by Peter Rimmer
“Don’t you start worrying about me. You are the one to worry about.”
“God looks after me, Will, who looks after you?”
“Hannes Potgieter at the moment. And very well. Do you want me to tell you about these two American women?…”
“Not really, Will. Not really… Something’s happened to you since I left England. Do you want to talk about it?”
“There’s nothing to talk about except you getting well. Only strong men do good deeds. Get your strength back. We have a safari on Monday for a week. Tell Laurie Hall to get a message to our permanent camp when they fly you back.”
“God be with you always, Will… And thank you.”
Hannes Potgieter’s leather hat was caked in old sweat and dust, heavy with the years in the bush, the lion’s claw stitched to the front of the headband a reminder that death was swift and final when hunting the big game of Africa. The client had shot the lioness or rather Hannes had fired simultaneously, allowing the client to claim the kill. The man was standing gun-butt on his knee, right foot on the dead lioness when a blur of maned fury hurtled out of the elephant grass straight at the camera-posing client. Hannes had run in between them, snap-shooting the black-maned lion from the hip, aiming for the heart, and the dead lion landed on top of him. It had taken Sixpence and Onepenny five minutes to disentangle the lion, the rifle and Hannes Potgieter, the client waiting all the time for his photograph to be taken. The English aristocratic had risked his life a second time in one day by suggesting to a badly bleeding Hannes that the photograph would look better with his foot on the black-maned lion.
Relating the story to Will, Hannes had told him never to take his eyes away from the bush. “The old man didn’t like his wife being shot, kerel, and I don’t blame him. Everything is in the food chain in Africa, including you.”
They were on their way in the Land Rover to Mongu to pick up a client, a long-time client of Hannes Potgieter who had become a friend.
“Newspaperman. Works all over the world. Anywhere there’s a problem. Wife a great socialite. Once a year or so, whenever he can get away from his newspaper editor and his wife at the same time, he comes out here to repair his soul. Hasn’t shot an animal for years, prefers to take photographs. An American. One of the best natural shots I have ever seen. You’ll like this one. He’s a man.”
Curious, Will watched the scheduled flight land and one broad-shouldered, sharp-eyed passenger run down the ramp and stamp on the ground. Will could hear the ‘yeah, yeah’ from where he stood by the petrol bowser, Laurie Hall having gone out to the plane with the mobile stairs.
“Does that every time,” said Hannes walking out to greet his friend, leaving Will wondering if three was going to be a crowd. Will watched them coming back.
“This is the young man I’m teaching, Melvin. Will, meet Melvin Raath. You may have seen his byline.”
“A privilege, Mr Raath,” said Will who read Time Magazine and had recognised Melvin Raath’s name.
“Melvin, please… You’re a lucky man, Will. Best teacher in Africa and I should know… want to write him up for an article but Hannes threatens violence, and that’s one man I don’t want to fight.”
Together they climbed into the Land Rover, Will in the back, waved to Laurie Hall and began the fifty kilometres of potted dirt track back to the permanent camp.
“You mind if I talk freely in front of this young man from England?” said Melvin at the deck bar looking out over the distant bush. The sun would only be down in an hour which had not prevented Hannes from opening the bar. Will listened without interrupting, sipping a weak whisky. Hannes had warned him at the airfield while they were waiting for the aircraft. “Good professional hunters need more than bushcraft. Like a good barman they are part friend, part shrink, part nursemaid and they always listen to the other man’s problems. This Melvin Raath will want to drink for two days and then go into the bush. Why I built the fancy house. A trip to the bush is therapy for Melvin Raath. But listen to him. He never talks kak. Even when he’s drunk.”
“Not the same without Danika,” was the only time the American spoke of Hannes’s dead wife, the shorter man reaching up to put a strong hand on the big man’s shoulder. They drank in silence for a while with Hannes going to the open side of the house to look out over the bush.
“Yes,” he said finally and came back to the bar and poured another drink.
“Let’s get drunk,” said Melvin.
“Why not, friend?”
“Can the lad drink?”
“Oh, yes,” said Hannes. “A little later, after we eat the best buffalo steak Fourpence can cook on the open fire, when we have studied all the stars in heaven, I will tell you about Polly and Cherry as told by my tracker Fourpence.”
Will looked thoroughly embarrassed.
“When he’s a little drunk, maybe Will can tell us the story himself,” chuckled Melvin, picking up Will’s embarrassment.
Melvin drank a Kentucky corn whisky Hannes imported specially, and Will sipped as short a measure as he was allowed to get away with, all the time enjoying the American’s range of conversation. The man had travelled to almost every corner of the shrinking world.
“Everyone wants to kill someone. Every jerk knows the best way to run the country. Every politician promises what he can’t fulfil and doesn’t care and everyone teeters on the brink of Armageddon. Clichés every one of them but every one of them horribly true… My wife wants to wheel me out at her parties like the prize she won at high school and my daughter is looking for the jerk she can nail down to pay for her for the rest of her life. She’s pretty so every poor sucker’s a taker… Why do men let their balls run their brains? Another cliché but oh so true. Sweet as pie until they give you a couple of children so you can’t run away and then they never stop asking for anything they can think of to make them feel wanted. If my wife has had a new thought in her mind for twenty years, she hasn’t told me. America stinks, England stinks, the whole world stinks and people make the world stink… Sorry, Hannes. It’s been a bad year… You want something so bad and when you get it you wonder why you bothered. And that goes for journalism, wives and daughter… The wife wanted to send me to a shrink so out I came agreeing, wonderful idea, I said to her, ‘Best idea you had… How long you think I need? A month? Two months? Make it six weeks.’… She thinks I’m in a clinic drying out having my brain rearranged so it will better fit in with her life… Whatever happened to nice families, with nice kids and people who love each other instead of everyone scheming how to hurt and get one up on each other? Why can’t people be happy anymore?”
Will watched the American, puzzled, not understanding what he was talking about. So far as he knew the Langtons had always been happy with each other at Langton Manor, and not only the Langtons but everyone who lived on the estate. They were his family, and it had not once crossed his mind that they were not happy together. Stanmore, the girl at Dancing Ledge were the unhappiness that contrasted vividly the good. If this was another world, the new world they were all talking about, he did not want to know… Leaving the two friends at the bar to become sentimentally maudlin, Will went to bed.
Even though Will knew the Goliath heron slept at night, he watched the earth bathed in moonlight on his way to his sleeping hut. Within a minute of getting undressed, he was sound asleep.
The following day the steady drinking continued with Will watching from the sideline. Hannes let Melvin talk, prompting him to go on when the train of thought meandered off course. It was a sad montage of a life Will knew nothing about with the constant theme of striving for happiness no one found, having trodden on everyone near to them… Will shuddered at some of the bitterness. Even the girl was now part of a beautiful memory, something Will would find again even if the girl had gone from his life forever. They had found a love for each other that had nothing to do with high school conquest but everything to do with the real meaning of life. There were souls, like theirs, that could join togethe
r in lasting harmony, in peace with each other reflecting the green trees, bluebells in the woods, gulls above the sea, the crash of waves, the smell of autumn rain on leaves, woods bare in winter, Christmas at Langton Manor, the happiness of family and the joy that was living.
“Kid, you want to join us?” asked Melvin.
“I don’t understand most of it,” said Will.
“You’re lucky, Will,” said Melvin. “I hope you never do. The best part of life is being young. Enjoy it before you become an old cynic like me.”
The next day they walked out into the bush, Melvin, Hannes, Will, Fourpence and Sixpence. They carried rifles and rations for a week. There was no alcohol in the haversacks. Small waterholes scattered the mopani and thorn trees far inland from the river and the game was scattered over the plains under the burning sun. Hannes and Melvin sweated out the booze in silence, each with his own thoughts. It was Will’s first safari with a client. They carried rolled-up sleeping mats and mosquito nets but no tents. Melvin wanted to see the bush, not the shade of a tree. The camera and set of lenses he carried was the most complicated equipment Will had ever seen to take photographs.
Some of the smaller waterholes had dried up and the bush, despite the recent rains, was crackling dry. They walked alone among the animals and by the end of the day when they made camp among a clump of tall, spreading acacia trees, Melvin Raath was smiling. They all collected wood in a big pile to go through the night and then the fire was lit. The sun was ten minutes from setting and Hannes nodded to the trackers.
Just as the sun sank into the far-off horizon of trees, silhouetting the skyline in vivid colour, Will heard a sharp crack behind the waterhole. Hannes had built a spit with forked sticks the thickness of Will’s wrist on either side of the fire. He was removing the bark from a long stick of mopani when the trackers came back with the small impala strung between them on a pole. Before the light had gone, the skinned animal was on the spit over the fire, the heart, the liver and kidneys set aside for breakfast.
Using a long-handled spoon that had hung on one side of his haversack, Fourpence basted the venison with oil and herbs, the herbs coming from the surrounding bush. Away from the spit, another fire was made, the flames leaping to the heavens warning the jackals and wild dogs, hyenas and lions, playing firelight far behind the backs of the men lounging in their legless canvas chairs, feet stretched out to the fire, coffee mugs down on the dry earth beside them with the sounds of Africa calling to the night for kilometre after kilometre around them.
They could have been the only people in the world.
That night Will lay awake inside his mosquito net wondering how such luck could have come to him. The mosquito net was hung from a long string attached to the lowest bough of the acacia tree, Fourpence having attached a piece of wood to the end of the string and skilfully thrown it over the bough of the tree. The carcass of the impala had been taken off the fire and hung in the tree. For three hours the carcass had been turned while they sliced thin pieces from the outside with the knives each of them carried in a sheath next to their right legs. The meat had cooked down layer by layer, crispy and better than any meat Will had eaten despite being tough from lack of hanging.
A thin moon, lying on its back, gave a pale light to the bush, and the coughs and grunts and splashes at the waterhole came to him early in the night. The big fire was burning bright a few feet away, and he watched the flames deep in the fire, crashing sometimes and shooting a thousand sparks high up on the draught of hot air. Hannes was asleep and snoring. Across the fire, Melvin Raath sat in his canvas chair watching the flames, the fire reflecting in his eyes. Fourpence and Sixpence were lying on their mats nearby. Sixpence was still awake, the flames deep in his eyes. Fourpence had his back to Will. After consciously trying to stay awake to savour the last of a perfect day, Will fell asleep. Not even the marauding lions woke him in the night.
The morning was cool and the smell of fresh coffee boiling over the fire made him push back the mosquito net to look at the day.
Within an hour the sun had scorched the last vestige of coolness from the air. The liver, kidneys and heart were roasted by Fourpence over the fire and cold cuts of venison piled on a plate on top of the canvas table. Will could smell the herd of buffalo without seeing them in the thorn bush. The waterhole was empty of animals and only the birds, flocks of francolin and quail, tiptoed along the water’s edge pocked by the hooves of the night animals. Three mourning doves called from a tree and vultures circled far out in the bush where death had come in the night.
“You know anything better than this?” said Melvin Raath. He had been watching Will for five minutes, his writer’s mind noting every expression on the boy’s face. ‘Pity my daughter can’t meet a boy like that,’ he was thinking.
“It’s so beautiful, it almost hurts,” said Will.
They walked all morning to the kill, the skeleton of the cooked impala having been cut down for the scavengers to complete the cycle of life and death, the fire well buried under earth to prevent a bush fire. The heat was intense. Despite the American’s enthusiasm Will could see Melvin Raath was glad to reach their destination. A pride of six lions were fifty metres off the kill in the shade of a thorn tree, their stomachs extended. Even the four cubs were flat out on their sides fast asleep. The vultures had settled in the thorn trees with a pair of steppe eagles. Further back the round ears of a small pack of bat-eared fox were just visible along the tall, brown grass. The bush was silent except for the buzz of flies around the half-eaten wildebeest, the eyes already eaten out of their sockets by the birds. Carefully, and with consummate skill, Melvin photographed what they saw, the satiated lions taking no interest in the American. They stayed on the kill until it was dark, jackal and hyena joining the scavengers but keeping back out of fear of the lions.
That night, Hannes, Will and the trackers took it in turns to stand watch over the constant squabbling as the opposing animals tried to feed, the night wrenched apart by whooping and barks, lion growls and the manic laughs of excited hyenas. They had dined on cold venison and a bully beef stew, washed down with mugs of black coffee. The dawn was bravely visible when Hannes led them away, back to the river, downstream from the permanent bush camp where the trackers fished for their supper, turning the river bream whole over the coals of the cooking fire high up on the bank away from the hippo and crocodiles. Again no shot had been fired all day.
The camp by the river that night was peaceful, the river endlessly flowing with flotsam, the bream jumping out of the water to avoid the chasing tiger fish, the moon large. There were three layers of stars in the heavens. Night birds called for most of the night and on Will’s shift the river down below the camp broke into a vicious fight of thrashing water he was unable to see in the dark. Whatever it was had died or run away and the night went back to the plopping of the fish, the castanets of the river frogs and the screech of the cicadas.
The tsetse fly struck with the dawn. Hannes Potgieter cursed and flayed the flies with his hat. Will watched from the safety of his mosquito net. Melvin Raath lay asleep inside his net, curled up like a ball. A fish eagle called weee-ah, hyo-hyo from an island in the river and a bull elephant went down to the river to drink. The fire had burnt well all night.
Before the sun had gone down the previous night, Sixpence had shot three guinea fowl out of their roost in the acacia trees, gutted the birds and covered them with wet river clay and buried them deep in the ashes of the cooking fire. Breaking open the baked hard clay that pulled the feathers from the birds with the skin, he let out the smell of cooked flesh that woke Melvin from his dreams.
They ate with their fingers, sucking the dark, succulent meat from the bones which they then tossed into the fire.
“I’d give away my camera for a bottle of whisky and the lenses for a cold bottle of beer,” said Melvin, looking out down the river. “And I’d give up journalism to stay here for the rest of my life. You, Hannes Potgieter, are the richest man alive and
young Will has found his paradise.”
For three days they stayed by the river, Hannes shooting up the water so they could swim while he watched, gun ready, from a high rock, searching the clear water of a small bay for crocodile and hippopotamus. Throughout the days, Will listened to the two older men talking, happy with his own thoughts. Then they went back to the permanent camp and opened the whisky.
Melvin had invited the trackers to the deck bar for a drink where Onepenny had laid out a cold spread of green salads, herb wild rice, mayonnaise potatoes, pickled river bream, pickled quail eggs no bigger than a thumbnail and three tall ice-filled buckets, each containing a bottle of Nederburg Cuvee Brut.
Melvin had bathed and shaved for the first time in a week and ten years had fallen from his age. Will no longer noticed the American accent.
“If I thanked you all,” Melvin said, “you’d think me sentimental, so I won’t. Suffice to say these trips save my sanity. Other people take pills or shoot themselves. Somehow the world has gone off track and doesn’t know how to get back again. We want a million things we don’t need and lie and cheat to get them. It’s all out there, the important things, in the bush. I just hope the new world doesn’t destroy this Africa, the last sane place I’ve visited on earth. Progress, the new progress they sell in every newspaper, magazine and television programme is mostly retrogression. The true value of a man’s life is destroyed by his greed and need to compete. If he does not change his ways, it is my humble opinion that life on this earth will not be worth the living. Man was not brought on this earth to live in a concrete hutch, thirty-seven storeys high. He was born to feel the earth between his toes, to be with nature, to love without forethought of gain, to give of himself without calculating the reward. Many generations have criticised their present and most of them have been right. The price of progress is not worth climbing the hill. Thank you all for restoring my faith in the nature of man… Hannes, open that champagne and I’ll stop this speech… Thank God we still have booze in America.”
