IN ITS EARLY DAYS THE HORSE SAFARI operation closed camp twice a year, once in July when temperatures could drop below freezing at night and it was no fun saddling up in the mornings, and again over mid-summer when the valley sweltered and was sometimes inundated after severe storms. This was also the time when insects proliferated and became a real threat to humans and horses. The horses would be moved to higher ground and the humans would generally go walkabout.
In July at the start of his second year in the valley, Ruff made a call to his old riding pal in Kaapsehoop, the legendary horseman of Mpumalanga Chris Huysman.
“I’m desperate, man. I’m down to just 10 horses before the season even starts. Have you got anything to spare, beg, borrow or steal?”
“Hell bru, you know I have a heavy demand on weekends from the larney folks in Joburg. If I go under 30 I have to start turning away business.”
“How many have you got?”
“Just 30. But you know what, there’s a big auction coming up in Windhoek and I was figuring out how to get there without using up any of my own diesel. What about I get myself to your place (which was about half way) and from there we could go in your rattletrap.”
The auction turned out to be a lame affair – “mules and horse meat”. But Chris knew of a stud run by an old flame, a blonde Südwester – “still a looker for a middle-aged woman who’s spent her whole life in the desert.” So they set their noses towards the westing sun and Swakopmund on the Atlantic coast.
Fräulein Sofie was delighted to see them, but even more so the thick roll of notes they exchanged for her surplus stock.
“Can you still sing that song?” she teased Chris as they were bidding farewell.
Chris smiled as he skipped up to the driver’s seat and slammed the door closed. As they were driving out the farm yard he put his head out the window, cowboy hat held aloft in the air and belted out: “Far across the blue waters, lives an old German’s daughter …” and the rest was lost in dust and corrugations.
With just enough cash left for fuel and food, the great Namibian horse expedition wended its slow way back through Windhoek, Gobabis, Ghanzi, Maun, Nata, Francistown and Selebi-Phikwe, arriving back on the north bank of the Limpopo wasted but flushed with success.
The horse safari was bolstered by the arrival of fresh blood, most notably Kalahari who was destined to play the leading role in one of Limpopo Valley’s most memorable incidents. The 16-hand light dun with a dark tail and mane was of largely Hanovarian blood. His father had been a champion show horse and he and Kalahari’s mother were killed one night by a full-maned desert lion that lurked in the area. Young Kalahari escaped the fray but had deep scars on his neck as a reminder. The bushbuck ram that finally did him in might not have appeared to be a more lethal opponent.
The new safari season at Limpopo Valley started with a bang. They were getting everything spit-polished for the first ride when Ruff got a call over the radio from Garth du Preez.
“You’d better come over to Pete’s Pool. I’ve got Moany here and it’s not pretty.” Whatever incident concerned the Bushman usually involved collateral.
The workhorse Land Cruiser was nowhere to be found, so Ruff virtually kick-started an ancient Landy Series 2 that must have been made from old bully beef tins, and raced over to the artificial watering hole named after a much respected game ranger. There was Garth and a few of his staff standing next to the Horse Safaris’ Cruiser, the back end sticking out of the water. Ruff’s heart skipped. Moany was sitting on a calcrete boulder doing what he did best. Moaning.
“The old fool is drunk and mad as a honey badger,” Garth pointed to the rocking man.
It turned out Moany had broken into the trunk that held the camp liquor stores and knocked a big hole in it. Ruff would have to find a new vehicle, a new supply of hard tack and a new groom in a hurry. But Moany always came back. He would sit under a tree on the fringe of camp and be a presence. He would sit there for days if necessary until someone gave him something to do. His reality was that he had nowhere else to go. His ancestors had hunted hereabouts but his own people were all gone.
Although they were still struggling to turn a profit, Ruff could no longer handle all the guiding work himself. He had put out the word that he was looking for guides who could ride and what he got was one who could ride but was not a guide, and a guide who couldn’t ride much. They were the only two who applied so he took them voetstoets. He would just have to bloody-well train them himself.
First was an Aussie who had ridden round-up on stock farms, but his first job had been as an electrician in Brisbane. At age 16 he had left school in the horse-and-copper settlement of Cloncurry to ply his trade and so the name Sparkie had stuck. His double legacy at Limpopo Valley Horse Safaris would be that he hooked up the camp to solar power and that he finally got his girl.
“You only need a big unit to fire up those big Minus-40 chest freezers for a few hours a day,” he instructed Ruff. “And then you don’t need to power light bulbs with a flippin’ nuclear generator mate.”
The other was Harvey, a qualified game ranger who was fast-tracked in horsemanship. His real name was Haveman Kabous, both surnames Ruff observed (another odd Afrikaans custom with naming sons). At school they had called him Hawemout, or breakfast oats, which in time become Harvey.
Around the campfire they discovered The Man From Snowy River was both of their favourite movie. They formed a riotous stand-up team around the campfire, Harvey singing old South African favourites like Ag Pleez Daddy (also known as the Ballad of the Southern Suburbs – “won’t you take us down to Duhbin … popcorn, chewing gum, peanuts and bubble gum, Pepsi Cola, ginger beer and Canada Draaaa”). To which Sparkie might respond with a stirring, sometimes staggering, rendition of Waltzing Matilda or A Pub with no Beer. Only after extreme provocation would he pull out one of his knock-down party tricks – reciting a poem by Banjo Paterson.
Soon enough, Harvey and Sparkie became legends of Limpopo Valley and Ruff had his hands full keeping the two of them out of mischief and their hands off female guests and interns. In time a posh Australian intern arrived who was duly named Sparkette. They kept a watchful distance from one another until the night Sparkie, nursing a mugful of the house wine, Famous Grouse, had slowly pulled in the attention of everyone with a quiet, slow rendition of “Clancy of the Overflow” (“Clancy’s gone to Queesland droving, and we don’t know where he are”).
When Sparkette saw some of the drooling looks around the campfire she thought it best she make the first move. She and Sparkie hit it off famously and before not too long she and the rough-edged stockman packed their bags and headed back to her family’s horse and wine farm near Adelaide.
Up to that time the only permanent female staff member was Joyce the chef and she showed no inclination for socialising. She sang in a church choir “back home” and spent her free time reading recipe books and listening to religious programmes on a radio in her tent.
In any business, when you first get going, there are little ambushes the business manuals call “barriers to entry”: things like you didn’t know you had to get a licence, that it might take three years, or the supply chain did not get as far as you and you were left with mouths to feed and only tinned beans, or the local mafia had that stream of income sewn up and they sent you a polite note to move on.
Ruff had not intended to work through the mid-summer months, when the Limpopo Valley sweated and was often pelted by thunderstorms that turned the ground underfoot into sticky goo and the rivers into torrents. But that was when many people in the northern hemisphere wanted to go on safari to Africa, so he was forced by the agents who were the lifeblood of his business to keep the stables open long past his good sense told him was wise.
He didn’t give a toss if people got hot or sick. Wet your sheet and fall asleep before it dries, would be his advice. But even though a strict regime of daily spraying had been instigated, his horses were still succumbing to those tiny devil midges. His original batch of horses was being thinned out but luckily the village replacements he was obliged to buy were a hardy lot that did not require any pampering. They in turn had never had it so good.
Ruff had an old mate, Blewitt, from his time growing up on a cattle farm in the rocky Matobos region of Zimbabwe, south of Bulawayo, the country’s second biggest city. They’d been through school together, rode horses, shot guineafowl, smoked Gunston cigarettes and generally got into all the trouble they could find and then, when they had to, did basic military training together. His real name was Bruce but he was known as Sluice because everything he touched went down the chute. He was the kind of guy who was great fun to have around when you were young and bulletproof but as you got older and more gun shy, you hoped he would remain a great fire-side story and no closer than a telephone call away.
It was around the end of October when the phone call came. October in the big valleys of southern Africa is suicide month. Winter is a memory, the rains are still a month or more off. There is virtually no food left in the veld and the animals are skeletal, desperate and panicky. Dust is everywhere and everything.
“No need for salt, thanks, I’ll just add dust.” It’s the month of the sun when everyone is watching the sky for signs of rain clouds and everyone and everything is electrified and on edge. Luckily it is also one of the quietest months in the safari business.
“Hey Ruff, howzit bru?” It was Blewitt. Ruff stiffened. “Look bru, I’m in a bit of a spot up here …” The last Ruff heard he had been working for a horse safari business up in the Okavango Delta.
“… messed with another guy’s girl and had to do a midnight runner from Maun. I just need a place to lay low for a few days. This guy, a huge Viking called Gunner (pronounced “gooner”), is looking for me. Gunner Gunnersen, can you believe. He’s a professional hunter.”
“Jeez, you really know how to stack up the crap, Blewitt,” Ruff whistled.
Messing with someone else’s woman has always been risky business. When that someone happens to be a big game hunter it would be useful if you were far away. And if they came from Maun, best you were a ninja.
A few days turned to weeks. To earn his keep Ruff got Blewitt to do all the stuff he’d put down on mental sticky notes: mend saddles, mend saddle bags torn by a hundred kinds of thorn trees. On the bank of the Limpopo River, 1 000 kilometres from Maun, Blewitt thought his troubles were dead and buried. Easy come, easy go.
He was shaken awake at seven one morning by one of the camp staff. Phone call for him in the office, urgent. He guessed someone would be offering him a job, or his father had died and left him a fortune. It was Maun: Gunner was on his trail.
“And don’t come back here, ever!” warned the woman in the middle.
Ruff was out with Harvey and two black grooms checking out new areas they could use for their soon-to-be-launched wilderness trails. The cats were away, so to say, so Blewitt looked around to see if he could find any cheese lying around that might bolster his running-away bag.
He snooped through the office. With his Leatherman he managed to prise open a cabinet in which he found the operation’s stash. Around 50 000 pula, or 25 000 dollars at the time. Blewitt divided the pile in half and closed the cabinet door – then reopened it and slipped a few more wads onto his pile.
I’m a man on the run, he figured. I’m gonna need it more than Ruff. He’ll understand. Good old Ruff. The problem was, LVHS was in serious financial troubles and that was money Ruff had borrowed from his landlord on punishing terms.
The wilderness trails were his last hope and Ruff had poured all his time and every spare cent into marketing them overseas. They were due to launch early in the new year and the bookings had started coming in. Months spent with his lanky frame jammed into economy class airline seats and flea-ridden hostel beds across Europe had to pay off.
Added to his woes was that he had severed ties with his former wife – or more correctly she with him – along with any leverage he might have had with the bank. The money Blewitt had taken was all Ruff had between running his own business in the bush and itinerant work on construction sites across the sub-continent.
By late summer, when all the money was gone, Ruff had nowhere else go. And so it was that on a bright summer’s morning, Cape turtle doves cooing in the wild fig trees – work harder, work harder – and everything seemingly well with the world, Ruff Stevens went with his custom-made O’Farrell cowboy hat in his hands (“the finest you can buy – made in Santa Fe, New Mexico”) to call on Randolph “Ratty” Michaels, the owner of Mashatu Private Game Reserve and his boss. Everyone called him simply the Boss.
And that was the day Ruff found himself working for the Boss. With very little left to bargain with, Ratty had tied him up in Gordian contractual knots and ensured he would never walk away with anything much of worth other than the clothes he stood in and his expensive cowboy hat.
Ruff walked back along in the shade of the giant sycamore figs that lined the riverbank, a group of noisy green wood hoopoes flocking from fruiting tree to fruiting tree. They weren’t interested in the fruit but in the insects that swarmed around the ripening bunches of wild figs. To Nguni speakers these birds are hlekabafazi, cackling old women. They seemed to be cackling at him. He swore and kicked up little explosions of dust as he trod.
“Blewitt …” Ruff Stevens spat a ball of spit into the dust. “You really did blow it for me this time!”
It was as though a storm was raging around Ruff’s head, his face was flushed and he would have surely killed his old friend right there and then – he spat again at the thought of him – if he had appeared. But he felt so sick at heart he would rather not see the thieving bastard ever again. He did, more than once, but the next time was on a wanted poster at the border post. Although it did not mention for what crime he was wanted Ruff imagined the worst he could.
The low-pressure system that enveloped Ruff’s head as he walked along the bank of the Limpopo was like a party balloon drifting off from a birthday picnic party compared to the meteorological storm cell that was at that time developing over the Indian Ocean and heading for Reunion Island.