by Robyn Scott
At first, Mum encouraged Matthews to write about other things: his family, his cattle post, what he wanted to do when he was older, which was to own lots of cows. But Matthews could find a cow angle in any topic. At the dinner table, Mum and Dad laughed about his passion. “But far be it from me to discourage such enthusiasm,” said Alum. “And it’ll be good for the kids to learn about such an integral part of local culture.”
So the days Matthews joined us became cow-themed. From the illustrated Greek mythology book, Mum read to us about Io, lusted after by Zeus, who one day turned her into a beautiful white cow to avoid discovery by his jealous wife, Hera. On the star chart, she showed us where all the constellations fitted in relation to Taurus. Once, we spent a whole morning studying the cow entry in the animal encyclopedia and tracing the outlines of cows’ four different stomachs, arranged in the ingenious system that enables them to digest even the tough cellulose in grasses.
Mum lasted for several weeks before she ran out of new cow ideas. And by then even Matthews had said everything he had to say about cattle breeds, cattle diseases, and herbs for treating sick cattle. He had even taught us how to estimate the value of a cow, depending on its age and size. A big healthy bull was about 2,000 pula, which meant, Matthews informed us, that just five or six bulls could buy a reasonable secondhand bakkie.
I knew – I was sure – everything there was to know about cattle.
Then one day a thin but otherwise healthy-looking cow collapsed just outside our cattle grid. She lay down and chewed her cud just like any other cow. But long after her herd had wandered off into the bush, she was still refusing to get up.
Matthews found Lulu and me crouched beside her, offering her handfuls of hay.
“Ah, no, you mustn’t feed that cow,” he admonished.
“She’s hungry.” The cow’s moist, orange-peel-textured lips pouted as she stretched them out for each new handful. She had already munched her way through a large slice of a hay bale.
“The cow will die anyway.”
“What’s wrong with her?”
“Ga ke tfje.” Matthews shrugged. “But she will die.”
“How do you know?”
“Ah, I just know. That is a dying cow.”
Lulu snivelled and stroked the cow’s neck. She didn’t flinch, blinking long curved lashes, staring at us with gentle, molasses-coloured eyes.
“I don’t believe you,” I said. “Dad says he can’t see anything wrong with her.”
“Ah, no.”
Lulu and I visited the cow several times each day. She continued to drink and eat whatever we offered her and seemed to appreciate us waving the flies from her eyes.
On one visit we found a young Motswana man, standing a few metres away in the bush, studying our cow.
“Is she yours?” I asked.
“No.”
“Whose is she?”
“Ga ke itse.”
We began to feed her, and the man burst out laughing. He walked off into the bush, shaking his head.
Mum realised the problem first. “The poor old girl hasn’t pooed for two days.”
Which meant there was a bale of hay stuck somewhere in between her four stomachs. The next morning she was lying flat on her side. She refused to eat, staring at nothing with glassy eyes. Dad said he ‘would have to put her down.
“No one’s killing any cows near my property,” yelled Grandpa Ivor. “I’m not having the police around here.”
Dad pointed out that the cow was in pain and would definitely die anyway.
“If you kill it, the owner will call the police.”
“The owner doesn’t know he’s got a dying cow.”
“Course he knows.”
“Then why the hell hasn’t he come and killed it himself?”
“The Batswana hate killing their cows. And he’s hoping some softhearted whitey will do it for him so he can claim compensation’.”
Mum gave the cow a mixture of homeopathic remedies, pressing the dropper into the side of her mouth and squeezing the alcoholic mixture onto her tongue. She didn’t swallow.
By midday her breathing was shallow. She no longer bothered to blink away the flies. Already, high above, several vultures circled and watched.
Lulu and I guarded the cow. Every time one of the giant brown birds landed in a nearby tree, we ran after it, yelling and waving sticks, Keller bounding through the bush and barking furiously. But as fast as we chased one bird away, another swooped down to a different tree, peering at us through beady eyes and shrugging and shuffling its cloaklike wings, impatient for the inevitable moment when we’d give up. Keller soon did, and collapsed panting under a shady bush. But Lulu and I continued our hopeless pursuit, screaming and swearing at the relentless birds, pausing only to wipe stinging sweat and dust and tears from our eyes.
We guarded her until after dark, whispering good night and stroking her still face and neck. Grandpa remained unrelenting. “She’s almost dead anyway. And they’ll be here as soon as she pegs.” Teary pleas did nothing to change his mind, and I went to sleep feeling sick with guilt. I dreamt of the cow being eaten alive by vultures and jackals that, in the darkness, didn’t realise that she was not yet dead.
When we returned just alter dawn, a small crowd ol men and women were gathered around the cow. There was not much left ol her.
“Think of it as biology,” said Mum, as we stared at the shiny jumble ol organs piled on the sand. “Don’t look at her face.” Most of the cow had already been chopped up and packed into plastic bags. “It’s better that she doesn’t go to waste,” added Mum. “Imagine how many people she’ll feed.”
None of this made it any less horrible, though.
Mum asked the eldest man in the group if he knew what had killed her. He nodded and reached into the bloody pile of insides, lifting up what looked like an enormous piece of snot. It was a plastic shopping bag, covered in runny yellow cow dung. “Nine,” he said, chuckling.
When the butchering was finished, the nine plastic bags were virtually all that was left behind.
The cow had died of plastic bags – the plastic bags that littered the bush, clinging to trees and bushes and tempting starving animals: goats, which were clever enough to eat only what was hidden in the bags; cows, which weren’t. Mum pronounced the ubiquitous bags “a tragedy for one cow, and a catastrophe for the whole environment.”
Matthews’ verdict was entirely unsympathetic. “Ah,” he said, bursting out laughing, “that was a bloody stupid cow!”
Grandpa Terry said, “I have seen people lose their senses over cows.”
Once, in a bad drought year when, daily, new carcasses littered the roads and many of the small cattle-post wells dried up, a senior Motswana mine manager in Phikwe had been unable to bring himself to slaughter any of his cows. He had ended up watching his entire herd of Brahmans starve to death; tens of thousands of pula dwindling to fatless skin and bones, gone to the vultures.
In drought years, which came often – and occasionally, terribly, in succession – the rainfall in eastern Botswana could plunge well below what would qualify the region as a desert. Crops would die, and the sparse grass would give way altogether to baked red dirt. In the villages and cattle posts, where many depended on maize and sorghum harvests, food parcels would be delivered, subsidised by the government. As a result, people in Botswana rarely died from drought. But animals did. And cattle – the love and pride of Batswana people, the lifeblood of the rural economy – starved in their thousands: their owners waiting too long, too hopefully, for the precious pula that never came.
♦
Not long after Matthews revolutionised our understanding of cows, Ruth asked if Moretsana, who had just finished school, could join our lessons for a few months.
Mum was delighted. She agreed immediately. Then she panicked.
“Maybe I shouldn’t have said yes.”
“Why?”
“Well, I’m not a qualified teacher.”
&nbs
p; “You teach Matthews.”
“He’s missed lots of school.”
“You teach us.”
“That’s different. You’re my own children. I can experiment.”
“You went to Oxford.”
Whenever I worried about what might happen to me from not having a real teacher, I thought about Mum’s university. It reassured me that she had at least studied somewhere famous.
“That’s irrelevant, Robbie.”
But Mum smiled. Oxford reassured her too. It made her think of the time when she’d had the world at her fingertips and was going to do groundbreaking research into nutrition. Before she had got married. And then got pregnant. By mistake. And had me, then Damien, then Lulu, and had become, before she knew it, a house-wife in the middle of nowhere, teaching three small children and the adolescent gardener. “Which I don’t regret at all,” Mum would add, as she finished reminiscing.
Moretsana was a softly spoken, perpetually smiling girl. She was going to go to teacher-training college, wanted to improve her English, and didn’t seem to be at all interested in cows. She had hundreds of tiny, shiny black braids in her hair, which she agreed to try and replicate on me and Lulu. But in our fine, slippery hair, they unravelled after just one night, which left us looking like the woman touching a Van de Graaff generator in the science encyclopedia and Moretsana speechless with giggles.
Her English was already good. Because she was a girl, she had started school at six. Young boys, she told us, were often sent into the bush to look after cows, which meant that, like Matthews, many didn’t go to school until they were eight or nine.
Moretsana asked Mum complicated English questions, about prepositions, participles, and other parts of speech of which we’d never heard. For the few months that she was with us, for the first and last time, we learned about grammar from Mum, who believed it was important to experience the beauty of a complete language, through good books, before you broke it up into its separate parts.
But Moretsana wanted to learn about English directly, the same way she’d learned about it in school, and Mum answered in detail all her questions about sentence construction and verbs, nouns, and the tenses that confused her because they didn’t exist in Setswana. Once, to our amazement, Mum even stood up and wrote out several verb declensions on the whiteboard in the schoolroom, which had until then only ever been used for our amusement. On the days Moretsana and Matthews came to join us, Mum also made a rare attempt to draw up a timetable that included a variety of subjects, instead of the usual brief – often briefer than Mum planned – session of the three Rs, followed by a long – always longer than she planned – session of the current enthralling book.
Then Moretsana went away. And with cow-dominated lessons no longer there as an attraction for Matthews, his attendance became much more sporadic.
Soon the words of books, through the voice of Mum, had reasserted themselves as our most important teachers. Or befud-dlers, in the case of Lulu, who in the beginning understood little of the books that Damien and I wanted Mum to read. Lulu would nevertheless listen as attentively as Damien and I, confused and wide-eyed, but no less transfixed by the otherworldliness of a room echoing with hundreds of pages’ worth of somewhere else. And I understood why, and felt, too, how the world of the book crept off the words on the pages, infused its surroundings, and, as long as the words were still being read, became its own parallel reality, with characters as real as everyone else in the room, and a past and a future that was yours as much as theirs.
If we were in between books, Mum would let us do whatever we felt like, assisting where needed. “I’m not going to spoonfeed you knowledge,” she’d frequently remind us. If we wanted to build a radio, grow crystal gardens, make papier-mache puppets, or paint the walls in our rooms a new colour, she’d happily help us. Sometimes she would insist on a few hours of the three Rs. But, then, if we wanted to spend the rest of the day playing in the bush or the caravans or the old aeroplanes, that was fine too. She’d help us make sandwiches, give us bottles of frozen water, and check we had our hats on. Then she’d tell us to watch out for snakes, wave us good-bye, and disappear to her type-writer to write one of the two books she was always working on.
As far as actually telling us what to learn, Mum’s was mostly a do-nothing experiment.
∨ Twenty Chickens for a Saddle ∧
Nine
Shocking Experiences
Kobus Venter was the first Afrikaans person I had met. He was also the fattest person I had ever seen. When he walked, which he did very slowly, the soft folds on his legs and arms behaved independently from the rest of his body, quivering for several moments after he stopped moving. A roll of fat at the back of his neck curled over his khaki shirt collar; another bulged at the tops of the khaki socks pulled halfway up his vast calves. Shaking his hand was like gripping an oily oven glove. I retrieved mine as quickly as I could. I wondered if Kobus had arthritis and smelly fungal growths between the folds on his belly like the very fat Batswana ladies that Dad hated having to examine at his clinic. When Dad told these women they needed to lose weight for their arthritis, he explained that their arthritic knees were like the small wheels of abakkie trying to support the weight of a truck that couldn’t go anywhere.
Kobus was a jumbo jet on bakkie wheels. Lulu, Damien, and I stared in open-mouthed, undisguised amazement.
“The kids are so excited about seeing the horses,” said Mum. “Aren’t you?”
“Ja,” said Damien, smirking as he imitated Kobus’s thick, throat-grating accent. Mum nudged me, and I nodded obediently. In my surprise, I had almost forgotten I was about to own my first pony, the thing I had wanted more than anything in the world since I was four and had first sat on a placid, solemn-eyed creature in the middle of a lush New Zealand field.
Five years later, in the overgrazed bush on the outskirts of Sefophe village, standing beside Kobus’s ramshackle house next to a cattle kraal, my fantasy was getting oil to a poor start – even for a fantasy. This heady mix of imagination, Anna Sewell’s Black Beauty, the British Pony Club manual, and the few horsy films I had watched was something along the following lines: A beautiful girl, not unlike Tatum O’Neal from International Velvet, would lead me over to a stable deep in sweet-smelling sawdust. With tears in her eyes, she would present me with her champion show-jumping pony (a smaller version of National Velvet’s Pie crossed with Black Beauty) and declare she had grown too tall to continue riding the exquisite animal. After careful consideration, she would say, she had decided that I, Robyn Scott, should be the one to take over the reins and go on to even greater glories. The fantasy pony, named Feste after the gentle, majestic horse in Lucy Boston’s Green Knowe books, would then whicker with the appropriate mixture of regret and delight, before gently plucking carrots and sugar cubes from my hand.
“The boys are just fetching them,” said Kobus. “They’ll be here any minute.”
Mum and Dad continued to chat to Kobus, and I tried to image what Boerperds looked like. Boer was because they were horses bred by the Afrikaners, perd was Afrikaans for horse.
“Fantastic animals,” Dad had said. “Tough as nails.” Boerperds, he explained, had carried the Boers all the way from the Cape to the Transvaal during the Great Trek. They had also fought in the Boer War, outlasting the larger, more delicate British horses. “Perfect for Botswana,” said Dad, “the bull terrier of horses. Don’t want any of these namby-pamby Thoroughbreds,” which of course was exactly what I did want.
But a horse was a horse, and I felt weak with excitement.
A few minutes later we heard distant shouting. This grew louder, and soon I could make out the sound of hooves and branches snapping. Suddenly two brown ponies, followed by a tiny black filly, charged out of the mopane trees. They skidded to a halt on the sand and looked around with wild, panicky eyes. Seconds later, two black boys on mules cantered after them, yelling and wielding long rubber shamboks. Circling and waving the shamboks above thei
r heads, they chased the frightened ponies into the kraal, where they huddled in a corner, their sides heaving and eyes revolving upwards to expose ugly white bits.
Now that they were still, I realised both ponies were actually light grey, but so dirty that their real colour was visible only in a few patches. The smaller, less skinny pony, the mother of the little black foal, had a pretty face and a neat pony-like body. The slightly bigger one, the mare’s brother, had wild eyes, an ugly Roman nose, and a long sloping back that gave him the air of a hyena. Both had bumpy insect bites across their coats, scratches, lumps on their legs, and cracks running up their hooves. They looked straight out of the chapter in the Pony Club manual on what can go wrong with your horse.
The two boys jumped off the mules and climbed inside the kraal. As soon as they approached, the ponies took off, tossing their heads as they galloped around the pen. After several minutes, however, the boys succeeded in fastening rough rope halters over their heads, and the captives stood still again, quivering slightly. I approached the mare and patted her hot neck. She shook a little but didn’t seem to mind until I leaned out to stroke her filly. I hadn’t even managed to touch the foal before she lunged at me, teeth bared and ears flattened.
“Been in the bush too long,” said Kobus. “Just needs a bit of good discipline.”
One of the boys, riding a mule, and Matthews, on foot, were going to lead the ponies to Selebi. From Sefophe, this was about twenty kilometres on dirt tracks through the bush, and they set off immediately, each tugging a pony, with the filly trailing her mother.
On the drive back, everyone talked at once, arguing about their names, what to feed them, and when we might ride them, at which point Mum said thoughtfully, “Keith, do you really think it was wise to get unbroken ponies?”
“Best way to do it,” replied Dad. “They’ll have no bad habits.”
“But they’re rather more wild than we thought,” Mum continued in a gentle voice. “Perhaps we should pay someone to break them in.”
