THE BLACK HORSE STOOD on a high crest of the Mpumalanga escarpment, the forested scarp plunging away to the Lowveld with the Kruger National Park and Mozambique coastal plain beyond that stretching away, seemingly forever. If you had a telescope, on a clear day you would be able to see a thin dark blue streak that is the Indian Ocean. Huge anvil-head clouds were gathering in the sky over Rhodes Heights game farm and stud. There would be an almighty thunderstorm later that afternoon.
Zulu thought about things, as much as horses can. People who work with them on farms, in yards or mills tend to consider them dullards, willing to do anything any human commands. People who don’t know them well usually appreciate their power and majestic bearing, but don’t think much more about it. But people who work with and ride them for pleasure usually believe that on some level horses are of a higher order, like the Houyhnhnms in Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels which rule over the lowly, violent and degenerate Yahoos, the humans.
Perhaps Zulu had vague memories of events that had led to his being here. And now, here, upon this bank and shoal of time, listless and having never really settled back into domesticated life, would he have thought of jumping his life to come?
There had been much suffering and death during those dry times, and yet it had been the only time – other than the time when he had been a pampered foal – when he would have felt really vital and free. And then of course there were the humans, those strange two-legged companions who were beyond knowing to a horse. There had been good ones and not such good ones, but mostly they had been tolerable in the various places Zulu had found himself. They had fed him when he needed food, and taken passable care of him and the other pitses; excepting during the years when he had run wild.
Would he have remembered he’d been born on a farm? He would have had no memory of his mother, a comely yet tough Kaapse Boereperd mare named Ntombi who had died out in the fields while giving birth during a winter storm. It was unlikely he would have known who his father was, one of two feral desert horses from Namibia that had been brought in to bulk up the farm stock. One named Fire established himself as the alpha male in the paddock. The other, Steel, had been foolish enough to try to mate with Fire’s mare and had the weals to show for it.
Bergsig (mountain view) farm was the place where memory would have begun. It was the only cattle and sheep ranch in the area surrounded by fruit and maize farms. Summers on the high-lying grasslands were delightfully warm but winters could be frigid. The district was known for its cherry farms, a fruit that needed a freeze before the fruit would set. For cattle you needed horses, so all the best paid jobs on Bergsig involved riding. Otherwise you picked and pruned fruit trees and shovelled kraal manure.
In spite of his fine lineage, Zulu was born with a defect that was not easy to spot unless you were trained in such things – other than a white paint splash on his shoulder and one white sock that offset his otherwise pure black colouring. The farrier who tended Bergsig’s herd picked it up on one of his rounds. He noticed a bulge around the coronary band at the top of the foal’s front right hoof.
“Little thing’s got a problem with that front foot,” he told the farmer. “See how the right hoof wall does not expand when he puts weight on it.”
“Will it be a problem?”
“It’s like a club foot in humans, it’s called a box hoof. It wouldn’t be much of an issue for a wild horse, but once you add the weight of a rider it could lead to crippling. Generally it doesn’t, but you can tell only when, or if, it does. There’s no point operating but don’t let the children ride him. By the time he reaches three you’ll get a better idea of how things are shaping up, and if he can be ridden after that.”
“What was Mike saying about the little one?” asked Ma nervously when her husband came inside.
“Poor thing’s got a deformed foot.” He remembered the night he’d brought the newborn into the barn, to be kept warm through the night while snow fell outside. For a long time Melodie, who had stayed awake all night with her mother, hugging and bottle feeding the foal in place of the mother that would not be coming back from the storm, would remember it as the happiest day, or night, of her life.
“Oh no,” Ma put her hand to her mouth, “Will it have to be put down? You’ll have to hide it from Senya and Melodie.”
“No, not yet anyway. We’ll have to watch it and see how things go.”
“You know Senya has given him a name, Zulu,” Ma said later over Sunday lunch. Lamb, always roast lamb on Sundays.
“Pa, he’s completely black. And he’s got a fierce spirit like a Zulu warrior,” Senya declared.
“Except for that one white sock and the splotch on his back,” ever-rational Melodie corrected.
The foal was almost completely black but in the African sunlight his coat glistened in iridescent shades of reds and blue-greens, just like the red-winged starlings that nested in the sandstone cliffs beyond the farm.
“That’s a great name,” Ma reassured the frisky 12-year-old boy.
“What about Shaka, the great Zulu king?” offered Pa.
“Another good name for an African horse,” observed Ma, “but I think Zulu will do just as well.”
Pa agreed with his still attractive but farm-worn wife that they could give the little thing a reprieve.
“But no riding until I say so,” he shook his knife at the children and his expression told them this was serious business. “He’s got one vrot hoof and if he is ridden while it’s still growing it will become deformed and then he’ll have to be put down.”
When the freshness of springtime settled on the foothills, the stallions on the farm were left to run in the open fields of red oat grass that had made the Highveld so attractive to cattle farmers since time before time. The yearlings and mares were moved each morning from the barn to a paddock beyond the cattle kraal. In Zulu’s second year, with no mother, he was allowed to run with the stallions.
By the time Melodie was 12, Senya had started high school and spent little time at home on the farm. Even weekends were sports times for him. Zulu was going on three and the girl would sneak out with him in the afternoons when she knew Pa was away on some errand and Ma was too preoccupied about the house to take any notice. Or so she thought; Ma noticed everything and kept the peace by letting each member of the family know just what they needed to in order to maintain harmony.
Melodie remembered when Zulu was a foal and so was she. On weekends she and Senya would go out on bitter mornings with their Pa to the barn where the horses slept in winter. Senya’s stunt was to find a fresh cowpat, then jump with his bare, icy feet in the steaming pile. Boys!
Once the sun was up and the frost had thawed, Pa would take out the tackle, shackle up the young black horse and begin the day’s schooling. The idea was not to control the horse too tightly, you needed to restrain it but not to “break it” as was so often said.
“Why would you want a broken horse?” Pa asked. “Would you want a broken car, or a broken wife one day?”
“I don’t know much about men, but I do know all boys are broken,” wise-cracked Melodie. Senya punched her.
Melodie understood and felt that intuitive umbilicus between horse and human. She had her own riding horse, a Palomino she had named after her favourite chocolate. At a notch under 15 hands (15-hh in horsey parlance) Top Deck was a large pony or a small horse, depending on whether you were buying or selling.
For her, Top Deck had always been there, more plaything than pet. It was only when Senya left and she got Zulu all to herself that affection developed into a union of spirits. In truth there wasn’t much work that needed to be done on Zulu ever since the children had frolicked in the paddock with their equine mate. The young horse had imprinted on the two children and they were confidants from day one. Very much unlike that which accompanied the schooling of Fire.
It was like a public holiday on the farm the day Pa decided it was time to ride the wild desert animal. He led the animal out the paddock to the nearby ploughed field while the family and all the farm hands gathered around to watch. With a lot of fuss and what climbers refer to as “tight rope”, the halter and bit were affixed around the stallion’s head. Then the saddle tightened while Fire blew defiance and fury. Two handlers held the horse while Pa mounted. The stallion’s sides flicked and flinched and it was hopping from hoof to hoof like a circus horse.
“Okay, let go …” and off they shot, horse and rider, around the sandy field.
Fire jetéd and pirouetted, did back-arched leaps and dying swan dips. Pa held on, legs flailing, all the time turning the horse in figures of eight. It looked like the rider was getting the upper hand and the crowd was clapping accordingly, when Fire suddenly stopped and dropped to his knees, sending Pa over his head to land on his back in a burst of dust and chaff, still holding onto the reins above his head. Pa lay still while the dust settled and the crowd went quiet. Fire stood up. Ma had her hands to her mouth.
Slowly the man moved his limbs, then rose, one joint at a time, stood, dusted himself off and pulled stalks from his hair and clothes. The horse was standing as though nothing untoward had happened. Pa casually walked up to Fire, then unleashed a power-driving right hook to the side of Fire’s head. The horse whimpered and sunk to his knees, its head in the dirt and open mouth full of grit and wheat stubble. An “uush” went up from the audience.
After some seconds Fire lifted his head, sluggishly, blew dust out his mouth and nose and staggered to his feet. Without ceremony Pa slipped back onto the saddle and walked Fire calmly back to the paddock, dismounted and turned to the amazed onlookers.
“A horse that will not be ridden is no use on a farm,” explained the farmer to the crowd. “It’s in his interests, you’ve just got to explain it to him so he understands.”
Steel, on the other hand, did not get past having a saddle put on him and ended up at the horsemeat butchery.
At the end of that year when Senya was home for the long summer holiday, Pa announced over lunch that it was time to see if Zulu was up to being a real horse. “It’s now or never. You cannot colly-moddle a horse, or a person, for ever.”
“Molly-coddle, Dad,” Melodie snikkered.
“Mel,” he ordered, the tone of his voice hinting at the ignominy of his own limited farm education, “go and ask Lettie to take out some apples from the storeroom.”
What he did not know was that Melodie and Senya had been riding Zulu bareback for quite a while before the appointed day.
“Get it right in the beginning and you’ve got yourself a good riding horse for life,” the father explained while Senya was saddling up the black three-year-old. “Push too hard and you end up with a bundle of horse nerves and colic. Then all you’ve bought yourself is some very expensive horse meat.”
As part of Zulu’s schooling, Melodie had been sharing treats with the bouncy foal from the time it started on solid food. The family’s cook, a rotund Sotho woman named Lettie, played along by slipping her carrots when the youngster told her she was hungry: apples in season, sometimes an extra muffin, or a sugary sweet koeksister whenever she baked.
“Okay, are you ready, Sen?”
“Nah, Dad, let Mel ride him. They are in love with each other.”
By that time the 15-year-old Senya preferred to ride Tommy, a big chestnut that suited him far better than “clunky old Zulu”. Just the thought of that misshapen hoof had been enough to make the boy spurn the black Boereperd-cross. Pa had found the young but imposing 17-hand chestnut at an abattoir in a stall awaiting the glue pot and brought him home. He was a large but gentle beast, not too bright but perfect for a growing lad.
“He’s more my kind of horse. I wouldn’t want Zulu to wimp out on me.”
Melodie glared at him. That was her older brother taking out insurance in case they had injured the young horse before his appointed day.
“All right then, you go and ask Lettie for apples. That should at least help to sweeten the deal.”
Lettie was typical of the Sotho women who worked on farms across the Highveld, wide of beam and larger of heart. She’d said her name was Lettuce but Ma had changed it from the day she started in the kitchen before the children were born. White farm children all grew up on the backs of black women like a Lettie, Patience or Beauty.
“Teta, teta, Lettie, (if the maid was a Zulu), or “Pepula, pepula, Lettie” (if she was a Sotho) were among the first words they learned, raising their short fat arms upwards to be lifted onto the comforting back of their black nanny and wrapped snugly inside a thick Basuto blanket.
Lettie’s real name was Lentswalo but she never shared it with white people. Few thought to ask. Lettuce was the short-straw name she’d drawn on her first school day at the mission school. Still, she loved the children from day one and they loved her back. They spent almost all of the days of their early lives in her company, preferring to eat putu and nyama – maize porridge with meat and gravy – on the rough floor of her small, smoky hut, than indoors with their fussy-pants parents. Best was in winter when snow covered the distant peaks.
That was also the time when the grass withdrew its nutrients below the ground, into the roots. The frost-bleached grass scored bare feet like the barbed wire strands that left all farm children with scars. Senya and Melodie would be up before the birds with blankets and bridles, Melodie’s pockets bulging with crisp apples.
In the small orchard behind the farmhouse, beyond the vegetable garden, grew peaches, plums and apricots, but best were the small, tart red-and-green heirloom Hugo apples. They had been planted by the legendary Groot Oupa who had mollycoddled the seedlings up from the Cape on the back of an ox wagon.
Except in cases of extreme cruelty, no horse ever refuses its rider. They will not flinch in a hail of arrows or even cannon fire, riding into the jaws of death, the mouth of hell if asked. When horse and rider move as one, when their senses are tuned into the same weft and warp of the landscape, the horse will take them through or over any veld furniture. It makes for a happy horse and a happy rider.
But some horses are never “broken” in the sense that trainers use the term. A broken horse is a broken spirit as well. During Zulu’s third summer on Bergsig, just when he was coming of age, Steel started playing up. Deprived of the desert freedom and cut off from the farm mares by Fire, he wouldn’t let anyone ride him, cantering and wind-sucking around the field. Then he started cribbing, chewing the fence posts of the paddock as well as his stable door at night, much like a human chain-smoker.
“Stall vices,” said the vet. “I see lots of horses doing it. Boredom. He’ll wear down his teeth. Get colic …”
Both of which he did. When he started biting himself Pa took action. Late one summer evening, with purple clouds sneaking over the grasslands, when the horses were corralled back into the barn, there was no Steel.
You might dispute their intelligence but no one who knows them well would deny that every horse has an abundance of free will and playfulness. Yet they are so fast to please. They will ride hard, for days or weeks if need be, as far as their rider pushes them. Like the golden bay Somerset who, back in 1842, carried Dick King from Durban to Grahamstown, 1 000 kilometres in just 10 days across hostile territory, crossing around 100 rivers in order to raise the alarm and save Port Natal from falling into Voortrekker hands.
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 was 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.