A World of Strangers

Chapter 14

At evening, the low horizon of bush ran together as the light left it, and seemed to sink over the edge of the world with the sun. And in the morning, it emerged again, a strangely even line of greyish trees, and, afar, was present all day. When we walked up to it, where it bordered the great mealie lands, it separated and thinned into growths of various characters; flat-topped, spreading trees, with mean and sparse foliage, waist- or shoulder-high bushes with short grass between them; low patches of briar; thickets of all three, trees, bush, and briar, through which not even the dog could crawl. And all these things were fanged with thorns. Everything that grew in this stunted forest had its particular weapon of thorn. The trees had long white spikes, clean and surgical-looking, like a doctor’s instrument, giving off a powdery glitter in the sun. Some of the bushes had the same kind of thorn, but others had shorter, thicker ones, more like those of a rose-bush, and some had thorns like fish hooks from which clothing, flesh or fur could not easily be released. The aloes with their thick fleshy leaves were spiked with red thorns. But worst and cruellest were the black, shiny quills, so sharp and smooth that they slid into your skin as quickly as a hypodermic needle, that covered the trailing briars, ankle-high. As you tore through them you heard them clawing at your boots, and no matter how careful you tried to be, every now and then one would stab into your ankle or calf. If it did not break off in your flesh as you pulled free, it would tear a bloody groove through the skin, as if reluctant to let you go without a taste of your blood. If it broke off, it would fester in your flesh, just beyond the grasp of fingernails or tweezers, until the inflammation it had set up around itself softened and swelled the skin enough for you to press it out.

Walking through this landscape, so thinly green, so hostile with thorn that the living growth seemed a thing of steel rather than sap, I thought of old religious pictures, with their wildernesses and their bleeding, attenuated saints. This was a Gothic landscape, where the formalized pattern of interwoven thorns that often borders such pictures, was real; where one could imagine a martyrdom symbolized by the brutality of these clutching, inanimate yet live instruments of malice.

In some places, where the bush had been cleared but the ground had not been ploughed for crops, fields of tall dead grass made a hissing noise as you pushed through it. Here and there, there was a break, and you would come upon a clearing where the low, thorn briars spread over the earth, and no one, man or beast, could walk there. Bristling branches which had no foliage to stir in the currents of the breeze and give them an air of life, maintained grim guard.

Grass like wood-shavings, pinkish as if permanently touched with the light of sunset. Khaki-weed, the growth of neglect and desolation, standing dead and high. The seed-burrs, round and sharp as porcupines, of some weed that had been cleared away, that crippled the dog the moment she set foot among them.

And more thorns, thorns in your hair and your hands, catching at your clothes, pulling you this way and that. And in silence. Silence on the fringes of which the soothing sotto voce of the doves, settling into the trees in some part of the bush which you never seemed to reach, was like the slowed heart-beat of the heat of the day. Now and then, the cheep, or the imagined cheep, of guinea-fowl. Where, where, where?

And a shot, from one of the others. And silence.

Out of the bush, on the borders of the mealie acres, a shot sounded differently. There, it rang right round the sky, as if the sky were finite. It was like a message, beaten upon the four vast doors of the world, North, South, East, West.

We didn’t get away early in the morning because when John Hamilton came to pick me up, not only did he still have some provisions to buy, but it was found that I didn’t have the right clothing for the trip. He raced me briskly round the town, in and out Army and Navy stores and various other shops, hustling me into long khaki pants that didn’t fit me (shorts, he said, were the one thing you could not be comfortable in in the bushveld), making me stamp up and down in bright yellow veldskoen, buckling me into anklets. In between, he collected the last urgent items on his list — salami and tinned soup, eggs, bread, matches, cigars, and lavatory paper. He did all this with the truant joy of a business man on holiday among the buildings and streets where usually he is to be seen hurrying from appointment to office. And there was a certain pleasure in going about the city on a grimly busy Friday morning, fitting oneself out in clod-hopper clothing from dark deep shops — whose existence behind gilded hotels and cinemas was unsuspected — stocked, it seemed, with props from an old Trader Horn film.

We met the rest of the party at someone’s house, and after scenes of confusion amid guns and yapping dogs and harassed servants, the great mound of stuff that was to be taken along was packed into and on top of a car and a station-wagon. Johannesburg dropped away and we were out on an open road where the winter morning lost its edge and the chromium rim of the car’s window, on which I was resting my arm, warmed in the current of the sun. Past Pretoria, the winter was gone entirely; there was a fine, fragrant warmth, like the breath from a baker’s shop.

I was in Hamilton’s car with a man called Patterson who was some sort of senior official in Hamish Alexander’s mining group; the car was one of those huge, blunt, swaying-motioned American ones that Johannesburg people like so much, and the three of us sat in front, with a space just big enough for John’s setter bitch among the gear in the back. John and Patterson talked of the probable state of the birds, the height of the grass, and the possibility of persuading a farmer named Van Zyl to let them shoot over his land. It was happy, practical talk, the talk of good children occupied in a game, and it put me to sleep, reassuringly; I dozed and wakened, like a convalescent on a journey, looking out at the thin bush that marked no progress because in its sameness, it did not seem to pass. Suddenly there was a railway siding with a grain silo, a butcher-shop, and a shoddy modern hotel. We got out of our great, over-loaded barges of cars and had cold meat and pickles and beer in a dining-room that had one blue, one green, and one terra-cotta wall, and smelled deeply of a summer of insect-repellent. One of the men from the other car, a stocky, fair chap with a jeering schoolboy’s face, leaned his elbows on the table and said in his grim South African voice, ‘We’ve got it taped, boy. Jist you wait, this time. It’ll be the biggest bag you ever seen.’

John was full of doubts, like a thoughtful general on the eve of a campaign. ‘The trouble is, with so much rain this summer, a lot of chicks must’ve got drowned. I don’t think we’ll find the big flocks we had last year, Hughie.’

‘There’ll be plenty birds, don’t you worry.’ He looked as if he’d know the reason why, if there were not. ‘We must get old Bester to get Van Zyl to let us go over to his dam, too. I’m telling you, it’s lousy with duck.’

Patterson said in his amused Cambridge voice, ‘Blast, I didn’t bring my waders.’

‘Is that so,’ John said, in the excited way of one confirming a rumour. ‘What’s he got there, mallard, yellow-bill, or what?’

‘Man, there’s everything,’ Hughie was both shrewd and expansive, putting another head on his beer. ‘I know Willard — he’s the brother-in-law of one of those big guys that run the duck-shoots for Anglo-American, and he goes down with this guy to the farm next door, old man by the name of Geek, old German, owns it. There’s geese too.’

‘Geese?’

‘By God,’ said John, ‘have you ever tasted a spur-wing goose? Two years ago, a shoot out Ermelo way, I got one.’

‘You can’t compare geese with anything else. A turkey’s got nothing on a young goose.’

‘We could go over there to old Van Zyl with a couple of bottles of whisky.’

‘Well, I don’t know, waterfowl are damned tricky, once they’ve been shot over they’re wild as hell. . ’

‘That time at Ermelo, up to the waist in freezing cold water. . ’

‘I got my waders,’ Hughie said.

‘I can see us all with frozen balls,’ Patterson murmured gracefully. It was from him that John had borrowed a gun for me; he said, ‘I hope you won’t find that bloody thing too cumbersome. I wanted to give you my Purdie but the ejector keeps jamming, and I wouldn’t trust it. I had to give it over to the gunsmith.’ I told him I hadn’t yet seen the gun he was lending me, and he explained that it was a Geyger, old as the hills, but still useful, and had belonged to his father. We discussed the personality of the gun; Patterson had the amused, objective, slightly Olympian manner of the ex-hero — as if he were not entirely there, but in some way remained still, like an actor on an empty stage, in the battle air from which, unlike most of his kind, he had not been shot down. I had met men like him before, in London, those men ten years or so older than myself who had survived their own glory; who, having looked their destiny in the face, did not expect, as young men like myself whose war was the tail-end of childhood expected that face, anywhere and everywhere. I knew him slightly from Alexanders’; he didn’t actually talk much about his war; but you felt that in thirty years people would come simply to look at him, as, early in the century, you could still go and look at some old man who had fought in the Crimea.

The alert, anxious, feminine face of the dog was waiting for us at the window of John’s car. The three Africans who had been packed in along with the rest of the gear, sat eating over paper packets in the station-wagon and did not even look up when we came out of the hotel. Hughie Kidd and his companion, Eilertsen, drew a trail of dust round us and went ahead with a curt wave.

The talk of guns and birds went on, mile after mile, an assessment of known hazards, calculable satisfactions, action within the order of limits that will never change, handicaps that will remain fixed for ever, for men cannot fly and birds cannot fire guns. It was all improbable: the elaborate instrument panel of the car before me, trembling with indicators and bright with knobs that didn’t work, the talk that, with a few miles and a change of clothes, had slipped gear and gone, like a wandering mind, easily back to the old concept of man against nature, instead of man against man. Outside, the bush was endless. The car was a fat flea running through the pelt of a vast, dusty animal.

We came at last to great stretches of farmland, where the mealies stood in tattered armies, thousands strong, already stripped of their cobs of corn. Children waved from ugly little houses. From road to horizon, there was a stretch of black ploughed earth, and the smell of it, rousing you like the smell of a river. Then, in a dead straight line, exactly where the plough had cut its last furrow, the bush began again, from road to horizon. We drove through farm gates, and made a choice at ochre sand crossroads where the roads were indistinguishable as those of a maze. A plump, pastel-coloured bird — John said it was the lilac-breasted roller — sat at intervals on a telephone pole, looking over-dressed, like a foolish woman, in that landscape that had dispensed with detail.

At three o’clock in the afternoon we skirted a mound of mealie-chaff at which a few dirty sheep were nibbling, passed a house with a broken windmill, like a winged bird, behind it, roused a ferocious old yellow dog, and bumped off on a track through the mealies. After a short way, there were mealies on one side of us and bush on the other; we came to a shallow clearing where Hughie Kidd’s car was already at rest. John backed up under a thin tree whose thorns screeched along the car’s side, and with a flying open of doors and an immediate surge of voices and activity, camp was set up. John, Patterson, and Hughie rushed about like boys who have come back to an old hide-out; they appropriated their own low, shallow trees as hanging-places for their things and shelter for their blankets, and allotted places to Eilertsen and men, to whom this clearing on the fringe of the bush was simply a piece of ground. Hughie chivvied everyone, shouting at the Africans, pummelling at and joking with his friends with determined impatience; the idea was to get a shoot in that afternoon, and not wait until morning.

When I had done my share of lugging things from the cars, I thought I had better have a look at the gun Patterson had brought for me, and I walked out with it twenty yards or so into the field of dry mealie stalks to get the feel of it. It was bigger than anything I’d used before, but well-balanced. In my hand, in the sun, it had the peculiar weight that weapons have; even a stone, if you are going to throw it, feels heavy. At school, in cadet target practice, I had shown a cool eye and a steady hand; a minor distinction that my mother had found distressing. Hardly anyone can resist the opportunity to do the thing he happens to do well, and for a year or two, I had gone shooting whenever I had the opportunity, more because I wanted to show off a bit, than out of any particular enthusiasm for the sport. On the other hand, I’ve never shared my family’s sentimental horror of killing what is to be eaten; I’ve always felt that so long as you eat meat, you cannot shudder at the idea of a man bringing home for the pot a rabbit or a bird which he himself has killed. Among the people I knew in England, my somewhat freakish ability as a shot was regarded as a sort of trick, like being double-jointed or being able to wiggle one’s ears, only in rather poorer taste, and I had lost interest in my small skill and hadn’t used a gun for at least a year before I came to South Africa. But, like most things you don’t care about, the small skill stayed with me whether I used it or not, and when I felt the gun on the muscle of my shoulder and I looked, like a chicken hypnotized by a chalk mark on the ground, along the shine of the barrel, I knew that I could still bring something down out of the sky.

I was only twenty yards from the others, from the big, beached shiny cars twinkling under their dust, the patent camp table and gleaming metal chairs, the boxes of food, the oil-lamps, and the paper-back detective novels; I could see Hughie throwing things to one of the Africans with a rhythmical ‘Here! Here!’, Patterson filling up the ammunition clips on the belt that was hitched round under his bulging diaphragm, Eilertsen shaking out a blanket, and John bending down to give his bitch a bowl of water. But they had all shrunk away in the enormous bush and mealie-land; their boisterous voices were tiny in the afternoon, and their movements were as erratic and feeble as those of insects lost in grass. I was suddenly aware of a vast, dry, natural silence around me, as if a noise in my ears that I hadn’t been aware of, had ceased. The sun came out of everything; the earth, space, the pale dry mealie stalks. There was no beauty, nothing ugly; it was as I had always imagined it would be if you could get out and stand on a motionless aircraft in the middle of the sky.

John looked up, where he was squatting beside the dog, as I came up. ‘Mind you, I was in two minds about bringing her,’ he said. She licked her lips and wagged her long feather tail, and her heavy belly swung; I thought she was pregnant. ‘No, it’s a big tumour, in there, poor old girl. A tumour on her liver.’ Feminine, downcast, she submitted while he turned back her lips and showed me her pallid gums. ‘I’m keeping her going with big shots of vitamin, and feeding her raw liver. She’s nearly ten and the vet doesn’t think she’d pull through an operation.’

‘Let her come, it’s her life,’ said Patterson. He had put on short gumboots, and the sort of sharkskin cap American golfers wear covered the lank, thinning hair on his sunburnt head.

‘Come on, Grade, up, up, my girl.’ John coaxed the dog to jump into the back of the car. I saw the muscles flex under the smooth freckled coat as she made the effort to lift her burden, and landed with a thud on the seat.

‘No loaded guns in the car,’ said John, as everybody got in. But Hughie, grinning in the driver’s seat, kept the muzzle of his gun pointing out the window. ‘I don’t want to waste time. — Get a shift on, Eilertsen, for Chris’ sake.’ Eilertsen was feeling about himself like a man checking up on his train ticket.’ Nearly ten past four,’ said Patterson, screwing up his bright blue whisky-drinker’s eyes against the mild sun. ‘Just right. They ought to be feeding nicely. Where’re we going? Down to the far boundary?’

‘Bloody birds’ll be going back into the bush by the time we get out. Let’s go down where the ground-nut field used to be, and then fan out through that little patch of bush and come out on the other side of the mealies.’

‘Look at that!’

‘Burned to blazes!’

‘Damn, damn, damn,’ John moaned softly as we jolted along the track, crushed against each other, with the guns hard against our shins and elbows. A stretch of bush lay reduced to ashes.

‘Half our cover gone!’

A cry went up from Eilertsen: ‘Stop! Over there, look — ’

The car stopped as if it had hit a wall.

‘Where, where?’

‘By that stump? See? Just to the left of that dead bush?’

The back of Hughie’s neck, before me where I sat, became red with an excitement like rage. ‘What was it?’

‘Two pheasants, didn’t you see?’

‘Ach, man, we don’t want to go haring off after a couple of pheasants, let’s get on.’

‘I think they’ve gone now, Eilertsen,’ said Patterson, distant and kindly.

‘What I like to do,’ said John, ‘when I see something like that, a couple of pheasant where the cover’s not too thick, near the road, I like to let Gracie work it a bit. Just go quietly through the bush with her, let her see what she can find.’

The car bumped and swayed on; far away, the broken windmill appeared on our left. We went off the track and through a mealie-field, the tall stakes with their ragged beards and torn leaves staggering at the impact of the car and going down with a crack like breaking bone. On the edge of the field we left the car and spread in a wide sweep through the dead mealies. I could just see Patterson’s cap, now and then, on my left, and hear, on the other side of me, John whistle softly to the dog. There was the water-sound of doves, a long way off. A whirr of finches, like insects, went up over my head. The sun had not begun to drop yet, but it seemed to hold off its warmth, in preparation for departure. My own footsteps, over the clods and the stubble, and the brush of my clothes against the mealie-stalks, seemed the noisy progress of some particularly clumsy animal. Once I heard a low, clear questioning chirrup, a peevish, purring call. After a pause, it came again, or the answer to it, much nearer to me. But we came out, all into each other’s sight, at the end of the field, all expectant, all with nothing to relate. ‘Did you hear them though?’ said John. ‘That’s guinea-fowl, my boy.’ ‘That rather plaintive sort of call?’ ‘That’s it,’ said Patterson.

We piled into the car again and crashed back over the field in the path we had already flattened before us. Hughie did not speak and swung the car determinedly this way and that. We came out on to a soft red dust road and drove cautiously, in first gear, along the bush. The car stopped, just where the bush ended and the mealies began again. No one spoke; like a yearning, our gaze and our attention went out over the field. And — ‘There!’ said John hoarsely. ‘Look at them, look at them.’

‘Ah, there.’

‘Where. . ’

‘Look, hundreds of them. And there.’

‘I had a feeling they’d be here.’ Hughie, both hands on his gun, spoke lovingly. ‘It’s funny, I had a feeling.’

In the middle of the field, among the clods that looked like broken chocolate, and the pale, untidy shafts of the mealies, I saw dark, small heads, jerky and yet serpentine, plump bodies with a downward sweep, stalking legs: guinea-fowl feeding. They reminded me of pea-hens, and their plumage was the blue-dark of certain plums.

We all got out of the car softly and swiftly. John made a plan of approach. Patterson would go up the centre of the field, making straight for them; John and I would swing out in a curve to the left, Hughie and Eilertsen would do the same on the right, so that when the flock was disturbed by Patterson, he would have his chance with them as they took to the air, and either John and I, if they flew West, or Hughie and Eilertsen, if they flew East, would have a chance with them as they made for cover. It was unlikely that they would fly directly away from Patterson, to the North, because there was a stretch of newly-ploughed ground there, and no cover. Hughie, scowling with concentration, was off with Eilertsen behind him and an air of going his own way, almost before John had finished speaking. Patterson’s big heavy shape went nimbly into the screen of mealies.

The dog wove in and out just ahead of John and me, but discreetly, held by the invisible check of obedience. The discomfort of her body was forgotten, she did not seem aware of it at all, but followed the map of smells spread under her pads like a crazy, enchanting dream, the dream that gun-dogs, twitching, dream all summer, and suddenly wake up to find themselves inhabiting, in the winter. We trudged without speaking, round the margin of the field; a barbed wire fence stood between the mealies and the beginning of the bush, on the left side, and we followed it for a hundred and fifty yards and then stopped and waited. John was unaware of himself, and me; he gave me an absent, flitting smile, and kept his white-haired, cockatoo head lifted. The dog panted with happiness, like an athlete who has just breasted the tape, and he put a hand down to quiet her. I opened the breech of my gun to look at the two cartridges lying ready. It did not seem likely that there was anyone else alive, in the multiplication of mealies not moving out there; I forgot what we were waiting for, as, I suppose, fishermen forget when they sit with the rod in their hands, and Patterson forgot the moment before he loosed fire among the Messerschmitts. I watched John, in the perfect moment of inaction that only comes in action, and wondered, after all this time, if this was what Stella Turgell had meant when she had said of her husband that Africa was for active and not contemplative natures.

The guinea-fowl came over, black and sudden, tossed up into the air by their own alarm, and cracks sounded, sharp and near and far and feeble. John gasped as if something had got him by the throat and swung up his gun wildly. A second flock came, rising steeply as they passed us. I felt the recoil against my shoulder, smelled the explosion-warmed grease of the gun. The black, plump shapes were lifting; nothing touched them. Then I saw them along the path of the barrel; a line drew taut in the bright air between my eye and a bird that hung, a split second, breasted on the air. The gun nudged me; the air toppled the bird and let it fall. I spilt the smoking cartridges, re-loaded, and shot another. Out of range over the bush, we saw the rest of the birds skim down into the trees.

My first bird was dead, the second lay in long grass on the other side of the fence. The dog found it at once, and John, who had gone through the wire to look for his own bird, picked it up by the neck and snapped the thread of life that remained in it as neatly as he would pluck a stalk of grass. The heads of the dead birds were ugly; they looked like the carved heads of old ladies’ umbrellas.

I followed John through the fence into the bush, carrying the soft, plump weight of my birds. As we searched for his wounded bird, we heard the voices of the other men, excited as the cries of boys on a beach. We went deeper into the bush, talking and purposeful; I had seen John’s bird come down, he had seen it flutter, half-rising again, once or twice. I looked all round the thorn-tree where I had seen it fall, but there was nothing, not a feather; was it that tree? Wherever you looked there were trees exactly like it; the moment I found myself five yards into the bush I knew myself to be in a place of uncertainty, and this was right — the beginning of the bush was like the middle, you did not go deeper into it in any sense but that of distance, for it was same, all the way. It reduced time and space to the measure of the sun’s passing across the sky and the tiredness of your own feet; I could well imagine that if you walked through it for ten minutes or ten hours, whether you went round in a small circle or covered miles in a straight line, you would have covered the same ground and have the same lack of sense of achievement. It had the soothing monotony of snow. John poked about and grumbled. ‘You see it’s hopeless without a dog in this stuff. We’d’ve lost yours, ten to one, if there’d been no dog.’ The setter swam steadily, head up, through a drift of thick grass, sniffed round thorny thickets as if they were about to explode. We didn’t find the bird.’ Lying low somewhere, under our feet.’ John reproached the dog, but she gave him a moment’s absent flick of the ears and went off again, her course erratic and mysterious as a water-diviner’s. The voices of the others were lost; alone again and in silence except for the clumsy passage of our bodies, we followed the dog through the indifference of the empty afternoon. I heard my own breathing and felt the prick of the thorns; they were thicker than leaves, on every bush and tree and bramble and, with scabby bark and crusted twig, gave everything the touch and feel of old men’s horny fingers. The enormous air paled; the sun was so withdrawn you could look right up into it, but the little scratchings of shadow from the bush did not seem to grow longer, but only to disappear in soft shoals of shadow that the grasses threw upon themselves, as the sea often seems to darken from beneath rather than from the failure of the light above. We went on, and, suddenly, the spasm of a muscle in a dream, three pheasant blustered into the air right before us. I was foolishly startled, and missed, but John, with that gasping intake of breath, wheeled on them and got one.

Back at the car, Hughie and Eilertsen were already there. They waved and shouted as we came up; there was a dark heap on the roadside beside them.’ Where the hell’d you get to,’ yelled Hughie, extraordinarily cheerful and friendly, swaggering with satisfaction. ‘We heard you potting away in the bundu; what’s the score? Jesus, that was some flock came your way, we only got the lousy stragglers, the few that panicked and went the other way.’

‘He got four, I got three,’ said Eilertsen, turning a bird over with his foot.

‘Jesus!’ Hughie looked at what we had in our hands. ‘I don’t believe it! Whatsa matter with you, John, you paralysed or something? I ruddy well don’t believe it! And what’s that, a pheasant — one of them’s even a pheasant. Didn’t you chaps see a few hundred or so guinea-fowl over your heads?’

‘Hughie, man,’ John said worriedly, ‘I come up too fast. I know it. You remember, it was just the same last year. The first afternoon, I’m just too damned het up and excited.’

‘Jesus,’ said Hughie resentfully, ‘only two.’

‘I did get one blighter, but he came down in the bush and even Grade couldn’t find him.’

Hughie began to piece together the strategy of the first shoot: ‘Why did Patterson have to make right for the middle of the birds, like that? He should’ve gone round, and driven them down a bit.’

‘Who can tell?’ Eilertsen had the look of a man for whom almost everything is a little beyond him. ‘You never know what they’ll do.’

‘But that’s fine,’ John said eagerly. ‘That means they’re not wild at all, this year, eh? Did you see, Hughie? He went right up dose, eh? We couldn’t see a thing, where we were.’

‘If I’d’a bin him, I’d’a gone round a bit, that’s what I would’a done.’

Patterson came out of the mealies with the happy, calm roll of a man who is smiling to himself. A duster of dark bodies hung from the hooks on his belt, bumping against his hip as he walked. As he drew nearer, I saw a feather, stuck in the band of the shark-skin cap. ‘Not bad,’ he said. A year of alcohol was beading, streaming, oozing out of his skin.

Hughie was counting. ‘Three, and me and Eilie seven, that’s ten, twelve — ’

Eilertsen tossed the pheasant to him.

‘Thirteen, could be worse. Patterson, why’d you go straight for them, man?’

‘It was amazing,’ Patterson was telling John, while he smeared at his face. He had taken off the cap and his hair was brilliantined with sweat. ‘I felt as if they would have come up and eaten out of my hand. They simply ignored me. One old boy just gave me a wink and went on feeding. D’you remember the one-legged one? He’s still here. He’s with this lot.’

At the sight of the car, as if at a reminder, the dog had dropped into exhaustion. She lay in the back, almost as inert as her prey. We drove back to the camp talking, scarcely listening to each other, and huddled comfortably together, rank and uncaring as animals in the loose, unquestioning association of the pack.

While we were gone, the three Africans had collected wood and fetched water from the farmhouse. Hughie shook himself out of the car and at once began to shout and berate in the meaningless convention of men who are brought up in a country where there are many menials; the Africans, in the same convention, heard only the sense, ignored the words, and did the minimum of what was required of them. Two of the men were John’s servants, very black Nyasas with blank faces that looked worried the moment they took on any task. The other was Hughie’s own servant, a little snivelling Basuto with a face the colour of fear. Hughie bellowed at him harmlessly, as if he were deaf. He sat down on a camp stool and shouted, ‘Here! Come on, get my boots off!’ Then he was all over the camp, looking into everything. ‘These lazy bastards! How long d’you think this wood will last, eh? That’s no good, all that small stuff. You get on out there and bring some big logs. Makulu, Makulu, eh? Plenty big logs.’

The darkness was cold. It came up around our legs and, as we stood around the fire, drinking the first whisky, the whole land became steeped in dark, while the sky took on the sheen of a wet shell. The shapes of the men changed clumsily as they put on pullovers and mufflers; I dragged out of the duffle-bag my souvenir of Zermatt. Meat had been brought from town for the first night’s meal, and John prepared and grilled it. Hughie opened a tin of beans and asked for bacon, butter, and various utensils John hadn’t got. ‘You should have one of those heavy iron pots, John, that’s the only way to do these things properly. Isn’t there a spoon with a long handle? Here! Find me a spoon, big one, one with long handle! — Jesus, this bloody thing’s burning me up.’ The unlikely-looking food was delicious, and with it we drank mugsful of red wine. We sat like spectators round the dance of the flames and the stars came out sharply and the dark seeped up and up. It was night, and in the great dark room of the world, we were a scene in somebody’s sleeping head, alight, alive, enclosed.

We sat drinking until late. Wine brought out an innocence, a schoolboy crudity, in Hughie. His swaying, bobbing face, smeared with the grease of chop-bones, hung above his mug in the licking light; he told old, long dirty jokes that one could listen to with the pleasant sense of recognition with which one follows the progression of a folk tale. He boasted about his dog; ‘If he was here and you touched me, like that — just touched me — he’d go for you. He’s not more than a year old yet, I reckon, but boy there’s nothing he’s not wise to. He never lets my kid out of his sight, I tell you, a Heinz fifty-seven varieties, and more sense than all your pedigrees.’

‘Poor old Grade, she enjoyed herself this afternoon.’

‘Well, give me pointers any day. I wanted to get a pointer, but then my kid wanted a pup and we bought this pooch. You know, I wouldn’t be surprised if you couldn’t train him to be a gun-dog. Honestly, I wouldn’t be surprised. That dog’s so damned clever. And what a watchdog! You won’t see a kaffir pass our gate without crossing the road first.’

While Hughie discoursed on the superiority of pointers over setters, Patterson and I dragged an ant-eaten trunk four or five feet long, on to the fire, and as the flame delicately explored it, and the heat of the fire penetrated it, the life to which it was still host abandoned it in panic. First came long refugee-columns of ants, and hurrying woodlice; and then that creature out of the zodiac, a scorpion. Eilertsen suddenly got giggling drunk, like a woman, and kept pouring himself more wine with an air of recklessness. ‘First damn time I’ve got like this since V.E. day,’ he tittered. ‘Reckon it’s time I had a few again.’ Hughie went off on a long disquisition on the habits of stomach ulcers, which were the cause of Eilertsen’s long sobriety. Hughie knew so many half-truths and fallacies about so many things that the self-sufficiency of his ignorance was awesome; it was impossible to be bored by him. To people who prided themselves on their sensibility, he would seem to be a person completely without imagination, yet the truth of it was that he lived in a fantasy, was possessed by the new witchcraft, the new darkness of the mind made up out of the garbled misconceptions of scientific, technological, and psychological discoveries he did not understand.

Before he went off to bed, John called the servants to give them some wine. ‘Not too much, we don’t want them half-dead in the morning.’

‘Ach, give them brandy, man,’ said Hughie. ‘They don’t like wine. Give them each a tot of brandy. Kaffirs don’t really like wine.’

A little way from our hollowed-out interior in the dark, the three men sat round a small fire of their own. They had eaten; they talked so low among themselves that in our row-diness, we had not been aware of this anteroom. It was true, they were pleased with the brandy. Each stood, watching it being poured into his mug; on the face of the elder Nyasa, Tanwell, a smile, sudden and soft as the flame that lit it, showed incongruously on the fierce squat blackness of his closed face. The Basuto clowned for his, while Hughie growled appreciatively and threatened to kick his backside. They went back to their fire with their consolation; it was plain that they didn’t enjoy this atavistic game of sleeping out. We had elaborate protective clothing, ground sheets, rubber mattresses, and sleeping bags, they had the blankets they slept in at home in the town. There was the unexpressed suggestion that they were naturally closer to nature, to put them back in the veld was like loosing wild things. But the Nyasas were close enough to a state of nature to know that, for man, the state of nature is the nest; the musky closeness there must be in the grass and mud huts of the tribe. The Basuto was a bleary-faced town-sharp man of about my age; I supposed that he would rather be gone to ground in Alexandra township or the tin and hessian of Orlando shelters.

But in my blankets, dressed up for bed in all the clothing I could muster, I felt the comfort of the voices about me, the cosy, confident sound of voices that held no tone of doubt; voices for whom God was in his church, justice was in a court, and all the other questions of existence had equally glib answers. The warmth of the wine in my body and the cold of the night on my cheek gave me that sudden, intense sense of my own existence that is all I have ever known of a state of grace; and that, exaltation of self that it is, must be the very antithesis of what such a state really is.

Patterson was pulling a woman’s stocking on to his head.

‘What’s that, a trophy?’

He grinned at me. ‘My dear boy, it’s the best way in the world to keep your head warm. But you’ve got plenty of hair.’

The others continued to stumble about the camp. ‘First damn time I’ve been drunk since V.E. Day, I’m telling you. . ’ Giggles. ‘Look out there, you silly bastard, you’ll have the whole thing over.’ ‘Here, girlie, good Grade, good girl.…’

I woke up to feel someone looking at me. It was the moon, staring straight down from a sky full of her great light without warmth, that weird contradiction of the associations of light. I pulled the blankets up over my head but I felt it, the eye that has no benison. The bundles of sleeping men were pale shrouds, the fire was silenced. Rolling out over the stillness there came a yowl from the entrails of desolation, the echo of a pack of nightmares. It stopped, and came again, and I did not think I heard it outside my own head. Suddenly, beside me, Eilertsen sat up whimpering in his blankets and fired three shots straight past my ear. The dead rose. ‘Good Christ, what’s the matter?’ ‘What the hell’s he doing.’ ‘I could see their red eyes in the dark,’ said Eilertsen, caught in the moonlight, ‘Just over there, in the bush.’ ‘Nonsense.’ When John was woken in the middle of the night he was not another self, like most people, but simply himself. ‘Jackal wouldn’t come that near.’ But after that, there was silence.

Chapter 15

In the mornings, the birds were frozen stiff where we left them on the roofs of the cars, and the bottles of beer that John put out specially were opaque with cold. Patterson lay helplessly in his blankets, waiting for coffee to come, but Hughie, with his gingerish bristles sparkling on his chin and his hair fiercely tousled, stumped about in impatience.’ Let’s go out and murder the bastards!’

And with hands aching with the hard cold of the gun, we would follow him through a morning wet and fresh and strange as something torn from a womb. A rent caul of webs glistened on the thorns and the grasses swagged together in wet brushes. We heard guinea-fowl. We did not hear the doves or the starlings or the plover or the quail; only the guinea-fowl, like the words of a language one recognizes in a close murmur of foreign tongues. It seemed that they knew we were coming for them; there was the compulsion of an appointment between us; the birds were there and the men had come, and they must meet. When we rested in the camp, we heard them, were aware of them and felt strongly that they were aware of us. The flux and tension of the pursuit were completely absorbing, so that, in the heat of the day, when there was time to read, we did not read. The old fear, that had been bred into me, of finding myself with nothing to read (what would one do, caught somewhere, someday, without a book) was suddenly made harmless. I did not need to read. The books lay stuffed down in the duffle-bag.

That was a wonderful hour of the day. The morning shoot ended at about half past ten, when we came back to camp after tramping through the bush and the mealies for nearly four hours. We had the sour, dissipated look of unshaven men who have not breakfasted, the look that is permanent with tramps. First we drank the beer which, carefully kept in the shade, held still the cold of the night. Then we cooked a meal without the customary limitations of meals; so long as you were hungry, John would produce another chop, more bacon, more kidneys. Then we took turns to use the tin basin for washing and shaving. Only Hughie did not shave; he went to lie in his tent — he was also the only one who slept in a tent, an inflatable thing that he put up with a bicycle pump.

A noon silence fell. The sun was a power in the bush; nothing moved; the thorns glittered; Patterson took his shirt off and put it over his face to keep off the flies. My blankets were under a thorn-tree, but the shade was nothing more than a net between me and the sun. The doves sounded regularly as breathing.

At some point when we were all asleep or seemingly asleep, Hughie would come quietly out of his tent with his gun and go off into the bush. Once he brought back a hare, a poor thing with ears full of bloated black ticks. ‘The boys’ll eat it,’ he said. ‘Here! Samuel!’ Bleary-eyed and sweating he would wait for us to make ready for the afternoon shoot, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand after a long drink of water, and keeping his head cocked, listening. ‘That crowd that feeds in the ground-nut field, they’re there already. S’tru’as God. They’re not resting in any bush.’ He watched us resentfully. And mostly, after the first day, when we were all out together he would leave us after the first few minutes, and disappear, with or without Eilertsen, for hours. We would find him at the car or back at the camp, counting his bag. He out-walked and out-shot everybody. ‘Let’s go and murder the bastards!’

John said, troubled, ‘Kidd takes it all too seriously. You know what I mean? He doesn’t get a kick out of just walking through the bush.’

‘It’s his way of talking.’ Patterson was amused, as he might have been amused by an almost-human chimpanzee. He said to me later,’ That chap’s the most inarticulate blighter I’ve ever met. South Africans are a pretty inarticulate lot, anyway, don’t you think?’

‘He’s got plenty to say for himself about everything under the sun.’

‘Oh he’d chat to Einstein about relativity. But he’s only got a few words to get along with; they have to fit every conceivable situation. Makes him sound like a savage.’

‘That’s what he calls the two Nyasas.’

‘Those two gentlemen. I must say, they’re not more than one jump out of the trees; John really is unbelievably patient with them. I felt like giving that one careless little bastard a kick in the pants this morning — if he’d been my own boy. The way he gutted those birds, simply hacked them to bits.’

‘Well, it’s all relative, I suppose, this savage business.’

He looked at me with curiosity for a moment, as if he had just remembered something. ‘D’you believe these black chaps could ever be the same as us, Hood?’

I heard Steven’s voice, mimicking him perfectly. Yet Steven was not Patterson, was not even me; was not Tanwell and the other Nyasa, chopping wood ten yards away as if all tasks were one.

‘Never. The French are not the same, or the Germans or the Italians. They’ll do all the things we do, but they’ll be themselves.’

He laughed, from that private vantage point on which I sometimes felt he was caught, unable to get down. He waved me away, as if I had offered him an evasion. ‘Run their own show? I’d like to see it. I just don’t think the poor chaps have got the brain. They’re limited. It’s just not there.’ He put down the rag with which he had been cleaning his gun. ‘Come on, let’s get some of those papiermâché things from the whisky bottles and stick ’em up on the mealies. See if I can hit a target, if nothing else, today.’ Big, handsome ruin, paunched, pouched and veined; sauntering heavily over the clods he reminded me of one of those splendid houses, thrown open to the public at half-a-crown a time, that seem to regard the trippers amusedly, and are seen by the trippers amusedly, as something over-blown and gone to pot.

In the bush I usually walked with John. The eager face of the dog, turning suddenly, beckoned us; the tip of her tail bled from the thorns and her ears held the seeds of khaki-weed like a magnet that has trailed through a box of pins; at night she was too exhausted to eat, and lay looking at us over the weight of the death growing in her belly, but in the bush during the day she seemed to outrun it. ‘I don’t think she can be as ill as you think,’ I said to John. ‘No, ‘he said,’ she’s finished. Like a good race-horse, she’ll go on till she drops.’

These were the clichés of the Alexanders’ world, the curiously dated world of the rich, with its Edwardian-sounding pleasures. They thought of courage in terms of gallantry, spirit in terms of gameness; in the long run, I supposed my mother’s and my father’s definitions were my own, I could really only think of these things in terms of political imprisonment and the revolt of the intellect.

But beneath John’s social sophistication, his equipment for Johannesburg, there was a strongly appealing quality. He reduced life to the narrative; we trekked through the thorns and the grass and all our faculties were taken up with what we were doing and where we were going. His thin brown face, alert above a bobbing adam’s apple, was a commonplace reassurance, like the image of some simple, not very powerful, household god who serves to hold back the impact of mystery from ordinary life.

On Monday evening, I lost the others and found myself alone in the darkening bush. I walked about a bit, but was defeated by the silent sameness and thought it more sensible to stay still awhile, and listen; I had discovered that if you forced your hearing capacity, you could very often part the silence of the bush and make out, far away, the sounds — like feeble bird-sounds muffled in the nest — of men talking. I smoked and listened; the ground was pink as warm stone and the thorn trees were wrought iron. Presently I separated from the furtive rustle of the bush, the faint panting of the dog. It seemed to reach me along the ground, on a rill of air. I called, and though there was no answer, in a little while, the dog, held on the leash by the younger Nyasa, appeared. Sometimes, when the dog saw a lot of guinea-fowl moving in a field, she lost her head and wanted to give chase. It was then that if the Africans had been taken along as beaters, John would give her to one of them to hold.

‘I can’t find the baas,’ said the African.

‘It’s all right, I’m lost too,’ I said. ‘Let the dog lead.’ We followed her half-hearted zig-zag for a few minutes. The thorn bushes were black splotches, like an attack of dizziness.

‘I don’t think we should just keep on walking, do you?’

He stood there with the dog and said nothing. I sat down and he settled a yard away. When I spoke to him he did not answer, unless what I said was a direct question. He wore broken sand-shoes, out of which the little toe stuck on each foot, and a torn dirty khaki shirt and a pair of brown striped trousers that must once have belonged to a man with a big belly — they were folded over in front, under a belt, like a dhoti — and he must have been cold; a kind of feverish chill ran over the ground the moment the sun dropped.

At last I did not try to talk any more, and we sat there, together. The dog was exhausted, and slept. He did not look at me or at anything; his isolation came to me silently; I was aware of it then, but it must have existed all the time, while we ate and we drank and we sang and we cursed, in our camp. I offered him a cigarette but he would not take it from the packet and he cupped his hands and I had to drop the cigarette into them. Loneliness gathered with the chill, a miasma of the ancient continent; he and I were in hand’s reach of each other, like people standing close, and unaware of it, in a fog.

After about an hour, Patterson found us — or rather we heard him, and the three of us managed to find our way back through the bush to where, in the mealies, the lights of the car turned on by the others to guide us hung two banners of heavily moted orange light in the blackness. As we stumbled into the colour and brightness, we got an applause of shouts and jeers of welcome. That night was our last and John insisted that we finish the red wine before we went to bed. I did a couple of imitations I had once done in a student revue at Oxford, and spontaneously added a new one to my meagre repertoire — Miss Everard and the Italians on the boat. John, using Patterson as a victim, showed us how he once tried to learn Judo. Hughie sang army songs with Eilertsen, and gave us, with no bones about it, his assessment of what makes a woman worth the trouble. Over at their own fire, the Africans drank their brandy ration and talked in undertones that now and then surged into laughter, or exploded, like a cork out of a bottle, into sudden onomatopoeic exclamations.

We went out after birds once more, early in the morning, but without much luck; yet the final bag was impressive — fifty-eight birds, not counting those we’d eaten in camp. When we had breakfasted we packed up to go; there was no point in washing or shaving in a tin basin when we could bath at home in a few hours. The camp looked like a house the morning after a party — everything was distasteful and begrimed, the flies sat about on all that was half-clean, half-eaten, half-done with in four days of thoughtless living. When we had loaded the cars, the patch of bush where we had lived simply looked flattened, as if some animal had lain there. We drove away. My arm, on the rim of the car window, was teak-coloured with sun and dirt. Patterson’s heavy face was seamed with white where he had screwed up his eyes against the sun. John had a poll of red hair, dyed with dust. There was an air about us both spent and refreshed; as we came back again among houses and shops, it seemed to me that I had been far away and a long time. The boot of the car was piled with the thick, soft bodies of birds, their plumage tousled and lying brushed against the grain, as it seems to become the moment life has gone. All the way the old setter lay on the back seat, asleep or dead, one hardly knew; both were drawn so close in her now, there was little difference. We stopped at Patterson’s house first, to divide the bag, and the birds lay heaped on the grass while Hughie dealt them out. The dog did not come when John called to her to give her a dish of water. He said to me, ‘Give old Grace a prod, will you.’ But when I put my hand on her rump she felt like the birds I had just tumbled out of the boot.