The Great Karoo

by Fred Stenson

  “Caledon,” he said, pointing and making a wavy motion with one hand. He signalled for Frank to get down. Then he turned his horse around and led the mule away.

  BOOK TWO

  The CANADIAN SCOUTS

  Prologue

  PINCHER CREEK

  December 1900

  Tommy Killam’s work these days was in his father’s store, decorating it for Christmas, designing the holiday ad for the Rocky Mountain Echo, and handing out leaflets of the same design on main street. It was his father’s campaign to keep the local shoppers from going to Ft. Macleod. The leaflet read: SHOP HERE FIRST AND YOU MAY NOT NEED TO GO FARTHER.

  But, in truth, the citizens of Pincher Creek, the ones with good teams and buggies—the ones with money—enjoyed going to Macleod for a few days around Christmas. The women shopped in the better-supplied stores. The men went to Kamoose Taylor’s Macleod Hotel to meet friends for a drink and a smoke. Wagered on a few hands of cards, a few games of billiards.

  The people who came to Killam’s were the ones without horses, the sick and the poor. The only ones with money who did their Christmas shopping there were the old people who could no longer stand the rough road east and did not want to risk the weather. There were also the Indians, who came to beg more than to buy.

  Tommy knew that the leaflets and his father’s newspaper ad wouldn’t change any of it. It was just his father wasting money while dreaming of making some.

  By coincidence, the Echo that carried their Christmas ad also had the biggest front-page headline Tommy had ever seen.

  OUR BOYS ARE COMING HOME

  As far as Tommy was concerned, the only fellows who mattered were home already (invalided out) or never coming home (dead). The fact that Inspector Davidson might show up in a month or two, or Mr. Redpath later on, did not interest him.

  Tommy’s surviving connection to the African war was in his pocket: a couple of columns cut out of the August 15 Echo and folded tightly inside the secret pocket of his wallet. It was a letter written by Hugh Davidson to the Morden family, which the Mordens had allowed the Echo to print so the whole town could read it. The clipping was smudged and broken at every fold, but that did not matter because Tommy had long ago committed it to memory.

  My Dear Morden,

  I don’t know how I should manage to write you and tell you about Fred’s sad ending, were it not that I know that long before you get this letter, the newspapers as well as the telegram to Canon Middleton…

  Sometimes when Tommy was out with his .22 and Fred Morden’s wolfhounds, up the canyon, he would recite this letter in different voices and accents, emphasizing the words that he pulled the trigger on.

  I know what your sorrow is and what a void is left in your family circle. God grant you all His consolation.

  When Canon Middleton’s buggy had rolled up to the Mordens’ gate, and the clergyman strode to the door holding a telegram, Tommy had been watching from his own yard next door. He had heard the loud wail inside the Morden house. A few minutes later, Mrs. Morden had come to his mother. Just inside the door, the two women held on to each other, rocking and weeping for a long time.

  In the days and weeks afterwards, the town filled with things: sorrow, indignation, hatred, Empire pride. But what happened inside Tommy was the exact opposite: an emptying of all the same things.

  People noticed the difference in him and, even within his own family, mistook it for maturity.

  “He grew up just like that,” he heard his mother say to a customer in the store. She snapped her fingers to show how quick it had been.

  Others came right up to him, women usually, and said, “You’re so much more of a man now, Tommy Killam.”

  What would they think if they heard him in the hills above the town singing Hugh Davidson’s letter?

  I knows wot sorra is

  And wot a woid it leaves

  Yer fammm-lee circle, she is broken.

  Gaaawwwd give His consolation to yuz all.

  Part Seven

  ALONE

  Caledon River, January 1901

  The Caledon River was high and galloping. Frank gripped his leather flap shoes tight and threw himself in. He was weak from too many raw mealies and could not swim well at the best of times. He flew and ducked like a fleck of debris, and on a tight S-turn the roaring Caledon spat him onto the sand and gravel, half drowned and eye to eye with a bloated ox who had perhaps come to shore on the same muscular water screw.

  To his surprise, the map in his shirt and the pound notes in his pocket were still there. He laid them out and pinned them with rocks and let the scorching sun dry them. The map was the last thing Alice Kettle had given him. After she snuck the pound notes into his fist, she more publicly handed him Lionel’s map. Brooke’s days of needing it were over.

  Looking at the map and relating it to past days, Frank believed the Basuto had set him down north of the Thaba Nchu road. The first option, then, was to follow Jim Whitford’s path in reverse, which would mean going west toward Brandfort, then north beside the railway. Without gun or horse, that might not be the safest way, maybe just farther and hungrier. The other option was straight north, which had to be shorter but would be through unknown country. He knew how to find north from the cluster of stars, and the one thing he could get from the map was the order of rivers. He could keep count as he crossed them and know roughly where he was.

  He decided on straight north and, to deal with the unknowns, he would travel by night. He would be out of the sun’s terrible eye and out of view of his enemies—a group that consisted of most everyone.

  As he began to walk, Frank decided it was best to think of himself as an animal, a wild animal that was no man’s friend; the kind that enters your chicken yard at night and that you set your dogs on. He would not be a healthy animal, just a starving one. If he could think like that, he would be more vigilant and less fussy about his food.

  The mealie crops were high enough now to hide him and the mealie stands also fed him, though the immature corn kernels played hell with his guts. He survived in a state of constant sickness.

  Sometimes, in the moonlight, he would see springbok gliding, and the desire for their meat brought him close to tears. During the days, when he saw vultures circling, he would even envy them their food. But there was no sense looking for carrion. He lacked the beak and claw needed to challenge the scavengers.

  Finally, when Frank was starving, and feared that soon he would be too weak to go on or defend himself, he found a farm. He entered its stand of blue-gum trees from the downwind side, tried not to imagine dogs bounding at him. He made it to the empty sheep kraal and tiptoed through the cakes of manure until he was close enough to watch the barn and house.

  When daylight came, he looked for white men and women with guns, but all he saw was one black man, a little older than himself, doing the farm’s morning work. As this one walked back and forth, and dragged and carried, he had the air of someone doing chores he had not thought up himself. Beside him walked a short, heavily muscled black dog with strong, slavering jaws. The dog wagged its tail and watched everything the black man did. The house’s chimney smoked and so did an outdoor oven between the house and barn. Mostly, the farm worker stoked these fires.

  Later, the worker went into the barn and led out a knackered horse. The dog ran in giddy circles and barked. The horse was dirty white. It had a ruined back and feet like cracked plates. The man threw a ragged blanket on it and then a sorry saddle. He went to the house and knocked, and a hefty vrouw answered with a double-barrelled shotgun in her hands. She broke it, raised it, looked through the barrels at the sky. She chucked it shut again and handed it over, then reached in her apron pocket and dumped a handful of shotgun shells into a pouch that hung from the black man’s shoulder.

  When the farmhand, the horse, and the dog left in a cloud of sun-flaring dust, Frank knew his best chance had come. The outdoor oven was giving off a meat smell that made him drool. Still, he forced himself
away from it and into the garden, where he crawled between rows of peas and root vegetables. He stopped and picked some immature pea pods and ate them whole. When his helpless stomach cramped, he slithered out of the garden to a rain barrel for a drink of green-tasting water.

  Still, he resisted the meat. He twisted the block latch of a work-shed door and entered a darkness that smelled of mouldy earth and horse leather. Spindly weeds more white than green coursed along the dirt floor.

  Something sharp. Something to make fire. Something for his feet.

  He had closed the door behind him, which left only needles of light through the wall. In a while, he could see to search. He found a glass jar full of nails that he dumped on the bench. He kept a few nails and forced the empty jar into a pocket of Young Sam’s trousers. In the blackness of one corner, he found a hacksaw blade brown with rust. He lifted a horse collar off the wall and cut leather ovals from the bulges. From the same collar, he carved strips and nipped them at the ends for cord. His torn feet would have to wait. He could not take time now to poke holes and make sandals.

  Outside, no one was waiting with a gun so he let himself be drawn to the rich smell of the oven. His plan involved a pitchfork that he had noticed standing beside a dung pile at the barn’s rear door. He brought it over now to the shed corner closest to the oven but out of sight of the house.

  He waited, and the vrouw finally came to check her oven. She opened the door and peered in, poked at the coals. When she was back inside the house, he counted to a hundred. Then he went to the oven door and opened it. The rich, greasy heat almost felled him. There were several fat chickens, almost brown, lying on a grate. He ran a pitchfork tine through two and ran.

  Frank got no more than a minute’s start before the Boer woman’s first shout. He imagined her inside, getting a rifle down from a wall. He ran for the nearest mealie field, a hundred yards away. Sped along on his mangled feet with the chickens on the pitchfork ahead of him. He barged through the wall of mealie shafts. A rifle cracked and the bullet rattled and snicked through the corn stand.

  He did not run. He knew movement in the cornstalks would help her kill him. He forced himself to go slowly, bending around each stalk, manoeuvring the chickens and the pitchfork at the same time. His weak body and dizziness were always close to betraying him, to making him lose balance and fall over. The vrouw was waiting for something like that to shoot at, and every once in a while she would try a shot, hoping to flush him.

  He did not let himself eat one mouthful of chicken, not even when he came out the mealie field’s far side. With the chickens still on the pitchfork, he left the farm’s low valley and entered another. Finally, when the hunger threatened to take his consciousness away, he sat and made a rusty rip through the breast meat with his saw. As he began to chew, he closed his eyes and felt the start of tears. He wept all through his first meal of meat in he didn’t know how long.

  After two weeks of walking on his homemade sandals, of eating more mealies and garden vegetables, and never having the luck of another chicken, Frank realized he was getting nowhere. He had crossed the rivers of two of his battles, the Vet and the Zand, but was not even halfway to where he wanted to go. When he came to the river he believed was the Valsch, he did not cross it but set off down it. According to his map, this would bring him to Kroonstad. A British-held town. The railway.

  He was pinning his hope on something that had happened when he’d travelled south with Lionel and the others. A British officer who stopped them had wanted to know who Frank was. When Frank had started his story and said he was a Canadian Mounted Rifle, the officer’s only concern had been that he would miss his boat. Thinking about that and ignoring all other possibilities, Frank planned to throw himself on British mercy. He hoped that either kindness or confusion would save him.

  By the time he staggered from the bush within sight of Kroonstad, Frank had not eaten for two days. He was sick and confused, and sometimes had to stop while his stomach bucked like some separate animal he had swallowed. Drinking from the river had given him dysentery. He could barely stand.

  It took him an hour to go the remaining distance to town. On Kroonstad’s main street, he fainted. A Boer farmer in for supplies revived him and carried him to the British hospital. There, a nurse saw the sunkenness of his eyes and the lack of resilience of his skin and started feeding him water they had boiled and cooled. It was one of the hospitals where Canadian soldiers had died of fever, but Frank was beyond caring.

  Within two days, he was feeling stronger and clearer. They considered him well enough to do something. Could he read, they asked. He said he could, and they brought him a Cape Town newspaper. It was only days old, and he was astounded to find that Christmas and New Year had passed. It was January 1901 and the war, which had stopped for him, was not going well for the British. The Boers seemed to have the upper hand.

  When the hospital staff saw that Frank could make sense of a newspaper, they figured it was time to make sense of him. A lieutenant was summoned to interrogate him. As this officer and Franks nurse approached down the aisle between close-together cots, Frank pretended to be asleep, and so heard a couple of the lieutenant’s questions and the nurse’s answers. That the nurse knew anything at all suggested he had been talking deliriously the day the farmer carried him in.

  “He’s a confusing one, sir. The shirt he had on was not from any uniform, but it had a bullet hole in the front and a bloody spot on the back. There’s no such marks on him. It was a well-made shirt too, something a hunter might wear. He’s badly scarred in his hair, though it’s healed.”

  The lieutenant was a light-built, astute man, who seemed misplaced in the war. When he started asking questions, Frank told him a version of what had happened. By now, he’d heard several deserters lie and knew how false they sounded when their powers of invention failed. For his own story, he stayed as close to the truth as he could. The only big lie was that he could not remember how he came to leave Aas Vogel Kranz.

  When Frank finished, Lieutenant Burridge shook his head and made a few pencil marks on the pad of paper.

  “Oh hell, Adams. I’m not going to write all that down. We hear some dillies around here, but yours takes the cake.”

  He probed his pencil stub into the loops of his pale hair and scratched. This made Frank think about his own hair and how heavily doused in louse powder it was. The poor lieutenant must be gagging at the smell.

  “The way this usually works,” Burridge said, “if a soldier’s been hiding or doing civilian work and wants back in the army so he can go home, is that he’ll be fatter than a normal soldier. They never come in looking as rough as you. I suppose you could have beaten yourself up to corroborate your story, but you’re overzealous if that’s your game.

  “But let’s say I believe you. Then what? Your battalion’s gone home. Do we send you to Cape Town? See if you can find a boat that will take you?”

  “What about Pretoria?”

  “Pardon me, but you won’t find too many boats there.”

  “But there’s Canadians there still, aren’t there? Strathcona’s Horse. Maybe I could find them and go home when they do.”

  “That makes a sort of sense. There’s something else called the Canadian Scouts you might look up. I don’t know what they are, really, except they’re new.”

  “Can I?”

  “Can you what? Pretoria? Fine by me. They want fellows like you off the books. If you can take care of it yourself, why not? What about a uniform, though? You said yours was taken by the Boers, and they gave you this dead fella’s clothes. We won’t have a Mounted Rifle outfit to give you in its place.”

  “I can wear what I came in with.”

  “With the bullet hole?”

  “I don’t mind. I’d like boots, though.”

  “You sure as hell would. Your poor bloody feet.”

  They both stared at Frank’s ragged feet for a moment. Then the lieutenant wished Frank better luck and left.

&nb
sp; In two days, Frank was on a train north. He’d had a good wash and another round of louse powder. He had new boots and an address in Pretoria that he was to check into.

  But, when he disembarked at Pretoria Station, Frank told an officer holding a clipboard that he was wanted at Middelburg, in spite of what his orders said. He’d met a soldier on the train who’d convinced him it was the British camp at Middelburg that would know what to do with him.

  A train for Belfast was about to pull out. The officer shrugged and let him go. By evening, Frank had deserted again and was walking south through the night, on the now familiar trail to Kleff’s Farm.

  Grey drapes of cloud reeled in and out. The sky rumbled and a warm rain fell steadily. Frank’s feet hurt, but from the old damage, not anything new. His dysentery had slowed, thanks to boiled water at Kroonstad hospital. Though wet, he felt more at peace the closer he came to his destination.

  When the wind rolled a cloud along the ground and bowled it off a shallow hillock, he briefly saw the kopje that marked Kleff’s Farm. What he would do when he arrived was not clear. He supposed he would climb the kopje and look down; then figure out what might have changed. Would the furious Mr. Kleff be present? Denny Straytor?

  Whatever else was false or true, Frank did not believe that Alma’s affection and passion had been invented. Her saying in blurry English that she was sorry (for the trick that let Straytor get away). He believed in that and in her tears more than in Brooke’s theory that she had betrayed him. Betrayals came in all sizes, as far as he was concerned.

  What to do after he’d climbed the kopje was still a problem. He could not, as he had done with Brooke, walk down yelling, “Its me, Frank Adams!”