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Over a million African villagers are forced to live in “protected villages” surrounded by barbed wire and guarded by Rhodesian government forces so that there can be no more pungwe. Children of fighting age are kept at gunpoint. Toddlers, the elderly, and women crouch under the watchful eye of their captors. They are allowed to fetch water. They are fed. But the captives, too, are watching. Shading their eyes against the sun, they stare into the hills, which rustle suddenly with movement: a chain of swaying grass and bushes. The Rhodesian forces look quickly over their shoulders, but they see nothing. Only the grass moving in the wind. What the old women and the small children and the mothers see are familiar bodies (soldier brothers, sisters, fathers, aunts) in a column, moving quickly over rough ground. The women pull their babies to their breasts, sink back on their heels, and wait for liberation.

The untended crops in the TTLs wither in the hot sun, curl up, and blow away. The African cattle hunch, starving, untended, until at last they push through the fences of neighboring commercial farms run by whites, where the grazing is fat and cultivated.

The long-horned, high-hipped village Sanga cattle spread ticks to our pampered, pastured cows, who instantly succumb to heartwater, redwater, and sweating sickness and whose bellies swell with the babies of the native bullocks. They run in the hills behind our house, unhandled, until they become wild. At night we hear them roaring to each other, not the gentle pastoral calling of our domestic cattle in the home paddocks, but the noise of wild animals in the hills, kraaling against leopards and baboons for the night or calling in randy, unrequited shouts.

Dad is away more and more, fighting. The material of his uniform wears thin, like wings, across his shoulder blades. The skin on his shoulder is bruised in a stripe, where his FN rifle hangs. Mum runs the farm now. When Dad is away, we are given a Bright Light—an armed man deemed unworthy to fight the actual war, but worthy enough to guard European women and children—to take care of us. Our Bright Light is called Clem Wiggens. He has tattoos from head to toe; his eyelids read “I’m” and “Dead.” His feet are labeled “I’m Tired” and “Me Too.” He comes to breakfast late, rumpled, having slept soundly through his watch. He has fiery red eyes, wafting marijuana. He is kind to the dogs, but if we ever get attacked, Mum says, “it’s just one more kid to take care of.” Sometimes she tells him to go and check up on the other women-without-men and their children. And so he leaves us and sits all day on another woman’s veranda and drinks gallons of her tea and stares with undisguised lust at her maids.

Mum and I are having breakfast. Vanessa is painting on the veranda. The cook comes with a tray of toast: “Philemon wants to see you, madam.”

I follow Mum outside, to the back door. The dogs, hoping for a walk, are at our feet.

“Yes, Philemon?”

“The wild cattle came into the home paddock last night, madam,” says Philemon. “They are jumping the dairy cows.”

“Oh, hell.” Mum bites the inside of her lip.

“They will make the cows sick,” says Philemon.

“I know. I know that.”

Philemon waits, dropping to his haunches and rolling tobacco in a square of newspaper.

Mum sniffs. “I’ll see what I can do,” she says.

She whistles up the dogs, orders me to put on my tackies for a walk, and stalks down to the paddock with my air gun tucked under her arm and her Uzi, as usual, slung over her front (where it is starting to rub permanent gray marks on her clothes). I am trotting breathlessly behind her.

“What are you going to do?” I ask, hopping over a patch of paper thorns and ducking under the barbed wire as Mum strides through the Rhodes grass toward the native cows, colorful and raw-boned against our square-rumped red cows.

“Shoot the buggers in the balls,” she says.

“Oh.”

“See?” she says, as we come up to the native cattle, who are grazing near our cows, but in their own