THE TOWN OF CHIMOIO, where we had found a small house, sat one hundred kilometers east of the Bvumba, in the heartland of Mozambique. Pat and I sat at traffic lights in town, sweating in the blistering heat, dry dirt caked across the windshield of our Land Rover. In the back, Jay lay with his head rolled back and his mouth gaping open. How he could sleep in this heat, I had no idea.
Taking the horses through the Mountains of the Mist had proven a bigger ordeal than I might have imagined. As I looked at Pat in the driving seat beside me, I could distinctly see the toll it had taken on him: his hair seemed to have turned gray overnight. I could tell how the lines had deepened in his once-youthful face, but I know he wouldn’t have taken it back for a second. We had made it out of Zimbabwe alive, and we had brought one hundred and four of our precious rescued horses with us.
It had not been easy. In the end, we had decided not to risk driving them through some secluded mountain pass, for fear of meeting soldiers and bandits along the way. Instead, we had faced the tyranny of the official checkpoints. There were enough obstacles to getting ourselves over the border, what with Mugabe’s border guards keen to clamp down on any little irregularity and bleed some kind of bribe money out of it, and for the horses the challenge had been almost insurmountable. It had taken weeks. Each day we had loaded our precious horses into the backs of trucks and taken them to the border crossing, nestling deep in the heart of the Bvumba—but, every time, we had been turned away, told that our paperwork was not correct, that we did not have authorization to take grass across the border, that the horses needed passports, that the passports were incorrectly bound, that we had to pay fees and charges—and yet more bribes. Time and again our horses were sent back. Time and again we tried. Then, just as the lines deepened in Pat’s face, as we began to talk at night about the very real possibility of abandoning half of our herd, we tried one last time. We loaded up the whole of the remaining herd and approached the border. By some strange mercy, that day the border guards smiled kindly on us. We sailed into Mozambique unharmed, and with us came Grey, Deja-vous, Shere Khan, Black Magic, Lady, and every other horse to whom we had devoted our lives.
In the column of cars behind us a chorus of horns started to sound, but they were not making the lights change any quicker.
We had been in Chimoio three months, but I had not yet gotten used to the heat. It seemed a world away from the other side of the Bvumba. Lower and less temperate than the Zimbabwean side, Mozambique’s very air had a different flavor. Chimoio was the fifth-largest town in Mozambique, the capital of Manica Province, which bordered the Bvumba. The town seemed to have lived a multitude of lives. In some areas, the evidence of its old colonial days was clear, with Portuguese architecture still standing and the language plastered across billboards and street signs; in others, the old town was derelict and slowly being reclaimed by new businesses and homes. The streets, wide and dusty, put me in mind of some frontier town of old, and as we navigated and got used to the town’s back streets, I began to understand that though we were only a hundred kilometers from Zimbabwe, this was an Africa like no other: a Portuguese Africa, a Communist Africa, a postrevolution Africa in which the rule of law still felt like only a guideline to most.
“Jay,” Pat barked, “wake up. We’re here.”
We had come to the very outskirts of town. There, beyond the shell of an old Portuguese building that was slowly being rebuilt and patched up with new fences, walls, and wire, I could see the heads of Grey, Shere Khan, and Black Magic grazing on their bales of dried grass. Lady’s head lifted from behind a bale to greet us.
“Thanks, Dad,” Jay muttered, “I was having a bad dream. I dreamed that we lived …” Jay stopped and stepped out of the car. “Oh, wait …” He grinned. “That wasn’t a dream.”
We had timed coming over the mountains into Mozambique well; perhaps, I reflected, it was one of the only things we had done properly in the whole of our journey. Having just graduated from Hillcrest School, Kate was accepted to study chemistry at university and had gone down to South Africa to earn her degree. Jay, meanwhile, had graduated from his hunting apprenticeship and accepted a post in Mozambique’s premier national park, Gorongosa, where he was training guides and introducing the first tourists to the wonderful park. Mozambique did not have much big game left, most of it having been slaughtered to feed soldiers in the war that had finished a decade ago, but season by season it was returning, and a private philanthropist named Greg Carr was financing the return of elephants, lions, and all kinds of antelope to Gorongosa.
We left the Land Rover and crossed the dusty street, eyeballed by a billy goat chewing on a small bush at the edge of the road. On the other side of the fence, we met the horses.
“Dad,” Jay began, “they look … terrible.”
Of the one hundred and four horses we had brought with us, forty lived in the paddock here, while the remainder were out on Zimofa, a farm thirty-five kilometers beyond the town limit. We had found the property soon after coming over the mountains, and it was here that we had founded our riding school. As more and more Zimbabweans poured into town, bringing businesses and agricultural ambitions with them, so too had foreign NGOs begun to populate the town. Chimoio had become a melting pot of southern African, Portuguese, English, Dutch, American, Canadian, and even Chinese and Indian immigrants. Many of them brought families with them, and our fervent hope was that, at last, the horses could start working together with us, helping to pay their way. Now, whenever we could, we took riding lessons and rides out into the wild, untamed bush of Mozambique.
Yet what Jay had said was true. All was not well in the herd. I walked over to Philippe and put a hand on his muzzle to stop him grazing. At first he seemed to be in good health, but when he turned his head to look at me, I saw the dark, ugly cavity where his right eye used to be. The grooms had led the herd out grazing one morning and, come the evening, Philippe had wandered back to his paddock at the riding school blind on one side.
He was not the only one who had suffered. In the corner of the paddock, Grey stood with dark pink lesions coloring his withers and the underside of his neck, while Black Magic wore the dark boil of ringworm around both her eyes, along her muzzle, and creeping around her hairless lips. Others wore the marks of the fungal infection deeply scored into their hides. With so little veterinary support in Mozambique, we were struggling to keep on top of all these ailments.
“Ringworm’s the least of it,” said Pat. “Come this way.”
Jay trudged after his father into the stables at the center of the riding school. In the first stall, Princess was contentedly being dipped for ticks by two of our grooms. Against all the odds, the wound in her withers had finally sealed—and, though she would forever be sensitive when anybody touched her, it had not festered and opened up again as it had done so many times before. In the next stall, however, stood a different story.
Little Fanta looked bereft. She hardly looked like a horse any longer. In the stall, a creature of skin and bone looked up, not a single hair left anywhere on her body. Her rib cage showed, stark and grisly, through her skin; her teeth were ugly yellow protuberances from the tip of her muzzle.
“It’s like an allergic reaction to the heat,” Pat explained. “She started losing her hair and then lost the ability to sweat. Everything just shed away.” He paused, putting a tentative hand out so that Fanta could nibble at it. “By rights, she should be dead.”
I stroked Princess’s muzzle. By rights, she should have been dead, too.
“She just won’t give up the ghost,” said Pat.
“Dad, you should get a vet.”
Pat gave Jay a withering look. “Nice idea, genius. You tell me—where are we going to find a vet for these horses?”
We explained that there were local vets, that much was true, but not one of them had any experience in treating horses. We had found that out as we came across the border. When, at last, we made it through to the Mozambican side, huge crowds gathered to see the horses led from the trucks and watered and fed. Hundreds of people had flocked out of the border buildings and houses to catch a glimpse of the herd. Horses, we were told, had not been seen in Mozambique since the dawn of the civil war—and that was more than thirty years before, in 1974.
“They thought they were big dogs,” I said, as Jay and I left Fanta wheezing and returned to the open air.
“Big dogs?”
“You know, big dogs you could ride. Dogs who eat grass …”
Across the riding school, Lady bounded up to the edge of the paddock. “That one is like a big dog,” Jay muttered.
In the paddock, Lady was standing with a collection of tiny foals.
“Someone’s been busy,” smirked Jay.
“They’re … accidents,” I said.
One after another, I introduced Jay to the illegitimate foals who had started to appear in the herd. One of the problems with maintaining such a big and disparate herd, especially in Mozambique—where the veterinary aid was almost nonexistent—was managing unexpected births. Because our horses came from such checkered backgrounds, and because we could not often determine their real ages, we had not always performed the necessary geldings in time. The horses we had taken from Rob Lucas and his lions had, it turned out, been a little older and friskier than we had imagined. It only took one boisterous young stallion to come of age more swiftly than expected, and suddenly the younger mares across the herd had come into foal.
Pink Daiquiri was one of those mares. She had given birth to a beautiful colt we had named Ramazotti. They stood together now on Lady’s left side, Pink Daiquiri with her sunken back and soft, beautiful features, Ramazotti with dark markings on each of his flanks, with pronounced facial bones and shimmering eyes.
“She’s better looking than that one,” said Jay, indicating another colt.
Some of the other illegitimates were not as blessed with good looks as Ramazotti. On the farms outside Mutare we had been keeping the foals together in a kind of equine nursery where they could learn to play, get to know the social structures of their herd, and go through the first stages of their training together. One of the downsides of this arrangement was that young stallions, just reaching maturity, could mate with their sisters. The foal that Jay had pointed out was named Vaquero, and he was the result of just such a union. As far as inbred accidents go, he was very healthy—but he had a disjointed, gangly look about him, and his eyes seemed to wander.
“Any horse would look ugly next to Ramazotti,” I began, following Vaquero’s roaming eye.
“That isn’t a horse, Mum.”
Vaquero must not have sensed the insult, for he pushed his muzzle over, eager to inspect these two gawking figures on the other side of the fence.
“One day, Jay, you might know what it feels like to have an ugly little brute of a son and still love him.”
I was halfway across the riding school, hurrying to join Pat at the car, when Jay figured out what I meant. Jay and Vaquero, I thought, were going to get on just fine.
In the afternoon, Pat and I rode out to Zimofa Farm. Though the rest of the herd was grazing contentedly in the pastures, we were not there to inspect them or medicate their ringworm for the hundredth time. Zimofa Farm was one of the many farms in the area we were hoping would help us get back on our feet, provide us and the horses with a permanent home once again. We were here to look at paprika.
Chimoio was in the middle of a gold rush. There were no mines in the hills, no gold panners in the riverbeds, nor any great stamp mills scoring the land. There were gold mines in the border country between Mozambique and Zimbabwe, but there was another kind of gold in Chimoio as well: nothing other than the land itself.
For farmers like Pat and me, Mozambique was untouched, virgin land. There was agriculture in the country, but not on anywhere near the same scale as we had known it in Zimbabwe. Here, farmers kept smallholdings or grew crops simply for subsistence—but there was land aplenty here, waiting to be opened up, irrigated, and transformed into healthy, functional farmland. As Mugabe drove commercial farming out of Africa’s breadbasket, it was inevitable that some of those farmers would turn their eyes toward the open country to the east and dream of what the land might look like if people with ancestral knowledge of farming poured their lives into it. High up in the Bvumba, the same thoughts had occurred to Pat and me.
It began, as these things often do, with paprika. We had been consulting with Zimbabwean paprika growers with our agronomy business since before we were forced out of Crofton and Palmerston Estates. We had worked closely with a large company known as Highveld Paprika.
Highveld Paprika had financed the growing of paprika across Zimbabwe, but, like us, the company’s leaders had been drawn to the east, to the fresh world of Mozambique, ten years out of its civil war and desperate for development. There was so much virgin bush here, and so little organized agriculture, that to the exiled farmers of Zimbabwe it must have seemed a promised land. It certainly seemed that way to the directors of Highveld Paprika. Their plan was to open up countless hectares of bush, investing in both local farmers and people like us who were streaming over the border, and watch the bush roll back, bountiful fields of paprika crops growing in its wake.
Overnight, Chimoio had become a boomtown, and we were at its epicenter. Investment in the land encouraged investment on a much wider scale. Across town, new houses were being built, and new traders were opening their stores. Engineers were setting up bases to help in building works and irrigation schemes, while money was being poured into the town’s utilities, a new medical practice had sprung up, and foreign NGOs cascaded in.
Pat and I had been tasked by the two directors of the company with being their intermediaries on the ground. Though we would not farm ourselves, we were to oversee the farmers in whom Highveld Paprika was investing. The plan involved Highveld Paprika lending us a vast amount of money, which we, in turn, would manage and lend to the Chimoio farmers involved in the program, by way of buying them tractors, harvesters, and irrigation equipment—and, of course, advising them on how best to treat and manage the crop. We did not plan on doing it forever, but the opportunity, we knew, was far too good to miss. For the first time since being driven from our home, we had the tools to claw our way back to the top, earn enough money to found a new home and build a permanent life for ourselves and our horses. It would never be Crofton, but deep inside I still dreamed of a place our children could come back to, a house to which they might one day bring our future grandchildren.
Pat strode along the trail, tracked by Tequila and Marquess in the paddock beyond, and walked between two banks of paprika plants. I followed. The paprika plants were shin high, wearing rich green leaves and budding fruits. I trailed my hand across their feathery tops, feeling the cold rustle of leaves across my fingertips.
For a second, we were fifteen years in the past, back at River Ranch in our earliest days. I was standing in the middle of one of our tomato fields, inspecting the leaves for signs of infestation or disease and calling out to Pat whenever I found something suspicious. Opening up the land, I constantly reminded him, is not only about driving back the bush. There are smaller, more insidious enemies to beat back as well.
“It’s really going to work here, isn’t it, Pat?” I called out.
Too lost in his dreams of the land, Pat did not turn back.
“Isn’t it, Pat?”
He looked back and nodded. “This is good land, Mandy,” he said, grinning.
“Better than home?”
He crouched, fingering one of the unripe fruits.
“It’ll do.”
I supposed that it would.
At first, I thought the voice was a dream. Half-awake and eager for the comfort of sleep, I rolled over, wrapping myself around Pat. He had kicked the sheets off in the night—the air beneath our mosquito net was so hot and clammy as to be almost unbearable—but a deep sigh told me he was still asleep. I was glad that one of us, at least, could get some rest.
“Wake up!”
This time, the voice jolted me from my tormented slumber. I sat bolt upright, happening to elbow Pat in the face as I did so. With a single giant snort, not unlike the disparaging sound Black Magic might have made, Pat awoke.
“What is it?”
“There’s somebody at the door …”
I moved to push out of the mosquito net, but, muttering some incomprehensible complaint, Pat pushed me back to the mattress and climbed out himself. Too nervous now, I followed him to the bedroom door and listened down the hall.
“There has been a terrible accident.”
It was the voice of our night guard, a local man we had employed to keep the horses in their paddock safe at night.
“What kind of accident?”
“The fencing wire has been stolen …”
Pat growled in discontent. “That doesn’t sound like much of an accident to me …”
It was only when the night guard next spoke that the true purpose of his moonlit visit became clear. “There are horses on the road. You must come quick.”
Pat pulled on a shirt, I quickly heaved boots on over my night clothes, and we set out into the hot Chimoio night.
Our first stop, the night guard in tow, was down at the riding school. As we climbed out of the Land Rover, Jonathan and Albert were down at the end of the paddock, shoring up a hole where the fencing wire had been stolen. Among the horses gathered at the other side of the paddock, I could see Lady, Black Magic, and Deja-vous eyeing us curiously. As Pat and I came to the fence, Lady began to amble over, but she quickly realized something was wrong and came no farther. Above us, the sky was streaked with thousands of stars.
“How many got out?”
“We counted three missing.”
“Who?” I asked, gazing into the dark silhouettes of the herd.
“Grey is gone,” Jonathan began. “Treacle, Romans …”
Pat stepped through the hole in the wire. “Which way?”
Jonathan pointed into the darkness. Grey and the other two runaways seemed to have turned their backs on the town and headed into the wild, open scrub. Yet out there lay as many dangers as there were here in Chimoio.
“The main road, Pat. What if they were …”
Pat cut me off. “Get back in the car, Mandy.”
We left Jonathan and Albert looking over the herd and screeched the car around to follow. Our headlights arced across the road, illuminating the potholes, and then we took off, out of Chimoio. The night rushed past around us. Streams of burning sand kicked up by the wheels twisted across the windshield, finding their way through the open windows to whip and sting us.
We hit the main road and turned west. My eyes roamed the verges, but in the darkness I could see no sign of where the horses might have gone. If there was grazing nearby, perhaps they had remembered it from their rides and were bound that way—yet, all around, there was only the dry, thorny scrub.
A full moon was on the rise. Fleetingly, in its ethereal light, I saw a spattering of horse dung in the middle of the road. I breathed out a sigh of relief—we were headed in the right direction. Then, something twisted in my chest.
“Pat,” I said, “they’re walking on the main road.” I paused. “In the dead of night …”
He looked at me, expressionless. The thought had occurred to him, too.
It felt cooler outside of town. The shadowy silhouettes of a stand of msasa trees, with their familiar fingerlike leaves, blocked out the silver of the moon and stars for a second—and, when we emerged on the other side, we saw a vast shape looming ahead.
Uncertain at first, Pat pressed his foot on the brake, and the Land Rover ground to a halt.
Our headlights picked out the shape of a truck at the side of the road, its cab turned into the carriageway, its back wheels up on the bank.
I moved to get out of the car.
“Stay there,” said Pat.
But something compelled me to stand, and I joined him on the side of the road.
We walked in the path of our own headlights, up toward the truck. The driver was already climbing back into the cab, gunning the engine back to life. With a crunch of gears, he hauled the truck around, crashed down from the bank, and took off up the road. Exhaust choked out of the back of the truck, enveloping us in an acrid cloud.
As the cloud parted and we emerged on the other side, I stopped dead. The shapes lying in the middle of the road were not great boulders of earth, nor cargo dropped from the truck. In pieces before us lay the bodies of the three horses.
I rushed forward, stalled, rushed forward again. I froze. By the time I came to my senses, Pat was on his knees at the side of the first horse. He gestured wildly for me to go back to the car, but I was drawn on, like a moth to a naked flame. I guessed that this had been the first of the horses into which the truck had plowed, for his haunch was torn half away from his body, and a mess of meat was open to the stars and insects of night.
My eyes panned up the ruined carcass, and I saw Grey’s head, stiff and lifeless. His tongue lolled out, caked already in hot dry dust.
In a daze, I stepped past. Farther on, up the road, hanging half in the ditch between the stone and a scrubby field in which subsistence maize was being grown, lay Treacle. At first, my heart soared, for her body was not pulverized like Grey’s. I dropped down to touch her flank, and my hand sank into her hide. Underneath, her ribs were shattered. Her body was a mere mask, for inside she was shredded. I ran my hand up her spine, into her mane. She had died with her eyes open and they stared at me now, pleading.
Between Grey and Treacle, Romans lay. Pat sank to her side, pressed his head to her chest as if to listen for her death rattle. There was only silence.
The truck was long gone, its exhaust trails clearing. We sat, in the middle of the road, surrounded by the devastation.
I was too numb to cry, but images rained down on me: Grey, a lovable foal on Two Tree; then, older now, taking me high up into the forests in Penhalonga as we searched for a way to drive the horses over the border.
“What do we do?” I breathed, still stunned.
Pat was beyond speech. He wheeled around, as if to climb back into the Land Rover, but then stopped dead.
“We need a truck,” he uttered. “You’ll have to go …”
“Pat …”
“Well, I’m not leaving you here, am I?” he roared. Then, suddenly, he calmed. “Tell Jonathan to get a truck out here quickly.”
I could still see Grey’s tongue lolling in the corner of my eye. I tried to shake the image away and found that, for the first time, my vision was blurred by tears. Perhaps it was a good thing; at least now I did not have to see their faces staring up at me. Grey had survived war vets, come back from being stranded out on Two Tree, been rustled off farms, and somehow made it through the rush of disease and parasites that had feasted on the herd when we first came to Chimoio. The thought that he was dead on account of us was awful.
I climbed back into the car. There I saw the cadavers, trapped in the headlights as if I were the one about to run them down. I tried not to look as I swung the car around and drove the long road back into Chimoio.
Half an hour later, I made it back into the riding school. Jonathan and Albert were just cutting off the last strands of wire in the new stretch of fence. I asked Jonathan to bring a truck round.
“Will you drive, madam?”
I looked down. I had not realized it, but my hands were shaking. “No,” I said. “You …”
It took an interminable time to get back. In the passenger seat I could not sit still. I wound down the window, wound it up again, played with the phone in my hands and toyed with calling Pat, each time fighting down the urge. In the back of the truck, Albert and another one of our grooms bounced around, waiting to help with the grisly task.
“I remember a time on Crofton,” I began. The memory had not occurred to me in such a long time, but for some reason it had resurfaced now, as vivid as if it were yesterday. “I was riding Grey, with Kate and Jay riding up behind me. Suddenly, he was so agitated. He stopped dead, refused to go on. It took me a while to see what he had seen.” I looked at Jonathan, my eyes glassy. “In the bush, there was a python, just gorged itself on a sable calf. Her mother must have been off grazing and came back to see her calf in the belly of this snake, straining at its skin from inside. She was hammering her hooves up and down, pulverizing that snake … but she could never set the calf free. It was already gone.” I paused, kneading my hands. “How did Grey know? Why did he care?” My voice broke. “I loved that horse.”
By the time we came back to the spot in the road, I realized we were not the only ones. The truck headlights picked out Pat, standing between Grey and Romans, with Treacle on his other side, but around him I saw groups of local villagers. Three figures, two women and a man, stood in the maize, while another crouched at Grey’s ruptured back. As I stepped out of the cab to hurry over, Jonathan maneuvering the truck so that we might heave the carcasses inside, I noticed others as well. One of them cried out in his local language. Though I knew he could not understand, Pat shot him a look like daggers. Turning, he saw the man bent low at Grey’s side and, with a great stride, drove him back to the edge of the road.
“What’s going on?” I asked.
“They want the meat,” Pat said.
I stared, as if asking him to say it again.
“We need to get them out of here, before more come … Jonathan!” Pat barked. “Help me here!”
There were more faces on the banks of the road now. I felt a hand tugging on my elbow and turned to see the questioning faces of two local women, shrouded in the blackness. Whether they were speaking Portuguese or their local language, I could not tell; the words were blurred, indistinct, as I watched Grey being loaded onto the truck.
When, at last, all three horses were aboard, Jonathan edged the truck around so that Pat and I could squeeze up front. When the headlights swept round, they illuminated not only the mass of local men and women, whose confusion quickly turned to anger at the thought of us hauling their meat away, but also the stains of gore where Grey, Treacle, and Romans had fallen.
I shut my eyes to it, but I could not block out the baying of the horde.
As the pink lights of dawn rose that morning, illuminating the snaking dust along Chimoio’s back streets and the blinking horses in the riding school yards, Pat and I stood with Jonathan, Albert, and some other workers in a small stand of gum trees on the very outskirts of town. There, in the holes we had excavated, lay the cold remains of Grey, Treacle, and Romans.
I could not bring myself to shovel the dirt in on top of them. I simply stood and watched, and knew, with a terrifying finality, that one of the last connections we had to the old world of Two Tree and Crofton was gone.
In the morning, I stirred late, my eyes heavy with sleep. Pat was already awake, hauling on his jeans on the other side of the mosquito net. When he saw that I had woken, he looked down.
“Go back to sleep.”
“Where are you going?”
He stopped in the doorway. “There’s something I’ve got to … Mandy,” he said, “you need to rest.”
Sensing that something else was wrong, I scrambled out of the mosquito net and followed him into the hall. By the time I reached him he was already out the door and climbing into the Land Rover.
“Where are you going?”
“I’ll deal with it, Mandy.”
Still barefoot and in my nightgown, I flung myself into the passenger seat. “Tell me,” I insisted.
At last, Pat relented. “Better put some clothes on, Mandy. We need to take a drive.”
Half an hour later, my eyes still heavy with sleep, Pat and I stood in the same stand of gum trees in which we had lain Grey, Treacle, and Romans. The ground in front of us was open, the graves empty, the only sign that our horses had ever lain here the dark earth where Grey’s blood had pooled in the ground.
“They took the meat,” I breathed.
“Followed us here and dug them up,” Pat said, too stony faced to betray any emotion.
“We have to get them back …”
Even as I said it, I knew it was too late. That meat was already gone, out into the villages or off to market.
“What good would it do Grey, anyway?” Pat said as he led me back to the car. “We failed him.”
Morning’s light was spilling over the riding school when we arrived. In the office, staring through the dusty window at the horses in their paddock, it struck me that I would never see Grey among them again. It seemed such a foolish thing; I had seen him sprawled on the road, I had watched them lower him into the earth, I had seen his grave spoiled and his body carried away—but it was only when looking at Lady, Deja-vous, Shere Khan, Black Magic, and the rest that his absence really sank in. I buried my head in my hands and wept, long and hard.
At that moment, one of the grooms appeared in the office doorway to beckon Pat. He was holding out a mobile phone.
“It is ringing,” he said.
Silently, Pat went to take the phone.
“Is the madam all right?”
“It was the horses last night,” Pat said, the phone still chiming in his hand.
“And you are upset?”
I looked up. I couldn’t reply. The grooms we had hired locally could never understand what these horses meant to me. They had not seen Grey limping off Two Tree, his hoof almost hanging off; they had not been there to see the spear wound driven through Princess’s withers, nor had they watched foals like Brutus escape the jambanjaed farms.
“I better answer this,” said Pat. “It’s Highveld Paprika.”
He walked away, bustling the groom before him. In the office, I was left alone. Then, after drawing in my tears, I decided there was only one way to face this new day.
I went out to find Lady and lose myself in the herd.
“It’s happening with tobacco,” Pat said over dinner that night. “It could happen with us, too.”
Nervously I poked the food around my plate. Then, deciding to get a grip on myself, I began to eat properly. I might as well eat while I had the chance.
The call had come from a very concerned director at Highveld Paprika. Rumors had reached them concerning various tobacco farmers in the Chimoio district—some of whom were the very same farmers in whom we had invested to grow paprika. According to Highveld, some of the farmers were refusing to harvest their tobacco crops, claiming that the prices they had been offered were far below market value. Rather than harvest, they planned on holding the crops to ransom and forcing the price up; every day they did not reap in the fields, the crops were another day closer to simply rotting in the ground.
“You know how much money we put into those farms,” I began. “What if Highveld just walked away? We’d be left …”
It was Pat and I who had sourced the farmers, found the farms, employed agronomists and laborers, purchased tractors and harvesters and countless kilometers of irrigation pipes. Out on those farms the results of our work were clear: the bush was being driven back and beautiful, bountiful fields were appearing in its wake. Another few seasons, another few years, and Chimoio could be the heart of a new agricultural wonderland. The country was untouched; the farms could grow and spread. But, for all that to happen, it demanded good, honest, hardworking people—and an insidious thought had taken root in my gut. Perhaps, in our haste to forge a new life beyond Mugabe’s control, we had been too naive.
“So what now?” I asked.
Pat shoveled in his food. At least one of us still had an appetite. “I’ll go out to the farms,” he said, “and see if I can get wind of what’s going on. In the meantime, there’s still the riding school to be thinking of …”
I nodded. Where had all my old Zimbabwean resolve gone? We had come through war vets and worse; whatever was happening on these paprika farms had to be a piece of cake compared to that.
That night, my thoughts were filled not only with Grey, Treacle, and Romans. If our farming investments disappeared, it would touch every single horse in the herd.
I woke in the dead of night, my heart thundering like hoofbeats, and lay awake until dawn.
Mozambique was putting us through hardships, but in return it promised us a great future. Yet all it took was one phone call from Highveld Paprika and that promise turned sour.
It wasn’t long before Highveld’s fears became a reality. Only a week later, Pat received a phone call from one of the farmers we had backed. He was demanding a greater price on the paprika in his fields and threatening to let it rot if we did not agree. Soon, other farmers joined the chorus, demanding prices for their paprika that we could not promise. Giving in to this blackmail was not an option we could even consider; the prices were set in stone by Highveld Paprika, and contracts had long ago been signed. Of the dozen farmers in whom we had invested, only three had subscribed to the plot—but three was enough to cripple our operation and ruin the scheme for the rest. Such were the fine lines on which farms succeeded or failed. This was a line we were all too familiar with from our earliest days on Crofton. As our new world, once filled with such promise, began to crumble around us, Pat spent his days driving out to the traitorous paprika farms, reclaiming as much of the crop as he could. We would still be able to sell it, but every little bit would help. Meanwhile, I remained with the herd, committed more than ever to taking out rides and giving lessons, finding any way possible to eke a living out of these horses that meant so much to us. If we were to claw our way out of this chaos, the horses were our only hope—and yet, as the farming boom collapsed so spectacularly, I feared that the people too would begin to leave Chimoio. It seemed that we had rescued our horses from Mugabe’s war vets only to lead them into another disaster.
At the riding school, I cupped Lady’s head in my hands and prayed for better times.
A few days later, Jay appeared on the doorstep, bedraggled but rugged, with hair falling in curls around his shoulders.
“You look like you might need a wash.”
“It’s nice to see you too, Mum.”
I welcomed him in and set about fussing like only a mother can. Once a huge breakfast was heaped on the plate, Jay set about demolishing it. If Kate and Paul had been there, the room would have been filled with banter, but Jay was as silent as ever. I propped myself against the counter and drank my tea, waiting for him to finish.
“I have something for you,” Jay began. With a flourish, he produced an envelope from the backpack at his feet. He twirled it over the table.
I wandered over, opened the envelope, and lifted a stack of Mozambican meticals.
“If this is payment, that was one expensive breakfast …”
“It’s not for breakfast,” Jay replied. “It’s my pay from Gorongosa. It’s for”—he shrugged, noncommittally—“you know, for the horses, for helping with the farm debts. For … food, water, life. That kind of stuff.”
“Jay, we can’t take …”
I tried to push the money back across the table, but Jay was already standing to slouch away. “You already did,” he replied. “Just don’t spend it all at once.”
I stood in the kitchen after Jay left the room, counting the money he had given me and feeling a terrible welling in the bottom of my stomach. It should not have come to this. The money Jay had given me was all he had saved from his work in the national park. It would tide us over for a little while, but it would not make such a significant dent in our debts that we could flee Chimoio and start again somewhere else. My mind was reeling, wondering how on earth I was going to convince Jay to take his money back, when the telephone rang. Preparing myself for yet another disaster, I picked it up and cheerily said hello.
“Mandy,” said Pat. “I’m at the riding school. You’d better come.”
Half an hour later, Jay and I stood with Pat at a shredded fence at the riding school. In the early hours of the morning, somebody had evaded the night guard and taken off with a roll of wire.
“I don’t have time for this,” Pat cursed. “What’s the head count?”
Jonathan stood on the edge of the paddock, with Lady on one side and Shere Khan on the other.
“We’re one down.”
Pat kicked a stone out through the hole in the fence. On the dirt road, it shattered.
“Who is it?” I asked.
“Tequila,” Jonathan replied.
Pat opened his mouth as if to bark out another oath, but in frustration he swallowed it down. “Well,” he said, “let’s go find him.”
Jay, Pat, and I took a truck and drove out along the same road on which Grey, Treacle, and Romans had met their fate, but there was no sign that Tequila had come this way. When, at last, we reached the spot of the accident, we pulled to the shoulder of the road and stepped out.
“Lightning doesn’t strike twice,” I muttered, as if trying to convince myself.
A truck appeared and rumbled past us, blaring its horn.
“It’s not lightning I’m worried about,” answered Pat.
My phone rang, and I answered it. On the other end of the line was Jonathan. We spoke for a moment, and then I hung up.
“He’s been seen,” I said, hurrying back into the truck.
“Where?”
“The other side of Chimoio. He’s going west.” I slid into the seat and Jay jumped in back just as Pat coaxed the engine back to life. “Pat, he’s fifty kilometers out. He thinks he’s going back home.”
We cut around Chimoio on the back roads and joined the highway back to the border on its farthest side. On the horizon, the heights of the Bvumba sat, their crowns almost merging into the blueness of the sky. Slowly, the mountains grew bigger. Their peaks became more defined, their forested escarpments burst forth in rich color. The day’s light waned.
At last, we saw Tequila. The highway was long and gun-barrel straight, and we could pick him out, a tiny dot trotting toward the mountains, long before we reached him. When we finally drew near, we could see that he was walking, head down, at the side of the road, refusing to be distracted. Afraid that we might spook him, we pulled the truck onto the verge a hundred yards behind and hurried to join him.
“Tequila,” I said, approaching on his flank with enough room between us that he would not be frightened off. “Where do you think you’re going?”
By increments, Pat crept near. Tequila gave a shallow snort of recognition, and Pat laid a hand on his flank.
“You dumb old boy …”
Pat lifted a halter and rope from his shoulder. Even then, Tequila walked sedately along. If he was listening to my commands at all, he did not seem to care. Either that, or he cared about Zimbabwe—about the idea of home—so much more.
Pat put himself in Tequila’s path and told him to stop. Tequila tried to weave one way, then another, but in the end it was a simple thing to slip the halter over him and attach a lead rope.
“Did you really think you could get over the mountains?”
His eyes lifted, locking with my own. He gave a sudden shake of the head, his mane falling down.
“Back to all that?” I went on. “Nowhere to live for more than a few months, no money, no food, never knowing if they might come knocking in the dead of night?” My voice seemed to trail off. Tequila’s eyes were fixed again on the Bvumba, but mine had drifted up. Over Tequila’s back, I was staring straight at Pat, and he was staring back. “You don’t really want to go back home, do you, my boy?”
Upon hearing those words, Tequila kicked into a trot, as if he did not want to listen. Cursing, Pat hurtled after him. For a moment his trot quickened; in response, Pat slowed his gait again, until Tequila slowed down.
“Mandy!” he called back, in half a whisper. “Get Jay to fire up the truck, in case he bolts.”
I turned and ran back to the truck, where Jay was resting in the baking sun. Back in the cab, he fired up the engine and we began to trundle forward. Up ahead of us, Tequila had slowed to a walk. Pat was keeping pace with him, though I could see my husband had developed a stitch in his side.
We stopped the truck again, for up ahead Pat had his arms draped around Tequila. Speaking to him softly all the while, he fitted the lead rope and gently teased the horse around. As I watched, a shiver seemed to run down the length of my spine, even despite the searing heat.
“What is it, Mum?” Jay asked.
“I was thinking … I don’t know how I’m going to manage the herd. Not when he’s gone …”
“What do you mean, gone?”
Pat and Tequila were drawing near now. For the first time, Tequila was facing away from the Bvumba, retracing the prints of his own hooves.
“I wasn’t going to tell you like this,” I began, “but … your father’s leaving.”
“Leaving?”
At exactly the same moment, and in exactly the same tone of voice, Tequila let out a whinny of surprise. Through the windshield, I cocked a look at him. He needn’t have been so shocked; we had told the herd three days before. Obviously, he hadn’t been listening. Or perhaps that was why he had turned tail and fled.
“It’s no good here, Jay. We’ve lost too much.” It was difficult to make sense of it, but I struggled to find the right words, eager that Jay should understand. According to our friends at Highveld Paprika, the farmers in whom we had invested were being advised by a shadowy businesswoman who never showed her face in Mozambique and operated from a house in Harare. It was this woman who had advised the farmers to leave their tobacco in the ground and ransom a better price out of their buyers, and it was this woman who was advising them to do the same thing with the paprika in which we had invested.
“Highveld cut its losses. Just walked away,” I explained. “As soon as the directors understood, they were gone.” I saw the way Jay was looking. “You can’t blame them, Jay. They made a bad investment. It’s big business. They took it on the chin and got out.”
“But you can’t do the same …”
“We owe too much to too many people. All the equipment, all the irrigation, all the seedlings, all the agronomists and laborers we employed … It’s all on our heads. It would have worked. The paprika would have paid for it. There could have been farms here for generations. But they butchered it, looking for a quick buck …”
It was worse than that, but I didn’t know how to find the words. When we discovered that three of the farmers were refusing to harvest, we were devastated. We hurried onto their farms, confronted them, tried to persuade them to do the honorable, honest thing. That they were holding us and our goodwill to ransom was terrible enough—but then we received a telephone call, instructing us that our paprika had been harvested in secret and was, even now, being shunted across the border at the capital city of Maputo, far to the south, for sale outside the country. Somehow, the same farmers who had accepted our investment and reneged on their promises had gotten ahold of signed export licenses and other government documentation. We were being stolen from wholesale—and all with the signature of a government official.
“So Dad’s leaving …”
“He’s going to Vilanculos with some of the horses to drum up work. I’m staying to salvage what we can from this mess. I’ll go after him as soon as this is over.”
Vilanculos was the closest coastal town, 450 kilometers from Chimoio. It was small compared to the northerly port of Beira, tiny compared even to Chimoio, but it was the gateway to the beautiful Bazaruto archipelago, a ribbon of unspoiled islands in the glittering Indian Ocean, with golden beaches and a vast, serene bay in which people came to snorkel, dive, and sail on the local dhows. Perhaps some of the tourists those places attracted could be tempted to take a ride.
“Mum, I’ll send you more money,” Jay said, his face as stony as his father’s.
“I know, darling …”
“For Kate’s university fees, if nothing else.”
I don’t know if my heart had ever felt warmer. Jay and Kate had always been close, ever since those days in which she trotted off after him into the bush to foil his attacks on the local birdlife, but the idea that he should send his pay home to keep her in school was too beautiful for words.
“Jay, it’s for the best. He’s taking seven from the herd. Lady, Fleur, Jade, Black Magic, Squib …” I paused. “Spicegirl and Megan, too. He’ll put them to work there. There has to be more trade there. More tourists.” I hesitated to say it, but I added, “More hope. Chimoio’s going bust. We have to get out.”
“Who are you kidding, Mum? You haven’t been apart all your lives …”
I smirked. “There was a time before your father, Jay.”
“You were younger than me. Much younger.” He stopped. “Are you going to be okay?”
“Well,” I said, “it’s not like I’ll be completely alone. Jonathan will go with your father, but there’ll still be Denzia, Albert, Never, and the other workers … And there’ll still be the herd. We’ll always have them.”
“The herd …”
I thought I sensed vitriol in Jay’s voice, as if it was the herd’s fault we were in this mess.
At that moment, Pat and Tequila drew level with the truck. Tequila seemed to have given up straining back for the Bvumba now. I slipped out of the cab to greet him.
Tequila dropped his head. I took hold of the lead rope and, conceding defeat, he ambled up the ramp.
Back in the cab, Pat pulled the truck around.
“It almost seems unfair,” he said, “to take him away from home like that …”
I thought of Mugabe, that day on Palmerston Estates, rustling the herd off Biri Farm, my mother in England, Paul still in London, Kate in South Africa, our family scattered to the four corners of the earth while, here, the new world we were trying to forge came apart at the seams.
“No,” I said, “it hardly seems fair at all.”
From the back of the truck came a mournful snort. I had always understood that we were here to care for the horses—but now the thought struck me that they did not understand, that to Tequila and the rest it might have seemed that we had dragged them here, that we were the ones keeping them from home. I longed for a way to tell them: we love you; we’d take you back, if only we could. But there was a gulf of language and understanding between us, and I could never tell them exactly how I felt.
At the riding school, Pat was fitting halters to Black Magic, Lady, and Jade, while Jonathan and Albert shepherded Spicegirl, Fleur, and Megan into the back of a truck. At the edge of the paddock, I stood with a reluctant-looking Squib. He was to be the only male horse accompanying Pat to the coast, but he didn’t look particularly pleased about it.
“Come on, Squib, Pat’s going to need another man about the place …”
Once Spicegirl, Megan, and Fleur were safely inside, Pat led Lady out. We stood together, in front of the truck, and I put my arms around the dainty, precious little mare.
“You look after each other,” I said.
Lady flicked her mane. Whether she was telling me no, yes, or simply not to be so melodramatic, I couldn’t tell. I watched her disappear up the ramp, into the darkness beyond. Jonathan slipped in afterward to help tether her and make sure she was secure.
The last to board the truck was Black Magic. Once she was safely within, Pat and Jonathan lifted and secured the ramp. The last thing I saw was Black Magic’s darkly glimmering eyes looking back.
Pat heaved a backpack into the cab of the truck. After the numerous times we had packed up our houses and fled, it seemed surreal to think it had boiled down to this: seven horses and a single pack, like some pioneer of old.
“Hard to think she was one of the nastiest little horses when we found her …” I said, still looking at Black Magic peering out of the back of the truck.
“What are you talking about?” Pat grinned. “It’s the nastiest horses that are the best. She’s got fire, that old girl …”
Jonathan had already climbed into the passenger seat of the truck, and now Pat swung up beside him, taking the wheel.
“So,” he said, cocking his head.
“So,” I replied, looking up.
The engine fired, and the horses shifted up back, as if readying themselves for the trip. They must have been used to riding in trucks by now.
“You’ll call me when you get there?”
Pat shook his head. “I’ll be calling you on the way, every half an hour,” he said. “You’ll be sick of the sound of my voice.” He paused. The door closed between us and, for a second, it was as if Pat was already gone. “You’ll let me know how it goes here. If I have to, Mandy, I’ll be back on the road …”
“It’s 450 kilometers from Chimoio …”
Pat shrugged. “It’s a straight highway.”
I stood watching until the truck had disappeared. Then, breathing in sand and stinging dust, I turned back to the riding school. In the paddock, Shere Khan stood out from the herd, a full hand taller than the horses crowding her on either side. She seemed to have craned her neck to watch Pat leave.
“You’ll have to put up with me now, Shere Khan …”
I wandered across the yard and propped myself at the fence. In the field, Brutus and Tequila stopped grazing to wander over. From between them, Princess approached. As I ran my hand along her neck, she suddenly cringed away, her withers still tingling with sensitivity where her wound had healed. I was reminded, starkly, of the ringworm eating its way through the herd; Fanta standing bald in her stable stall, rasping desperately in the heat; Philippe with his rotted eye; and all the other ticks and parasites, so alien to Zimbabwe, that had taken to our horses.
Somehow, I was going to have to get them through it, while at the same time juggling our debts and navigating a route to the other side. A route, I was determined, that would one day take us all along the same road on which I had just watched Pat depart: to Vilanculos, and the Indian Ocean.
There was much to do, but for now it would have to wait. I would have my hour of peace before I walked willingly into the chaos. I called for Albert to help with a saddle and girth and stepped into the paddock to rope Benji, one of my favorite horses and one of the stars of the riding school, who always cheered me up when I felt down.
I hoisted myself into the saddle and Benji carried me out of the paddock, across the riding school, and onto the road along which Pat had traveled. We would follow him, if only for a little while, out to the town limits and the bush beyond. And one day, we would all follow this road—every last one of us—and never look back.
I was sick of new starts. We had had too many.
“This time,” I said, hand entangled in Benji’s mane, “this time will be our last.”