THE PEAKS OF the Bvumba and Penhalonga were lost in low clouds. No wonder they were called the Mountains of the Mist. Beneath me, Grey shivered, silvery as the mist through which we rode. On each side, the steep escarpments were covered in thick woodland, with leaves of rich gold and red. Clouds billowed in low gullies, swirling in the grasslands where the forest thinned. We wound between walls of dense pine forest, at last reaching the highlands where the trees grew more sparsely and the crags were covered in smaller scrub, succulent aloes, and the gentle mauve sugarbushes with their feathery faces and razor-edged leaves. The valleys around us were home to small coffee plantations, and when the wind blew in the right direction, their scent filled the air. We rode on until at last we broke out of the tendrils of cloud and we could look down through the shifting reefs: the ravaged farmlands of Zimbabwe on one side; the lush green bush of Mozambique on the other.
It had been two years since we had fled Biri Farm; now we rode through these mountains plotting yet another move. This one was to be bigger than the many we had made before; this time, we were not merely going to another farm but plotting our way out of the country itself. Beside me, Pat was riding Shere Khan, her regal eyes looking first at one country and then at the next; behind me, Kate and Deja-vous brought up the rear. The Bvumba had been a good home, a place of peace in which we could regroup and consolidate our herd, as well as take in many new horses—but, like all good things, we had known from the very first that it wouldn’t last. In the east lay the wild, virgin bushlands of Mozambique, a nation just recovering from a bitter twenty-year civil war. We had come into the mountains searching for a way to herd the horses through without facing the tyranny of the official border crossing; that we were even contemplating such a move was proof, if ever it was needed, of the madness consuming our own country.
The Bvumba was the eastern highlands, running down the border between Zimbabwe and Mozambique like a jagged serpent’s spine. We had been living among the mountain peaks at a cottage called Partridge Hill, clinging to a steep escarpment with rich green forest on every side. Partridge Hill hung above the beautiful border town of Mutare, where the wide streets were lined with beautiful trees, heavy with blossom, and the people were so peaceful it was easy to forget the ravages Mugabe was wreaking on the rest of our country. Our new home was small, just big enough for Pat, Kate, and me, with some workers in the grounds. Granny Beryl had stayed with us for a time, until we were at last lucky enough to find her a home back in England, but there had been absolutely no space for the horses. It felt strange not to have them near, but we had found grazing land for them on several smallholdings and farms dotted around Mutare itself, as well as the fields of a game park where they could roam with antelope and giraffe. They’d had to be separated into smaller groups, but though it was sad to see them divided, we knew it was a good thing. If one of those farms was to fall, we would always have a backup onto which we could take its horses.
For a time, we had found peace. For a time, we had been able to forget. Then, the reality of the new Zimbabwe caught up with us. One by one, the farms at which the horses were kept began to fall. One by one, we had to find new homes for the horses. Now, every last smallholding or farm around Mutare was gone, taken by some crony from Mugabe’s inner circle. The herd, vast and unwieldy, had been brought together again. Now they were all holed up on the grounds of Kate’s school, but they could not stay there long. We were running out of food, we were running out of space, and we had been living on borrowed time for too long.
I turned in the saddle and looked over my shoulder, realizing that I had pushed some way ahead. Through the mist, Shere Khan’s muzzle appeared, her head held high as if she considered herself queen of the mountains. For a moment she hung there, as if suspended in the swirling gray mist, before Pat appeared, sitting tall in the saddle.
“Which way?” I began.
Pat shook his head. “Back the way we came. There isn’t a pass this high.”
We coaxed the horses to turn and dropped back down a gully, entering a clearing between tall gum trees.
“Nothing?” Kate asked, bringing Deja-vous around.
I shook my head. “Not yet.”
At once, Pat hauled Shere Khan to a halt and lifted a hand to wave us down. Behind him, I squeezed Grey with my thighs and guided him to a stop. Kate and Deja-vous drew alongside.
“What is it?” I asked.
“There’s been army here,” said Pat. “Look …”
In the roots of one of the tall gum trees lay a ragged backpack. There had been a camp here; I could see the circle of stones and charred earth where somebody had lit and then quickly doused a wood fire. It was not the first time we had seen such a thing. We were not the only ones who had dreamed of jumping the border, and army patrols on either side of the frontier knew how tempting it was to try. Whoever had been here had been waiting for the most opportune moment to pass, unseen, over the imaginary line between nations. A patrol must have stumbled upon him, and, ditching his worldly possessions, he had fled.
A terrible shiver ran down my spine. I wondered how close we were, even now, to watchful eyes.
“Dad …” Kate began, as if about to voice the same fear we all had. “What if there are border patrols when you try to take the horses through here?”
I tried to imagine what it might be like. More than a hundred horses herded through these mountains, only to come face-to-face with some opportunistic border patrol.
“The border patrols are the least of it,” Pat went on. “A border guard you can buy off, if you’ve got the right mind and money.” He looked back, as if he might see some wily Zimbabwean border guard watching us from the mountain range. “It’s the Mozambican authorities I’m worried about. Once the horses are in Mozambique, how will we be able to account for them?” He stopped Shere Khan. A strange look ghosted over his face. “Damn it, Mandy, we just can’t take them through here …”
“Pat,” I said, coaxing Grey closer to Shere Khan, “we have to. You said it yourself. We can’t stay in Zimbabwe any longer.”
It was the reason we had come to the Bvumba in the first place. Those first nights after fleeing Biri Farm had been terrible, but we had known we had to make a decision. It had seemed like a prophecy: one day, we would be fleeing Zimbabwe and taking our horses with us. In anticipation of that, we knew we had to head for a border, find a place to stay, and organize ourselves. Wherever we went, our new home had to be a place from which we could very quickly escape. The nearest border to Biri Farm had been the Bvumba, the nearest nation the poor Mozambique, still reeling from its bitter civil war. That was why we had headed into the east.
“We can’t risk marching them through the mountains.” Pat’s hands tightened on Shere Khan’s reins, as if he did not mean to let her go. “We didn’t save them from those farms just to lose them here.”
I looked up. Perhaps we had been fooling ourselves, thinking we could lead the herd through the mountains unnoticed.
“What now?” I asked, my hands tangled in Grey’s mane.
“Now,” said Pat, “we round up the herd. We take them to the border crossing.” He reined Shere Khan around and pointed her to a sloping mountain road, back to Mutare. “And we pray, Mandy. We pray the fates are with us.”
Two years ago, the idea of abandoning Zimbabwe forever had been a distant dread. Now that it was real, I got to thinking about how the past two years had changed us and the herd, the exact circumstances that had brought us to this. I could hardly believe how wildly our lives had transformed since the day we brought our young children to Crofton and Two Tree. That we were about to lead the horses into the unknown again scarcely seemed credible.
After being driven off Biri, we had found a home at another friend’s farm while he marshaled his resources to find a new home in Australia. The farm was in Headlands and called Bushwazee, but we had been there a scant four months when Mugabe’s war vets descended again. Once again, we were left rustling our own horses off the farm. Headlands had been east of Biri, and then we traveled even farther east, until the dark spine of the Bvumba Mountains promised us sanctuary. We set up house high in the hills at Partridge Hill, found Kate a new school in the town of Mutare—where she could live with us through the weeks and stop boarding—and began to make alliances with all the local farmers so that we could bring our horses with us, too. In the end, the herd was divided and taken to a dozen farms around Mutare. Pat threw himself into working with the horses, establishing training grounds as we had done at Biri Farm, and approached schooling all the foals in the herd as if it was not only his profession but his very calling. I had never seen my husband so energized since the earliest days of Crofton, when we were trying to found the farm. Pat was no longer a farmer; he was a horseman through and through, rising at dawn each day to go out training with Brutus, Lady, and all the other foals we had gathered.
And, meanwhile, the phone just kept on ringing as people called to tell us about their horses.
Rob Lucas was a farmer who had first contacted us while we had the horses at Headlands. He was not the only one. The rumors of what we were doing seemed to have gone before us, and the calls began to come from farther afield. Fanta, a fifteen-year-old chestnut, came from a prominent farming family in the Marondera area, along with a group of older horses, some of them lame, whose owner insisted they had to accompany the beautiful mare. Fanta was one of the most delightful horses I have ever come across, and her friendly nature and wonderful personality instilled confidence in so many children who learned to ride her. There were others too—but by far the most intriguing plea we heard came from Rob Lucas. For Rob, like us, had turned his home into a refuge for abandoned horses.
Here was a man we simply had to go and see.
We drove back along the winding Bvumba roads, through the wide, floral streets of Mutare and past the site of Kate’s school, Hillcrest. Mutare did not seem as barren and run-down as the rest of Zimbabwe, for its shops were lined with goods smuggled over the mountains from Mozambique. Here, people did not have to go hungry while watching their hard-earned wages evaporate in a mist of hyperinflation. We stopped, briefly, to look in at the farm where Grey, Fleur, Duchess, and the other Two Tree horses were grazing in their paddock, before taking the road deeper inland.
We reached Rob Lucas’s farm, leaving the highway to follow a dirt road up to the farmhouse. Just like in Zimbabwe’s towns and roadways, there was a sense of decay about the place. The fields sat empty, devoid of all crops, and in places the trees had been felled and carted away.
We saw the horses in the field before we reached the farmhouse. There must have been fifty of them, including ten foals. From the look of them, some of them must have been stranded on jambanjaed farms for long weeks or months before being spirited away. A strawberry roan appeared to have a sunken back, much like Pink Daiquiri, and his withers were thin and ragged. The silvery mare at his side looked weak and rangy, and when a dark gelding turned to shuffle away from our oncoming car, I saw that he was trailing behind him a lame leg.
Pat climbed out of the car and hung over the fence for a moment, gazing at the herd.
“They’re huddling together,” Pat observed.
He was right. The herd seemed skittish, moving as one to shuffle away from us. The only one who did not move was a tiny blue roan foal, its eyes wide with bewilderment.
“There’s something wrong here.”
“What do you mean?”
Pat moved to swing back into the car. “Not even Princess is as spooked as those horses, and think about what she went through.”
We rolled on up to the farmhouse, where Rob Lucas was waiting to meet us. Rob was a big man, in his fifties, with the same harassed look we had seen on countless others from whom we had taken horses. He shook Pat’s hand vigorously.
“That’s a big herd out there,” I said, wondering just how many Pat thought we might take.
“It’s been a nightmare,” Rob admitted, tramping around the corner of the farmhouse as I hurried to catch up. Curiously, we were walking away from the horses. “The war vets came a year ago. We fought them off. We even managed a court order … but what does that matter in Zimbabwe?”
“What changed?” I asked as we rounded the corner.
“Oh, everything.”
At the back of the farmhouse, tall fences marked the edge of a small game park, just like Nick Swanepoel had kept on Avalon Farm. In front of the gates, Rob’s Land Rover was parked. He slipped behind the wheel and gestured for Pat and me to climb up front.
“Just make sure you keep the windows wound up,” he said.
“Why aren’t we going toward your horses?” I asked.
“You’ll see.”
One of Rob’s workers pulled back the gates and we rolled within. The game park was wild and fairly wooded—though, in truth, it did not look so very different from the rest of the farm, now that so many of the fields had been ceded. Once we had driven through, I looked back. There was something ominous about the blank expression of the man on the other side as the gates came together and sealed us within.
We drove along a meandering road of red, potted with deep holes, and ground to a halt in the shadows cast by a stand of msasa trees. In the front seat, Pat moved as if to step out of the car, but Rob reached out and held him back.
“Just look,” he said, lifting a hand to point. “Over there.”
I squinted through the trees. On a great mound of red ringed with small bushes lounged a lioness. The sunlight spilled around her, but she was not asleep. I could very clearly see one eye open, methodically considering her surroundings.
I saw a flash of yellow in the corner of my eye and turned suddenly.
“There!”
The lioness on the mound was not alone. Now I could see a huge lion, perhaps the leader of this pride, coming up out of dense scrub. My eyes must have become attuned, as suddenly I could see other patches of scrubland moving; long grass and thornbushes resolved themselves into the forms of other lions. We were, I decided, quite surrounded.
“They’re rescue lions,” Rob explained, “from the droughts in the 1990s. You remember?”
“Oh,” I said, remembering Crofton withering under that interminable sun, “we remember.”
“I’ve kept them here for so long, done everything I could for them … They’re happy. Strong. Free of disease. You see how well they look? But it’s coming,” Rob said, his eyes still trained on the king of the pride. “I’m getting out.”
Rob looked suddenly downcast, and my heart went out to him. I knew only too well what it was like to feel trapped, that you couldn’t just pack your bags and flee, no matter how difficult the circumstance. Rob had the same look in his eyes as Pat sometimes had, as I sometimes saw staring back at me out of the mirror. Just as we could not abandon our horses, Rob could not abandon his lions.
“We had friends,” I began. “Neighbors of ours where we used to farm—Rory and Lindy Hensman. They took their elephants south, tried to get them into South Africa.”
“I have it in mind to do the same. Botswana, Tanzania, South Africa … It’s all the same.”
“Mozambique?”
Rob weighed it up. “They don’t have lions there. They don’t have anything. They massacred it all during their war. No, I think I’m heading south as well.”
“Rob,” Pat suddenly interjected, “where do all those horses come from?”
“Well, Pat, during normal times farmers used to send carcasses of animals that had died on farms to the lions. This included old and sick horses. Since the land invasions, desperate farmers who have to leave in a hurry have been loading up their horses and dumping them here.” I heard the exasperation in Rob’s voice. “We’ve had ten mares foal down in one of the pens.” He looked at Pat in despair. “I can’t just shoot them all.
“I can’t just leave them to the war vets, either,” Rob went on, “and I don’t want to have to put them all down. I was hoping you might …”
Rob brought the engine back to life and we trundled on. In the long grasses at the edge of the mound, a giant, broken rib cage sat, stripped of all meat and slowly being bleached by the sun. No farmer, no horse trainer, no man who had studied animal sciences could mistake that rib cage for anything other than what it really was.
“You release the horses into this game park?” Pat’s voice was cool, but I wondered what was happening inside.
“No!” Rob gasped. “I shoot them, Pat. When the lions need to feed, I go out into that field and I shoot one of them.” He paused, shaking his head in disbelief. “I mean, I’m not a monster!”
The horror of it struck me hard in the face. That was why the horses had seemed so skittish. Yet, when I looked at Rob, the way his face was creased, the horror seemed to evaporate. There was horror of a different kind in the modern Zimbabwe—the war vets, the government-sponsored violence, the murders on the doorsteps of once-happy farms; that Rob had been reduced to this was not something to hate him for.
We drove back up, circling the wary lions and leaving the game park by the same gates. In the paddock, the horses were waiting. When we climbed over the fence, they seemed to turn in nervous circles against one another.
“They can smell it,” I said. “They’re petrified.”
I noticed a beautiful gray horse with a silvery mane staring at me from the middle of the herd. I felt close to tears. I did not want to imagine what these horses might have been through, only to wind up here, their grisly end delayed but not forever. If things had been different, any one of our herd might have landed here. I pictured Deja-vous, Princess, Brutus, and regal Shere Khan—all of them, lining up to be shot and served up.
Pat and I drifted into the herd. A string of blue roan foals scattered at our approach. Behind us, Rob Lucas lingered at the fence.
“Pat,” I tentatively began, “I know what you’re thinking, but …”
Pat was not looking at me. He had his eyes fixed on the smallest foal, pushed up against the flank of a big gray mare whose eyes flashed back at us.
“How can we not look after them?”
“Because we have more than we can cope with already. Because we don’t have a farm. Because our horses are scattered on smallholdings that might be taken away any minute. Because, the more horses we have, the harder it’s going to be to get over those mountains and escape, if the time really comes. That’s why, Pat.”
“You said it yourself—they’re petrified. What would you do if it was Grey here? Deja-vous? Shere Khan?”
He had me tied up in knots, spinning a web with the very same fears to which I dared not give voice.
“How much money do we even have, Pat?”
Pat would not answer.
“How are we going to keep them?” I stopped. I could see that the gears were grinding in his head; he knew that I was right. “What if we can’t look after them properly? You’re going to have to shoot them, Pat. When that day comes, you’re going to have to line up the horses we love so much and put bullets into each of their heads.”
Pat stopped dead. “Better a bullet then or a bullet now?”
I looked at him, hopeless.
“Let’s get a truck.” He paused. “Load them all up, Mandy. Every last one …”
On a smallholding outside Mutare, we stood among ten terrified blue roan foals and a mother mare who would not let us near. Getting a halter onto her had been an ordeal, heaving her onto a truck even worse, but now she stood here, among the foals who might easily have ended up as lion food. They milled hopelessly in a makeshift corral. At the rope, Pat and I considered them closely. Kate, who had the week off from Hillcrest School, was trying to coax the tiniest foal, a feeble little thing we had named Texas, to the rope, but Texas only huddled by the mother mare, Montana.
The land belonged to Sally Dilton-Hill, and most of the Crawford horses were already grazing here. In fact, every time I came here, there seemed to be more: Viper, a purebred Arabian whose owner had been forced to find him a new home when he had somehow managed to nip off a groom’s nipple; a big gray mare named Megan; and Spicegirl, a young bay mare with a Thoroughbred-type gait and a sweet, gentle face. We had brought the Lucas foals here, from the jaws of the lions, because Sally was renowned as an expert trainer, and we wondered if she might help us get them over their instinctive terror.
The arenas that had grown up here dwarfed what we had built at Biri Farm. Here was a great training ring of gum poles where horses could be isolated from the outside world and have their join-up performed; here was a field where dressage routines could be practiced and drilled in; here was a gymkhana arena where a horse ready for riding could be put through its paces. Many of the Crawford foals and the youngest horses we had taken from Two Tree were being saddled and schooled—and, with the herd having swollen to many more than a hundred, training them was a full-time occupation. Indeed, we had taken to treating it like a business. Along with Sally Dilton-Hill, we employed many people to help with the training; perhaps Pat’s favorite was the eighty-year-old veteran who had been a significant figure in the Rhodesian military, back in the days before Mugabe and Zimbabwe had ever begun.
Sally climbed tentatively into the corral. The horses, sensing danger, moved as if to scatter—but there was nowhere to go.
“What do you think? He must have just been shooting them in front of each other,” Pat said.
“A horse is never lost,” said Sally. “Certainly not a foal.”
We had first learned about Sally’s skill in training animals when we met her donkeys. By some strange enchantment, Sally had taught her donkeys how to count. I could see them, even now, in a paddock on the other side of the corral. All Sally had to do was lift up her fingers to illustrate a simple sum, and Arabella the donkey, with her wonderful black eyes and long lashes, would scratch out the appropriate answer in the dirt with her hoof. A woman like that, we thought, could do wonders with our most unruly horses.
In the roped-off corral, Sally tried to get close to the mother mare, Montana. Around her, the foals—Texas, Arizona, California, Indiana, and Colorado—scattered, but Montana stood firm. She rolled her head angrily, eyes shaking. Then she released a vicious snort, rising slightly from her forelegs as she did so, as if to box Sally back. Sally lifted her open palms, as if to convince Montana she was no threat, but the big mare was not convinced. My heart sank. What had this horse been through on her jambanjaed farm? How many of her old herd had she seen shot down and carted off to the lions?
One eye on Montana and one eye on us, Sally backed away.
“I think we have our work cut out for us here, Pat.”
Among the foals, Montana threw her head back and glared.
The peaks surrounding Partridge Hill were home to other families as well, many of whom had abandoned their farms and come for sanctuary here, just the same as we runaway Retzlaffs. One morning, as Pat prepared to take Kate into Mutare for school and run a circuit of the surrounding farms, checking on all our horses, one of those neighbors appeared on the doorstep with a plaintive look in her eyes.
The visitor introduced herself as Colleen Taylor. She lived just down the mountainside, her little smallholding—a tiny flower farm, replete with greenhouses and tunnels—besieged on all sides by the dense Bvumba woodland. Colleen was tall and dark, and almost as regal-looking as Shere Khan.
“It’s Pat Retzlaff, isn’t it?” she began.
Pat nodded, stoutly.
“Pat, I wondered if I could beg your help. You see, I’d heard you were the horse people …”
Colleen Taylor’s smallholding sat lower in the Bvumba than Partridge Hill, a wide basin of open land between fringes of forest, from which several gullies climbed and others dropped away. Though it was not very far, the way between the two homes was treacherous, so Pat and Colleen traveled there by road. As they turned from the sheer mountain pass along which Kate and I were hurtling, already late for school, they were flanked by Colleen’s greenhouses and tunnels. Aloes grew in great banks along the sides of the track, mingling with wafts of coffee from a plantation deeper in the mountains to make a curious scent.
In a paddock outside the small farmhouse stood three horses, a beautiful dark bay mare, a similar gelding who could easily have been the mare’s brother; and a smaller, lean foal, a bay who seemed to be forcing his head between the sparring adults.
Pat stood with his foot propped against the car.
“You see my problem?” Colleen asked.
“I’m not sure I …”
“You soon will. Come on, Pat, let’s take a closer look.”
Pat climbed into the paddock and tentatively approached the dark bay mare. The mare seemed to lock her eyes on Pat, shifting to face him head-on. At her side, the foal cantered away, but the black gelding stood firm, eyeing Pat with a look that could only be described as gleeful malevolence.
Pat went to lay a hand softly on the mare’s muzzle, but before he could touch her, the gelding sprang into action. Thrusting himself between them, he rolled back his lips and whipped his head from side to side, teeth bared, preparing to nip. Quickly, Pat whipped his hand away, took a step back. He was just craning a look over his shoulder when suddenly Colleen cried out.
“Pat, quick!”
Too late, Pat realized what she was saying. In the corner of his eye, he saw the dark bay mare lift her foreleg and kick it out with the precision and ferocity of a bare-knuckle boxer. Turning against the blow, he stepped to his left. The mare’s leg whipped past him and back again. Once it was planted firmly on the ground, the mare lifted her eyes to pierce him, while the gelding at her side still rolled his head, lips parted to show razor teeth.
“They’re devil horses,” Colleen began, on the other side of the fence.
This time, Pat did not take his eyes off the mare.
“She’s Magie Noire, or Black Magic in English. The gelding’s Philippe.”
“Brother and sister?”
“I never had that bond with my brother …”
“These aren’t your horses, are they?”
“What gave it away?” Colleen paused. “I’m not a horse person, Pat. Not like you and Mandy. I know a skewbald from a piebald, a stirrup from a halter, but … There used to be a family, lived high up in the Bvumba. The Nielsens. They had a holiday plot here, so they came to stay when they were thrown off their farm. In the end, they could only stay a year. It got to them. They had to get out. They’re back in Belgium, but they had to leave their horses behind. I said I’d do what I could, but …” For the first time, the beautiful Colleen betrayed her worry; her face creased and she breathed out slowly. “I can’t deal with them anymore, Pat. I can’t get near them, can’t feed them, can’t dip them. I certainly can’t ride them …”
Pat’s focus was still trained on the mare Colleen had called Black Magic. She was a small, statuesque mare, perhaps fourteen hands high, and her coat shimmered like a black tar road under heavy rain. Her brother, Philippe, had calmed down, but he stood so tightly to his sister that Pat did not doubt what would happen if he tried to get close. These two horses were thick as horse thieves.
“What did you say the farmer’s name was?”
“Nielsen. He farmed in the Mvuma area.”
Pat arched an eyebrow. A thousand warm childhood memories came to him.
“I knew Nielsen,” Pat breathed. “From when I was a boy.” A smile blossomed on Pat’s face, quickly dominating his every feature. “He was the most wonderful rider. I used to go to those gymkhanas. I used to go to those paper chases. I watched him playing polo. Those horses of his … I’d never seen anything like them.”
His eyes returned to Black Magic and Philippe, the foal hidden behind them.
“Nielsen’s horses?” he wondered, aloud. “What about the foal?”
“He’s Rebel. He was with Nielsen, too. He was one of the wild horses.”
“The wild horses?”
“You know, the herd they had, down near Mvuma …”
In the land around Mvuma, south of Harare, there lived almost three hundred wild horses, a herd made up from the descendants of farm runaways and old Rhodesian cavalry horses, unaccounted for at the end of the war. A trust of farmers in the area had collectively taken over stewardship of the herd, letting them roam free but taking care of their veterinary needs and rescuing injured animals whenever the need arose. Nielsen, it seemed, had been one of those men.
“Rebel’s all that’s left …” said Pat, as the terrible story seemed to tell itself.
Colleen nodded. “When they started being driven off their farms, the farmers got together. They couldn’t leave the herd to be butchered by the war vets. They didn’t deserve that.”
The image was a dark and bloody one and brought to mind the vet Rob Gordon’s heartbreaking recollections of putting down countless herds of livestock.
“They shot them,” breathed Pat.
“But Rebel was just a tiny foal. Nielsen took him in, brought him up here with Black Magic and Philippe. And now …”
Pat stepped out of the paddock. “I don’t know how I’m going to get them out of these mountains,” he admitted.
Colleen’s face seemed to light up. “Then you’ll help?”
“I’ll be back tomorrow morning, with halters and ropes,” Pat said. Then, with a final look at the tempestuous, snorting Black Magic, he rolled his eyes at Colleen. “And help,” he said. “I think I’m going to need it.”
The next day, Pat and I went back to Colleen’s plot and, distracting Philippe from Black Magic with handfuls of horse cubes and hay, managed to fit halters and ropes to each. With Rebel trailing behind, we wound our way down the mountain road and around Mutare’s border, at last reaching the land where Duchess, Marquess, and twenty of our other mares were grazing. Black Magic had been tempestuous beneath Pat, twisting her head against his every command, but Pat was growing to be an expert horse trainer now, and he had an idea. Sometimes, if a human cannot convince a horse to behave, other horses might be able to do a much better job.
We released Black Magic into the herd of mares. As one, they watched the new intruder. Pat reached his hand out, and I followed it to see Shere Khan, gazing imperiously at the devilish horse who had just joined the herd.
“You just watch,” he said. “In a month’s time, they’ll have sorted her out.”
It was true. Every time Black Magic kicked out or butted one of the other mares, the herd turned against her, driving her out to stand on its edges, refusing to allow her back in. Every time she was readmitted and kicked out again, they would drive her out again, and again after that—until, at last, she would stand among them and graze contentedly, betraying her devilish spirit only in the gleam of her eyes, the fleeting flick of her mane. It was a psychological tactic that Pat and his trainers were employing in breaking and training all of the new foals and rescued horses who had come to the herd: a horse wants nothing more than to belong to its herd, and there is no better way of convincing it to behave than by making it confront the very real fear of being ostracized completely.
Fearing his malign influence on his sister, we took Philippe, along with Rebel, to join some of our horses on another patch of land, a smallholding owned by a wonderful woman, Sue Elton, where Brutus and Duke were roaming. And, in the days to come, it was a joy to see Black Magic slowly learn manners, shed her wicked ways, become a real part of the herd. The magic worked on her so quickly, so perfectly, that I was left agonized that I hadn’t known this sort of psychology back on Crofton, when our children were small. Perhaps it might have worked on Jay and some of his wilder, more unruly ways …
In the morning, Pat bounced out of bed, flexed his muscles, and—for a reason that will always evade me—did a little John Travolta side-shuffle dance routine. I rolled over in the covers, burying my head in the pillow.
“Really?”
“Really, Mandy. You know what today is, don’t you?”
“It’s not your birthday.”
“No,” said Pat. “It’s better. Today is Brutus day.”
The training had been in full swing for several months, and its most recent graduate was Brutus. Though he hadn’t yet shed his permanently worried expression, or the furrowing around his eyes that made me want to throw my arms around him and console him every time we met, Brutus was growing into a strong horse. Pat had been looking forward to this day for some time—a chance to finally get in the saddle. Brutus had been trained and schooled in how to behave with a rider on his back, and—or so his trainers swore—he was as ready as he was ever going to be.
“You’re coming, aren’t you, Mandy?”
He was, I decided, as excited as a little boy at Christmastime. I rolled over for another five minutes’ sleep.
“Wouldn’t miss it for the world, darling.”
A couple of hours later, high up in the Penhalonga Mountains, at the training grounds, a small crowd had gathered: Gaydia; Sally Dilton-Hill; Sally’s daughter, who had been working on Brutus; and a few onlookers.
In a paddock beside the fields where other horses were grazing, Brutus was waiting. As I chatted with Gaydia and Sally, Pat strode heroically from the crowd and swung himself over the fence. Sally waited eagerly at Brutus’s side.
“How’s he been doing?”
“Wonderfully,” Sally insisted. “He’s taken to it like a natural.”
Brutus, now fifteen hands high and wearing a smart saddle, flicked a look at him as he approached, but dropped his head sadly, as if what was coming was the most horrendous thing in the world.
“Come on, boy,” a beaming Pat said, “we’re in this together …”
Stopping only to make sure that there were no rocks or small stones left in the grass around Brutus, Pat swung himself into the saddle. He sat there for a moment before lifting his leg to adjust his left stirrup. When he was certain both he and Brutus were comfortable, he turned and flashed a grin at me through the crowd. Taking the reins in his right hand in classic African fashion, he coaxed Brutus gently around.
Suddenly, Brutus lifted his head. His permanently worried expression transformed itself into one of abject horror. In the saddle, Pat froze. He knew what was coming.
Brutus lifted his forelegs, stamped them back down, and performed a buck. In the middle of the field, he lifted himself, smashed back down, lifted himself again, shaking his head fiercely. In that first buck, he shook off Pat’s grip on his reins—but, still, Pat held on. His hands grappled out for Brutus’s mane, his legs clenched tight.
Then, he was in the air—and then, he was lying spread-eagled on the ground at Brutus’s side. He did not move.
Sally was the first out of the crowd and over the fence to reach him. I hurried behind, catching hold of Brutus’s rein to stop him bolting. By the time I was there, Pat was stirring, turning over, and looking up with bleary eyes.
“Pat, are you …”
Pat seemed to be trying to stand, but then he winced and took another deep breath. His eyes drifted sideways, and mine followed. Lying at his side was a single piece of brick, the only one left in the whole field. His chest had crashed down upon it.
“How does it feel?”
“Broken,” uttered Pat, as I helped him to his feet.
“Let’s get you out of here …”
Pat’s face twisted. From the corner of his eyes, he took in the bank of watching faces. “Not a chance!” he rasped. “I can’t let them see me like that, Mandy.”
“Pat, if you’ve really broken your ribs …”
“A couple of broken ribs?” Pat agonized. “I’ve been waiting to ride Brutus ever since John Crawford’s farm …”
There was no use arguing further; I had seen the steel in Pat’s eyes. Either that or the vain foolishness. I handed him the rein and helped him get his first foot in the stirrup.
“You’re being …”
“Heroic?” interjected Pat, wincing as he swung his leg back over the saddle.
As Pat sat uncomfortably in Brutus’s saddle, Gaydia led the other horses out and made sure they were tacked up properly. I had not ridden in several weeks now, and I was longing to be back in the saddle, but now also a bit apprehensive. Behind me, Gaydia fastened a girth and swung into her saddle to adjust her stirrups, while Sally readied another horse. We pulled onto the trail and began the gentle walk off the smallholding. At the head of the procession, I pulled my horse level with Brutus.
“Are you sure you’re okay?” I asked.
Pat whispered to me out of the side of his mouth, “Brutus hasn’t been trained at all. He just hasn’t taken to it.”
“How does he feel?”
“Like he wants to be back in a paddock with Jade, grazing on some grass.”
“Unresponsive?”
“Dejected …”
That did sound like our poor little Brutus.
The sun was almost at its highest point above Penhalonga, but, in gullies and crags, the morning mist still lingered. We nosed Brutus and the rest through a cold reef of gray, emerging in brilliant sunshine at the head of the gully beyond. For a while, the trail cut circles around the foothills, before following a ridge with the scrubby escarpments dropping away on each side. Then we were up, high among the pine trees, climbing to what seemed the top of the world.
At the head of the procession, Pat rode Brutus. Though I could not see his face, I could tell from the way he was sitting in the saddle that he was tense. The disgruntled little horse did not want a rider on his back, nor to be high up in these mountains. He wanted, I knew, nothing more than a paddock of long grass, a trough for water, and the rest of the herd all around him.
I looked back to wave to Gaydia, coming up in the rear on her horse Aruba. When I looked back, Brutus was gone.
A streak of brown was hurtling up the road ahead, my broken husband clinging to his back.
Brutus had taken off. I urged my horse to follow, but it was already too late. Brutus was careening wildly around a bend in the road, and Pat was gone.
In the saddle, Pat clung on for dear life. He squeezed with his thighs, rocked backward—but if Brutus had ever learned his commands at all, he no longer wanted to take them. As I came around the next bend, I saw Pat craning to his left, peering through the trees. Still, Brutus plowed on. I cried out, my voice lost on the wind, and saw Pat crane left again, as if he could see something through the trees. My eyes darted the same way.
It was then that I realized what was coming.
Up ahead, our road came together with another, running almost parallel, to meet the final stretch of road winding to the very top of the mountain pass. Brutus and Pat were rapidly reaching the apex where two roads became one.
Through the trees, motoring blindly along the other road, came a gargantuan semi truck, piled high with tree trunks felled from the forests. Approaching the junction, the truck and Brutus were almost neck and neck, each straining for the lead as they charged toward an inevitable, very messy meeting.
I closed my eyes, drew my horse to a sudden stop, and muttered a prayer. The sound of the semi exploded in my ears, a horn blasting out as it sailed through the trees, cruised through the junction, and took off up the mountain road.
All was silent. All was still.
At last, unable to keep them closed any longer, I opened my eyes. At the top of the road, only yards from the junction, Brutus had stopped dead. Pat was still in the saddle, gazing back at me as if shell-shocked.
I very carefully made my way up the road to Brutus’s side. “That was close, Pat.”
“This horse,” Pat wheezed, dragging his arm across his brow to wipe away the fear, “hasn’t been trained at all.”
I looked down. Brutus’s gaze met my own. His brows seemed to be pinched and his eyes loomed large, protesting his innocence.
“Time to go home?” I asked. Behind me, Gaydia and the rest of the procession were only just arriving.
“Home,” Pat said, “and bed.” Then, he gripped his chest. “Oh, and a doctor. I probably need a doctor …”
That night, back at Partridge Hill, I stripped back Pat’s shirt and saw a dark square of black bruising where he had fallen on the brick. I tried to run my fingers around the marks, but instinctively he recoiled, as sensitive as Princess had been around her open withers.
“Broken,” I said.
Pat fingered his wound. “But not completely.”
It was, I decided, exactly how I had come to think of Zimbabwe.
We had been in the Bvumba two peaceful years, and around us the herd had swollen. Kate neared the end of school, Paul called to tell us that he had met the girl he meant to marry in London, and Jay left to complete his final exams and began to look for work, not only in Zimbabwe’s hunting areas but all across southern Africa. Never since the earliest days of Crofton had I seen Pat so industrious, riding out each morning to train another horse. Partridge Hill had proven the oasis in Zimbabwe’s storm that we had craved ever since Crofton.
Yet, if I ever allowed myself to believe we were safe, it was a feeling that quickly passed. There was always the whisper in the back of my mind, a little voice telling us we had delayed the inevitable but that, one day, it would come for us, too.
When the ax fell, it fell swiftly and viciously, just as it had always done in Mugabe’s Zimbabwe.
I was returning from England, having finally found Granny Beryl a home and small state pension, when the first news came in. With so many of the nation’s farms already fallen to Mugabe’s war vets, it was only a matter of time before his relentless gaze fell on Mutare and the borderland between this country and the next. Immediately on my return from England, we heard the news that one of the farms at which we were keeping our horses was about to be seized. We marshaled our resources to ferry the twenty horses, including our precious Grey and Deja-vous, to one of the other farms we were using. Only days later, that farm too was taken, and we had to ferry the horses again. Now, the land grab gathered pace. The calls came at midnight, in the smallest watches of night, in broad daylight as we drove through Mutare’s broad, flowery avenues. One after another, the farms where we were keeping the horses fell to Mugabe’s war vets.
We had reached the end of the line.
A small part of the herd had been kept on the grounds of an old game park, where most of the animals were aged or already dead. As the farms fell, we ferried the horses here, so that soon the herd was roaming wild where once antelope, giraffes, and elephants had been kept. Our days became an endless zigzagging across the countryside as we tried desperately to bring the whole herd back together on safe country: foals splitting from their mothers in the confusion; a gelding going astray only to be discovered grazing, oblivious, at the edge of the road; Black Magic momentarily finding Philippe again and rediscovering the sheer joy of being a truculent, aggressive prima donna. You could see the confusion in the faces of the herd, mares disgruntled at having to leave good grazing behind to be driven to some farm where the fields were already shorn flat. Among them, Brutus wore his old expression of permanent alarm. Perhaps he, alone of all the horses, understood the true severity of what was going on.
If the farms kept falling, there would soon be no place for them to go.
We arrived at Partridge Hill, late at night, to a meal of leftovers from the night before, Pat and I both longing to fall into a deep sleep and not wake up for days. Kate was waiting in the living room, her schoolbooks splayed out around her. Her eyes looked heavy, ink stained her fingers, and I doubted very much that she had eaten properly tonight.
I hated this country then. If none of this had happened, if we still lived on Crofton, if we hadn’t had to take Kate away from Lomagundi School … how different her studies might have been.
“How’s it going, Kate?”
Kate nodded. “It’s okay.”
“Are you sure?”
“Actually, Dad …” Kate stood. “Tell me if I’m going crazy, but I was in the library today, and I swore I could see … Brutus, out on the playing fields … I thought I was seeing things, but when I looked again, there were Duke and Duchess, too. Black Magic. Deja-vous …”
“Kate,” said Pat, “there’s something we have to tell you.”
Kate slumped in the sofa. “I think I get the picture …”
“They announced they were taking the game park,” Pat went on. “We couldn’t risk them being there when the park falls. But”—he paused, sensing Kate’s amazement—“the school has land. All the land beyond those playing fields and tennis courts.”
Kate nodded, sadly. “But they can’t take the school, right?”
“Not even Mugabe can steal a school,” I explained. “It’s a last resort, Kate. Hillcrest School might have the final piece of grassland in the whole of the district that Mugabe can’t take for himself. There’s enough grazing there to buy us some time. That’s all it is. We’re moving them all there over the next few days.”
Kate breathed the information in, seemed to weigh it up, and nodded sharply.
“I don’t know how I’m going to live this one down.” She grinned.
“Just pretend we’re not your parents?” I said.
Kate grinned. “Mum, I’ve been doing that for years …”
I pulled up at the gates of Hillcrest School, and all I could see were horses.
The fields were not much larger than ten tennis courts—and there, more than a hundred horses were packed, the grass around their hooves already bitten down to scrubby stubs. Along one side of the fences keeping them in, three farmers’ trucks were parked. They were not only from the farms on which we had kept the horses, but from farms and smallholdings farther afield as well. Figures were unloading bales of hay from the backs of the trucks, carrying them over to where the horses might feed. These were acts of selflessness and generosity to make me certain there was still so much good in the world, even in the madness of Zimbabwe.
It took me a moment to pick out Pat in the throng. He was standing with Shere Khan and Jonathan, who was wearing his backpack for spraying the horses with a dip solution. When Pat saw me, he weaved through the herd to meet me at the fence.
“They’re bringing the last ones up from the game park.”
“How are we going to fit any more in?”
Pat gazed around. Lady’s head had appeared to root in his armpit, and he fought her down. Even after long months of training, there were some habits that would not be broken.
“Mandy, we’re not.”
I was not surprised. A piece of me had known he would say this, ever since I returned.
“Where, then?”
Pat’s eyes drifted east, to the peaks of the Bvumba and beyond. “It’s time, Mandy.”
I nodded. We had railed against it too long: Crofton and Palmerston, Biri and Headlands … and now here. Pat looked at the bales of hay lined up at the fence. We could not rely on it forever. Mutare’s farmers would soon be disappearing. Some of them might even flow over the mountains into Mozambique. It was where we would have to go too, we wild-eyed Retzlaffs and our horses. Even in spite of the two years’ peace we’d had in the Bvumba, that, I reminded myself, had always been the plan.
“How long have we got?” I asked.
“Days, Mandy. Maybe a couple of weeks.” Pat pushed Lady’s head away; she was getting far too impatient—but then, so were we. “It’s time to make a plan.”
I made my way back to the car and sat behind the wheel. Across the herd, I could see the front facade of Hillcrest School. A shrill bell rang, and moments later the girls began to stream out. Among them, I saw Kate emerge. She looked smart and proud in her school blazer, but at the top of the steps, she stalled. She gazed out across the fields filled with her father’s horses and I saw her visibly squirm. In the middle of all this, Pat and I had become Zimbabwe’s most embarrassing parents.
Yes, I thought, it really was time to leave. My eyes drifted to the mountains, and thoughts of the lush country of Mozambique sitting beyond. Tomorrow we would go up into the mountains, Pat with Shere Khan, Kate with Deja-vous, me in Grey’s saddle, and search for a way through. We would look down on the valleys of Mozambique, those untouched lands, and it would suddenly be very real: after years of struggle, we were fleeing Zimbabwe, and taking one hundred and four horses with us.