Twenty Chickens for a Saddle

by Robyn Scott

  I shivered. Veronica and Mum looked at each other, faces horrified.

  Dad simply raised his eyebrows. “Why were your cows on my farm?”

  “Ah, well.” Mr. Phethu looked quickly at the ground. “Sometimes they run away.”

  “Indeed,” said Dad. “Well, nice to meet you. We look forward to seeing the crocodile. I hope he doesn’t get the chance to eat any more of your cows.”

  Later, gazing safely from the bank, we did see him, for the first of many times. He ‘was unforgettable, and unmistakeable. Not only was he a giant, he was exceptionally green for a crocodile. He looked like he was covered in algae.

  That night, as we ate dinner around the fire, we heard a distant sawing sound.

  “What’s that?”

  “Just a leopard,” said Dad. “They’re shy. Don’t worry.”

  “Oh, yeah, Keith.” Ian grinned. “Anyone for a top-up?” he asked, reaching for the bottle of Remy Martin cognac, which ‘was his camping equivalent of feather duvets.

  “What if there re lions though, Dad? What if they drag us from our tents?”

  “I’ve told you,” said Dad. “There are no lions in this part of the Tuli Block.”

  “Heard that one before.”

  “Well, fight them off with your feather pillow,” said Dad. Then he lit one of his once-in-a-blue-moon cigars and sipped his Remy, grinning sheepishly in the firelight.

  After that camping trip, we christened the farm Molope, in honour of the thick-canopied tree with beautiful bright red flowers that was found throughout the land, and particularly along the rivers. Its common name is the weeping boer-bean, as the flowers drip copious amounts of sweet, sticky nectar. Molope is its Setswana name.

  But we really chose it for its Latin name, Schotia brachypetala.

  In late 1993, six years after arriving in Botswana, we began packing up the cowshed.

  Earlier that year, Grandpa Terry had retired, and he and Granny Joan were now living in Cape Town. But if moving to Molope Farm would bring us slightly closer to them, from Grandpa Ivor and Granny Betty – six years across the road – it would take us seemingly a world away.

  “You’ll see me all the time,” said Grandpa Ivor. “Won’t be able to keep me away. I’m a busy man. But I love the bush.”

  Mum said, “It’s only two hours away from Phikwe. I’ll be visiting often. Dad might be able to not see other people. But God knows, I can’t.”

  Dad said, “We’re going to be living in the most beautiful place in the world. In a huge house. Our friends will come to us.”

  He was right: long before we’d even started packing, friends from Phikwe began scheduling weekend visits to the bush. And, Mum assured us, if all this failed to give us enough time for socialising, Dad could drop us off in Phikwe, which he’d be passing through every Wednesday, travelling to and from his Tonota clinic.

  All in all, it seemed that we could have our reduced-sugar, fibre-rich, colourant-free cake and eat it.

  The greatest pang I felt was for the brown paper floors. The well-trodden parts, though often repaired by Mum, had by now lost much of their effect: worn, duller, and in a few places curling up, definitely paper. But as the furniture was carried outside and loaded onto a truck, part of the floor appeared in all its former glory. Beneath the sofas and wall-units, the faux flagstone gleamed like the day we’d laid it, character-giving air bubbles and all.

  Matthews had long since left to find work in Phikwe. But Ruth and Maria were coming with us, as were all our animals – except, of course, for Redhead, the redheaded weaver. On our final morning in Selebi, we all climbed onto Mum and Dad’s bed to watch him for the last time, diligently weaving his new nest. The year before, after five solid years of failure, Redhead’s wife had finally accepted one of his nests. Recalling this watershed, Mum sighed and said, “Thank goodness. Now I can leave in peace.”

  Then we climbed out of the bed and stripped the sheets. Dad dismantled the frame and loaded it onto the four-ton Dyna truck parked in the driveway. He had borrowed the truck, but only for a few days, which meant we had to move everything in just two trips. This was the second one. By the time Dad had tied down the last sofa – upright so we could later sit on it at the farm – it sat atop a four-metre-high load.

  With such a precarious cargo, the drive to the Tuli Block, normally two hours, took us nearly four. But nothing fell off, and when we arrived at our farm gate, Lulu, Damien, and I clambered up the sides of the truck and onto the sofa, which we sat on, looking out for game, yelling in excitement, as Dad drove the final mile to our new house.

  Redhead, the redheaded weaver, was the first wild creature to be named in Selebi. The first to be named on Molope Farm was the crocodile, which we christened Fiddian Green, after one of Dad’s old medical school lecturers.

  “A fitting beginning,” said Dad, “to real Africa at last.”

  “Goodness, that’s rather far away…Where will you shop?…Will you have electricity?…a telephone?…Don’t you need to speak Afrikaans?”

  These were the reactions of friends who’d never lived in the Tuli Block. The response of the one person we spoke to who had was, “Beautiful place. Just don’t stay too long.”

  “Sorry?”

  “Unless you want to become alcoholics or born-again Christians.”

  “What?”

  “That’s what the Tuli Block does to Englishmen.”

  Dad said, “Lin, which do you pick?”

  Mum said, “Aah, well, depends on which spirit moves me.”

  “Smile, Robbie,” said Dad. “We’re only joking.”

  “Anyway,” added Mum, smiling, “I bet we’re the oddest Englishmen the Tuli Block’s ever seen. It’s the locals who should probably be worried about us moving in.”

  “The point is,” said Dad, “this is land we actually own. Fantastic land. And for that, I don’t give a damn whether I like the neighbours. We won’t even have to see them if we don’t want.”

  This was not difficult to believe. You could sometimes drive the length of the Tuli Block dirt road and not pass a single car.

  The road ran parallel to the Limpopo, and most of the houses – several of which were no longer lived in – Jay deep inside the farms, nearer the river. Through the fences, there was only bush, in dark and pastel greens; so strange, at first, missing the brilliant greens of the mopanes. After six years in Selebi, bush without mopane trees required total recalibration.

  The dust, too, was different – still with a warm reddish tinge, but much greyer than the brick-red Selebi dirt. More fertile too. And in most cases less overgrazed, with soft yellow grasses covering much of the ground behind the fences. For here no cattle and goats wandered freely through the bush and onto the verges.

  A rare stretch of freehold land, the Tuli Block is a legacy of the British Protectorate, when the area was thought strategically important in keeping out the land-hungry South African Boer farmers, living across the Limpopo.

  Initially, the land was ceded to the British South Africa Company, led by Cecil Rhodes, who planned to run his Cape-to-Cairo railway along the Limpopo. But it was soon decided that the tributary rivers, like our Lotsane, would make construction too expensive. The railway was redirected via Francistown and the Tuli Block sold off to English farmers, with the same objective of a buffer against the Boers.

  A historical irony, given that by 1993 the area had long been the near-total preserve of Afrikaans farmers, who’d once, just before independence, even threatened to secede from Botswana. They never did, but the separatist feelings, the dislike of Botswana’s black government, and the resentment against the English never quite died.

  R

  ♦

  obyn Scott, of Sherwood Ranch, Botswana (P.O. Box 50). Our postal address, at least, was English. And my address, I decided, was well worth a forty-kilometre drive to get the post.

  In addition to the post office, Sherwood Ranch had one general store, a petrol station, a takeaway, and a small white
building in which Dad now ran a weekly clinic. Mostly it was just a stop for people heading straight on to the nearby Martin’s Drift border post with South Africa. The postboxes numbered not more than 50, and very rarely did any cars turn left or right, off onto the dirt roads and into the bush.

  In the middle of Molope Farm, halfway up a gently sloping rise, stood our grand new thatched double-storey house. To one side, the land swept down towards the dark green line of the nearby Lotsane River. Two kilometres to the other side lay the Limpopo, the river border, and in the distance you could just see the blue outlines of faraway hills in South Africa.

  All around the house was bush, bursting with song, cries, and all kinds of antelope, glimpsed through the trees: tiny duiker, impala, kudu, and fat fluffy waterbuck, peering at us suspiciously.

  The house was only half finished. For weeks we slept on camping mattresses and found our way at night by candlelight. Dad hadn’t yet connected the borehole to the plumbing, so we showered under a plastic water tank on the back of our old Land Cruiser, watched by curious, saucer-eyed bush babies that came out at dusk and ping-ponged between the shadowy branches of the thorn trees.

  Inside, the house smelt of fresh golden thatch, and new plaster on the unpainted walls. “Choose your bedroom colour,” said Mum. “Then you can paint it yourself. Nothing more satisfying than painting. Highly therapeutic.”

  Immersed, dawn to dusk, in the task of finishing the house, Mum painted, grouted, and pored over the plans, making last-minute design alterations.

  Supposedly, the house was built according to a package design purchased from Farmer’s Weekly magazine.

  But then Mum had decided to ‘tweak’ the plans. “Keith, don’t you think we should have another room here? Easy to do. Just need to raise the wall a few metres…Damien, wouldn’t you like a basin in your bedroom? So easy to run a pipe through the wall from the bathroom…And what if we move the staircase over here?”

  The house now bore almost no resemblance to the original drawings. Cake recipes, school syllabuses, architectural plans – it was always the same. Mum was hardwired not to follow instructions. In keeping with her character, she’d also continued to change plans as the house was being built. Which, Dad said, gave him some sympathy for the longsuffering builders, even if they were a ‘bloody unreliable bunch’.

  That was part of the reason we had moved in before the house was finished: after a few misplaced windows and gently leaning walls, Dad had decided he couldn’t trust the builders to do the final touches unsupervised. “Can’t even use a jolly spirit level,” he’d mutter as yet another specially imported wooden door wouldn’t fit in its frame. “Unbelievable.”

  The builders at least were nice, and looked just as content whether they were slowly mixing cement or sitting under a tree and eating their lunch. The builder in charge, who regularly went fishing and left the unskilled labourers to finish off jobs, was a gentle coloured man called Festus who had bloodshot eyes and wore a perpetual grin. He had the curious habit of inserting the word actually into every sentence.

  A month or so after we moved in, when the men had started work building a wall across the Lotsane, Mum planted a flowerbed outside the kitchen window. As the shoots grew, one quickly dwarfed others, its tall, densely leafed stem reaching right to the window.

  The mystery of the dodgy door frames ‘was solved.

  “Actually cannabis,” said Dad. He tapped the kitchen wall and grinned. “Between Actually Festus and Mum, it’s a wonder this place is still standing.”

  Mum raised her eyebrows. “Between Fiddian Green and you, Keith, it’s a wonder we’re still standing.”

  “Touche,” said Dad, smiling appreciatively at Mum.

  ♦

  The gunshots cracked across the still afternoon bush, echoing for a second.

  We were having tea in the lounge, all the windows flung open, watching scores of birds demolish the newly replenished fruit and bread. The bird feeder stood just outside the window, a large piece of beautiful gnarled wood suspended between two thorn trees. At the shots, the members of the more jittery species fluttered up into the branches.

  “Scoundrels,” said Dad, leaping to his feet. “They’re poaching down at the river.”

  He put down his teacup with a clatter, and the last bold crimson-breasted shrikes and yellow-billed hornbills flapped off to more peaceful perches.

  “I’ve had enough,” said Dad. “I’m going after them. Me and my trusty steed gonna give them a bit of a surprise.”

  “Can we come?”

  “Nope. Just needs one of us to frighten them. Plus I need to sneak up quietly to catch them red-handed.”

  “Is it safe?”

  “Course it’s safe. Just small-time jkellurru taking advantage of empty farms. If you want to be useful, start saddling up while I put on some trousers.”

  Minutes later, Dad was galloping away towards the river, wiry little Quartz charging up the slope like a battle-horse. “Yee-hah,” cried Dad as they skidded around the corner, vanishing into the bushes. And we returned to our tea and rusks, listening for shots and eagerly anticipating the prospect of the poachers getting their comeuppance.

  On our first ever visit to the farm, before we’d bought it, we’d come across a young Motswana boy who offered to sell us two captured Egyptian geese that watched us miserably through their lovely dark-ringed eyes. We bought them and set them free, Dad warning the bewildered boy not to touch them, that things were going to change soon.

  Several months after our arrival, we were still finding snares, occasionally with the pitiful dead body of a duiker or impala, the skin on its leg bulging either side of the wire noose. But as word spread that the farm was now lived in, there were fewer snares laid, the poachers concentrating on the empty farms around us.

  For the bigger game, there were armed poachers, and we’d heard shots before on neighbouring farms, but mainly near the deserted road, which skellum local farmers were known to drive along, shooting kudu and impala on their neighbours’ farms and sending their Batswana workers over the fence to haul the carcasses into their bakkies. We’d never before heard them so close, down at the river. Not shooting animals at their drinking places was an unwritten rule of fair hunting. And the idea of poachers breaking this rule too made us all ache with outrage.

  After about fifteen minutes, during which we’d heard a second shot, we put the kettle on in anticipation of Dad’s return. After twenty minutes, there ‘was still no sign of him. We speculated whether he might be attempting a citizen’s arrest.

  Damien said, “I’ll drive down and take Dad his gun. Maybe he needs to defend himself’.”

  Lulu gulped.

  I said, “He is taking a long time, Mum.”

  “For goodness sake,” said Mum. “This is Botswana. Not a war zone.” The poacher, reasoned Mum, would disappear when he saw Dad. “They’re only poaching because they think no one’s around. Dad’ll be back any minute. Now have some more tea and stop worrying.”

  Then another distant shot.

  Mum said, “I’m sure it’s just the poacher finishing off a wounded animal. Dad will find him soon.”

  Twenty minutes later, the door banged, and Dad walked slowly into the lounge.

  “What happened?”

  Dad sank into the couch and stared thoughtfully out of the window.

  “Dad?”

  “Keith?”

  “The bastard shot at us.”

  “Is Quartz okay?”

  “He’s fine’,” said Dad. “So is your father, if you’re interested.”

  Mum poured fresh tea and handed Dad a cup. “Well, go on, tell us what happened.”

  Reaching the Limpopo, Dad had slowed Quartz to a walk as he rode quietly into the neighbouring farm. He’d heard voices ahead and some way along the riverbank he’d seen footprints and drag marks across a stretch of dry riverbed bet-ween our neighbour’s farm and the South African riverbank.

  “Ratbags,” muttered Dad. “The
y’d been sitting on the South African side, potting at animals drinking from pools on the Botswana side and then hauling the carcasses back across the sand banks.”

  But then someone had missed and wounded an animal. They’d crossed the river and were tracking it along the bank on the Botswana side. Dad saw a flash of white flesh and khaki in the bushes ahead of him.

  “Voehiek,” he bellowed. “I’ll call the police.” He kicked Quartz into a trot towards the figure crashing through the undergrowth. “If I ever see you here again, you’ll spend the rest of your life in a Botswana jail.”

  Then the movement stopped. Seconds later, a loud crack echoed along the river.

  “Ear-splitting,” said Dad. “Literally. Felt the bullet whiz right past my ear.”

  “Wereyou scared?”

  Dad said, “Well, I decided not to hang around and chat.”

  “Sherbet,” said Mum. “Well, he was probably just trying to frighten you off. And at least he would have got a serious fright himself.”

  “True,” Dad sighed. “And we were warned about being English in the Tuli Block. Just didn’t think it’d happen so quickly. Oh, well,” he continued, adopting a reverent tone, “I should be rejoicing. But for the grace of the Good Lord I might not be here.”

  “Indeed,” said Mum. She put down her teacup. “Well, if you’re taking that route, I think I’ll take the other and hit the bottle. Fancy a stiff drink?”

  ♦

  These shots were much closer.

  Four. Maybe five.

  I didn’t have time to count. All three horses bolted in fright, bucking wildly and veering into the bushes as they tore off down the dirt track.

  It took a few hundred metres before we brought them back to a trot. The shots had come from across the Limpopo, but the riverside brush and the dense, immensely tall trees allowed only glimpses of the water and the opposite bank. We could see nothing.

  “That’s odd,” said Dad. “Can’t be poachers. And I didn’t think Louis John was the type to shoot by the water.”

  Louis John and Martie Botha owned the South African farm opposite this stretch of the Limpopo. They didn’t live on the farm, but loved the bush and visited often. They also ran a professional hunting business, and the hunters were supposed to conform to strict hunting etiquette.