The Great Karoo

by Fred Stenson

  Last time we had a family dinner, my daughter asked me to write a war memoir. My son chimed in and said it was a good idea. The grandkids nodded their heads wisely. Grandpa should do something. My daughter had heard on the radio that the fortieth anniversary was approaching. Because we are in yet another war, having a father or grandfather who fought in South Africa is antique currency, like a Spanish doubloon.

  The day she came up with the idea, I asked my daughter if I was looking peaked—because, in my experience, the memoir part of life comes just before the death part. I asked her and her brother, why the Boer War? Why not my cowboy memoir? Or, my broke-down rancher memoir? But then I quit horsing around, because the idea of a memoir already had me reliving the story in my head. Last night, I got down to it, and there it sits. Frank Adams’ Boer War Memoir. Twelve pages.

  Over the years, I’ve read anything I could about the Boer War, including Arthur Conan Doyle’s fat book, that Uncle Doc gave me for Christmas when it came out. English writers like Conan Doyle could write a whole book about the South African War and not mention there were Canadians in it. Though to be fair, I should say that Conan Doyle did mention the day Charlie Ross and his Canadian Scouts found De Wet’s cave full of booty (just like Charlie predicted some history writer would). I’m told that Dinky Morrison, the gunner from Toronto, wrote a book when he came home from Africa, but I haven’t seen it. There’s a rumour going around that William Griesbach is working on one, and that interests me and makes me nervous, because that one might contain more than I want known.

  What I don’t like about the Boer War books I’ve read so far is that they don’t contain the feeling of being there. Mostly they’re just place names and dates and how many got killed, and who won a DSO or a Victoria Cross. Now that I’ve written my own, I’m pretty sure it’s just as bad, for the same reasons. My daughter would say I shouldn’t expect to stay up for one night and pen a masterpiece. But if I took six months and wrote a hundred pages, it would be the same, because I’d still have left out all the interesting parts.

  Pete and Eddy Belton are an example of why. There’s a pair I don’t care much about or see very often. They showed up in Alberta around 1910 after having served their jail time for desertion and theft. They went back into the North Fork country and squatted in some cranny, running a few cattle on other people’s grass. Every fall, they go through the Livingstone Gap, to hunt for elk and the Lost Lemon Mine. If I see Pete in town, that’s what he tells me: that this is the year he’s going to find the Lost Lemon and become a rich man.

  In my memoir, I don’t mention them, because I don’t want to tell how they poisoned the baboon, tried to shoot Jeff Davis, and stole my dun mare. Nobody thinks highly of Eddy and Pete, but I don’t think it’s my job to give people reasons to look down on them even more.

  I do mention Ovide. I say that he was a friend of mine from home, and how we fought together and looked after horses, and that he died of poisoning at Pan Station. I left out how his poisoning occurred, because I don’t want to be like Greasy, telling how Ovide took medicines five and two when he needed seven and died of good arithmetic. Greasy’s a major-general now and Ovide’s long dead. Why tell a story that makes Greasy look mean and Ovide look stupid?

  Something that made me feel a little better about Ovide was when Pincher Creek built a new hospital and called it Memorial in honour of the town’s Boer War dead. They could have put Fred Morden’s and Robert Kerr’s names on the plaque and stopped there, and no one would have been disturbed. But they put Ovide Smith’s name on too. I’ve bought my supplies in Pincher Creek ever since.

  In the part of the memoir that’s about me, I’ve skipped a lot and did not add any bluster. From the start, I told my wife, and then my children, that I was no war hero. I said I would never take much of a risk to shoot a Boer, which was the truth. I tell them it was a stupid war from start to finish and benefited no one but the rich. The proof is that the black people of South Africa never did get the vote, just like Indians here in Canada don’t have the vote to this day.

  What I’ve left out of the memoir is that, after Ovide died and Dunny was stolen, I deserted. Nor is there a whisper of my having loved a Boer girl. I did not want my children to think of me as a coward. I did not want my wife to know I loved someone before her, in case she thought I loved her less.

  I did write about Jeff Davis, but mostly about what happened after the war. Jeff and I accepted an offer from the British Government to go to England and be part of the celebration of the new King’s coronation. When we got there, Victoria’s son Bertie had appendicitis and the coronation was postponed. We bummed around London the whole summer and enjoyed ourselves. Finally, we rode in the coronation parade with a few other Canadian Scouts and Alex MacMillan in the lead. The newspaper called us “very tough desperados,” and I cut that out and brought it home.

  Before we left Africa, Jeff had shipped The Blue to Halifax with instructions to send her to a certain Halifax livery barn. When we arrived in Halifax from England, we found the blue cayuse, not only alive but fatter and sassier than ever.

  A few weeks later, Jeff and I took leave of one another at the Old Man River ford. He was going east to Ft. Macleod. I had quite a long ride yet to the Cochrane Ranch. We did not embrace or shake hands. We had a whole lifetime to meet up and shoot the breeze. That’s what we told each other.

  Four years later, on a hot summer day, Jeff’s brother Charlie came over from the Blood Reserve to tell me Jeff was dead. He’d had a little farm on the Willow Creek, which he acquired with Boer War scrip I’d encouraged him to apply for. His hay binder was plugged and he was leaning over the canvas, pulling hay out, when his horses spooked and a tine popped up and pierced his heart. He was still on it when they found him.

  I had dreams about Jeff’s death for years. I would be there and trying to lift him off. But there was always a problem. I’d be caught on something or my arms would have no strength. I could never help Jeff no matter how many times I dreamed it.

  By the time of his death, Jeff had a reputation around Ft. Macleod as a drunkard. “Just a Halfbreed” was what he was called in a book about the range era by a man named Kelly. Kelly also called him “shiftless, unmoral, and whisky sodden.” There was a whole page devoted to running Jeff down as a war hero who came home and did nothing “with all his advantages.”

  I have seldom been as angry in my life. I wrote a storming-mad letter to Kelly, but I never sent it. I did not because I knew that, if Jeff were alive, he wouldn’t have bothered. He would have laughed about it and had another drink.

  When I get up from this table, I will make a fire in the wood stove. Then I will feed this memoir to that fire, every page. Back in the Great Karoo when I kept telling myself it was a moose to a horse, that was the closest I came to understanding. The whole war was like that. We travelled inside it, Ovide, Jeff, and me, but we never understood it and were never part of it. Ovide proved that the day he tried to turn five and two into seven. Jeff believed he could make the war do tricks but finally couldn’t even get it to kill him. And here I am trying to make sense of it still, trying to make a horse when it never was a horse and never will be.

  THE END

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  Many have helped me with this novel.

  I thank my wife Pamela Banting for her understanding, patience, and wonderful sense of language.

  Many thanks to my agent Anne McDermid for finding The Great Karoo a home, and to Maya Mavjee for her certainty that Doubleday Canada should be that home. The team at Doubleday Canada has been wonderful, but special thanks to Martha Kanya-Forstner for her fine editing and unfailing calm good humour.

  Several times in the writing of this novel, I was given information that was simply not available in others ways. For these gifts, I thank Joyce Bonertz, Peter Redpath, Rachel Wyatt, Linda Smith, Barbara Brydges, and Hugh Dempsey.

  Thanks to Elaine and Robin Phillips of Cochrane for helping prepare me for my research trip
to South Africa. In Middelburg, Transvaal, Peter Dickson and Gerald Gerhardt gave me a fine tour, including the concentration camp graveyard, the military graveyard (where I found the grave of Ovide Smith), and Aas Vogel Kranz. Kate Minaar of Middelburg served me Hertzoggies and Smutzies in her home. Thanks to these Middelburg gentlefolk for their generosity to a complete stranger.

  I would like to thank the friends who helped at key times: Marina Endicott, Peter Ormshaw, Caroline Adderson, Chris Fisher, Andrew Wreggitt, Don Smith, Ian Prinsloo, Steve Gobby, and George Parry. Special thanks to Greg Gerrard for the author photo.

  I would like to recognize the staff of the Glenbow Museum, Library and Archives, for all the help they have given me over the years—and again with this book. Thanks as well to the National Archives of Canada. Of the many books that were profoundly useful sources, I would like to recognize Painting the Map Red by Carman Millar, Our Little Army in the Field by Brian A. Reid, Canada’s Sons on Kopje and Veldt by T. G. Marquis, The Boer War by Thomas Packenham, and Firewater by Hugh Dempsey. The wonderful memoir I Remember by W. A. Griesbach provided a great deal of detail and atmosphere, and I apologize that Frank Adams took such umbrage at Mr. Griesbach’s joke about Ovide Smith. Though the novel’s General Butler is a fiction, the factual basis of the character came mostly from William Francis Butler’s An Autobiography, as well as his Canadian memoirs: The Great Lone Land and Wild North Land.

  Finally, my thanks to the Canada Council for the Arts for the timely grant that allowed me to imagine and frame this novel.

  A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Fred Stenson is the author of The Trade, which was nominated for the 2000 Giller Prize and won the inaugural Grant MacEwan Writer’s Award, the City of Edmonton Book Prize, and the Writers Guild of Alberta’s Georges Bugnet Novel Award. The Great Karoo is Stenson’s eighth work of fiction and fifteenth book. He has written scripts for over 140 produced films and videos. Stenson writes a regular humour column for Alberta Views Magazine. He was raised in the Alberta foothills north of Chief Mountain and lives with his wife, Pamela Banting, in Cochrane, Alberta.

  Copyright © 2008 Fred Stenson

  Anchor Canada edition 2009

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  eISBN: 978-0-307-37258-1

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

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