The Great Karoo

by Fred Stenson

  “Anybody see who it was?”

  “Nobody saw. But I gotta tell you, the Beltons are gone. Maybe I shouldn’t say it’s them, but they were working here yesterday.”

  “Can I borrow a horse?” Frank asked the orderly. “Ovide and me …”

  “You and Smith will return to your tent.”

  They turned and saw Davidson. He had snuck up in the dark.

  “This isn’t a riding stable, Private Adams. You leave this camp without permission, it’s a crime. I’d see you court-martialled for it.”

  “But, sir, that’s my horse,” Frank said, pointing to the space.

  Davidson grabbed him roughly and pulled him away.

  “Listen, private, I know it’s your horse. I know it’s a good horse. Frankly, I suspect there’s more story here than I’m being told. I tell you to forget about scouting and you go directly to Pete Belton and try to wring his neck. Now your horse is gone and so are the Beltons.”

  Frank tried to compose the story in a concise way. It made no sense at any size.

  “The Beltons have committed two serious crimes tonight,” the lieutenant continued. “Horse theft and desertion. They could be executed for either. Because the other horse belongs to a British captain, there will be no mercy. If you know more, Adams, spit it out. I doubt even you want the Beltons shot.”

  “I think Pete took Dunny because I fought him.”

  “But fought him why?”

  “He wouldn’t stay out of my plan to scout. It put you off.”

  Davidson loosed a weary sigh. “For God’s sake. If that’s all, get back to bed. Our scouts are out. Maybe they’ll find them. If the Beltons get beyond our outposts, the Boers will take care of them.”

  Frank returned to Ovide at the picket line. They stared at the space beside Ovide’s new horse.

  Frank said, “Eddy.”

  “Yup,” said Ovide. “Dunny likes Eddy.”

  Ever since Canada, Dunny knew Pete was her enemy, would lay her ears flat whenever he passed. But, when the Beltons joined Frank’s four, Eddy had liked to pet and nuzzle Dunny, and Frank had let him. Dunny had put up with it, the way most horses will humour a child.

  That, in turn, meant Pete had stolen the charger, which made sense too. Eddy would take a horse he knew and was liked by. Pete would take a horse he could never ride any other way. That the charger would bring down British wrath on both their heads was Pete outsmarting himself again.

  Back in the tent, Frank could not begin to sleep. He stared into the mildewed darkness and imagined Dunny yanking out of Eddy’s hands or lying down and fighting off the hobble they used to contain her. He saw her galloping down the back trail, coming home with that eerie sense horses have for where they’ve been. Maybe she would be standing at the picket line, untied, come morning. It was all he could do to stay in the tent and not go there and watch for her.

  In the occasional moment when he did not think of his horse, Frank thought of Ovide, snoring beside him, the friend he’d planned all week to leave behind. He thought of how, out of this whole camp, only Ovide would understand his loss or care. Frank rolled himself to the far edge of the tent and cried in sorrow and in shame.

  Reitvlei

  The Mounted Rifles left Irene, headed southeast along a chain of hills. Britain’s army was concentrated wherever a pass cut through the hills (at Tigerspoort, Witpoort, Hekpoort, and Koffyspruit). On the far side of those gaps, the Boers were waiting, and for now, the British goal was to keep them from breaking through.

  This British army was not the monster that had rolled north a month ago. It had been whittled down by the need to protect the cities and roads the British had won. The Boers had lately discovered they could shrink Lord Roberts’ army just by threatening Joburg or Pretoria. A few days ago, a feint toward Pretoria had caused French and Mahan to leave the front and scamper back, which was why the Canadian Dragoons and Mounted Rifles had been called up. To plug the hole.

  General Hutton’s brigade was charged with holding Witpoort Pass. He had seven hundred Mounted Infantry, a thousand cavalry, six hundred infantry, and twenty guns. The Boers on the far side of the pass were thought to have about the same. Fights at even strength were so unusual, many thought the odds automatically favoured the Boers. If Louis Botha thought so too, a challenge might come.

  The Mounted Rifles’ destination was a camp called Reitvlei, but Frank did not go with the horsemen. Dunny had not been waiting at the picket line at dawn, nor did she show up before the army lined out to leave. For the first time in the war, Frank was unhorsed. It was also the first time he had been so in his remembered life. It was a new element, and he felt as naked in it as a fish in a creel.

  Leaving Irene, Frank took turns with the black labourers riding the baggage wagons. The rest of the time, he walked.

  When the baggage convoy took a rest, the sergeant in charge chose Frank to come to the front and sit on the first wagon. He had his Lee-Enfield, and his job was to scan ahead and to the sides for snipers. Frank tried to keep his eyes running over the scenery and to not think. He looked for any clump of stones that might hide a man.

  But though he did not think in words, pictures of Dunny kept coming to Frank. Dunny in countless poses, and such was his perversity that he often saw her in danger. His ass clenched and the nerves in his back were trilling. Into those pictures, he forced Jeff Davis and Casey Callaghan, for surely Jeff’s purpose in returning was to protect them—even, as in this case, when that protection was from themselves. Frank imagined Jeff and Casey saving Dunny, and sometimes saving Eddy; but never Pete. Pete was on his own. Frank imagined Pete left on foot in places immense and barren.

  Having pictured this so often in the first hours of the day, it was shocking for Frank to see the actual Jeff Davis, with Casey Callaghan, come riding up the road. They approached the baggage convoy when it was stopped at a spruit for water. The Blue and The General were as ridden down as Frank had seen them, crusted with dust and sweat. The two scouts looked stiff and tired as they dismounted and let the horses dust and water. They gave them oats and hay nets, and tied them to the emptiest wagon. The men crawled inside it to sleep.

  Frank went to the two horses and started to brush them, and when The Blue spoke back to him, Jeff’s face appeared atop the wagon’s wall. His eyebrows were bushy with yellow dust. He had not even wiped his face before lying down to sleep.

  “Did you find any tracks?” Frank asked, and by the look on Jeff’s face he knew they had not been looking for the dun and did not know what had happened.

  “I wondered where she was,” Jeff said after Frank told him.

  “Do you think anyone else tracked them away from Irene?” Frank asked.

  Jeff shrugged and dropped down. Frank was asking things he could not know.

  When the wagons rolled again, the two scouts kept on sleeping. Their horses walked in the wagon’s wake. Frank was on the front wagon, staring through his rifle sights but seeing little. He’d pinned his hopes on Jeff and Casey finding his horse. With that idea blown, he had no other hope to go to. Pete and Eddy could have gone in any direction. The bush veldt. The Magaliese Mountains. Up or down the Vaal. If Pete had chosen east, the Boers had probably caught them.

  The baggage convoy rolled into Reitvlei after dark. They’d had all kinds of problems and were very late, and a knot of angry Mounted Rifles were waiting, wanting their tents. They acted as though the wagon men were late through carelessness and sloth. Jeff and Casey were no longer with the convoy. They had woken up and departed, headed in some other direction.

  Frank threw their tent down to Ovide. Later, when the wagons were bare, he went to find him. The tent was up, and Ovide shook his head in answer to the only question Frank had. Their part of camp was mostly empty, because the other Mounted Rifles were off visiting the Canadian Dragoons. The two squadrons had not seen each other since Diamond Hill. Ovide had heard some of their news. The Dragoons had still not lost a single man in battle.

  Bef
ore Frank slept, fellows came back anxious to tell the stories they had heard. There was nothing in it about his horse or the Beltons. That was old news already.

  Witpoort Pass

  Louis Botha’s general Ben Viljeon attacked Witpoort Pass at dawn.

  Helios were blinking the news as soon as the sun broke the horizon—that the Boers were firing on the First Cavalry with three guns. That was on Hutton’s right. The Royal Canadian Dragoons B Squadron and New Zealand Mounted Infantry were under similar attack on the left. Behind these outposts, Irish Fusiliers were positioned on both sides of the pass. They would be next if the outposts could not hold.

  Hutton called for his reserves, and both the Mounted Rifles and Dragoons A Squadron left Reitvlei at a canter, bugles yodelling. By the time they reached Witpoort, B Squadron had retreated and the New Zealanders were overrun. The Fusiliers were holding, but as the reserves deployed, the Boers were jumping into the Irish trenches, and they were having at each other with rifle butts and rocks.

  The Mounted Rifles were sent galloping to secure the left. The fresh Dragoons were told to dismount and to help the Fusiliers. As the Dragoons climbed, two of their troops were split off around the cliffs shoulder to surprise the Boers—where, by strange luck, the Boers were doing the same. The instant the Canadians rounded the cliff, they were fired upon but did not know from where. They dropped and waited. Lieutenants Borden and Burch stood up at the same time to see if they could figure out the enemy’s location. The Boers were right in front of them, too close to miss.

  Frank Adams spent the day in Reitvlei with a nurse herd of horses, the ones who had managed to break down on the road from Irene. Somehow he had not imagined Hutton’s reserve could leave without him—until it did. He had supposed that an able-bodied man, even one on foot, would be of some use somewhere. But he was untrained for infantry or gun support, and was of less utility than the black men who whacked the oxen and mules and moved the guns around; who were up there now carrying shells to the mouths of smoking guns.

  Ovide had left with the rest. In every fight since Fischer’s Farm, Frank had been right beside Ovide or at the next point in the extended line. Always close enough to see the cowboy and to yell if his head was up or he was failing to shoot, or if he had missed a signal to move back or forward. Frank had wanted to leave Ovide only a few days ago. Now, he felt desperate at not being in battle beside him.

  It took hours before anyone or any piece of news came back. The first thing was an ambulance in the early afternoon. Frank went to the Red Cross tent and watched the bodies being carried inside. Two were covered in blankets. Dead. An inert but living man went by, face bloody from the eyebrows to the jaw. The last one was writhing and yelling. Shot in the chest, he was fighting death and anyone who came near.

  Neither living man was Ovide. Frank measured the corpses with his eye, trying to find them taller or shorter, more or less bulky, than his friend. He pushed into the tent, taking advantage of the confusion. The medic saw him and shouted to stop gawking and bring water.

  “Who are the dead, sir?”

  “They’re both lieutenants. Canadian Dragoons. The wounded are Dragoons too. Now get moving.”

  The medic was wiping blood off the man with the wounded face. The soldier stiffened with each pass of the cloth. He had no eyes. The structure of his face was still there, so the bullet must have come from the side. Just deep enough into his profile to pierce both orbs.

  The first riders who came back were Dragoons. They fired in the air and shouted, until the medic told them to have some respect. They were A Squadron: the men who had left Reitvlei this morning. Now two of their lieutenants were dead, and they were trying to fashion it into a tale of bravery, worthwhile sacrifice, success.

  From them, Frank learned that it was lieutenants Borden and Burch who had been killed. The blinded private was Mulloy, an Ontario schoolteacher. The other was Arthur Brown, who had been an English sailor. Hanging from the bloody operating table, Frank had seen Brown’s thrashing arm. There was a tattoo: two hands clasped.

  When the first Mounted Rifles came back, Frank asked but none of them knew where Ovide was. Most did not know who he was. The Mounted Rifles had seen less action so far and had been selected to guard the position overnight.

  A full moon dodged among flowing clouds. Alone in his tent, Frank left the flap open so he could see the sky. He could not sleep. He had decided he was no longer worried about Ovide, but the smell of Dunny’s saddle, the rank oil of the mare’s hair, made him sad, made the light outside call to him. He left finally and went to the edge of camp, looking at the plain and the dark ripple of hills. The winter blond was like moonlit snow, and, on it, every thorn bush and tree stood out. A hyena laughed.

  Frank imagined a pack of hyenas running in this underwater light, closing on an antelope. Then the fleeing animal became Dunny, and Frank could feel his mare between his knees: the fullness of her chest; her bellows that sprang the hinge of his ass on her deepest inhalation.

  That she was gone carved him to the bone. It was no good to say the fault lay elsewhere. Frank had done things to Pete Belton that had caused his hatred. He had allowed things that had caused Eddy Belton to choose Dunny off the picket line. A touchier horseman would have told Eddy to back off, to not fool with Dunny. Don’t touch my horse, old cowboys said from the distance of Franks childhood; men who would never touch another man’s horse or dog.

  There is always fault, thought Frank, and it is always yours.

  Middelburg

  At the end of July, the Mounted Rifles pushed east into an ugly winter wind that was full of grit and streaked with snow. Then it filled with hard rain, until the high-wheeled transport wagons squelched through dongas in muck to their axles. On the steep downslopes, the men closest to the wagons screwed in the brakes but the wheels slid anyway and ran up on the startled drays.

  Mules and oxen were helpless against the weather and the gruelling slippery pull. Any animal harbouring the germ of death hastened to that end. Pole-Carew’s army had been through already and dead mules and oxen lay in their hundreds at the first river crossing. A cow gun had been left in the river’s middle, mired and tipped, its barrel pointed at the sky. The men no longer wasted ammunition on blood-beaked vultures and ripping wild dogs. They made their eyes and noses blind; moved on.

  They trekked onward until the town of Middelburg appeared in a bowl of hills: sedate, tidy, made of stone. They arrived as the main body of Lord Roberts’ army readied to leave. It took time to understand that the Mounted Rifles were being left here: that all along they had been slated to go no farther and had been part of no one’s plan for the fighting. Here, they would stick and guard the railway between Middelburg and Pan Station. They would patrol a triangle that included the northern point of Bankfontein.

  At first, the Mounted Rifles stared with envy at the backs of the Canadian Dragoons, who continued east. The Rifles scolded and muttered that the Dragoons were the “fair-haired boys,” not motley prairie gophers like themselves. But then an emissary rode back to say the Dragoons had their orders now and they were not much different. They would also be minding the railway: from Pan east to Belfast.

  The Mounted Rifles’ sense of grievance was restored the next day when news came that Lord Strathconas Horse under General Buller was about to rendezvous with Roberts’ army. While the Dragoons and Mounted Rifles stared at the blank railway, the Strathconas would be in the heart of the final war with Louis Botha.

  Though the Strathconas were mostly westerners like themselves, and by now thoroughly bloodied by the war, the Mounted Rifles still liked to think of them as coddled wards of a rich patron. It helped somehow to think of the Strathconas as fops; to think of Sam Steele, who had left them for the Strathconas, as a turncoat.

  At Middelburg, Frank and Ovide were on horse duty: Frank because he had no horse to ride and Ovide because he had refused to gallop his mare. Ovide had returned from the Witpoort Pass leading his horse; his only comment,
that the mare had something wrong with her. This was his new mare, and she was reminding him of the Great Karoo and his cutting mare who had laboured around her ruined heart along the final miles.

  Later, Frank found out that, during the Witpoort action, a corporal had ordered Ovide to charge a slope, and Ovide had refused. The corporal called it cowardice, and Ovide had answered that he didn’t care what he called it. Ovide had been demoted to horse campie, alongside Frank, feeding and doctoring.

  Their life as campies was not stationary. Major Sanders and Capt. Tommy Chalmers had the Mounted Rifles marching around the Pan-Middelburg-Bankfontein triangle relentlessly, as if it were packed with dangerous Boers and was the real centre of the Transvaal war. They divided up and marched in every combination, around the triangle perimeter and through its heart. They often stopped at a hump called Aas Vogel Kranz that guarded the Lydenburg Road. The scouts, led by Casey Callaghan and Charlie Ross, with Jeff Davis prominent, went farther, probing outside the triangle to see what threats lay beyond. There was never any news of the Beltons or Dunny.

  If any of these activities located rebel Boers, it was usually because they announced themselves with rifle fire. If the Canadians guessed they had the Boers outnumbered, they would shell them, charge their position, and drive the enemy to another ridge.

  When the Boers found them, it was usually in their outposts at night. There was no taking away the terror of bullets whizzing in the dark, even if the men knew the rifles were aimed by guess and unlikely to score. You could easily imagine yourself unlucky.

  Frank and Ovide settled into the routines of marching and making camp, of soaking, salving, and poulticing horses. They were never called upon for anything else. They were part of no foursome, since the defection of the Beltons, and even if Frank got a horse or Ovide’s was miraculously cured, it was unlikely they would be called upon again. To the satisfaction of Lieutenant Davidson and the sergeants and corporals, Ovide was a coward and Frank was bad news. Those who spoke to Frank at all seemed to direct their talk toward finding out whether he had been strange all along or had been made strange by the war. Even these fellows did not want him at their backs.