The Yellowstone Kelly Novels

by Bowen, Peter

  A young boy, maybe fourteen, with hair so blond it was almost white, ran circles around the little train on a dapple pony. He rode right up to me and stopped and looked down for a moment.

  Dik Uys came over, laughing, chattering at the kid. He then spent a few minutes going over his limited store of English, and finally pointed at Greetje and then at the kid.

  “Oh,” says I, light dawning. “This is your little sister.”

  “Ja ja ja,” says Dik.

  “Ape turd,” says the little sister.

  “You speak English,” I says.

  “Yaas,” she said, and then turned to her dear brother, and smiling very sweetly, she said, “You stupid baboon.”

  “Ja ja ja,” said Dik happily.

  “Want me to translate?” says I.

  “I would look very innocent and my brother would beat you into the ground like a tent stake,” said the girl.

  “Marieke,” said Dik. “Ja ja ja.”

  “Nice to meet you,” says I.

  Marieke smiled sweetly and put spurs to her horse. She cantered off into the dark.

  I got up on a wagon seat.

  We lurched off toward a distant blue range of mountains. The mosquitoes were godawful.

  31

  THIS PART OF AFRICA looked a bit like most of Wyoming—dry, gravelly hills with sparse grass, buttes, and I could tell that there were high mountains far off by the way the clouds stacked up on the horizon in the evening. There were scrubby acacia trees along the little watercourse, and though the country was in some ways familiar, in others it was strange, and I was uncomfortable. I didn’t have no Jim Bridger to draw me maps on a square of sand.

  The family Uys took turns chattering at me in their Afrikaans, and I was able to pick up a few words the first day and more the next. They dragged their wagons with teams of sixteen oxen, all matched reddish and white on one wagon, dirty brindle on the other. The wagons themselves were longer than the Conestogas, and the whips the boys used to drive the oxen were nearly forty feet in length. A young nigger ran beside the lead animals and tugged on a rein to guide them around this and that. The wagons were pegged and a lot of the fittings that would have been metal on an American wagon were rawhide.

  We drove all night, and let the oxen rest and chew their cuds during the day. The Boers have a saying—“Never let the sun shine on spanned oxen”—and I thought that a lot of our immigrants were fools to have insisted on driving during the day, since it was harder on the stock.

  Little Marieke spent her time riding hell for leather here and there. She’d lather up four horses in a day. When she was in camp, she argued with her mother constantly. I couldn’t understand what she was saying, of course, but I suspect that it was what all mothers and daughters argue about. Anything handy, favorite subjects being the loose comportment of the daughter, who is no doubt headed for a house of ill repute, and counter-accusations of fossilization and pecksniffery.

  Marieke took enough of a shine to me to stop by where I was every once in a while and beg some new cuss words. It pleased her to describe in loving detail the shortcomings of her brothers, using words common to buffalo skinners and folks what just hit their thumbs with hammers.

  She was very pretty. Certain of her parts would now and again fetch up against the loose shirt and britches which she wore and then disappear again. Once she give me a level stare which has but one meaning and I felt most encouraged before I thought of having a whole passel of Boer in-laws. I could see myself croaking out things I swore I would never say in front of a minister with six elephant guns leveled at my vitals.

  Marieke would no doubt be leveling one of the guns. She went on at some length about what a stupid passel of unwashed dolts her brothers were and how she warn’t going to settle for such as they. She lived her young life like she rode her pony—straight for the fence and be damned to the possibilities.

  It took us five days to get to the Uys farm—it was one of ten owned by the family. Boers feel that they need two large farms, one for summer grazing, and one for winter, and of course each son needs the same number for his family, and so on. A lot of the green, lush places we passed was infected with lung disease, so even though Africa was big, I could see how land was dear—one Boer family who produced the customary number of sons would need upwards of a million acres for the next generation.

  The Uys house was a low, one-story mud-brick house, which rambled all over. New wings had been added as the sons got married and about four hundred small children came boiling out of everywhere—little white kids and little niggers, all mixed up in a mob. And there was a native camp—they call them kraals—about a mile away.

  We had got the oxen off the tows and so forth and I was trying to help without getting in the way. A rider appeared on a ridge to the north, and I could tell by the way that his horse moved that the animal was lathered and hard rode. It was another Boer, and he come trotting up, swung down and give his reins to a black groom, and launched into a speech, with a lot of hand gestures.

  Piet Uys and his four sons went up to him and they all commenced to talk at once. They talked louder, and then a couple of them went off and the old man began to beller and point and order the black servants this way and that. I didn’t have the faintest idea what was going on.

  Pretty soon the two sons who had gone off returned and not long after some black herders brought in some fresh oxen.

  Oh, Kelly, I says, this don’t look like no ivory hunt.

  Old Piet was thundering along at the top of his lungs, and the servants were throwing some things out of the wagons and throwing other things in—lots of boxes of ammunition, I noticed, and bags of the coarse meal the Boers bake bread with—and Greetje was flying back and forth with jars of this and that and chivvying her servants.

  By sundown we was headed north again, lurching along what I supposed passed for a road. They had given me a horse and I had the use of a saddle, and my rifle was stuck in a rawhide boot. I felt strange. Here I was, going off to war, it now seemed, with a bunch of folks whose language I did not know and into a country I had never seen. I wished I had some maps.

  There was someone following us. I don’t think that the others took the bother to look behind, but I couldn’t get out of the habit. A couple of times I would see a flash a couple of miles behind.

  I slipped out of camp at midnight and followed my nose to a little cooking fire and found Marieke washing her hair in a folding canvas bucket. Then she washed the rest of herself. Soon as she began to dig the soap out of her eyes I padded in and took up residence on a near stump.

  When she saw me she started a little. Not much. Then the little minx finished her bath and rubbed herself dry with a couple of small towels and stretched like a cat.

  Then she come over and stood in front of me with her hands on her hips and a grin on her face.

  “Bastard,” she said.

  “You ought to go on home,” I says. “There’s a war up ahead.”

  “I go home now, there’s a war with my mother.”

  Not much I could say to that.

  “Let’s fornicate,” she said.

  Not much I could say to that either. Couple hours later I went back to the rest of the family Uys, who was all sleeping. A nigger boy give me a big white grin and I almost kicked him. I went out again the night after but she was gone and there was no sign of her.

  Three days later, after crossing a lot of watercourses and gullies, we come to another road, one which had had hard use recently. We turned a little west and come dawn, camped. I could see dust far forward of us, and another big cloud behind us. One of the boys—I think it was Dik—pointed to the dust cloud and then pointed to the wagons.

  “Rooinek,” he said. It meant redneck, which is what they called the British.

  Along about noon a train of wagons hove into view, some drawn by oxen, and some by mules. The wagons was driven by civilians, with a few red-coated soldiers riding in front and to the sides. They went on. The
mules looked all in and starved to boot, so I figured that it must be some stock recently brought. The Army was in a hurry, if they couldn’t wait even to let the animals gather their strength. One span of mules was in such bad shape I knew that they would be dying before long. Their flanks were bloody from the whips and they were wheezing.

  I rode along with the soldiers—a young Lieutenant (subaltern) named Smith, and he told me what little he knew.

  The General, Commanding, Chelmsford, was up ahead, and he had supply dumps for three columns which he was going to shove north into Zululand.

  “We need to provoke the Zulus into attacking us and this is the way,” said the youngster. He said a lot of other things of the sort you hear from lieutenants who just got out of school.

  “And you, sir,” he said finally, “will you be riding with those filthy Boers?”

  “At least till I get to Helpmakaar,” I says. “And who do you recommend that I see when I arrive?”

  “Buller’s your man,” says the kid, “a jolly fellow.”

  I didn’t reply to that, but what I was thinking was why a jolly fellow would be at the end of the damn earth buckling up to get perforated by a lot of spears. I had spent some time in the soldiering business, and found it largely run by idiots adept at sacrificing great numbers of morons. I had known some great soldiers—Miles, for instance, who for all his foolishness kept his eye on the prize—and a lot of others, usually low enough in rank that some imbecile up the ladder made sure they got slaughtered before they got enough rank to do anything about it.

  We got to Helpmakaar, where the main supply dump was for Chelmsford’s army. All of the grass for ten miles out had been chopped down. There were trains of wagons bearing nothing more warlike than hay. Apparently Chelmsford had given up on the hope of having enough oxen and was using mules, Army issue, and these mules, like most soldiers, had to be fed. They was unused to grazing and weren’t about to start beating up their own living if there was cut hay.

  The Uyses found a big mob of their kind and commenced to having a real nice bellering match, encouraged by some dirty old brute in a dog collar who must have been a preacher, who had a big old Bible he read from in a voice like a foghorn.

  Dik Uys was standing toward the outside of this festival, leaning on his big old muzzle-loading elephant gun, and looking sort of bored. I rode up to him on the bay horse they had given me, fished out a couple of gold double eagles, handed them to him, and rode off, leaving him looking bewildered. I would no doubt see them again, at which time I could either pony up the rest of the money for my rig or get change.

  Old Piet was matched up with another white-bearded old pirate, and they was alternately stabbing each other in the chests with horny forefingers or hollering to the heavens, so it seemed a bad time to dicker with him over the saddle and tack and stock. I got my spare ammunition from the wagon and my bedroll and slipped off, looking for the tent that must be headquarters and maybe a nice soft job over west, where I had heard the gold and diamonds was, and the Zulus wasn’t.

  Military encampments is all alike, especially the ones back of the lines, where all of the stores is piled up and the damn clerks are running here and there hollering and begging signatures off of officers who are hoarse from shouting. The accents was British, and there was hundreds of potbellied niggers carrying things or being kicked and cursed by civilians.

  I asked directions, was pointed to a cluster of tents up on a little hill, hard by a big corrugated iron shed. I was told I would find Chelmsford there and the rest of the staff. It was about noon.

  My first sight of Redvers Buller was unfortunate, as it made me like him right off and if I hadn’t seen him as I did at that moment, I might have reacted a little more sensibly later in the day.

  The big tent off to the right was the mess tent, where Buller and the rest of the officers ate and in the evenings got drunk and such.

  A little sandy-haired feller came flying out of the tent, and he was follered closely by a shower of notepaper and pencils, and then by a tall, broad-shouldered, red-faced Major who took one long stride from the tent door and gave the sandy-haired feller a hell of a kick in the arse as he was struggling to his feet. As the sandy-haired feller flew by me, he looked up at me. It was George Hanks of the Hartford Courant.

  “Kelly?” he gasped, just as the red-faced Major—he was so damn mad that his moustaches were sticking straight out to the sides like a longhorn steer’s horns—gave George another mighty kick, and when George didn’t get up he stood over him and stuck his hands on his hips and bellered at him for a while.

  “By Jove, you double-damned lying sneaking scummy little berk of a bloody journalist, if I ever see you in the mess tent again I will ... ,” and he trailed off and run out of words.

  I couldn’t think of a thing to do but clap and shout hooray.

  The officer turned and looked at me and blinked, sort of like a bull who has just turned an opponent into a bloody smear and wishes to crunch something else soon as his head clears.

  “Do you know this bastard, sir?” says the Major.

  “Ain’t there a nice anthill we could peg him out on or some crocodiles we could toss him to?” I says. “That lying little bastard ain’t never written a single truthful word.”

  The Major stared at me for a moment and blinked, then he walked over to me. I swung down off my horse.

  “Buller,” he says, sticking out a huge hard-cased paw.

  “Adendorff,” says I. His hand sort of swallowed mine, crushed several bones, and spat back the little that was left.

  “I’ve not seen you before,” he says. “Are you with the Light Horse?”

  “I just got here,” I says. “I ain’t with anybody.”

  “That your horse?” he says.

  I nodded. I was later to wish I had said something intelligent, like no.

  “Cobbett!” Buller yelled. “Cobbett, damn you, get your arse over here.”

  A harried-looking Leftenant came rushing out of the tent so recently abandoned by Hanks.

  “Enroll him in the Light Horse,” says Buller. He looked me over for a moment.

  “Make him a sergeant,” says Buller.

  “Right, sir, very good.”

  Buller went back to the mess tent. Cobbett pulled a pencil from a leather case on his hip, took out a form, and cleared his throat. I took the opportunity to go over and kick Hanks a couple of times. Hanks groaned and passed out again, or maybe he was lying doggo.

  “Name?” says Cobbett.

  32

  THE FRONTIER LIGHT HORSE was a collection of what passed for the gentry of Natal. Youngsters and a few choleric men in their forties who had seen action somewheres else and would no doubt try to fight Zulus like they fought wogs or Ayrabs. They didn’t have any uniforms, and a great deal of not very good thought had gone into the design of their individual duds, no doubt by mothers and wives and sweethearts who wished to have their boys stand out and be prominent.

  I have always wished to blend in and be a part of the landscape, as it attracts less in the way of bullets and spears and arrows and other expressions of interest from whoever you are fighting. The one uniform thing we all had was this great goddamn feather from something called a cocky-olibird. The feather was white and about two and a half feet long and mine was going to last right up to the point where we headed into Zululand, when it would disappear and be damned about it. My clothes was yellow-brown stout canvas denim and I had a hat of a color I call anonymous.

  It was true that I didn’t know the country at all, but I’d had a few years of wandering around in the landscape when it had folks in it who would dearly like to make Mrs. Kelly’s son Luther into maggot food, and I had learned how to go silent, how to blend in, and how to stay out of the way of trouble as much as I could. It don’t always work, that, but it goes with the job and I have never liked clerking.

  I bought a bottle of brandy from a sutler and went around the encampment, looking for some scarred older fe
ller with shifty eyes who might know something about these here Zulus.

  As I ambled along I spotted a table which had a big pile of pamphlets on it, and as I looked through them I saw one that said “Fighting Kaffirs in the Seventies,” by a Colonel Steptoe. I picked it up.

  “That arsehole couldn’t find the balls on a bull,” says a deep voice behind me, “and what he don’t know of the Zulus would get you killed.”

  I turned around and looked at the critic. He was a giant man, near on to six and a half feet tall, and though young, his eyes had those crowsfoot lines you get from squinting hard into the distance. Also one of the eyes was glass. The other was a bright blue and it never quit flicking here and there.

  “Care for a drink?” says I. “As I am prepared to trade good brandy for a little information about these here Zulus.”

  The stranger snorted and nodded, and we walked away from the worst of the uproar and found us a couple of unused crates in the shade of a blue gum tree.

  “I’m James Adendorff,” says I, “and you know of the Zulus?” I handed him the bottle of brandy and he took a long pull.

  “John Dunn,” says he, handing me the bottle back. He had two pistols stuck in his belt, and his back to the camp, and while he talked his good eye never stopped flicking this way and that. There wasn’t anything to see, but it is a good habit, one I admire and have myself.

  “They are a great and noble people,” says Dunn. This took me aback for a moment, as I was expecting a list of atrocities. “And this war is unjust as all such wars are. These damn fools”—here he jerked his head toward the encampment—“think that the Zulus are a bunch of cowards like their Kaffirs, who are farmers and slaves to wages. The Zulus made them cowards. The Zulus so despise the Kaffir that they kill them with rocks, they being unworthy of the iklu, the assegai. I have lived among the Zulus for many years.”

  And that is how I met John Dunn, the White Chief of Zululand. He had forty Zulu wives and was the scandal of the entire colony ... the women, anyway. The men was green and dripping with envy. He talked for two hours, about how the Zulus form for a battle, how they divide into regiments so proud that they have to be quartered very carefully, for there are grudges between certain regiments and if they are camped together, they will fight each other.