The Great Karoo

by Fred Stenson

  As so many horses faltered, it became harder for Frank to conceal the good health of his mare. One way was to lead her and claim it was due to a bad leg. He got the idea from Ovide, who was trying to save his Basuto by going on foot. Frank and Ovide walked together and tried to stay on the opposite side of the convoy from Davidson.

  In fact, they could have walked where and how they pleased. The lieutenant was paying little attention to anything beyond his own mind. The fact that Morden and Kerr had died while he was in charge had made him doubt himself. Over and over, he replayed the battle, considering each Boer gambit and his response. Like a soothsayer casting bones, he hoped to see them come out in a way that would restore his faith; that would allow him to continue.

  There could have been no worse time for Frank to badger Davidson about scouting. He knew that but was powerless not to end each day at the lieutenant’s tent—as powerless as Davidson was not to be inside writing more letters to General Hutton and the people of Pincher Creek, insisting that the dead men’s heroism must be recognized.

  The second time Frank went to the tent, Davidson left him outside to figure out for himself that he wasn’t wanted. To pass those hours, Frank made the acquaintance of Dakomi, Davidson’s guard. Dakomi had been chosen for his few words of English, but Frank discovered he had a full deck of cards and knew the game of cribbage. As Frank waited, they played until the camp bugler blew lights out. Just before snuffing his lamp, Davidson said, “I have no further comment.”

  The third time Frank approached the lieutenants tent, Davidson was waiting, arms folded, face like a rock. He told Frank to go away. He said it abruptly, as you would say scat to a cat. Frank obeyed, but returned once the lieutenant went inside.

  To get around the need of a cribbage board, Frank and Dakomi gathered a heap of roughly uniform stones. As an evening passed, the pile would grow in front of one, then flow back toward the other. Possession of all of the stones would have ended the game, but this never seemed to happen.

  The evening of the day they crossed the Vaal at Viljeon’s Drift, Dakomi and Frank were playing when suddenly the lieutenant flung back the flap and stood in the tent’s opening, his eyes blazing under coiled eyebrows, his mouth a miser’s purse.

  “The words no and go away have no meaning for you, do they, Adams? Are you waiting for me to tell someone to physically remove you? Because I will.”

  “It’s important to me, sir.”

  “It certainly must be. And not just to you. Before you arrived tonight, Private Pete Belton paid me a visit. It seems he and his brother think they have a vocation for scouting too. He’s very sure they’d be wonderful at it. Is there some kind of contest going on?”

  Frank rose to his feet, accidentally kicking his pile of stones. He did not attempt to speak.

  “This is absolutely my last word. Fred Morden and Robert Kerr were not scouts. They were merely excellent soldiers who did what was asked of them. That diligence cost them their lives. Now go away and try to be half the soldier they were. And, trust me, you’d be wise to stay out of my sight from now on.”

  Frank did not move when the flap slapped closed. The bugler blew lights out. The lamp inside the bell tent snuffed. Without any thought, Frank ran through the dark rows of sleeping men, stumbling over pieces of kit and tall men’s legs. He knelt beside a form with an oil sheet pulled over its head. He grabbed and knew by the skinny neck that he had Pete Belton.

  “What the Jesus?! Eddy! Wake up! Some bastard’s killing me!”

  Frank jerked Pete onto his back, jumped his knees onto his skinny arms. He saw the pale ghost of his own scrunched fist and could not say for sure if it was about to smash Pete’s face.

  Eddy sat up, rubbing his eyes with a huge mitt.

  “What you doing, Frank?”

  “Eddy, you stupid bastard! Get him offa me!”

  “You better stop, Frank.”

  Hearing Eddy’s mildness caused the fit to lessen. Frank recognized the words as good advice. Either Pete knew why Frank wanted to strangle him, or choking him would not cause him to learn. The scouting plan was ruined and would remain so regardless.

  Then he felt a hand on his shoulder. He thought it was Eddy but, looking around, saw a familiar shape bent toward him. “Come. Come on now.”

  Frank rose off Pete’s arms and followed Ovide meekly through the camp. Behind him, he heard Pete yelling.

  “He jumped me! In my sleep! Choked me! Didn’t he, Eddy? Frank Adams. Supposed to be our friend. Crazy sonofabitch!”

  Ovide stood over Frank as Frank got his boots off. Ovide handed him his blanket, and only then began to get himself ready to sleep again. Frank lay face up and thought. He thought about how Pete got his meddling hands on the plan in the first place, the way it had stemmed from his own impatient need to tell Ovide. Frank’s culpability in the matter took the rest of the heat out of him and allowed the ground to clutch him with its chill fingers. The blanket was more hole than cloth. You had to infuse such a covering with a powerful wish before it could warm you.

  His plan had been like that too, he saw. A tangle of strings. A web. Imagining he could make Davidson decide something he had no wish to decide. Imagining he could turn Ovide into an ardent tracker and chaser of Boers.

  “You’d never have come scouting with me, would you, Ovide?”

  “No.” The voice was thick with sleep.

  “You like things boring.”

  Ovide made a noise close to a horse’s mutter.

  For some seconds, there was poignancy. Frank felt the quiet, good steadfastness of Ovide. Then, like everything else tonight, that impression flipped and a different picture bloomed: the old cowboy’s eyes opening slowly. They were in the destroyed Boer kitchen, the second before Ovide said he had no interest in scouting but maybe Pete and Eddy did. More than anything else, that had wrecked Frank’s plan.

  Not me. These fellas, maybe.

  Beneath his cold blanket, Frank was suddenly warm again. Heart fast, breath short. He felt like he had when Pete’s scrawny neck was in his hands, but now it was all about Ovide handing Frank over to the Beltons, for no better reason than his own immediate convenience.

  Frank imagined himself riding off with Jeff. He poured all the muscle of his mind into the question of whether he really could go if an opportunity arose. He understood he would have to become someone different—a fellow not as nice as he tried to be on any ordinary day. Frank considered it and decided he could be such a man if he tried.

  Part Five

  AAS VOGEL KRANZ

  Irene, Transvaal, July 1900

  Seen from Lord Roberts’ war balloon, the temporary city of Irene would look cracked in half by railway tracks. One half was for soldiers; the other for animals and black labourers. Along the two sides of the railroad were the depots and factories upon which the camp’s life depended.

  In the soldiers’ town, tent communities were ruled off by dusty streets. Each regimental suburb was a garden of the same tent vegetable; each group surrounding its regimental flag. Wherever a cavalry or mounted infantry regiment resided, picketed horses stood. The mounted regiments were on the downwind side, because the regiments of foot did not find horse smell as homey as horse soldiers did.

  The other animals in this human town were pets and mascots: rock dassies; springbok captured in infancy; a baboon on a chain (shades of Norvals Pont); ostriches, who could fight out of any hobble but were addicted to oats. These were sometimes coerced to race.

  On the other side of the railway tracks, farther down the prevailing wind, was the true animal town. Paddocks of cattle, sheep, goats, and bullocks; mules and free-pool horses. Between the paddocks, garbage carts rolled to the refuse pits, where vultures walked, fussy and unhurried, like shoppers in a market.

  Near the dump was the African camp: shelters built of garbage that were home to the men who did the work of Irene and those who needed rest between convoys. For food, the Africans cooked heads, hooves, and offal cast out by the but
chers.

  Directly beside the railroad tracks, meat-fragrant smoke rose from the ovens behind the giant mess tents. Butchers’ tent. Knackers’ yard. Biltong smokers converting trek ox into dried meat.

  At the edge of Irene, a British sergeant-major instructed Lieutenant Davidson’s troop to dismount. A veterinary sergeant and his assistant walked along the horse lines. A firm believer in perverse army logic, Frank looked away and tried not to think as the vet looked at Dunny—her eyes, neck, legs, and feet. He tried not to display relief when the vet pointed her to the side with the stronger horses. Ovide’s Basuto was sent to the other side, to stand with the exhausted cobs, their chests like birdcages, their eyes blank.

  The men were to leave their horses and form a line behind the quartermaster sergeant. The promise was of new uniforms and smalls; much-needed boots. Ovide ignored this and stayed by his Basuto, even as a sergeant with bulging eyes shrieked in his face. What might have looked like stupid impassivity was, Frank knew, implacable stubbornness. Ovide was staying with his horse and that was that.

  Frank could do nothing about it, so he pushed to get near the quartermaster. When they walked inside the canvas cathedral, damp and close and rank with mildew, he raced for a stack he knew were tents and grabbed one. Then he went for the piles of khaki, taking a second, larger set of everything for Ovide. Most important were boots, for Ovide had walked much of the last fifty miles and had worn through both layers of moosehide on the moccasins Marie Rose had made for him.

  Franks arms were piled high and as he was trying to get out past a corporal who thought he was hoarding, Ovide appeared in the tent’s mouth. Frank knew the Basuto was dead. He gave Ovide his half of the goods, and the corporal let them pass. Outside, Davidson was waiting to lead them to their place in the tent city.

  At the dirty slab of ground, the lieutenant told them to pick a spot and dump their gear. Next stop was a horse corral for remounts, and they were due there in fifteen minutes.

  Because he had a horse, Frank did not need to go to the corral. Dunny was over on the picket line, eating. But he bridled her, jumped on her bare back, and rode there anyway. He arrived at the empty corral as a hundred and sixty horses were released into it. Then he saw the unhorsed troopers coming at a run, swarming over the pole fence. Ovide was among them: adjusting his rope, wasting little time in making his choice.

  The remounts were not Canadian horses, nor were they fresh off any boat. Boer ponies stolen from burned farms and Argentines other regiments had ridden down and then traded for something better. Even the best-looking Argentines were brainless culls, for why would a horse country like Argentina reduce its stock of good ones for the sake of a British war?

  All the same, the boys fought over them. Frank watched Ovide drop his hoolihan over the head of a Boer mare as plain as mud, but one in whom he saw some quality. Ovide was simply never wrong about horses. Frank also noticed that the Beltons were only pretending to go after horses. They shared a rope, and Pete was flinging it, usually hitting between hip and shoulder. He gathered the rope quickly, lest he loop a pair of legs by accident.

  When all of the horses were caught, Frank heard Pete tell Davidson that he and Eddy had been shut out.

  “When’ll there be another bunch?” he asked.

  Davidson looked pained. “There are no more remounts, Belton. You’re unhorsed, both of you. Until further notice, you’re grooms and latrine diggers.”

  Pete’s face fell. Thinking he would outwit the other men, imagining a second corral of better horses, he had fooled himself as he always did.

  Pete spun away and saw Frank watching. His face was at once steely with hate. Whenever Pete damaged himself, he always fixed the blame on someone else. He did so now.

  Ovide sat on his oil sheet in his new khaki uniform and boots. None of it fit well, but he seemed not to care. Before him was an almost-new Texas stock saddle, standing on its horn. He was feeling around inside the tree, for points or nicks that would rub his new horse wrong. Beyond him, the mare had her face in a hay net.

  Frank had opened out the tent on the ground. He was rubbing dubbin into the frayed seams. Despite the new gear and horse, Frank knew Ovide was mourning. His Basuto mare had been shot. Ovide had told Frank how it happened; how he had walked beside the Tommy in charge while a black man led the mare. Ovide had argued as best he could that the Basuto should be left with him or turned out to recoup her strength; that she was much stronger than she looked.

  The walk led to a trench. The Tommy stopped and stamped. Like something mechanical, he slapped his rifle to his shoulder, stamped again, brought the rifle down, and shot the mare through her eye. At the same time, the black servant put a shoulder into her, so she fell over and slid down the short slope, stopping against the limed pile of dead.

  “Least we have a tent,” Frank said now, for he had just thought of the portion of winter remaining. The smell of the tent was bad but they could live with it to be warm. Ovide looked up and his expression was as spiteful as Pete’s had been earlier. He did not speak but kept feeling inside the saddle tree.

  Within himself, Frank told Ovide to go to hell. He understood about the Basuto and Ovide’s state, but was practising to think less, and care less, about what Ovide felt.

  In Frank’s new plan, his time to be a scout would come when another scout was killed or sick. When that moment arrived, Frank was prepared to do two things: go over Davidson’s head, and leave Ovide behind. Frank would find Major Sanders and tell him he was ready and available, with a strong horse, to take the laid-low scout’s place. This imagined conversation went smoothly, because Dunny was strong and because Frank only had to speak for himself. There would be no pointing at Ovide and trying to argue how much smarter and more capable he was than he seemed.

  The success of the plan depended on Hugh Davidson’s lack of vindictiveness and his instinct to protect his own reputation. Frank could not imagine Davidson going to Sanders and telling the major that Frank was annoying or had attacked Pete Belton in his sleep. Frank thought such talk would seem small, and that Davidson would only make himself small by saying it.

  Another possible concern was that Major Sanders would have heard about the attack on Belton from the rank and file. The story had circulated fast once the Mounted Rifle troops were back together at Irene. Sometimes Frank saw it moving: men looking at him and talking low. Even fellows he knew were ready to throw out what they knew in favour of the novel idea that he was wild and unbalanced. But Frank could not imagine any of them using rare time with the major to talk about him.

  Seeing how readily the other soldiers turned on him taught Frank an important lesson.

  “If all people have for you is nothing against you,” he said to himself, “don’t count on them in time of trouble.”

  While Ovide and Frank were still at their chores in the late afternoon, the NCOs came around and ordered the men to their lieutenant’s tent. There was to be an announcement from Major Sanders.

  The news was that they were leaving tomorrow, first thing. They would head southeast to rejoin Hutton’s column for a push against Louis Botha. The Royal Canadian Dragoons were already there.

  The larger purpose was to capture the Delagoa Railway line, which connected Pretoria to the east coast. The railway was something for which the Boers would have to fight. At the moment, their president, Paul Kruger, was governing Transvaal from a railway car at Machadodorp. They must also defend their connection to the port of Lourenço Marques in Portuguese Mozambique, because their German munitions came from there. A major battle for the railway could come at any time, wherever the Boers thought they could win. Major Sanders said to expect the Boers to be desperate and to fight that way.

  While Lieutenant Davidson delivered these messages, Frank saw Jeff Davis ride into Irene. He was alone, and he guided his blue cayuse to the D Squadron picket line. One glance, and Frank believed Jeff was here to stay, for there was no strip of animal skin on his hat. Frank felt weak with pleasure
and was already imaging the conversation in which he would explain his need to be a scout. If anyone could understand this, it would be Jeff.

  Davidson sent them away to prepare for tomorrow, and Frank ran for the horse lines where Jeff was standing. He shook Jeff’s hand and burst out with his news.

  “I want to be a scout. I got to get out of here. I don’t have to bring Ovide. He doesn’t want to anyway. But I do.”

  Then Casey Callaghan was there, slapping Jeff’s shoulders with both hands. He stepped in front of Frank and hustled Jeff away toward the scouts’ camp, where Frank supposed there would be a bottle to split.

  Back at Frank’s own tent, Ovide was doing farrier work on the new mare. He had procured a new shoe and was carefully pounding in the nails. When Ovide saw Frank coming, saw how disheartened he was, the old cowboy said, “Least we got a tent.”

  Go to hell, thought Frank.

  Rapid whumping on the tent wall woke Frank. He listened for the bugle but there wasn’t one, just someone calling his name in the dark. He pulled on his boots and pushed out the flap. It was the horse orderly.

  “Your horse is gone.”

  Frank’s shoulders cranked so hard he almost fell.

  “I was sleeping right beside the line,” the orderly said. “I always wake up if there’s a fuss. There’s a second horse missing too. Big charger. The British officer who owns that one is madder than hell. Same thieves must have got both. I didn’t hear a thing.”

  They rushed toward the picket line. Ovide caught up as they were looking at Frank’s saddle standing in front of Dunny’s empty spot. Ovide’s new mare was lying half on her back next to it. Frank decided he hated a horse that slept like that.