Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight_ An African Childhood - Alexandra Fuller [38]
“Oh.”
She says, “Get away from my nice cows,” and aims a shot at the offending bullocks’ rear ends with my air gun. She misses.
“Bugger it.”
“We need Vanessa,” I say. But Vanessa is in the middle of another art project, which means she won’t be off the veranda for days now.
Mum edges closer to the native cows, who move mildly away from her, swishing their tails and keeping their heads steadfastly low in the high, tangled Rhodes grass. “Now,” Mum says, raising the air gun to her shoulder and letting go with a pop. Nothing happens.
“Did I miss?”
“Which one were you aiming for?”
“Any of them. Did I hit one?”
“I don’t think so.” I frown into the high summer sun, a big ball of red hanging through the haze of wildfires, over the yellow fig tree on the edge field. “It’s hard to tell in this light.”
Mum hands me the gun. “You have a go,” she says.
I break the gun, slip a pellet into the barrel, take aim, and fire.
But the native cattle are tough. The pellets from my air gun ping off their unyielding hides even at close quarters.
“Damn it,” says Mum. She picks up a clod of earth and throws it feebly toward the offending cows. “Go away!” she screams. “Go home!” The clod of earth falls to the ground not far from our feet and crumbles in a little sighing breath of dust. Some egrets, startled, fly out of the grass, like a tattered white picnic cloth being shaken out of the earth, and then settle again at the cows’ feet.
Mum’s shoulders sink, and her face folds, defeated.
I say, “They’re quite fat, some of them.”
“On our grazing.”
We start to walk back to the house, up past the diesel-smelling workshop and the sharp-tobacco-smelling barns. Mum is silent and angry, stomping along the road.
The next morning when I come to breakfast Mum is already two-thirds of the way through her pot of tea.
I sit down and wait for July to bring me a bowl of porridge. I order two fried eggs with toast.
Mum says, “Eat up,” looking over my shoulder and out of the window. “The horses are ready.”
I am surprised. Usually Mum dawdles through breakfast, listening with half an ear to the radio if it is the news or Story on the Air and reading a book propped up on the toast rack while simultaneously dealing with the constant flow of requests that come from laborers at the back door, via the trembling hand of the cook, who is greeted with a hostile “What is it now?”
“Malaria, madam,” says July, or “Sick baby,” or “Snake bite,” or “Accident with fire.”
But this morning Mum tells July, “I am not seeing anyone. Tell them to go away. They can come tomorrow.”
The cook hovers, distressed. “But, madam . . .”
“But nothing. I mean it,” says Mum. “They won’t die if they wait another day.”
She shoulders her Uzi and pulls on her hat. “Come on, Bobo,” she says. “You’ll have to leave the rest.”
I stare in dismay at my half-eaten bowl of porridge and my promising plate of eggs and toast.
“But—”
“We’ve got work to do.”
“What?”
“We’re going to round up every bloody stray cow on this farm,” she says, “and have a cow sale.”
That day Mum and I ride up into the foothills on game paths and tracks that the terrorists have used. These paths are already strangled with fresh growth, with the promise of a new rainy season coming, the quick green threads of creepers stretching over old, dry tracks, swallowing footpaths, and demonstrating how quickly this part of Africa would reclaim its wild lands if it were left untrodden. The horses struggle over rocks, their unshod hooves slipping against the hard ground as we climb ever higher into the mountains. Mum rides ahead on Caesar, her big bay Thoroughbred, an ex-trotter rescued from an abusive home and made ridable again under Mum’s patient training. I am on my fat chestnut pony, Burma Boy, a bad-tempered and ill-behaved animal; bucking, bolting, kicking, and biting regularly—all of which, Dad says, is good for me. The dogs swarm, noses down, through the bush ahead of us, yelping with excitement when they put up a hare or mongoose