The Great Karoo

by Fred Stenson

  It was all just the animal world moving and calling to itself, but it was hard not to feel it was meant for you.

  Victoria West was an older town that the scientists of railroad construction had bypassed. Its houses were adobe, like miniature American cavalry forts. White church, two hotels, a millinery shop. Ft. Macleod had no millinery shop. Nor had Frank expected the women to be so pretty. Part of the talk the soldiers had used to arouse their contempt was that Boer women were fat and ugly, and would be fatter and uglier the farther into the republics they penetrated. But here, already far from Cape Town, the bonneted, parasoled Boer ladies were anything but ugly.

  The black women were pretty too. They wore clean pink calico like the flowers Frank had seen in the desert.

  At Victoria West, the desert had no flowers and, worse yet, no grass. Sheep and goats were out among the tufts and rocks for some purpose, but whatever they were eating the horses could not find or would not eat. The horses went out in the scrub eagerly, but their heads popped up soon after they dropped. They moved on quickly to a fresh disappointment.

  Ovide and Frank were leading their horses back after a failed graze when they saw Jeff coming. He had been out on another scouting chore with Casey. But, as he came closer, Frank saw that Jeff’s expression was serious and troubled. He said something about how they might lose their horses. He and Frank had already discussed a rule that said officers and cavalrymen could take a trooper’s horse, despite ownership, if they felt it was needed. He thought Jeff was repeating this for some reason.

  “They’re not getting mine,” said Frank.

  “No,” said Jeff, and shook his head. “Listen.”

  What Jeff explained was something different and worse. Colonel Parsons had given Herchmer a scolding for bringing pale horses on the expedition. They would be visible at night, Parsons claimed. They would give away their position and attract sniper fire. Herchmer was stung by the rebuke, and had already gathered up six white and pale horses he intended to shoot. He would not hear of selling them, because they might fall into rebel hands.

  Then Frank spotted Herchmer. He was coming in their direction with a brisk-walking entourage.

  “It’s this way,” said Jeff, hurrying to finish. “He’s got his eye on The Blue and your dun.”

  Frank felt light-headed and could not think. Jeff grabbed his arm and squeezed hard to get his attention back. “Don’t say anything. I’ll talk.”

  Herchmer arrived with his orderly, a sergeant, and two lieutenants. Their expressions were stern and dutiful. Herchmer said exactly what Jeff had just explained. The blue mare and Dunny were pale and would have to go. He looked at Ovide’s mare and cleared her. She had white tips on dark brown hair, but the light at the moment was showing the brown.

  Jeff did what Frank could never have done. When Herchmer declared his intention to do away with the two cayuse mares, Jeff nodded as though he saw the point and the danger, and even somewhat agreed.

  “But, you know, sir, these two mares came off the ship stronger than almost any other saddle horse. You could ask Sergeant Tracey.”

  Herchmer gave Jeff a look reserved for those slow in the head.

  “If you’re listening, private, I’m not talking about fitness, I’m talking about colour.”

  “Yes, sir. But I think, since they are solid horses, good scout horses, we might test to see if they can be seen at night or not.”

  Frank forgot Jeff’s instruction. He blurted out a repetition of Jeff’s point about consulting Sergeant Tracey.

  “I will not ask Tracey! I command Tracey!”

  Herchmer’s face was a dangerous shade of black. Frank regretted having spoken. But some of Herchmer’s colour was due to frustration over the reasonableness of Jeff’s suggestion. It was reasonable, and several witnesses had heard it.

  As dusk faded to night, Jeff and Frank rode their mares into the Karoo scrubland west of camp. They were to go out a mile and wait. They could choose the length of that wait, returning at any time during the next two hours. There were two sets of sentries posted on this side of camp, and both had been instructed about the plan. They were to sing out the instant they saw a pale horse. If those sentries so much as thought they saw something, Frank’s and Jeff’s cayuses were done for.

  At the estimated mile, Jeff told Frank to dismount. The main danger, he said, was that their heads or hats would show against the sky, which was not yet solid dark. They would lead the horses back and crouch a little so everything was below the horizon. As for waiting, Jeff chose not to. He thought the best gamble was that the sentries would not expect them back directly.

  Frank had hunted plenty of times with the Bloods, and he recognized Jeff’s way of walking on their return as that silent kind. Jeff led them right between the two sentry posts. After that, Frank circled around behind the left-hand post, while Jeff continued into camp.

  Frank did not see anyone until he had completed most of his circle. Then two khaki backs (speaking of pale) loomed before him. The two sentries were behind a pile of rocks, peering hard into the night. Frank tied his mare to a scrub branch and came slowly forward. When he was within a few feet, he sang out, “How about it, fellas? Any luck seeing those birds?”

  The sentries jumped in fright. Next they were angry. Then one of them laughed, and everybody laughed.

  Meanwhile, Jeff was leading his mare into camp and up to her usual place on the picket line. He tied her, then walked to Herchmer’s tent, where his orderly was sitting on a camp stool. Jeff asked whether the old boy was in and could he have a word with him? When Jeff led Herchmer over and showed him his mare on the picket line, the colonel was furious. He said he would court-martial those useless sentries. Jeff said he would be happy to try it again with different sentries. His bluff called, Herchmer stormed back to his tent and ripped the flap down.

  Carnarvon Road

  The idea of the Carnarvon Field Force was that it would move across the desert in three parts, the arrival of one triggering the departure of the next. E Battery’s arrival at Victoria West meant it was Herchmer’s time to go. There would be no easy objective this time. They were headed for Carnarvon, eighty miles away.

  After two hours, they halted by a stagnant pond trapped behind a rock dam. The water was a green remnant swarming with flies. The horses wanted it, and the officers commanded that they be allowed. Frank and Ovide shared a look. Back home, only the most careless horseman would let a horse drink out of something like that.

  Later in the day, they saw dust devils that they thought might be rebels. It soon turned into a sandstorm. They entered a walled room of dense grit that cancelled the sky. The suffering horses dodged their faces back and forth, looking to escape the stinging assault. Their hooves, supposedly healed, were already tender again from razor shards of rock.

  Frank felt himself grow angry. What was the point, he wondered, of pampering them on the beach, if it was in preparation for this? He was thinking on behalf of the horses, but it was also a way of feeling sorry for himself. That Herchmer had come as close as he had to killing Franks dun mare had lodged a bitterness that would not leave. Something in the way he felt about the war had changed already. He had not seen a single rebel except for the prisoners back at Green Point, but he was locked in a battle anyway. He was forced to fight for what was precious to him.

  Still in the grit storm, they came upon another Boer farm. The column stopped and Frank and Ovide were in the group detached to search it. The farms they had seen so far were deserted, but this adobe contained the surprise of a Boer farmer who stood up from his table and faced them with arms stiff to his sides and his chin beard raised. There was crying below, and the searchers pulled a ring and lifted a door to see the man’s wife and some girls weeping in a dirt cellar. Frank climbed down with a torch. He looked for guns and found none. The women shrank from him wherever he moved, and he saw that the wife held a big carving knife. Back on top, he did not mention the knife. In the light, he noticed a naked cross
on the wall and, beside it, askew, a yellowed calendar picture of Queen Victoria.

  Outside, Herchmer had a bunch of soldiers working in the empty sheep kraal. They were cutting dried dung into squares to be carried for fuel, and also checking that no rebel munitions were buried.

  Ovide said “water,” and he and Frank went looking. They were dreaming of a sweet well, but found another rock dam across a donga. This water looked even worse.

  “Do you think they drink that shit?” asked Frank, meaning the Boer family.

  Ovide did not answer, for it was evident. What else would they drink?

  At seventeen miles, they bivouacked on stony ground beside more rotten water. Their own bottles had little left, and they raged with thirst after being allowed one swallow. Frank wondered if a time was coming when the green water would start to look good.

  Picket pegs would not hammer into the stony ground so they tied the horses between the guns. Frank and Ovide laid their shared oil sheet and blankets on the warm drifted sand. When the moon rose full, the night shone cool.

  Frank’s mind was assailed by things he had seen during the day, pictures that danced weirdly in his head. It must have been like that in Ovide’s head too, but almost no words had passed between them. In fact, almost nobody in the whole of D Squadron had spoken since the train. It came to Frank that the lack of talk might be because they had no words for what they were seeing. How can you talk about what you cannot name?

  Franks own search for words kept circling something Doc Windham used to say when Frank was a boy. To explain a thing, Doc would say, “It’s like a moose to a horse.” He would never explain beyond that, which suggested that Frank was to figure it out for himself.

  That’s what Frank was doing now, and he was glad not to have to explain to anyone why this thing was repeating in his brain.

  Like a moose to a horse. Compared to home, the Great Karoo was like a moose to a horse.

  Next day, reveille was at five and they were marching in an hour, taking advantage of the last of the cool. By ten, the air was hot and full of locusts that crossed the sky in a clittering cloud. When Frank was in that cloud, they struck his face like small brittle knives. While the cavalcade stopped to rest, Frank threw rocks into the locust cloud, and it made a swishing sound. The wagon drivers could slash down dozens at a time with their whips.

  At noon, they were ordered to stop and sleep. They put their oil sheets over themselves to keep off the sun and locusts. At eight in the evening, they started again. The horses walked all night, surrounded by moonlit dust. Every once in a while a man asleep on his horse would fall, the sound like a box of cutlery dropped on a floor.

  They followed a road, a slash of brown sand through the scrub. When the next day dawned and they were still moving, they entered a valley fertile and green. The first real grass since the Cape, and the horses woke and ran to it. In farmer’s fields, mature corn stood, the ears ready for picking. Fruit trees. Thousands of sheep and goats. It was the sixteenth of March, and they had reached Carnarvon.

  Carnarvon

  Carnarvon was the same kind of town as Victoria West. Flat-topped houses of unbaked brick, plastered with mud. Two white churches. A town hall. An African town, with its kraal, stood on the slope of a nearby hill.

  As the Field Force rode down the dirt main street, they pointed their rifles at every building. A crowd of Boer women in bonnets and long dresses ran before them toward the town hall. Inside, a meal of tea and jam sandwiches was waiting. A nice-looking woman, maybe still in her twenties, poured tea out of a big can, and Frank went with his mess tin to get some. A C Squadron corporal was talking to her in what Frank knew was German. The woman looked embarrassed and would not answer or meet the corporal’s eye.

  “She can understand me,” he said to Frank. “She’s just trying not to. I talked German to the Boers in Cape Town. Even old Case, the wagon boss, had no trouble with it.”

  The woman kept on not looking at him, roses in her cheeks.

  A lieutenant came along with a cup. “It’s pure cussedness, you know,” he said, summing up the woman’s silence. “They have no grievance.”

  Not understanding the corporal’s German had become proof of being rebel. Frank headed for a jam sandwich and tried not to think too hard.

  After lunch, there was a stir of excitement because Jeff Davis and Casey Callaghan had brought in two fellows who might be rebels. They were old men, and had been caught on a kopje overlooking the town. They were skinny and long-bearded. Herchmer ordered them tied up, put in a building, and guarded.

  E Battery and the supply train rolled in come evening. The sixteen-ox wagon teams looked tired and disgusted after eighty miles of desert. Each ox pair stood like statues while the black teamsters pulled the pins from the bows and lifted off the yokes.

  The whole Carnarvon Field Force was together now, for at least this night. They had only been in the desert four days, but could have passed for hard-travelling pilgrims of much longer passage. Day before yesterday, Franks bottle had emptied, and he had been forced to strain wrigglers out of green dam water. Dysentery came with remarkable swiftness, as if he had eaten gunpowder. Everyone started out with the same amount of water. Everyone ran out at the same time. Now everyone had the same case of the shits. By the night fires, they looked drained and ghastly. Bold fighters one day; fighting to keep their bungs closed the next.

  There were cases of sunstroke too—what for some reason of army delicacy was called “a touch of the sun.” In fact, they had been clubbed by the sun, clubbed stupid, dizzy, and sick. Ovide had sunstroke as well as the shits, and tonight he staggered wherever he walked. When Frank got their tent up and Ovide’s bedroll laid, the old cowboy fell on it like a shot bird. He slept with both hands holding his head.

  Next day was Sunday, and the chaplain and Herchmer had no mercy. They demanded everyone turn out for church parade. It was supposed to console and comfort them to stand in the sun and listen to scripture and sing hymns. More than a few had to flee their place in line to run for the latrine ditch. A few more toppled over, touched by the sun. Frank knew some were faking, having spotted a good way to get back to the tents and to sleep.

  Frank saw Colonel Herchmer lurch forward and buckle at the knees. His orderly and Capt. Archie Macdonnell grabbed him and whisked him away.

  Not long after church, a sandstorm rose, pouring into town on a hot wind. They took to their tents and the sand came straight through the walls, covering their bedding and leaving drifts in the corners.

  When the storm stopped that afternoon, Frank felt certain he was about to see rain. A cloud raced up and lowered its ass over the town. But the drops that fell boiled in the air and never made it down.

  That evening, a dispatch rider came. He climbed off his lathered horse and went to Herchmer’s tent. The result was a bulletin pinned to the officers’ mess tent that said Bloemfontein had fallen to General Roberts’ army. Each mob of men who went to read the paper gave a feeble cheer and walked away. Bloemfontein was the capital of the Orange Free State, the closest of the two rebel republics. Another turning point.

  The war was sweeping north as the Canadian Mounted Rifles were creeping west. They were farther away every day. Frank knew that some of those around him had already given up on seeing the war. Ovide had been beyond caring even before he left the ship. Frank had asked him a few times why he had ever enlisted, but got no answer. He stopped pestering when he realized his own reasons were far from clear.

  Van Wyk’s Vlei

  The first group, now called a flying column, left Carnarvon first thing in the morning. Between that and the second group’s leaving, Colonel Herchmer was loaded into a cart and given a two-soldier escort back to Cape Town. Other soldiers too sick to ride were left in town. Their next objective, Van Wyk’s Vlei, was another eighty miles away.

  On this weary stretch of road, the land was soon stone dry again, and the horses weakened badly. Many were humped and water-sick. No longer paying atte
ntion, they often stumbled. Their progress was slow, and this made the whole section stretch long and thin. They would have been easy meat for the rebels. Even if there were rebels, thought Frank, why should they bother to attack, when the Field Force was taking itself apart so efficiently? Dysentery, lameness, sunstroke, thirst.

  Along their path, picked-clean rib cages gleamed in the scrub. A horse with a Waldron brand stood crooked on the road awaiting their approach, a still-living portent. Turned loose by the flying column, the gelding swayed on his legs, and his eyes were smoky. He stood beside one of the polished skeletons as though by a friend. Probably blind, the horse heard the other horses coming and passing. Trying to turn, he fell on his knees. The crack of a pistol, finally.

  The carrion birds milled overtop the shuffling line. To the gliding birds, a smell ascended with the dust, as from a long thin kitchen. Their meat was on the grill.

  The sickness and weakness of the horses told by contrast how strong Franks dun really was. She still had her flesh and her clarity, still responded to every flicker in the bush, quick ears snapping. She probably hated this place and feared it, but that only made her more vigilant and faster to react. Frank thought of Herchmer, sick in his cart, and gave him the same lack of mercy he had shown Franks mare. Herchmer had faltered; Dunny had not.

  Out of the whole of D Squadron, the only horse doing as well as Dunny and Jeff’s blue was Eddy Belton’s gelding, Buck. One look at the bull’s arse on Buck and you knew he was a dray, the kind that were all over the Canadian prairie now, helping pilgrims bust sod. Whatever crossbreeding produced Buck and his stone-boat gait had also made him unkillable. Stone stupid, Buck would plod through a day of scorching sun, sand, and locusts—and come out the other side unbothered. He probably didn’t remember any of it.