Sunset at Sheba, page 6
‘This is a fine old way to wash things,’ she said. ‘Sammy, can’t we get any water? That stream’s more mud than anything else.’
‘You ought to know by now,’ Sammy replied calmly, ‘that when you fall into a South African stream you get suffocated by the dust. We can pick up water tonight,’ he added. ‘I know a sure place. Plenty of time. Got to learn to make do.’
‘Sammy Schuter, we’ve been making do ever since we left Plummerton! I’ve got dust in my eyes, in my nose, in my mouth. My hair’s full of it. I haven’t looked in a mirror since we left. How’s a girl to take a proper pride in herself?’ It was less of a complaint than the mourning cry of a town dweller whose personal appearance was part of her life.
‘It won’t take long,’ he consoled her. ‘Then you’ll be able to comb it all out.’
She looked at him candidly, demanding the truth. ‘Sammy, when are we going to find a decent-sized town again? These flies fair take the flesh off you.’
‘I told you,’ he said patiently. ‘Four-five days. A bit longer perhaps.’
‘A bit longer’s right,’ she said ruefully. ‘I didn’t think it’d be like this.’
‘I warned you.’
‘No, you didn’t. You just said there’d be no hotels. You didn’t say there’d be no water either, and all this dust.’
She picked up the concertina and stretched out on the ground, idly squeezing a tune out of the instrument. Her face felt like leather and she was uncomfortably aware of the grease that still lay between her fingers from the rudimentary cooking and cleaning.
For a while she studied the veld, gently undulating, wide and empty and featureless to the distant horizon, and the immeasurable saffron dome of the sky. The land lay very still in the first streaks of light, and the faded green patched with reddish-brown stony earth looked like a desert. The Wilderness. It was well named. With its scant vegetation and wide patches of coarse grass alternating with slopes of thorny scrub, it looked like the bleak landscape of another planet, for trees were rare enough to be a landmark beyond the patch of mimosa along the deep dry bed of the stream.
Polly stared at it, comparing it with the single bedroom which had been her home in Plummerton. Used as she was to the sound of a piano somewhere in the background, the chatter of voices, the rumble of traffic outside, she was still unable to accept the tremendous silences that made her feel as though she were suspended in space.
‘Sammy,’ she said uncertainly.
‘Yep?’
‘How much longer will it really take?’
He glanced down at her, busy with his task. ‘We’ve hardly started yet!’ he said, avoiding an answer.
She looked up at him, slashing at the flies again. ‘I didn’t get any sleep last night,’ she pointed out. ‘I was cold. I had a stone in my back. And, Sammy, I could imagine creepy-crawly things all the time. I heard ‘em once. I heard something howling.’
‘Wild dog mebbe,’ he said, unmoved. ‘Nothing to worry about.’
She regarded him with a wry expression on her face. ‘I bet you knew it’d be like this,’ she accused.
‘Course I knew.’
‘Sammy, why didn’t you tell me?’
‘I tried to, but you wouldn’t listen.’
‘Did you have a bad night?’
‘No. Slept like a log.’
‘Anybody’d think you were enjoying it.’
He grinned at her. ‘I am. I like it best out here. Better than towns.’ He looked up at the horizon and wiped his hands on the grass. ‘Better be making a move,’ he said. ‘We’re not here for pleasure.’
Polly jumped to her feet and began to load pans into the back of the cart.
‘What are we going to do?’ she asked, eager for anything that would take her mind off their discomfort.
‘A bit o’ shootin’,’ he said.
She stood with an armful of their belongings, watching him over the top of them as he lowered the carcass of the buck to the ground.
‘Sammy’ - her eyes shone suddenly as excitement caught hold of her - ‘shoot me a springbok! I’ve never seen a springbok shot, only that measly little thing you got last night!’
He glanced at her, enjoying the gaiety in her face. She hadn’t bothered to put make-up on and instead of doing her hair in elaborate rolls, as she usually did, she had tied it simply behind her head with a ribbon she had unthreaded from her petticoat, so that she looked softer, fresher and curiously younger in the old print frock and with the coils of her hair free about her neck and throat.
Sammy was staring at her, his eyes steady on her face, approving and warm. ‘Don’t know why you ever put all that muck on your face,’ he said, apropos of nothing.
Polly frowned, but it was a half-hearted gesture, spoiled by the look of pleasure in her eyes. ‘A girl don’t look her best less she titivates herself up a bit.’ She stared at him primly, nearer to blushing than she’d been for years. ‘We going to stand here all day?’ she demanded loudly.
He grinned. ‘I’ll get the hosses.’
He loped off to where the horses were grazing - the old mare that they used in the shafts and the one-eyed Argentino police horse that they’d bought for ten pounds in Plummerton Sidings, a bad-tempered animal which shied every time they approached it from its right hand side. They were both of them knee-haltered a short distance away, cropping at the grass.
‘We’ll pick up meat for a few days,’ he said as he returned. ‘Then we’ll get moving. When we get nearer Kimberley, we’ll fill the cart. It’ll fetch a pound or two in the market. Get that fire out, Poll.’
Polly was already kicking dust over the remains of the fire as Sammy harnessed the bony grey mare into the shafts, but the smell of coffee and fried meat still hung faintly round the small encampment.
Sammy swung himself into the saddle of the little Argentino with its age-whitened muzzle, fighting it as it moodily protested against his mounting on the wrong side. For a while, it jerked its hindquarters, lifting its legs with hints of kicking, a tough little animal which for all its age and lightweight had already proved its stamina, then he mastered it and waited until Polly had swung herself up on to the seat of the cart and adjusted the folds of her skirt. He passed her the old shotgun they’d bought with the horse and she sat holding it gingerly.
‘Don’t blow your head off,’ he warned.
He pulled the Martini Henry from the scabbard and laid it across his saddle, holding the reins with one hand and the rifle with the other.
‘Let’s go,’ he said. ‘Now’s the time to pick up the buck. They’re kind of slow before the sun warms ‘em up. We’ll find ‘em in the hollows licking the salt off the dried water holes.’
The day was still only a faint promise of gold in the east and it was a pure morning, with all the world still and the air invigorating. Even Polly was aware of its clarity.
‘Kind of cleans out your lungs and brain,’ she admitted, gesturing vaguely at the space around them.
Sammy nodded silently. There was a quiet, unhesitating sureness about him, a definiteness of purpose in his movements that inspired confidence. Taking out a yellow bandanna handkerchief, he removed his hat and passed the handkerchief round the brim, not looking at it, his eyes moving down the valley.
The land seemed empty, bare and rolling, covered with thin brown grass dried through the summer by the shimmering heat of the sun. The ridge beyond them rose slantwise, rough-edged like a saw where small outcrops of rocks broke through the surface and edged the skyline.
The Argentino stood in silence, snorting softly through its nostrils, nuzzling at the dried blood on its foreleg where it had cut it climbing out of a donga the night before, and Sammy’s hand moved gently along its neck, soothingly, feeling the greasy sweat where the reins lay. Then he licked a finger and held it up thoughtfully.
‘What wind there is, is coming from the west,’ he said quietly. ‘That’s good. We can keep the sun behind us and stay downwind at the same time. Won’t affect the shooting neither.’
Polly stared around her at the endless horizons. The exhilarating climate lifted her heart and for the first time in her life she knew the pull of a different existence from the one she had lived in the saloons and bars of Plummerton with their smell of stale smoke and spilt liquor, and the dusty plush and gilt furnishings.
‘You know,’ she said grudgingly, ‘this place’s maybe got something after all. I’m beginning to see why we could never get you home, Sammy.’
He nodded. ‘Some men’s for towns,’ he said shortly, ‘and some’s for the veld.’
She sniffed the air, noticing in it a freshness she had not caught during the heat of the previous day. ‘It’s sort of clean-smelling in the morning before the dust gets up, isn’t it?’ she said. ‘You’ve got to get up early to get a proper whiff of it.’
He nodded again.
‘What’s the matter?’ she demanded. ‘Cat got your tongue?’
He grinned. ‘Nobody ever shot anything who told it he was coming first. They’ve got ears like you. Keep your eyes open and your mouth shut. That’s the way to pick up a buck.’
He grinned at the startled indignation on her face.
‘You’ve got to learn,’ he said. ‘Only born fools stay fools all their lives.’
She shut her mouth with a click at the implied rebuke and he nudged the Argentino ahead of the cart. She flicked the reins across the grey mare’s back and followed him, her lips clamped, trying hard to behave with his taciturnity and finding it, with her normal capacity for endless chatter, difficult to the point of being exhausting. Fully awake now though, her nose in the air and sniffing, she felt keenly the space around her, and for the first time was curiously content simply to be there.
As they reached the top of a fold in the ground, he reined in - not sharply, but gently, with an instinctive movement as though he never moved awkwardly or in any abrupt way that might break the rhythm of his movements.
‘Springbok down there,’ he said softly. ‘Moving slow. They like to loiter when they’re undisturbed.’
She stared into the floor of a shallow valley, a vast basin with sloping sides, the purple hills like clouds beyond it. Other folds opened out from the main valley, some veiled in this mist, others just touched by light, and all filled with a curious blue glow that came from the milky vapours, so that they seemed to be looking into the depths of clear water. The ground before them was studded with ant heaps and a few karroo flowers, their foliage grey-green against the red soil.
Polly strained her eyes, trying to see what Sammy saw. ‘How do you know there’s springbok?’ she asked.
‘I can see ‘em,’ he said, a hint of surprise in his voice.
Polly stared again. ‘You got damn’ good eyes!’ she retorted, unbelieving.
‘Practice,’ he said. ‘I can see things because I’m looking for ‘em. They’re scattered now. They’re always like that till the sun gets up. You can see their heads out of the mist if you look careful.’
He was glancing round him, moving slowly and deliberately in the saddle.
‘Stay here,’ he said. ‘Come on down when you hear me shoot.’
‘Will that mean you’ve got one?’
‘Usually does. I don’t miss often. You can get down in the valley with the cart, but keep upwind of ‘em, if you can. Then if they whiff you they’ll scatter towards me. Give me a chance to get across the other side first though. That’s all.’
For a moment, as he sat with one leg cocked over the saddle he seemed almost statuesque on the little knoll, sharp against the brightening sky, then he kicked the horse into a gallop and a bunched flock of guinea-fowl in the distance, black-barred and grey, and squat and round as barrels, scattered quickly along the edge of the dusty track, moving like shining beads of lead, ‘chinking’ excitedly as their turkey heads disappeared into the stubby grass.
He had been gone some time and she was feeling incredibly alone when at last she caught a glimpse of a group of animals at the far side of the valley above the milkiness of the mist, moving rapidly along the sloping bowl of the land. With a spasm of excitement she. knew at once they were springbok from the speed with which they moved. With their bright lithe bodies they seemed like a stream of water rippling in the growing daylight, almost as though their bodies reflected the glowing sky.
For a moment, she was puzzled, for these couldn’t have been the herd that Sammy had seen, and she moved slowly farther into the valley, among the ghostly tops of the thorn trees. Her first glimpse of the nearer buck was of one or two dim ghostly shapes suspended against an invisible background, bodies without legs, heads without bodies. She had stumbled on them unexpectedly and she halted the cart, not quite sure what to do, and while she was still debating with herself, two shots rang out on her right.
Twenty or thirty horned heads shot up immediately out of the mist where before she had only seen two or three. Then they began to move towards her and she saw the whole herd as the mist shifted. Like drops of bright water flung against a stone they broke apart abruptly at the alarm, then they swung together again like metal filings under the influence of a magnet. They were racing across the veld now in a straight line diagonally across her front and disappearing behind the fold of the next slope. Excitedly, she realised they would cross her path, and the next second the buck, sweeping up the slope in a strung-out cloud, rolled over the curve of the hill towards her, swinging past her almost as though they were all attached to the same string.
Then they were spraying outwards round her, a whirlpool of racing animals in a cloud of dust to right and left of her, in full flight, dozens and dozens and dozens of them, springing and jinking as they passed her at top speed, giving little sneezy snorts as they leapt over each other in graceful nine-foot curves in their efforts to escape. She found herself screaming with excitement as the brown and black and white striped bodies shot past her, and almost too late she remembered the shotgun. Dragging it out of the cart, she blasted into the tail-end of the herd as it swept past, and to her delight, a big ram stumbled and fell.
Before she knew what was happening, the rest had swept on up the slope, the sound of their feet dying through the drifting dust, bright shifting motes now where they had once been animals, disappearing over the top of the slope where the sun was already touching the curve of the earth, only tiny stirrings of movement, more like changes of light than the manoeuvres of a herd of antelope swinging out of danger and melting into the far pathway of the horizon.
She laughed, her heart still thumping with excitement, and turned to where she could see the body of the buck sprawled in the dust forty yards away.
‘Well, that’s not bad for the first go at it,’ she said gaily, pleased with herself.
She whacked the horse into a shambling gallop and rattled across to where the buck lay, the cart jerking and rolling over the uneven track, the hubs screeching on the axles, small stones flying out from under the iron rims of the wheels. Gradually, with the help of the slope, the old horse moved faster and she suddenly found herself bouncing about on the seat, struggling to keep her balance.
‘God’s truth,’ she cried out, in sudden alarm as she realised the horse was enjoying itself also and had broken into a furious gallop; and she began heaving on the reins, sawing with them at its mouth so that it swung off the track and across the rough ground.
She reached the buck with the horse weaving in a staggering gallop as it tried to dodge the ant heaps and the small dry karroo bushes that disappeared beneath the wheels in an explosive shower of twigs, and as she pulled up, her box bounced clean out over the tailboard and went rolling across the ground, bursting open to scatter her belongings on the grass, her underclothes flying through the air like great white birds. Then the back end of the cart hit a rock, bounced off in a whipping turn and almost rolled over.
Polly sat up, panting and scared, as they came to a stop and stared back at her scattered clothes. ‘Lor’,’ she said aloud, ‘there’s more to this lark than meets the eye.’
She climbed down and moved towards the buck, cautious at first, afraid and excited at the same time, and then faster as her curiosity caught hold of her. Stopping alongside the slim body, she was consumed with disappointment and despair at the sight of the staring velvety eyes. The hide, which had seemed so smooth at a distance, now seemed shabby and rough and the long frail legs ending in the sharply pointed hooves worried her that she had stilled them for ever. Then, while she was still staring, she saw the hindquarters heave in a spasmodic movement and the head lifted, the jaw working, curious formless sounds coming from the throat.
A scream was jerked out of her and she began to run, stopping only when she realised she wasn’t being followed by the crippled buck. For a second she stared back then, her legs still unsteady, she began to collect her clothes with nervous haste, stuffing them anyhow into the box. Bundling it into the cart, she climbed on to the seat and sent the old horse shambling into the wreaths of mist, suddenly wanting to be nearer to Sammy, more than ever aware of loneliness in the vastness of the plain.
Sammy was bending over the carcass of a buck on the floor of the valley, his knife slitting it up the belly, gutting it, until it was no longer a lovely living thing but a small faded heap of hide and flesh and bone. He looked up as she approached and saw her face.
‘What’s the matter?’ he asked.
‘It just don’t seem right,’ she said, in a small voice.
‘What don’t?’
‘When they look like they do,’ she explained inadequately. ‘They’re pretty for wild animals.’
He nodded. ‘Often think that meself,’ he said.
He removed the liver and set it aside, then he wiped the blood from his fingers with a handful of sparse grass and stood up.
‘There’s another across there,’ he said.
‘I shot one too, Sammy,’ she said, unable to restrain the pride in her voice.
He looked up and grinned, surprised, and her face fell again.
