Running Wild Read online

  Zulu would remember, with some relief, when rough-riding Senya went off to boarding school and Melodie became his inseparable companion. From his paddock the dark horse had watched father and son carry a large trunk to the dented old bakkie. Son and mother embraced, then Lettie ran up and stole a quick bear hug from the awkward teenager. The men climbed into the truck as it kicked into black-smoked life. It chugged off with Ma waving stoically and Lettie sobbing. Melodie gave a modest crooked-at-the-elbow wave, like royalty to the unwashed. Freedom at last!

  Otherwise, life on the farm seemed to carry on unchanged, the rattle of tractors, barking of dogs, clunk of the windmill behind the cattle kraal, mooing and baaing and neighing, a veritable Old MacDonald’s Farm they were. Melodie had the farm and Zulu all to herself and no one was more relieved than the horse.

  Usually it was just the two of them; sometimes Blitz the sheep dog ran alongside. Sometimes a school friend would come to stay for a weekend and invariably they would go off riding, Melodie on Zulu and the other on Top Deck.

  Everyone was happy and the good life seemed to go on forever. Where the relationship between horse and Senya had been one of tough male bonding, Melodie was a gentle, singing spirit who allowed Zulu free rein. She didn’t even mind when he wandered over to the stallions’ paddock to engage in some submissive grooming. A precocious colt never knew when he’d need to call in some favours.

  Since Fire was always tetchy, Zulu usually sought the company of gentle Tommy, a second-tier gelding who minded his own business mostly. Even less approachable than Fire was the mighty Ironsides, a big black beast with white boots and a blaze. Ironsides kept mostly to himself, a Percheron who spent most of his time in a far corner of the field where a gnarled old wild olive tree threw a pool of shade over the fence and which he was prepared to share only with Tommy, the gentle giant chestnut gelding. Only Pa rode Ironsides.

  Melodie loved to ride out into the range lands, then dismount and lie in the grass. She would lie on her stomach and look for ants, small beetles, grasshoppers, sometimes a small lizard or slug-eater. Then she would turn over and butterflies would alight on the grass stalks or the stem of a wildflower around her head.

  If it was a summer afternoon, puffy white clouds would start to tumble upwards in the sky. She loved the way the sunlight created starbursts of light behind the fluffy grass heads and how clouds could tumble upwards as though defying the law of gravity she’d learned about at school.

  “The laws of physics are universal and never change,” the science teacher had drummed into their stubborn heads.

  Ha, Mr Van Rooyen, you have never watched clouds!

  In April, when the grasslands of the Highveld started to turn gold and the cosmos flowers erupted in great profusions of pink and white, white cabbage butterflies would descend on the fields in wafting clouds and then she would imagine she could fly like them, rising up into the amethyst sky.

  Lying in the grass, Zulu munching nearby, her ideas rising like little cumulus thought bubbles in the warm summer sky, she would watch the cumulonimbus clouds building as the afternoon grew hotter. She could imagine she saw funny faces, sailing ships, dragons. She was floating in a warm air pocket, daydreaming: was she a girl lying in the grass who dreamed she was a horse, or was she a horse dreaming she was a girl, lying in the grass …?

  Sometimes Zulu would nudge her awake, his velvety muzzle and warm green-apple breath on her neck. Magic days. But sometimes it was the crack of lightning that would cause her to start as the clouds bruised dark purple-grey and a cold wind cut across the veld, heralding a thunderstorm. Then there was no time left for daydreaming and they would race back to the farmyard.

  “Don’t get caught out in a thunder storm,” was the family’s 11th commandment. Uncle Ernie had been caught out one day while looking for lost cattle and his face had been fried to a crisp by a bolt of lightning.

  “You are not to stare at Uncle Ernie,” their mother would warn before family get-togethers. But Senya and Melodie could not stop themselves. They would make sure they were seated one on each side of him and spend the meal trying to see what was behind the plastic nose attached to their uncle’s glasses.

  “It looks like he got them in a joke shop,” Senya said to Melodie. That lunch was a fiasco when the two children suddenly broke into a giggling fit. It was one of the few times they could remember Pa giving them a serious hiding.

  The slow, reassuring sound of the windmill, clunking and squeaking, doof-doof-doof, a soft breeze fluttering through its blades, was the metronome of farm life. Every farm relied on its wind pumps for nourishment. Without reliable water there could be no farm. But had God not provided them with the means to tap underground water? If you were looking for a miracle, surely that was one, Ma argued.

  “He has given us the means to tame the Earth. It is His will.”

  One year, with political storms pummelling the country and credit hard to come by, farmers at the annual co-operative meeting were threatening insurrection.

  “Here you can farm only with skuld en geduld,” said one.

  “Never mind about overdrafts and persistence, Jannie. Farming is such a gamble it is surprising the Good Lord allows it all,” said another.

  Then the chairman called the meeting to order and announced that a new wonder crop could save the struggling farmers. Wattle trees. They had been a great success in Natal. You simply planted them and they grew like weeds. It was almost too good to be true.

  “We are God’s chosen people,” was Ma’s happy response.

  But Pa, who never voiced an opinion about God in front of his family, had his doubts.

  “All trees need water,” he said at the lunch table where Ma was badgering him to start a wattle plantation. The only problem was that these trees, weeds in fact, spread across the once grassy lands and along stream banks, displacing the indigenous plants. Wherever there was a spring or a vlei, as the wattle invasion spread, it sucked them dry. Then the ground water started to recede.

  Year by year, wattle tree by wattle tree, millions of tap roots and billions of secondary root hairs of the miracle trees sucked up the ground water, droplet by precious droplet. On Bergsig they noticed one winter when their stream had slowed. The next year it had stopped flowing altogether excepting after hard rain. And then their water pumps started to fail.

  The reassuring meter of the windmill no longer beat out its steady rhythm of life and work on the farm. An ominous silence greeted each morning. Everyone felt it but no one spoke about it. The silence of the windmills became the song of despair on the Highveld. That was when the farm closures began and a sense of depression settled across the district, as palpable as God’s mercy which ground as finely as the trillions of fine root hairs that sucked up the livelihood of the land, molecule by molecule.

  Senya had been called home from boarding school. The farm was being foreclosed by order of the sheriff of the court and would be auctioned off at the end of the month. All assets were to be sold off that weekend.

  “Who are we to question the will of the Lord?” challenged Ma.

  Pa said nothing but the frown lines on his face were etched deeper. His hair had started to go grey.

  “Distinguished,” said Ma, but the joy was not shared all round.

  The day everything changed there was a palpable tension in the air. No one had come at first light to let the horses out of the barn. It was deep winter and the stallions, including three-and-a-half-year-old Zulu, were stomping on the cement floor by the time the big wooden doors swung open. But it was not the familiar silhouette of Melodie who stood backlit in the brilliant cold light. It was a stranger who marched down the central aisle, taking a quick look into each stable and calling out to a second stranger: research or abattoir. They smelled of stale clothes and old smoke. Each stall got a chalk mark, R or A.

  “Third closure this month,” an officious man with the clipboard remarked to one of the truck drivers hired by the agricultural auction house that wa
s handling the sale. The farm staff had been paid off during the week. The cattle and sheep were divvied up first. Last came the horses.

  Cattle and sheep had been herded onto articulated lorries like slaves in old galleon ships. The horses were divided into two lots. The first and larger group was loaded onto the larger of two flatbed trucks.

  Ma and Pa had told Senya and Melodie to wait inside until all the animals had left. As Zulu was being readied to walk up the loading ramp of the smaller horse trailer, Melodie saw Lettie coming towards them from the staff compound dressed in her Sunday best, reserved for church, weddings and funerals. She could bear it no more and ran outside.

  “Oh, oo oo oo oo Lettie …” Melodie ran crying: “Everything. We’ve lost everything,” she sniffed. She threw her arms around the big woman’s neck and together they sobbed. Like a real mother the rotund black woman knew exactly what to do, as she gently eased her young charge in the direction of her favourite horse.

  “I am Lettuce, the maid of the children,” she announced as she pushed her way past the throng of officious men.

  “Well, you certainly are well dressed,” quipped one of them, a lone wit among the hatchet men.

  Melodie broke from Lettie’s considerable clasp and hugged Zulu. The tears ran uncontrollably as she stroked the horse’s head. The horse was confused and nervous: what was going on?

  Ma made a move but Pa put a firm restraining hand on her arm. “Let her be.”

  On Zulu’s bridle was fixed a yellow tag on which was printed “Onderstepoort Veterinary Institute / Equine Research Centre”.

  “Oh sweetie pie, I’m so sorry,” Melodie sobbed as the bewildered horse was shoved up the ramp into the open-bed truck. “Poor thing, poor thing.” She was still holding onto the horse as it was being manhandled onto the truck, hooves clattering up the steel ramp. Lettie gently prised Melodie free and led her back to the house.

  Senya stood silently behind the kitchen window, watching his future being carted off. The four chosen horses that stood in the relative comfort of the smaller trailer were Zulu, Fire, Tommy and Ironsides.

  “Hold on a bit,” said the sheriff’s man shuffling papers, “we seem to be one short here,” and he stared at Pa who stood and offered no explanation.

  “Come check here,” the man motioned him over to the truck and banged his sheaf of papers with a fat index finger. “I counted 11 horses. I counted twice. But we have 12 listed. I have not seen or ticked this one, named, erm, Top Deck.”

  “Ah yes, poor old Top Deck,” hammed the patriarch. “Broke her leg. Had to shoot her, about a month ago. Sold her to a butcher in Bloemfontein. You can check with him.”

  “I will, I certainly will,” replied the man. His job depended on it.

  Pa knew the butcher worked for cash only to evade taxes and kept no records of ad hoc transactions. He also knew it was a lie. In fact, only recently Top Deck had gone lame, from no discernible cause, and the farrier Mike had taken her back to Johannesburg with him to see if he could find a cause and a cure.

  (It was found to be soft tissue damage of the left back leg. A blackjack seed had worked its way in just above the hoof where it was hard to detect due to the natural bulging of the fetlock and the excess of hair there. Once healed, Top Deck would soon be her old cheerful self again. She would evade the farm eviction and rejoin the family in good time.)

  The trucks fired into life, engaged gears, juddered and ground their way off down the dirt farm road. Then the farm was empty, still, dead it seemed. And you noticed things you hadn’t before – the gate hanging skew on its hinges; the rusting, disused machinery in the fields; the dongas in the road that had not been fixed since the last summer rains.

  The trucks clanked and clattered along the potholed track, the animals in the open load boxes being thrown this way and that, hooves hammering and skidding on the steel floor. Neighing and kicking and lashing out. Dirt track gave way to district road and by mid-morning the four research horses were bouncing along the national highway bound for the Golden Reef.

  The Theron family was already packed up for their move to the Waterberg, a rugged ranching region far to the north – “where the real Africa begins,” cajoled Pa. He would be managing a cattle and game ranch. Senya would be going to a prestigious school in Bloemfontein on a sports bursary. Melodie had been enrolled at Pioneers Agricultural Boarding School, an hour’s drive from their new home.

  Not the finest education to be had, Ma admitted, but it meant the girl would be home every weekend when she could ride.

  “There are horses on the farm, just like we used to have here,” Pa had to battle to prevent choking on his words.

  Later that afternoon, Melodie fell asleep on the couch while Senya watched a rugby game on TV. Melodie was in too dark a hole to care about what school she might or might not attend. Their parents had disappeared into their bedroom right after lunch after they’d said a last sorrowful goodbye to Lettie who had insisted on clearing the table and washing the dishes one last time.

  Melodie woke up in the dull glow of evening. Senya sat silent and still in the armchair in the dark.

  “Hey, Sunnie.”

  “Huh?”

  “Do you really think it’s God’s will?”

  The boy just shrugged.

  “I think Ma has been praying to a cold-hearted god all these years.”

  “Uh,” grunted Senya.

  Blitz kicked and whimpered in his sleep, chasing meerkats.

  A screech owl called from the rafters of the empty barn.

  3

  Onderstepoort

  THE DRIVE NORTHWARDS HELD little to no recall of anything a confused, thirsty and hungry horse would want to recall. At one stage they had crossed a wide river.

  Then there was a slow haul up a mountainside in the hot afternoon sun and an even longer, hotter descent. The horses jumped each time the air brakes bellowed. As the truck descended it grew noticeably warmer and for the first time there were lots of trees. That would have been the Magaliesberg, a low range that marked the ecotone, or biological divide, between the temperate Highveld grassland and the Bushveld plains that stretched from there all the way to Timbuktu.

  The veld here was garlanded with monkey-thorn acacias, wild bushwillows, silver cluster-leaf and wag-’n-bietjie thorn trees. If by mistake you backed into one you would have to wait a bit until someone came to extricate you and chances were they would not escape unhooked and unbloodied either. In African lore the spirit of a deceased person can be carried in a branch, and if that person has died far from home, buried in their place.

  The truck had slowed down and turned onto a dirt road. Tall gum trees delineated various fields. They had been planted more than 100 years previously because nothing sucks up water like a blue gum. In doing so a swamp had been turned into pasture, which was good for the livestock but not so good for the wildlife that once roamed the area.

  The four horses, weary from a day travelling in the open truck, were driven into a yard surrounded by red-brick working buildings. There was a bus nearby with a group of 30 or 40 young, playful youths milling about. With them was an older, very tall man who was clearly in charge. When the truck stopped he marched over to talk to the driver.

  Where are these horses from?

  How long have you been on the road?

  Where did you stop for food?

  He asked in a soft tone that anyone with brains between his ears would have read with caution.

  “We stopped in Bloem for breakfast, and then at this Portchi take-away near the Joburg abattoir,” the driver said grinning. “Yirra, those okes make such a kiff peri-peri chicken, I bet they could open a franchise. Then I could give up this kak job and open up one in Kroonstad …”

  The tall man’s eyes had narrowed.

  “I meant the horses, you doos.”

  The horses were electrified with tension. Their mouths were gummy with dried saliva. The two drivers knew nothing of animals. They were simply delivering a load
from another estate gone belly-up. The tall man had called over to the crowd, his students, who had grown quiet.

  “So you want to learn about horses. Come over here and learn something then.”

  The big man opened the back hatch of the truck and climbed into the load area. The horses shied. He quickly summed them up, saw one was wilder than the other three bouncing back onto their haunches and stomping in threat. He noted one, the chestnut, was already gelded. Two others were stallions but were not overly agitated in the situation but clearly the fourth, the dark Namibian bay, would need to be gelded in order to fit into the Karl Plaas regimen. In Fire’s case to stop him killing the other horses. He was one intimidating steed.

  The man untied the dark bay’s lead rope from the retaining bars and held it tight with his left hand. Luckily the familiar smells of the stable helped to diffuse the horses’ pent-up fear. With his right hand the man reached slowly to the horse’s head. It jerked back. He put his hand on its muzzle; it jerked back again but the man held on. Again he put his hand on its muzzle, then quickly but smoothly gripped its top lip between his second and third fingers and twisted.

  “Ooooh!” some of the students cried out.

  “And that is how you do the twitch,” he told them from his elevated platform. “Settles a nervy horse every time. You can even buy twitches if your fingers aren’t strong enough. Slowly, slowly catcha de monkey,” he said in a mock African accent. The students winced whenever he did that: he was white and they were all black. But the horse suddenly seemed to calm down and with that it was easily led off the truck.

  Grooms appeared. Fire was led away and one by one the other horses were guided off the trailer and taken across a cobbled courtyard to be hosed down, all the while lapping up water from the nozzle. Once inside they were put into their own stalls and feedbags filled. Things henceforth would be structured, if dull. Dull was far better than stress for horses, which have an uncanny disposition for nerviness.