, the cattle drop dead one after the other, heaven knows why and who’s going to halt to find out, and we trek past trees next to the road of which the bark has been stripped for food or in vengeance or in bloodthirsty delirium and then we’ve crossed the sorry couple of pools the people around here call the Bushman’s River.
So that’s how we end up in the Zuurveld, this expansive battlefield. Zoom up into the heavens with Omni-Buys and survey the Great Fish from above. See how the stream on its way to the sea takes a sharp turn to the east so that for a while it runs along the coast, before it swerves again and debouches into the sea. This right-angled swerve and concurrence with the sea creates a rectangular arena in which various groups of people all at the same time seek to graze their cattle and where between the ocean and the Fish and Bushman’s Rivers they will be clamped and crushed as in a vice measuring fifty by eighty miles. Welcome to the Zuurveld, the land of sour grazing.
The banks of the rivers traversing the Zuurveld are overgrown with trees and thorny shrubs, dense and impenetrable to the uninitiated. As soon as you climb out of the gorges, you find some of the loveliest pastures on God’s earth. This verdant grass is deadly. In summer it offers excellent grazing, but in winter the cattle start dying. The Zuurveld Caffres and the frontier farmers know that in winter you have to move your cattle to the sweet veldt in the gorges that are perennially verdant but cannot support heavy grazing. In summer the cattle move to the sour veldt again. Look, the deckswabs-made-flesh in the Cape draw boundaries on maps in offices. Any cattle farmer could tell them it’s insane, these god-cursed borders that disturb and destroy grazing patterns. The farmers and the Caffres get het up. And by the time I end up here the whole lot is thoroughly pissed off. As soon as my cracked heels step onto my quitrent farm, Brandwacht, my thumbs start pricking like the whole sky crackles before a thunderstorm.
We build a shelter and I go to greet my big brother Johannes. A few weeks later Maria is standing waving me good bye with the baby at her breast. Elizabeth is standing next to her mother and does not wave at me. Accompanied by the few Hottentots who can shoot I venture into the bush. I’m like a child on Horse’s back; I can’t sit still and I babble uncontrollably and order the little troop to go and peer behind every kopje and in every thicket. At night I keep my trap shut next to the fire or I get drunker and louder than anybody else. A week later I return with a herd of Caffre cattle that look a good deal fatter than the few half-dead beasts I drove all the way from De Lange Cloof. I immediately put out of my mind the young Caffre and how he looked at me when I shot him where he was guarding his cattle in the open veldt, that first person I murdered. Later we build a hut and later a proper house. And always, in the distance, the dogs. When we fine-comb the veldt for Caffre cattle, red-brown smudges flash in the corners of our eyes. At night their eyes gleam in the bushes around the house. My Hottentots try hard not to see them. Nobody mentions them, nobody chases them away, nobody takes aim at them; God help the scumbag who dares.
A year later I walk into the wattle-and-daub house. The swallow darts in at the door before me and up to its clay nest under the rafters. We’d hardly moved in or the swallow pair followed and devised their own clay-and-wattle home against the roof. I wanted to clear them out, but Maria insisted that they brought good fortune to any marriage. The little creatures mate for life. I said it’s not as if we were married and Maria said they come and go with the seasons and the rain. Any farmer would thank his lucky stars for a pair of swallows that foretell the weather. The bird-brains twitter all day in their nest but I let them be. They’re not that much worse than the chickens and the suckling pig and the cats and the kids. It’s Maria’s house, I’m not here very often. If she wants to build an ark, it’s her story. The veldt is mine.
The veldt is mine, as it belongs also to my cattle and the Hottentots who look after my cattle and the Caffres who bring their cattle to graze and don’t clear out again. What kind of a Colony is this, where you can’t move your arse at the furthest reaches, as if those who are inside want out and those who are outside want in? And there on the borderline, on the riverbank where the whole lot come face to face, no tribe wants to back down before any other; there’s a chronic butting of heads and a preening like young cocks.
I regularly do my rounds on the other side of the border. No Cape-bred fellow with silk stockings and scented powder in his wig is going to tell me which river I’m not permitted to cross. If the river wants to stop me, the river can stop me, but that is between me and the waters. And the Great Fish is a bugger when it’s in flood. Then that border is a bloody border and you can talk all you like, you’re not going to get across it. But sometimes the Great Fish is no more than a waterhole in a barren riverbank where hippopotami yawn with gruesome teeth. Sometimes it’s narrow and deep, sometimes broad and vague and shallow. Sometimes you can cross by foot. But it is always brown with soil, as if the very sand wanted to get out of the Zuurveld and march down to the sea, the great and eternal boundary where everything flows into everything else and drowns itself and from which all Christians and pen-pushers emanate. In no place and on no day does the eastern border look the same. Nobody steps into the same Fish River twice.
Barely an hour’s trek from where we struck camp this morning, the yellow grass of the plain feels like a long day’s journey away, as if time itself got snagged here in the long thorns that claw and clutch. The water, thick and strong as Maria’s coffee, winds through the kloofs where the thorns grow lush and kudus appear and disappear in tracks that only they can see. In these thickets you could disappear very quickly, for ever if that was what you wanted. To cajole the cattle through this lot is a bloody manoeuvre, even where the water is shallow. There are hiding places aplenty; here everything happens mysteriously. I don’t hear the shell of the tortoise crack under the wagon wheels in the drift, only see the river floating the shards of shell and limbs downstream. This primordial creature that for thousands and thousands of years has been scrabbling unchanged under the indifferent sun. How do I know this? you ask. When I wonder about the soul, I read about vertebrae and magma.
The stream is powerful. It takes what it will. It doesn’t ask before it takes. You have to heed it, even though you don’t heed laws. I frequent the river. I know the river almost as well as the