There was movement on the trail below Two Tree, a truck Pat did not know winding its way through the fields with black men—not workers from Two Tree—piled up in its back. For an instant, he froze, his hands resting on the crests in Grey’s spine, poking up through his threadbare hide. Then, the truck rolled on, bound no doubt for Crofton or the land beyond.
“Where are we even going to take them, Pat?”
It was a question they had not yet asked themselves. Lady, Duchess, Duke, Marquess, and Fleur were still on Rob Flanagan’s farm, but there were no guarantees that they would stay safe for long.
“Do you know Braeside?” asked Pat.
Charl nodded. Braeside was a farm that bordered the land we had been leasing at Palmerston Estates. In a time not so very long ago, Braeside had been an African idyll. It sat near Palmerston, between sheer hills crowned in scrub, where jacaranda trees stood heavy with scent. Its owners, Rory and Lindy Hensman, were farmers like us, but their lives really revolved around the amazing menagerie of orphaned animals who called Braeside their home. Their house was open for all the lost things of the bush. At Braeside, Hoggles, an enormous bristly warthog, dominated the sitting room, taking over settees and armchairs in preference to his basket of woven grass; at Braeside, a scaly anteater, known as a pangolin, wandered along a passage, a kudu calf drank daintily from a china cup, an orphaned owl perched curiously at an attic window, searching for a way in. And, on Braeside, a whole herd of orphaned elephants roamed the tracks or swam in the rivers with Rory and Lindy clinging to their backs.
“The war vets will come there, too,” said Charl, gently pushing Grey up the ramp and into the back of the truck, there to be received by Deja Vu and the rest of the mismatched herd.
“Maybe,” said Pat. “But better that they’re there than . . . here.” He turned, surveying the familiar fields through which we would ride no longer. “If there’s one place animals can still be safe, it has to be Braeside,” said Pat, and he ran his hand tenderly along Grey’s sore, patchy muzzle.
Chapter 7
HIGH IN THE HILLS of Braeside Farm, the night was alive with fires, small cauldrons of orange and red stirring in the bush. The same fires could be seen far into the distance; below the Braeside hills, there were rings burning on Palmerston Estates, where ramshackle villages had sprung up in our carefully tended fields. The smell of smoke came on the wind, bringing with it the dull sounds of chanting. Whether it was only the war vets, or the labor force of Braeside forced into a pungwe, roaring out slogans in support of Mugabe and ZANU-PF until their throats were raw, Pat and Charl could not say. In silence, their bodies hunched over, they made haste along the track below the shell of the Braeside farmhouse until they reached the stables.
“It’s like being in the army again,” said Pat.
It was an observation he had made before. Many of Zimbabwe’s white farmers had spent their youth fighting in the bush war, and as the farm invasions intensified, all the old instincts seemed to bubble to the surface.
When they reached the stables, Pat and Charl made sure that they had not been followed and then, under cover of darkness, slipped inside. In the first stall, Grey hung, half-suspended, in a great sling made from tarpaulin and suspended from the rafters. His two hind hooves and one of his fore balanced, gently, on the stable floor, while his damaged hoof hung above. His ears turned at Charl’s approach, and he let out a muted whinny.
“Hello, old friend,” Charl whispered, hurrying over.
“How’s it looking?”
Charl crouched at Grey’s hoof, the light of his torch sweeping across the stable and picking out different corners: the pile of manure in the corner, Grey’s patchy flank where his ribs still showed.
“Better,” Charl replied. “But not healed yet . . .”
Ever since moving the horses onto Braeside, Pat and Charl had been coming here to tend to them. At first it had been simple—for, even though Braeside looked down on Palmerston Estates, it had not yet been abandoned to Mugabe’s thugs. As war vet activity intensified, though, Rory and Lindy had made a drastic decision—they determined they had to leave while they still could. Rory and Lindy had other concerns as well, for they were not the sort of people who could leave their orphaned elephants behind. After much careful thought, they had set out south, intent on driving their elephant herd across the border into South Africa.
The flight of the Hensmans, however, had left Grey, Deja Vu, Imprevu, and the rest stranded on Braeside. With the farmhouse abandoned, the war vets quickly moved into the farm, settling in its fields and hills. Now their stick huts could be seen along every trail and ridge; their fires burned in the bush, and the night was filled with their songs. What had become of the Braeside workforce, we did not know; terrorized and driven to pungwes, perhaps, but some of them limped on, trying to keep whatever portions of the farm they could in working order.
After making certain that Grey was as well as he could be, restrained in his sling, Pat and Charl crept on, into the stables where Deja Vu and the rest were waiting. They seemed to know they were being called upon, and they shifted, excited, at Pat and Charl’s presence. Tonight, the men were administering vaccines, and in the dull light of their torches, they prepared the syringes. After palming a fistful of horse cubes into each of the horses’ mouths, they administered the injection into the horses’ necks. Only Imprevu seemed to object. At the touch of the needle, she bucked, releasing an ill-tempered snort.
Pat and Charl froze, listening out for the sounds of footsteps. So far, they had been fortunate in their midnight trips onto Braeside; if the war vets knew they were here, they did not care or were wary of any confrontation. All the same, until there was another home for Grey, Deja Vu, and the rest to go to, Braeside was all that we had.
Confident that they were not being watched, Charl ran his hands around Imprevu, feeling the horse twitch.
“They’re getting restless.”
Pat smirked. “You want to take them out on a midnight ride?”
The sounds of the distant pungwe were carried high on the wind.
“Maybe not tonight,” Charl returned, with a wry smile.
By the time the vaccines were administered, the horses dipped and deticked, and the stables shoveled of muck, the black of night was paling into dawn. Fingers of red sunlight burst over the horizon. From Braeside, Pat could see the contours of the neighboring Palmerston Estates. It was mere weeks since we had left, but it might as well have been a lifetime.
“I think it’s about time we weren’t here,” said Pat.
As they drove back down the track, Braeside Farm was eerily silent. They rolled past the still stick huts of Palmerston, the barren fields where a single rangy cow lowed at them from where it was tethered. Then, out onto the road and past Heroes Acre, a cemetery where heroes of the bush war—those men we had once called terrorists and insurgents—were still being ceremoniously buried. Above the turnoff, a big mural of Mugabe’s face peered down.
“Do you ever think about leaving?” Charl asked.
“For where?”
“Anywhere,” said Charl. “Anywhere but here.”
Late the following night, Pat turned to me in bed and brushed the hair out of my eyes.
“What is it, Pat?” I asked.
“It’s Charl,” he whispered, careful that his voice not be heard through the safehouse walls. “There was something in his voice last night, on Braeside. I think . . .”
Unsettled, I reeled back. “Think what?”
“He’s thinking about leaving, Mandy. I’m sure of it. I could . . . hear it in his voice.”
A thought occurred to me, something that had not entered my consciousness until now. “And you, Pat?”
Half of me, I knew, was begging him to say: Let’s go; let’s buy our tickets and fly out of here. But the other half pictured him riding on Frisky, tending to Deja Vu, nursing Grey back to health.
“Never,” Pat whispered. “This is my country. Those are my horses.
This is my”—his voice faltered—“world,” he finally concluded.
I looked at him. It was his country; they were his horses; it was his world. But they were mine, too. My world was Pat himself, and I felt the very same fire in my own chest.
“There was a call today,” I said. “I think you should call back.”
Pat and I had spent the day compiling data for our agronomy business. Agronomy is the science of agriculture, and ever since Crofton we had run a small business on the side, consulting for farmers across Zimbabwe, analyzing their land and providing suggestions on how they might best improve their yields and profits. Now that we no longer had River Ranch or Palmerston Estates, agronomy was the only way we could make any money. Yet what had once been a straightforward task of taking soil samples from various farms and making recommendations had become more complex since the start of the land invasions. As farms fell, so did our clients, and we had to roam wider and wider for smaller and smaller incomes.
“It’ll have to wait,” said Pat. “Gaydia will wonder where I’ve got to.”
Gaydia Tiffin was an old friend who worked with Pat on the agronomy business. Gaydia was warmhearted and vivacious, and she and her husband, Roldy, had once farmed in the same area as us. The fact that they were expert polocrosse players, and almost as at home in the saddle as Pat, only cemented the union. Gaydia’s daughter, Romaen, had the same passion for horses her mother did. Their home had often reminded me of Crofton, filled with dogs and cats of varying shapes and sizes.
“I think she’ll want to hear this one, too.”
The call had come early in the morning. Even though we felt secure in the safehouse, a call at that hour of the day had triggered my panic response. Shaking the sudden feeling away, though, I had simply picked up the phone.
“Hello?” I had tentatively begun, half expecting the guttural tone of some CIO official on the other end of the line.
“I’m looking,” a soft, female voice said instead, “for Mandy Retzlaff?”
The woman on the other end of the line introduced herself as Katherine Leggott, from a family who farmed on the outskirts of Chinhoyi. I was not familiar with the family, but we soon settled into talking about the land invasions. Even though I knew so little about the Leggotts and their farm, it seemed that, somehow, they knew about ours.
“You’ll have to forgive me,” Katherine began, “but I’m just going to say it . . . You see, we heard you were the horse people.”
She gave a strange emphasis to the word horse, as if to intimate that we ourselves were some curious mixture of equine and human genes.
“Well,” I began, “we do have horses—”
“Yes,” she interjected, more eager now. “And I heard . . . I heard you were the people who could be counted on to look after them, that you wouldn’t let them go the way of . . .”
There had, it transpired, been increasing war vet activity across the Leggotts’ farm. Though they had not yet been evicted, the mobs had gathered, the trails had erupted with a plague of stick huts and settlers, and it seemed that the noose was constricting around them.
“We’re leaving,” Katherine’s voice buzzed at me along the line. “My husband, John, has family in Australia. We’d thought about moving before, but . . .” She paused, trying to fill in the blanks of her own story. Just as it felt to so many of us, everything was happening all at once. It would take years for people to look back and put these months into any semblance of order. “We’re going there for our kids, Mandy.” She paused. “But it’s our horses. Something has got to be done about our horses.”
I looked at Pat across the safehouse kitchen.
“Well,” I ventured, with a smile, “what else can I say?”
The next day, Pat and I went out to see the Leggotts. Once we had seen their horses, there was nothing else we could do but take them in. The consequences of leaving them behind passed before Pat’s eyes, and after that there was never any other option. I was worried, for our horses were already divided—some still out on Rob Flanagan’s farm, the rest on the rapidly diminishing Braeside—and there were moments when it seemed an unnecessary strain. It was only as I watched Pat loading them up and taking them to join Grey, Deja Vu, and the rest up on Braeside, smuggled onto the farm under the cloak of night, that my worries relented. While he was concentrating on all these horses, at least my husband did not have time to brood on what was happening to the country he loved. If tending horses was what it would take to keep him from exploding the way he did that day on Palmerston Estates, I wouldn’t have minded if he had taken in all the horses in the whole of Zimbabwe.
The day after, I made the trip into Chinhoyi to collect more veterinary supplies. In town, I met with Rob Gordon, a veterinarian we knew well from Crofton and Palmerston. Today, he looked like a shadow of the man who had treated our animals on Crofton. I caught up with him on the main strip that ran through Chinhoyi, the road flanked on either side by busy market stalls and bustling crowds. I tried not to look at the stalls too closely these days, for we were certain that items scavenged from the jambanjaed farms lay here. Indeed, we had known farmers whose furniture was piled high for sale here, and across the villages.
Rob looked distinctly harassed as I told him what we needed. His face was etched in hard lines.
“Rob?”
“Sorry, Mandy,” he began. “Of course I can help . . .”
I quickly understood why Rob seemed so different. He was, he said, one of only a handful of vets left in the Chinhoyi district. Since the land invasions began, veterinarians had never been more needed—and yet now they were leaving Zimbabwe in droves, just like the farmers themselves. As more farmers were driven from their farms, more and more herds of livestock were being abandoned. If those sheep and cattle were not immediately slaughtered by the war vets, they were left to die slow deaths from sickness and neglect. Dairy cattle were in particular danger, for they need milking several times a day; if just one milking is missed, it is only a matter of time before infection sets in.
“So we’re killing them all,” said Rob. “If the war vets don’t do it, it’s down to us.”
Rob’s words were like dull thunder, sounding on the horizon and growing louder as a storm grows near. The scale of this devastation was vast. Each farm looked after thousands of animals, and each farm’s herds were unique to that land, selectively bred over generations to produce a certain strain. Rob and veterinarians like him were moving in where the war vets had been and euthanizing great flocks of animals.
“Rob,” I said, “it’s madness . . .”
He looked at me as if to say he knew.
“If not us,” he said, “who else?”
Faced with this dark new responsibility, many vets had chosen to leave Zimbabwe altogether, finding cleaner work in South Africa; Tanzania; and, like the country’s farmers, farther afield as well: Australia, New Zealand, England, and all over the world. In my heart I could not blame them; they had trained to save animals, not to cull them by the thousands.
Yet, as Rob sold me the vaccines we needed up on Braeside, I could not help thinking about the animals left behind, not only the domestic pets stranded on farms from which their owners had fled, but the herds out there in the bush and the fields, waiting in vain for their owners to come back.
“Rob,” I said, “are there more horses out there, left behind?”
He looked at me through eyes half-closed, his head cocked to one side as if he was still trying to understand what I had said.
“Mandy,” he said, “they’re everywhere.”
I stood for the longest time as he drove off.
I would, I considered, just have to tell Pat.
In the days that followed, the safehouse phone rang more and more often. The country was a chaos of rumor and misinformation, and one of the tinier rumors swirling around the streets of Chinhoyi was that Pat and Mandy Retzlaff had opened their arms to horses whose owners were being compelled to leave them behind.
It was Rob Gordon, I knew, who had been disseminating the rumor. As we sneaked more horses—a sleek roan mare, a gorgeous dappled gray gelding—onto Braeside, we could not fault him for it. Rob had put down more animals in the last twelve months than he might have done in a whole lifetime, and the idea that there was even a glimmer of hope for some of these abandoned horses must have been a temptation too difficult to ignore.
The more horses we smuggled up onto Braeside, though, the more danger Pat and Charl put themselves in every time they crept onto the farm under cover of night. With Rory and Lindy gone, the settling of Braeside was intensifying. Villages grew up out of the bush, fields were partitioned, and all through the night the fires burned and the drums were beaten. We could not neglect the horses kept there, for then they might all fall prey to the same withering devastations that Grey had endured—but the longer they were left there, the stronger the danger of going to look after them became. We were living on borrowed time and had been for too long.
With thoughts of the horses being divided circling in our minds, we resolved to make a trip to Rob Flanagan’s farm and check on the Two Tree horses being kept there. Before we had even turned off the main highway, we could see the evidence of settlers abounding. On one of the banks there spread a cluster of stick huts. A small boy darted from one to another, and a face I took to be his father’s glared at us from the darkness inside. We rolled by barns that stood gutted and empty, a tractor standing, spent and curiously alone, in the middle of a field.
“Was it like this when you brought them here?” I asked.
“There were problems,” Pat said, with a withering look. “There wasn’t this.”
We climbed out of the car and came toward the farmhouse where Rob Flanagan still clung on. On the windward side of the house, I saw the looming outlines of the great tunnels and greenhouses where Rob grew his flowers to be exported all over the world.
One Hundred and Four Horses Page 10
