Somebody asks me about the hyena in the middle.
It’s not my hyena.
The man looks confused, asks me how much I’ve got on the hyena. I say I did not bet anything.
On whose side are you? the man asks.
A windbag with a sack for a shirt scolds and hisses and apes the fight in a farcical mime. When the hyena pounces he and a henchman grab each other in the same grip as that in which the hyena and the dogs are tearing at each other. His mouth gapes open when the hyena barks, his teeth gnash when the dogs growl, as if he’s the puppet and the dogs the ventriloquists.
The hyena retreats, its mouth stretched open, a sharp yelping. The dogs circle. The hyena leaps, first at one dog, then the other. The greyhound lies bleeding. The bull terrier has an open gash across the back, the mongrel’s snout is in shreds. The hyena is red all over except for the white sinew dangling from its paw. The animals fight without surrender, as if they’ve fought and died a thousand times in other bodies in other arenas.
The men around the kraal are now talking more to each other, bored with the bloodbath. They’re staying for the bets, but the fervour has dissipated.
The firelight finds the hyena’s eyes. I once again see the same thing I saw in the baboon. A pure thing, something that I have only seen this close up in animals in traps.
I make my way through the wall of shoulders, firmly push aside those who don’t give way. The mongrel is in tatters and has no chance any more but does not stop charging. Its owner climbs over the wall, tries to get the chain on his dog again. The dog bites him and the man curses and his friends echo his curse raucously. I look at the men on the other side of the kraal, some of them with spatters of the fight on their faces. They shout and bark and gob and wipe the blood from their eyes and how can they not see it? I step back, suddenly afraid that the hyena’s chain will snap, and then I hope the chain will snap and I smile and then I’ve already swung the one flintlock from my shoulder and aimed it at the hyena and pulled the trigger. The powder ignites and while I have to keep the rifle aimed at the target for an eternity while the powder burns and launches the bullet out of the barrel, the men around me all of a sudden stand struck sober and stupid. The hyena crashes down. I already have the second rifle in the foul face of the drunken lout next to me and I open up a passage through the crowd and have to smack one pipsqueak with the butt of the rifle and then I’m on my horse and gone.
Some distance along I hear somebody calling after me. A rider follows me and shouts about the value of the hides and how much I owe him and you can’t just shoot another man’s animals. I gallop on and the man carries on shouting after me, but never tries to catch up with me. A few hundred yards along he adjusts his pace to mine. He hollers until his voice is raw and the words are mere sounds and the shouting just a shouting and he gives up and turns back to his pals.
At daybreak I wait for the men to wake up while I boil water. We travel back to Brandwacht. I sit silent in my saddle and wonder why wagon trails always wind even though everything is flat and straight in front of you and nobody asks me any questions but they talk among themselves.
On the second day out of Graaffe Rijnet we notice the dogs in the underbrush again. A red one trots out in front of Horse. It’s not the one-eared dog that I wrestled. This one has a fresh mark across the snout; both ears are erect. He is broader and darker and younger than old One-ear, his eyes wilder. The pack leader is dead, long live the pack. What happened to old One-ear? Tick bite? Old age? Did he have to defend his position with his teeth and was he too old? Was he bitten to death or did he wander into the wilderness, a defeated loner? Life surges on, the pack lives for ever. The dogs have a new captain and I have a new shadow.
At home I bustle to and fro around the place and at night I lie awake. Maria manages after a few days to drag the story out of me.
And so they let you go just like that?
They wouldn’t shoot a man for a hyena and a few apes.
You know they shoot for far less.
How must I know why they didn’t shoot me.
You were angling for it.
I went back for the animals on that wagon. I knew I was going to blast the daylights out of whatever was let loose in that kraal.
Oh come on, Buys, I know you. You also wanted to see what they would do to you. The Graaffe Rijnet boys.
I’m silent.
You didn’t shoot the dogs?
What for? They’d been tamed already.
In winter when the river can hardly flush away your piss, my comrades and I and our Hottentots trek through the bushes and kloofs and river to Caffreland and return with cattle from the Mbalu kraals. A few nights later Langa’s people trek through the bushes and kloofs and river and get away with cattle from my kraal. A few days later I trek through the bush-grown kloofs and the dry river and return with Langa’s cattle, and a few days later Langa treks through the overgrown kloofs and the Great Fish River and returns with my cattle. Langa is eighty and he’s always fought and he’ll always carry on fighting.
When I come home on a strange horse with a herd of strange cattle and a wagonload of ivory, buck hanging from the wagon tilt, and guns – chests full of smuggled guns – Maria comes running out of the house and she takes up position a few paces in front of me and I walk up to her and she steps back and stops when I stop and looks down and closes her hands tightly over her thumbs and presses her hands to her sides and looks up quickly:
Your child is dead, she says.
The baby was buried behind the house against a hill, a heap of stones piled on top of her little carcase. Maria takes me to the heap of stones. I have still not said a word.
You couldn’t have waited? I say.
How was I to know when you’d be coming home? You’re forever drifting about.
I am silent. I sit down and pick up one of the stones. I stroke it, knock it against another stone.
I should have waited with the burial, she says. But I didn’t think you’d mind. You were gone. It was starting to stink.
That’s all right, I say. It wouldn’t have been of any use.
I wait for the afternoon to heat up properly. I go and chop wood and ride a distance on my new horse that does not yet recognise my body’s signals. The following morning I’m awake before sunrise. I walk up to the hill with a pickaxe. I hew rocks from the incline that one day when we’ve all copped it will become a mountain. I take out the rocks and split them further until I can pick them up. When my people come and ask whether they can help me I chase them away. I carry the rocks to the heap and pile them on my daughter’s body.
After a week the pile is higher than the house and wider. Maria comes to stand before me with her arms akimbo.
You never even gave her a name. You never touched her. She was nothing to you.
Now