The Great Karoo

by Fred Stenson

  This one explained that they were now under the command of Major-General Hutton—a Canadian general, as he was sure the men knew. The Royal Canadian Dragoons were also in Hutton’s brigade, as would be Lord Strathcona’s Horse when that battalion arrived from Canada. All three Canadian mounted battalions were under the direct command of brevet Lt.-Col. E.A. Alderson.

  The officer swung a hand toward the officer who had not yet spoken. It turned out to be Colonel Alderson himself. With some prompting from Howe, the boys saluted and Alderson saluted back.

  Alderson began his speech by congratulating them for their successes in the Great Karoo. Thanks to them, he said, the rebels were back north of the Orange River. The liberation of the three Karoo towns meant people in the southern Cape could breathe more easily again. They stood there trying to believe what was said about them. There was no mention of their never having fired a shot at a Boer, or of being sheep looters and whisky thieves. Later, while eating a mutton supper, they did laugh and were stared at by men in other outfits.

  After supper, a fellow came around with Young Men’s Christian Association stationery and a can of sharpened pencils. He encouraged them to write to their mothers. Fred Morden was already writing. Using a book as a desk, he was scribbling fast. He had a fat package of letters from his girlfriend, and more from his parents. If he got his letters done, they could go on a southbound train before the Mounted Rifles moved on. Frank was surprised to see Jeff Davis take a pencil and sheet of paper. Jeff put the paper on his saddle seat and started printing. He went at it slowly, pausing often to think.

  Frank tried to imagine doing that. He had never in his life written a letter. Printing his name at the bottom of the postcards to Aunt Pol was as close as he’d come. Now he was drawn to the idea. He composed something in his head and imagined what it would look like on paper.

  We are in a camp by a railroad. We were in a desert where the horses had nothing to eat. Dunny held up good as any. Then there was rain and we almost drowned. But it’s hot and dirty again. I have seen no Boer rebels except prisoners.

  The sound of it was very dull. But, dull or not, he knew his parents would be proud and would show their friends, who would also be proud. They would all pretend it was the most exciting thing ever written, and this embarrassed him so much he was certain he would never do it.

  What the folks at home mainly wanted to know was whether he was alive. The perfect thing would be one of those postcards his father bought at the drugstore for Aunt Pol. It was always the same postcard, showing the Macleod barracks and a Mountie beside it. The idea of having a card like that, some picture of Africa, and writing, Still kicking. Frank, appealed to him so much he resolved to buy one as soon as he got a chance.

  During the evening, some Tommys came and asked if the Canadians would like to get up a side for a tug-of-war. Everybody called low-ranking British soldiers Tommy Atkins or Tommys, and Frank had taken to doing so too. Some of the Tommys were already kicking around a bunch of old uniform shirts tied into a ball. Just the thought of pulling on a rope for no reason made Frank weary, and the reaction of the others was the same. The Tommys went off looking for a spunkier bunch and found some willing Australians.

  As it darkened, the night was clear and warm, and the wind had died. Frank and Ovide did not bother with their tent. But Frank found he could not sleep when he tried. In his head, he began a letter to Uncle Doc, which was easier and more exciting than the one to his parents. Doc and Franks conversations had always been freewheeling and tended toward the salty and disrespectful.

  Dear Doc. Both our commanding officers, Herchmer and Sanders, are laid up in Cape Town. If this keeps up, Hugh Davidson will come home a general. These officers aren’t shot. They are sick. Nobody has been shot. I haven’t even seen a Boer rebel except for prisoners. What’s dangerous in this country is the country itself and your own officers, and maybe yourself.

  I got Ovide Smith as a tent partner. Ovide works for Jughandle Smith but isn’t related. He’s about perfect as he doesn’t fart or snore. It’s like he dies each night and rises from the dead each morning. Ovide and I hate what they do with horses here. The commander tried to have my dun mare and Jeff Davis’s blue mare shot for being pale. Ovide had a pretty little cutting mare. She pushed herself too hard and blew up her heart. If I pointed at somebody and told Ovide that’s the man who started this war, Ovide would blow his head off and face the firing squad with a grin. Horses are not valuable here. Men might not be either.

  Three fellas in D Battery went to a hotel in Cape Town and met Rudyard Kipling. It was Lieutenant McCrae’s idea. He’s a gunnery officer who writes poetry and sings. Kipling asked them questions for something he might write. I was with McCrae in the Great Karoo Desert.

  That Karoo was one hell of a place. What you’d call a moose to a horse. I thought it would kill us or our officers would, or we might kill them or each other. All the stops were pulled.

  Frank was about to start in about how he was worried about Ovide, who had hardly spoken since his horse died—and how frightened he himself had been when it looked like he would lose Dunny. Same when they crossed that roaring river and he thought the wagon would roll over on him.

  Frank stopped his imaginary writing there. He would not want Doc to know that things frightened him, and that he was especially afraid of getting pulled away from who he was. To be a stranger to yourself was an awful idea and he feared it most.

  Frank thought of Jeff Davis and wondered who he could have written to. It would not be his mother, who probably could not read. He didn’t know how Jeff and his father got along. It might be a brother or his sister.

  Then Frank wondered if Jeff had a girlfriend. He had not mentioned one, but Jeff was the kind who might not say. Frank liked this idea best and went on imagining it: Jeff writing to a girlfriend, just like Fred Morden wrote to his.

  Still not sleeping, Frank thought finally about mysteries. Jeff Davis surely was one, and Frank considered what went into that. Being quiet was not enough. Frank and Ovide could be quiet as mice and never become anybody’s mystery. But Jeff’s silence was mysterious. Frank wondered if it was a combination of silence and size, then, or silence and being part Indian. He rejected those ideas too.

  The key to being a mystery, Frank concluded, was that people had to care what was going on behind the silence. People did care about Jeff, and wished they could see into his head. Frank knew because he wished it too.

  Norvals Pont

  De Aar was a junction, and its importance was that you could cross from there to the central railway, the one that went northeast toward Johannesburg and Pretoria. The central railway also went to Bloemfontein, the current front in the war—or where the war was currently stalled.

  When the Mounted Rifles boarded an eastbound train, they were excited. The front beckoned to men like Fred Morden and Reg Redpath, for whom the dream of glory (or duty) still existed, but it also called to those who cared little about glory and wanted to go home. The front was where the war could be won. It was the fire you had to run through to get away.

  At the central railway, they were put on another train headed north to the Orange River. That was the frontier between the Cape Colony and the first rebel republic. At the river was a high steel bridge with its middle span blown out. To replace it, the army engineers had built a pontoon bridge, a wooden floor atop a series of boats. The floating bridge sank beneath them, and they got wet. But finally, late that day, they stood on enemy soil. They were exulting about that when their officers told them they were not going any farther. They were to relieve the New Zealand garrison here at Norvals Pont and guard the bridgehead until further notice.

  In that moment of being told they were stopping, Frank discovered he still had an urge to fight. Even the Karoo had not killed it. Like most everybody—everybody, that is, but Ovide—he was disappointed that the war was going to elude them again. Ovide really did not care if he ever fought. The war was just a hole in his life that
he hoped would get filled somehow.

  The Kiwis had their gear piled by the tracks. They did not yet have a train but there was the promise of a train. When it came, they would be heading for the war. Buoyed by this, they were keen and welcoming, and wanted to tell the glum Canadians everything there was to know about Norvals Pont. Mainly, they would have to keep a lookout at night. Some Boers were in the hills to the north, and these snuck down at night to snipe. A couple of times the Boers had faked a major attack. When the camp was roused, they faded back.

  But the best thing about Norvals Pont—and they led the Mounted Rifles to the centre of the camp—was the baboon.

  In the middle of a ruined sheep kraal stood a telegraph pole. Chest high from the ground, a platform had been built around the pole, about seven feet square. On that platform, a round-backed beast with a dog’s face sat glowering. It was chained by the neck to the pole.

  Frank knew it was a baboon. He had seen this kind of monkey loping across the Karoo. They ran in groups. It was not immediately clear to him, though, why this sour-faced thing on the platform was special. While Frank and the others stared, the ugly monkey sat with its mouth wide open, canines longer than a wolf’s, occasionally flashing its crimped rope of tail.

  The Kiwis said it was a male baboon that must be fed and cared for at all costs, because he was the best sentry an army could have. The slightest night movement beyond camp, and this baboon would screech and throw himself against his chain. He would even point. They had estimated that he could see (or somehow sense) disturbance at more than one hundred and fifty yards—even at night! The job here at Norvals Pont was to man a bunch of Cossack posts fanning out to the north. The New Zealanders confided that, after a while, they hadn’t bothered occupying the closer posts. They slept and let the baboon do the job.

  The Kiwis had caught the baboon with a net when he came into camp to steal food. They reckoned he was alone, and the theory was that he’d been separated from his gang during the recent flooding. There were several ideas about his scouting behaviour, but a favourite was that he thought every movement out on the veldt might be his friends. His fuss was an attempt to let them know where he was.

  By the time the New Zealanders’ train came and went, the Mounted Rifles had their camp set up and their chores done. Major Howe had decided which men would go to what outpost for the night, but since it was still just late afternoon, he did not send them. They might as well eat supper and go toward dark. Until then, they could sleep or play sports.

  Frank and Ovide drifted back to the sheep kraal and the baboon. Most everybody had. Fellows were trying various kinds of foolishness to get the animal to react. Calling to him. Throwing bits of rock that hit off his hide. Making faces, as they thought another monkey might.

  But the baboon was not in any mood to play. He just sat there, with his deep-socketed frown, occasionally showing his big yellow canines. A couple of young privates—Henry Miles, from north of Pincher Creek, and Gil Snaddon, a cowboy from the Willow Creek—brought long sticks and went to opposite sides of the platform. As they probed at the baboon, he stayed close to the pole in the middle, attentive and still.

  Determined to get a rise out of him, the two fellows lunged so they were actually poking him. The instant their hands came within the reach of the baboon’s chain, he flew through the air. He swung his head and gashed Snaddon’s hand. Then he sprang the opposite way and bit Miles’ finger. Both men were left bleeding.

  Snaddon had drawn his Colt. Fred Morden was watching and jumped between Gil and the animal. He told Gil he would arrest him if he shot the baboon. While these two exchanged opinions on rank, Frank watched Jeff Davis work himself to the platform’s edge. He began making bird and animal sounds.

  Jeff did not stop at an owl, like most people would. He screeched like a hunting hawk and knocked like a woodpecker. His raven wasn’t just a croak or a knock but a whole suite of complicated nonsense. Elk’s bugle, moose’s mating call, the howls of wolf and coyote—he really had a repertoire. He did it so well Frank was homesick.

  During the fight, the baboon had been screeching, but now he fell silent. He sat back on his bony haunches and studied Jeff with a professor’s intensity. After a while, the baboon started to answer him. It was like a contest, or so they thought. Gil, who had calmed down by now, stopped sucking his bleeding hand and said, “That damn monkey’s trying to ape Jeff.”

  He meant imitation, and as soon as he said it, Frank could hear it too.

  Jeff’s response was to start imitating the baboon’s imitations of him. Frank thought this was going in the wrong direction, because the baboon was a much poorer mimic than Jeff. But the baboon did not see it that way. He became more excited than ever, jumping and hitting the end of his chain so hard it flipped him over. He was making a brand-new sound: baboon applause. Probably, the baboon thought the human had progressed.

  When the first smell of meat came off the fires, soldiers started leaving. Finally, only Frank and Ovide remained, watching and listening to the developing friendship between Jeff and the baboon. Jeff asked them to watch the baboon a minute and ran off. It did not like this despite Frank and Ovide doing their best owl hoots and wolf howls. Then Jeff returned with his oil sheet and bedroll. He said he wasn’t assigned to any outpost tonight, so he was going to keep the baboon company. He made his bed outside the kraal, where the wall was broken down.

  The mealtime bugle finally blew, and the three of them left to eat. The baboon had an angry fit and kept on screeching and yelling. Between bites, Jeff tried some of his sounds. Though they were seventy yards at least from the kraal, the baboon quieted. Jeff waited until it started yelling again and tried his responses in a quieter voice. The baboon stopped even then.

  Lieutenant Davidson was sitting near Jeff, having his supper. He said that if Davis had been assigned to outposts tonight, he would have unassigned him. Obviously, keeping the baboon happy was central to everyone’s rest.

  Ovide was still dependent on a loaned horse, and tonight it was Jeff’s blue. Ovide was the only rider The Blue would accept besides her owner. Frank and Ovide got their horses ready and thought they would check on the baboon kraal on the way out. Jeff was leaned over the wall, making his sounds as they approached. But right behind him—and Jeff did not know it—sat a British major on his horse. The major was watching the performance and getting angrier by the second. Frank made himself have a coughing fit until Jeff turned, and that was when the major tied into him. Was this beast his little pet? Did he think he was in a zoo? And so on.

  Lieutenant Davidson heard the ruckus and came to check. The major switched his attention to him.

  “This private with his baboon seems not to have noticed that we’re in the middle of a war. I want him put on sentry duty immediately.” Finally, he rode off.

  Davidson was in a quandary. Sending Davis was now an order from a British major. But what about the baboon? As soon as Davis left, he would start screeching and keep everyone awake. And how would they know whether the baboon was screeching about Davis’s absence or about Boers sneaking up?

  Davidson was thinking all this aloud, and his final decision was to keep Davis close by. There was a bit of wall within sight of the camp, maybe a five-minute walk into the scrub. It was a place Jeff could stand and technically be on duty, if the major returned. Based on what had happened at supper, Davidson was guessing Jeff could keep the baboon happy at that distance.

  After getting his Lee-Enfield and filling his water bottle, Jeff started out. Frank and Ovide rode beside him. Halfway to the wall, the baboon started yelling. Jeff made some of his noises, first loud, then softer, until he found the margin where the baboon started not to hear him. He kept it up out to the wall, and all was calm. It was like the baboon was a gun on a tripwire: quiet but set to go off.

  That was all Frank and Ovide saw. They were already late for their Cossack post, which was a mile farther out. The other soldiers were already there. Frank and Ovide sparked their hor
ses to a gallop so they could get there before dark.

  Pete and Eddy Belton had not been chosen for night duty, as was usual. Pete’s performance in the Great Karoo had been erratic enough that no one wanted him or his brother as Cossack-post mates, especially at night. Lieutenant Davidson liked to do what his men wanted, and so saved the Beltons for daytime chores.

  Pete had spent the early evening watching Jeff Davis’s baboon show, and had been hiding in the shadows later when the British major came along. Later still, when Davidson made his plan for giving Davis sentry work, Pete was listening, and he followed at a distance when Smith and Adams went out toward the wall with Davis. After that, he found Eddy and dragged his brother to a place where they could not be heard.

  The fact was, Davis’s celebrity in the matter of the monkey was more than Pete Belton could bear. Raised to hate Indians, Pete never thought he would see the day when a whole camp of whites would suck up to a Halfbreed. He had vowed to get back at Davis and his blue cayuse for the death of his gelding. The more he thought about it, the more he felt tonight was the right time. His plan was not refined as yet, but he was pretty sure it involved poison. He could start on that part while he thought out the rest. He would tell Eddy only the slightest bit, because the big fool seldom understood things the right way and would ask stupid questions.

  What he told Eddy was that he was not feeling well, that he was sunstruck. He wanted Eddy to go get him some medicine.

  “You better go, Pete. I’ll get it wrong.”

  “You won’t get it wrong. It’s just two numbers: five and two. You don’t even have to mix them. You just bring them.”

  “Why don’t you go yourself?”

  “Because I’m sick. Aren’t you goddamn listening?”

  Then he told Eddy one more thing. If he met anyone on the way, he must not tell them the numbers of the medicine he was after. He was to ask them to help him get something for sunstroke. Leave it at that.