by Peter Rimmer
"Life is made of memories," explained Tinus as he in spanned the sixteen oxen into two teams. "At the end of it you look back and remember the good memories. The rest are forgotten. The mosaic of life. You cannot hold the good moments forever. We never reach eternal happiness in this life and maybe not in the next. What we have found on the banks of this great river is joy for weeks on end. Remember them and thank God, for such weeks are rare. They are the reason for coming into this world. Now, put my chest of books in the wagon young Seb and we will go. We can never stand still, more's the pity…Friends, my speech is over. May God bless our journey. Tatenda, you will ride with me and Harry in the big wagon. Yes, indeed, we must go."
Tinus led the way slowly across the Zambezi Valley, followed by Seb driving the second wagon and the two saddleless horses on long reins behind. The sky was puffed by small white clouds motionless below the perfect blue of the sky. The sun was white-light on the dust and long grass that brushed against the chests of the lead oxen. A fish eagle's triple call from the river floated out to them. Ahead, the escarpment was another day's journey.
Day after day followed as they slowly journeyed through a country empty of people, villages and cattle, the country south of the Zambezi stripped bare by first Mzilikazi and then his son Lobengula. It had taken the Zulu impi fifty years to decimate the tribes of the Shona. All the hunters saw was game; herds of elephant they left alone; stampedes of buffalo; prides of lion; cheetahs running down the buck, impala, waterbuck, springbok, kudu. Even the great eland were prey to the predators. Among the buffalo, herds of the gnu. Among the elephant, at respectful distances, prehistoric rhinoceros. In the rivers, crocodile and hippopotamus. High in the sky, eagles and falcons, hawks and buzzards calling their lonely cries. And always behind them the long line of crushed grass to prove their passage and mark their trail for weeks to come.
The nights were best for Alison: camped in the wilderness with the upward heat of the fire curling sparks high into the heavens, the bulk of her man next to her, Harry asleep, the last of their coffee boiling over a small, secondary fire mingling pungent sweetness with the smell of wood smoke. Away, close to the smaller wagon, Sebastian and Emily holding hands.
Above them the great sky of heaven, layer upon layer of crystal stars fixed in their paradise, the wagons the centre of the dome, the Milky Way splashed like cloud among the heavenly stars. And then the moon rising from the wilderness…stacking the fire and falling asleep in each other's arms.
By the middle of May Jeremiah Shank had given up on his second five hundred pounds and was turning his mind to the estate he was going to carve out of the African bush. He had studied the map in the company office that showed the Zambezi River cutting them off from the north, hundreds of miles of one of Africa's greatest rivers. Somewhere along that river, in territory previously controlled by Lobengula, his quarry had camped for the duration of the rains. The consensus of opinion, drawn from prospectors back from their fruitless hunt for gold, elicited after buying round after round of drinks in the new hotel, was that any sane hunter would bring his ivory out on a line that to the west would keep his wagons far away from Gu Bulawayo, Lobengula's military kraal and far east of Fort Salisbury in case Rhodes levied a tax on the ivory. Somewhere there in the middle: for weeks, Jeremiah had ridden across this line, climbing kopjes that stuck out of the flat grassland with his telescope looking for the trail of his quarry. All he ever saw were the vast herds of game which he found permanently irritating. To Jeremiah there was only beauty in gold or pound notes.
His horse was going lame and he reasoned there was no reason for Brigandshaw to travel at all. Hartley, he heard in the hotel, had spent years in the wilderness without the need of his fellow man. Jeremiah made camp for the last time on his journey. Even before he had made his supper the hyenas were laugh-whooping at him from the darkness of the bush and then the first lion roared and sent a shiver down his spine. Owls were calling to each other from the clumps of trees. A leopard coughed and Jeremiah clutched his rifle in fear and loathing. Even as exhaustion made him sleep to the dancing light of his fire he dreamed of horrors through the night.
The dawn came slowly with the song of birds and the fire was still burning high. Jeremiah was glad to be going. That BSA Company would have placed their beacons to demark his farm and he would find some blacks to work for him. There were white men without money who would build him a house and oxen to clear patches of his land that would grow the food for the fools looking for the gold that wasn't there. He would buy cattle from the company and very soon he would be a man of property. He began to walk his horse the thirty miles back to Fort Salisbury.
Around midday, with the sun a ball of fire above his head, he crossed the trail he had been searching for four weeks. Even his inexperienced eye showed the trail was less than two days old. The wagons, two of them he read from the tracks, had travelled much closer to the British camp than he had expected and the one wagon drove a rut far deeper than the other. Jeremiah threw his hat in the air and whopped. The only load in the wilderness going south would be ivory, the only hunter not accounted for, Sebastian Brigandshaw. For the first five minutes he actually ran towards Fort Salisbury. With a wagon that heavy the police would catch up with them easily.
The police were not interested.
"Mr Shank, you saw a wagon trail in the bush and want me to ride out and arrest the wagon master for kidnapping somebody's wife in England. Please, Mister Shank. Anyone capable of hunting elephant in the bush for months on end is not I would think the kind of person to drag someone else's wife off to Africa and stick her in an ox wagon at the far extremity of our Empire. Having said all that, you did not see this Brigandshaw but a rut in the ground miles from nowhere."
"But he is the type," insisted Jeremiah Shank patiently. He had learned years ago that losing his temper with authority was a worthless extravagance. "The man's face is on the poster outside and if you capture him you will have your name in every newspaper in England." For a moment the policeman's eyes changed from 'how do I get rid of this man without losing my temper?' to one of personal interest. For a moment the man looked at Jeremiah and then his expression changed to one of resignation.
"I'm stuck behind this desk. Anyway, Major Johnson would never authorise the expenditure of sending two men down a cold trail without proof that Brigandshaw was at the end of it. Fact is Mr Shank, the company is tight with money now they find there isn't any gold."
"Who owns the ivory on that wagon?" said Jeremiah Shank seeing his opportunity.
"Well the company, of course. Anyone hunting for ivory in company territory needs a licence and has to sell any ivory to the company."
"And if the hunter does not have a licence?"
"The ivory would be confiscated."
"Thank you, constable, you have been of extreme help."
Puzzled, the policeman watched the man abruptly leave the charge office. He thought for a moment the man was being sarcastic and then he wasn't so sure. Through the open door he saw the man he had been trying to get rid of the last half an hour running down Pioneer Street as if a full Matabele impi had swept into Fort Salisbury.
When Jeremiah entered the office of the BSA Company, the same company in which Arthur Brigandshaw had invested all his money, the ex-seaman was out of breath.
"I wish to see the man who issues hunting licenses."
"You may fill in this form...Is there something wrong?"
"There's a man without a licence not fifteen miles from here with a full wagon load of ivory going south and if you don't move very quickly your company will lose a great deal of money."
"A full load of ivory? My word, the company will be very angry if that slips through our fingers. Mister Rhodes said every penny counts. How much ivory, do you think?"
"Well over five tons."
"Goodness gracious me…Can you show us where it is?"
"Will there be a reward?" asked Jeremiah thinking on his feet.
"I rath
er think so."
"I'll need that in writing before we go. But hurry up. Every minute the ivory is getting further away. We'll need a company policeman to make the arrest."
"Yes, I rather think we do. Now, what is your name and I will report all of this to my superior?"
Tinus Oosthuizen was in no hurry. It was the middle of May, the best time of the year. There had been no rain for well over a month and the days were cooler, the night mildly cold. The long elephant grass was brown and beginning to bend and the tsetse flies no longer attacked them at dusk and dawn. Most of the small rivers were still pooled with water and the game dispersed far and wide across the grasslands of the highveld. The oxen plodded slowly across the veld and had not felt the whip since climbing the escarpment out of the Zambezi Valley.
On the second wagon, Harry sat between his mother and father, Tatenda taking the shade sitting on the tailgate behind. They all watched the face of a giraffe which topped a clump of trees ten yards from the wagon. The animal had stopped chewing at the last leaves on top of the tree and seemed to smile at their passing. Harry looked back and the animal had begun to chew a leaf stuck in his mouth still watching the wagon. Harry smiled back at the giraffe.
From the back of the almost empty wagon, Tatenda spoke to him in Shona. Someone was coming. Someone was coming down their trail. A cloud of dust was back on their trail. There were horses and men, the first he had seen for so many months.
"Tatenda says we are being followed," he told his father.
In front the heavily loaded wagon pushed on into the long grass, moving round a red anthill that rose out of the head high grass.
"We've cut a new trail, Harry."
Jack Slater, the company man, believed in rules, particularly the rules of the British Empire as without the rules man would return to primitive anarchy. He was a product, as had been his father and grandfather, of a minor public school in the south of England. He had been sent to the preparatory section of the school as a boy of seven and put in a dormitory with twenty more young boys who had been taken from their parents and given to a House Master who would teach them how to become English gentleman, how to comply with the rules. The family had been solicitors for three generations and before that minor squires. The Slater graves in the church at Tonbridge went back to the time of Cromwell. The family had had something to do with the Great Protector and somehow held onto their land when King James the Second was restored to the throne of England. The junior and senior school had so indoctrinated Jack Slater that he believed in his heart that the British Empire was the only source of stability in the world, but any nation or people that were lucky enough to become part of the Empire would live in peace, that individuals who complied with the rules would be protected from the vagaries and rapacious nature of his fellow man. Under the flag of England a man could walk the streets without fear for his life or property. All he had to do was comply with the Rules and all would be well for him for the rest of his life.
After Jack's two elder brothers joined the family firm of solicitors it was left to Jack and his younger brothers to use their training to help govern the Empire. He was twenty-four- years old when the office of the Colonial Secretary seconded him to the British South Africa Company to make certain they complied with the rules set down in the Royal Charter. It was a splendid way of making the men of business pay for the administration of the Empire. Clive had gone about expanding the Empire in India, Brooke in Sarawak and now Rhodes in Africa. And the rules said the Charter Company, as it was now been called, had right of protection over the indigenous people provided the company enabled the missionaries to do their work and convert the heathens to Christianity. Their rights included the land and what was below and above the land which included the animals. When the young man at the front desk had brought the horrible little man into his office who had proceeded to sneak on someone taking ivory out of the new country his instinct had been to throw Jeremiah Shank out of his office.
His upbringing overcame his dislike for the man with the crooked nose and drooping eyelid. If one rule could be broken then so could the rest. A blind eye turned to a breach of the rules was the equivalent of taking a bribe and for the British civil servant that was the worst crime that could be perpetrated against the Empire. Honesty was the first rule of them all.
Half an hour later and with the young policeman who had first spoken to Jeremiah, he rode out of Fort Salisbury to arrest the wagon load of ivory. They were the rules. The owner of the ivory would be given a fair hearing as to why he was not in possession of the permit, a fact that Jack Slater was certain of because no one had yet been given the right to hunt. Everyone had been more interested in finding the gold in King Solomon's mines.
Unaware of anything untoward, Tinus Oosthuizen in the lead wagon, with his left hand resting comfortably on Alison Ford’s knee, was enjoying the pungent smell of wild sage and the sight of a herd of buffalo whose heads and sometimes part of the backs was visible as they moved through the long grass looking for choice grazing. The idea of a farm and family was foremost in his mind with a tug of war to decide on land in this new country or farm with his fellow workers in the Transvaal Republic or the Republic of the Orange Free State. Even though his mother had been from Scotland and a major influence on his life, his reading of English books and his command of the English language, never once had he considered himself anything other than a Boer of Dutch descent. He was an African Oosthuizen as his family had been for seven generations, for over two hundred years. One of the first tasks on the new farm, wherever it was to be, was to teach Alison how to speak the Taal, the Dutch van Riebeeck had brought to the Cape in the seventeenth century. Tinus let his thoughts meander and realised he was happier than he had been for all of his years.
The buffalo were the first to spook and Tinus took his hand away from Alison's knee to have them both on the reins. The grass was so tall the predator lions could be anywhere and Tinus searched the bush with a practised eye for the head of a lioness. Back in the cool shade of a tree would be the lion waiting. The buffalo were properly spooked and were running through the long grass pushing a cloud of dust up into the sky. Puzzled, Tinus looked again but there were no lionesses leaping through the grass in pursuit of their quarry. The crash of hundreds of hooves pounding the dry earth were so loud they obliterated the sound of the crickets singing in the grass. Tinus brought the oxen to a halt and watched the spectacle.
"You own this ivory, sir," said a young man on horseback who had ridden up on his right, away from Alison. Tinus turned slowly to look at the Englishman and told him to mind his own business in the Taal.
"Sorry, old chap. Don't speak that lingo. You speak English by any chance? Name's Jack Slater from the Charter Company. I believe, sir, you don't have a licence to shoot our elephant?"
Tinus cracked the rawhide whip over the lead oxen and the wagon lumbered forward again. He pressed Alison's knee telling her to keep quiet. An emptiness had found its way into the pit of his stomach: the English again, it was why his people had made the Great Trek out of the Cape to be free of British rule. The young man on his right was joined by a second young rider, this one in uniform. Then a third horseman came up and Tinus looked into the sneering eyes of the man with a crooked face. One of the man's eyes drooped half shut and the hollow in Tinus's stomach became a certainty: this was no accident.
The young policeman rode to the front of the team of eight oxen and with a quiet expertise, took hold of the lead oxen by jumping off his horse onto its back. He then tried to bring the animal to a halt with little success. For Tinus, the target was too great a temptation and before he could control his temper the long thong of his whip curled out and cut a hole in the man's starched uniform making him scream with pain. In the commotion, Sebastian caught up with the lead wagon.
"I say, do you speak English?" asked Jack Slater, appalled at the unprovoked attack on the policeman.
"Of course. Why did your man try and stop this wagon?"
"Carrying ivory without a permit."
Instead of becoming more annoyed, Sebastian smiled to himself. Now he understood. There was a new law in the land and the laws had to be complied with. The men were doing their job as they thought best.
"Tinus, bring the wagon to a halt."
"So he does speak English?" said Jack Slater.
"Of course he does. His mother was a Scot." Sebastian climbed down from the box in front of his wagon and walked across to the policeman slumped over the lead oxen, blood staining the back of his uniform. The buffalo were far away in the distance, still in full stampede.
"You all right, old chap?" asked Sebastian. "My partner was a bit hasty."
"That hurt."
"He's a bit of an expert, so to speak. Can I help you down? My wife has some iodine. It will hurt but stop any trouble. Now, what's all this about? You see, we have a permit. A very valid and at the time a very important permit from Lobengula. We left to hunt long before you chaps invaded the country. You can't arrest a chap for a crime he hasn't done, now can you? And if you don't believe we wasted three weeks at Gu-Bulawayo you can ask Lobengula yourself but that probably would not be wise. He still thinks this country belongs to him. All you have is the right to prospect for minerals. So you see we are complying with the law. Lobengula's law. But if you go and ask him he might just bash your head in with a knobkerrie. Saw him do that to his top general. Nasty mess. Whole head split open. Dead before the poor chap hit the ground. So be a good fellow can you and put in a proper report after Emily has looked at your back. Sorry about that, I really am."
The policeman, still in pain slid off the back of the oxen and Seb helped him to the ground.
Jack Slater had also heard the conversation and was duly relieved. Now he had an excuse. The rules had not been broken. These people had come into the country before the Pioneer Column had across the Shashe River.
