The Great Karoo

by Fred Stenson

  Burial would be in the morning, at the battle site. Wood was yanked from a wall and two crosses fashioned. Looking at the homely result, a fellow said, “Monument.” He asked Hugh Davidson to take a pound from his soldier’s pay toward the cost of a proper headstone. Others said to sign them up. Harry Gunn said to put Reg Redpath down for a pound. Redpath wasn’t here but had been a close friend of Kerr’s. Make that two pounds. The wood crosses would do for now.

  The mourners were not allowed a fire because of Boer snipers, so they sat around a blackened firepit. The bundled bodies stretched beside them. Quartermaster Capt. Jack Allen produced two bottles of whisky. Each man had a few good pulls that changed out some of his hurt for anger. If they’d had trouble hating the Boers, it was no trouble tonight.

  Frank found the whisky did not make much difference to him. The anger he saw around him seemed beside the point, though Frank wasn’t sure what the point was.

  When someone spoke, it was usually Hugh Davidson. He sounded broken as he recited what Tom Miles had said in his ear. Tom was in the temporary Red Cross tent, hopefully asleep.

  “After Tom was shot and could not fire his own rifle,” Davidson said, “he spotted for the other two. Kerr got hit next, in the side, but kept firing until he was shot in the heart. Fred Morden didn’t stop firing even then. Not until the bullet hit him in the forehead. Tom said they killed at least two Boers, and wounded more.”

  “Fred did not have to do this,” Davidson continued. “He could have let those Boers pass. No one would have blamed him. He could have surrendered. Many a brave soldier has surrendered in this war. The Boers would have let them go later.”

  It was an agony for Davidson to say these things, and an agony to listen to. The only other man who spoke was Harry Gunn. He patted Davidson’s arm, and when the lieutenant paused, Gunn murmured things the others could not hear. But Davidson seemed to feel it was his obligation not just to tell what he’d been told, but to repeat it.

  Davidson was the Mountie who had raised the troop in Pincher Creek, the one who had stirred the young men’s interest and outrage and convinced them Britain’s interests were their own. Now he felt responsible: for Kerr and Morden; for Tom Miles’ ruined shoulder; for Henry Miles’ hand.

  There was little sound beyond Davidson’s talk. Occasional pulses of wind pulled at rips in the Red Cross tent. No man said good night when he left the circle. The night had fallen clear, an icy silent dark.

  For his own thoughts, Frank waited until he was alone. In his bedroll, he was still angry at Morden for his Empire heroics and at Jeff for his stupid game of scouting. If everyone had just stayed in their place, looked after their own, maybe Jeff could have figured a way to relieve Morden’s four. Frank knew this was crazy thinking, that it could not have been that simple, but he went on thinking it anyway until he slept.

  The Mounted Rifles went to the Cossack post at dawn. They dug the hole deep and wide a dozen yards from the tracks. Morden and Kerr were put in side by side. Those who were religious said prayers. Everyone sang “Glory Hallelujah,” then Hugh Davidson gave a speech, his voice stronger this morning. Major Sanders had arrived in the night and spoke next. It was a rousing, patriotic talk, the one about heroic sacrifice. They’d heard it before but needed it now.

  They filled the hole and punched the crosses in; piled rocks on the grave. Frank saw Casey and Jeff mount up and leave, headed east. The rest went back to camp.

  Davidson and Harry Gunn had taken effects. Pocket watches, jackknives; things that could be sent home. Harry found a half-written letter to Trudy Black in Fred’s back pocket. He put it in a YMCA envelope and licked it shut; printed her name and address on the front.

  By that afternoon, Percy Girouard had repaired enough track to get a train as far north as Katbosch. The train could go no farther, and a wagon full of wounded men was brought down from Honing Spruit. These were British ex-POWs, ones who’d been freed from Pretoria’s prison camp. Now they were wounded and on their way to hospital.

  Beside the huffing train, Lieutenant Davidson sat on a camp stool with a portable desk on his knees, deep in a kind of writing that spurted fast. He looked desperate when he was not writing. Letters to Morden’s family and Kerr’s sister. His face was composed but wet.

  On the train, D Squadron crowded into the aisle of the car where Tom Miles lay and Henry sat. C Squadron was in a different car with Ingles, Aspenall, and Birney. The wounded were on their way to the hospital at Kroonstad.

  The Mounted Rifles could not all fit inside the car. Some clung to the outside and stared through the windows. The talk was nervous and hearty, mostly false, because Tom Miles still did not look well enough to live, and because they remembered Canadians had died in Kroonstad’s hospital. Henry Miles was not hurt badly, certainly not enough to go to hospital. Hugh Davidson was sending him to look out for his brother: to make sure they didn’t put Tom in a room full of typhoid.

  The steam whistle blew and the men jumped off. The train puffed away. Everyone who had been clustering together since the previous evening abruptly broke apart. No one wanted to hear what anyone else had to say. Most went to their horses. Where the horses had been clipped by shell fragments, they cleaned and anointed them. They brushed them until the oil rose and their coats gleamed.

  In the days after the battle, every Katbosch morning started out the same. The Shropshire sergeants yelled in the dark. The Mounted Rifles corporals and sergeants ran around delivering Lieutenant Davidson’s orders. Cossack posts; patrols; hunting for the pot; burying horses, oxen, and mules; gathering fuel for the fire; piecing together a new shantytown out of the flattened ruins of the old. Only the sick and the wounded were excused. Everything was about keeping fear and self-pity at bay.

  It was not working for Frank Adams, who was neck deep in emotions he could not even name. He bunched it together and called it frustration. Even things that had never bothered him frustrated him now. Trapped in a small box was how he felt.

  The start had been finding Morden and Kerr dead, but the feeling had spiralled tighter and higher when he hadn’t liked Jeff Davis’s talk. When Jeff and Casey had ridden away, the roof had caved in. That was the end of sleeping, so that every day was worse than the one before.

  In the cold, sleepless, endless nights, Frank gummed his problem like a toothless dog, pushing the facts around the yard of his brain. But some things came clear. He remembered what Doc Windham used to say at funerals. As they walked away from the grave, he would put his hand on Frank’s neck and say, “Sorrow is for the self.”

  When Jeff and Casey rode away, Frank had not been thinking about the dead; he’d been longing with all his heart to be on Dunny’s back beside the scouts. In his tin-cold bedroll, Frank became convinced that he and Ovide had been going about this war exactly wrong, and that what they needed now was to become scouts as soon as possible.

  When Frank went to breakfast, he bumped into Davidson, who ordered him to take his four and go on patrol five miles west. Frank asked whether it would be all right if he and Ovide went alone.

  “Adams, sometimes I wonder if you think at all. Three days ago we lost two men. Does that strike you as reason to exercise less than normal vigilance? You will go out as four. Get moving.”

  The day was grey and the wind cold. In this calendar month at home, the prairie would be glittering with crocus, buffalo bean, pincushion, and wild rose, but the winter veldt here was frostbitten and stone dead. The horses barely looked at it.

  None of the four talked about the attack two days ago, but as soon as the camp disappeared behind the first roll of landscape, its shadow was on them like a devil dog. Pete unslung his rifle and carried it across his saddle rolls. Eddy did the same. Pete was gouging his horse then yanking its head when it tried to answer. Ovide told him to quit it and Pete told him to shut up.

  Though the other horses were still thin and weary, Dunny was sparky and insisted on pushing ahead. That put the nervous Beltons behind Frank, and he felt th
e itch all over his back. Out a mile, Dunny heard a snake in some rocks and kicked with both hind feet. Eddy’s rifle cracked, luckily firing to the side. Frank stopped and ordered the Beltons to the front; ordered them to hook their fingers on the trigger guard and not on the damn trigger itself. When Dunny objected to going last, he wound her in a tight circle then snapped his reins on her when it was time to go straight. She looked back with chagrin and wonder, not used to such treatment.

  The destination was a farmhouse. Davidson said it had been visited but not properly searched. The lieutenant had been impressed when Ovide found the root cellar at the first farm. He thought he might repeat the miracle.

  They searched the house and found nothing. It had already played host to British soldiers. A Tommy bard had written on the wall.

  BOOER NO FEAR

  REMBER MAJUBA

  The cupboard doors were off their hinges. The spaces within contained broken cups, dishes, and crockery. The Tommys had been thorough. A table stood on its legs in the middle of the room, but the chairs were spun off into corners and some smashed. The cellar below the house was alive with mice, who had eaten anything that could be eaten.

  Frank asked Pete to check the barn loft and heard a rifle blast soon after. When Pete climbed the ladder and poked his head through, a cloud of doves had exploded out the hayloft. Pete had blown a hole in the roof.

  They went to their saddlebags for hardtack biscuits and cold tea. They flipped the surviving chairs upright and swept the mouse dirt off the table. The room was dirty and the windows broken, but the walls kept out most of the wind.

  Frank’s plan for the day had been to soften Ovide up to the idea of scouting. He knew it would be a slow process and was anxious to begin. He also knew that saying anything in front of Pete was risky, yet he could not stop himself.

  “We ought to do something about Morden and Kerr,” Frank said to Ovide. “Not just ordinary soldiering. Something else. Otherwise it could happen again.”

  The old cowboy kept chewing at the hardtack with his few good teeth. He could have been deaf and dumb.

  Pete was on it in an instant. “What do you want us to do, Frank?”

  Frank went on staring at Ovide.

  “Ovide and I should go scouting,” Frank said. “If we were scouts, this war would be less boring. Time would pass more quickly. We’d feel we were doing something and getting home sooner.”

  Ovide was hard to flatter, but Frank tried that too. He praised how Ovide had found the root cellar and the split horseshoe track at the battle site. That was real scouting. Ovide shook his head once in denial, causing some saliva to escape and run down the deep crease that bordered his chin.

  Frank had not anticipated immediate success. He wanted to plant the idea in his old partner, like a grass spear in a sock.

  Ovide turned toward Frank and opened his eyes turtle-slow “Not me. These fellas, maybe.”

  “We’d go scouting,” said Pete. “Go out with Jeff, eh?”

  “No!” Frank said louder than he intended. “Jeff’s not in this. It wouldn’t be with Jeff.”

  “We’re still interested. Aren’t we, Eddy?”

  The bigger Belton smiled and nodded agreeably with a piece of hardtack packed in his cheek.

  “We can track,” said Pete. “We track real good. Don’t we, Eddy?”

  “I guess everybody can,” Frank said, losing patience.

  “Oh, no. I wouldn’t say that. That’s not true. Not good like we can.”

  Frank fell silent. Pete tried two more times to goad him into argument about tracking and whether the Beltons’ ability was unusual, but Frank dummied up like Ovide had. Every man in Alberta believed himself a superior tracker, just like every man believed he had a special gift for riding horses.

  “Well, we can,” Pete said, insulted by Frank’s silence.

  Frank had known before he started that he would regret speaking in front of the Beltons. He was already thinking how to keep Pete’s interest from spooking his plan.

  That evening, before the camp went to sleep, Frank excused himself to Ovide and said he was going to the latrine. He started in that direction then veered for Davidson’s tent. The canvas of the bell tent was lit dully from within. The black guard who looked after Davidson and his horse at night lay curled like a dog beside the flap.

  “Talk to the lieutenant,” Frank said to him.

  The guard tapped the tent and said, “Bossy.” He repeated it several times.

  Davidson flung the flap. He was wearing his greatcoat, buttoned to the neck.

  “What is it, Adams?”

  “Need a word, sir. Have a request.”

  Davidson went back inside and Frank stood in the tent door. He had never been inside an officer’s tent and was struck by its neatness. The bedroll was on the floor, made up and turned down. There was even a pillow. Beside the bed’s head was a box that showed a book in its open top. A picture in a metal frame leaned against the box’s side. It was of Davidson, his wife, and their three daughters.

  On the tent’s other side were two camp stools. Davidson sat on one. The other held his travel desk, open with a partly written letter and a pen dripping ink on the blotter. A lantern hung from a riveted hook above. Davidson did not offer to move the desk and Frank stayed standing.

  “Ovide Smith and I would like to be scouts, sir.”

  Davidson knocked the ink out of his pen and wiped it. He wrapped it in a rag.

  “You’re good with horses,” he said. “I’m surprised either of you has ambitions beyond that.” Davidson paused. Maybe he thought he’d said enough to make Frank disappear, but Frank remained.

  “You’re letting the warmth out, Adams. Sit on the bed. Mind your boots.” He reached behind Frank and pulled the flap closed.

  Frank did not want to be on Davidson’s bed. He sat in the middle and kept his boots near the door. He had to put an arm behind himself and lean on his elbow. He was closer now to the picture of the lieutenant’s family. Four pretty females in formal dresses. A younger Davidson behind them in his Mountie uniform, head bare and hair slicked down. Frank knew the photographer was the fellow who worked the towns along the Crow’s Nest Pass railway. Frank knew because a photograph of his parents and him, against the same painted sheet, hung on the wall of their cabin.

  “Private? Your reasons, please.”

  “It’s Morden and Kerr, sir, and the Miles brothers. As scouts, maybe Ovide and me could keep the outposts safer. Maybe Casey and Captain Chalmers could use help.”

  “Maybe our scouts don’t need or want your help.”

  “I just thought since Jeff Davis left…”

  “There’s been plenty of time to fill that vacancy, if there was one.” He saw that Frank wanted to say more. “Let me finish.”

  The lieutenant asked to be let finish but had nothing to say. Frank waited.

  “Scouting, as you know, Adams, is more than wanting to scout. There are skills. A certain type of man.”

  “Ovide and I are good trackers, sir. We’re both good riders.”

  Davidson fingered the letter he was writing. Tipped up its head end and stared. Frank was losing him. He could see the negative reply forming in the lieutenant’s head. In desperation, he said, “Ovide and me are part Indian.”

  Davidson lifted his eyebrows and swung a look at Adams.

  “My mother’s a Montana Halfbreed. I don’t know how it works with Ovide.”

  “Perhaps you should have said so at the time of enlistment.”

  “Colonel Herchmer had just passed Jeff Davis when I came up. I thought it would be the same for me. Since I look less Indian than Jeff.”

  Davidson laughed without humour. “I don’t know what being Indian adds, frankly. Callaghan is Irish and seems to do well. Charlie Ross was born in Australia. At any rate, Private Adams, this is not a decision I can take—or want to take—immediately. I’ll think about it. In the meantime, remember that patrols and outposts are scouting. The Canadian Mounted Rifles i
s a scouting battalion. Just do your work well. Good night.”

  The brevity of the conversation suggested Frank had been dismissed, and the guard at Davidson’s door grinned as he left. But Frank was not defeated, no more than he had been by Ovide’s silence. Davidson’s final comment was not outright refusal. The possibility of success hung by a thread. He decided before he got to their bedding spot that he would not say anything about the conversation to Ovide, certainly not the part about Ovide’s being a Halfbreed, which of course he wasn’t.

  Ovide was in his blanket and turned away by the time Frank arrived. Frank kicked off his boots. In his bedroll, he writhed to loosen his lice.

  “That was a big shit,” Ovide said.

  “I went for a walk.”

  “Doubt it.”

  March to Transvaal, July 1900

  At the start of July, the Mounted Rifles were ordered to leave the railway camps and proceed to Irene (pronounced I-ree-nee). They were being sent back north to fight Louis Botha’s Transvaal Boers. As there were convoys in need of guarding, they were ordered to march rather than go by train.

  The attack on Katbosch had left Davidson’s troop touchy. If one of De Wet’s burgher armies appeared from behind a kopje, or one of his guns started dropping shrapnel rounds from a hill’s top, they were sure they would not have time to un-extend and form a defensive circle; that they would be defeated. Nor was running an option. Someone had calculated that C and D Squadrons had six fit horses among them.

  The oxen were clapped out too. Every day, a few would stop. Unable to lie down in their yokes, they would stand still, and no amount of abuse from the drivers could move them. If the whipping went too far, the cowboys among the Rifles would force it to stop—for, like any cow, an ox can put its brain to sleep. In that state, you can beat it to death and achieve nothing.

  Several times a day, a man would drag his horse off the line and shoot it. Pete Belton shot his early to get it out of the way. Eddy had been forced to give up his giant horse to a gun crew and was given a small Argentine who was no match for his weight. When the Argentine pony fell twice in an hour, Pete shot it as well, so that he would have Eddy’s company on the wagon.