Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight_ An African Childhood - Alexandra Fuller [60]
There are no towns anywhere near the ranch, and only one thin road leads past it, described on the map as a strip road. I point this out to Dad.
He says, “Great, isn’t it?” He takes a deep pull on his cigarette and shows me. “Look at the rivers.” There are three rivers running through the ranch.
“Well, that looks watery,” I say, more hopefully.
Dad snorts. “It just looks that way. Dry as a bloody bone.”
“Will we grow tobacco?”
“Cattle,” says Dad. “I’m going to find their cattle.” His thumb covers hundreds of miles and he moves it slowly across the bottom of the map. “All this, see? That’s where the cattle are. They think.”
The herd went wild during the war. They’ve started to range and roam like wild herds of eland or kudu. Dad is going to find, herd, dip, vaccinate, dehorn, castrate, cull, and brand a few thousand head of wild Brahman cattle.
“Will we be the only white people?”
“Almost. There’s the ranch manager and his wife.”
“Are there any kids?”
“Not white kids.”
“Oh.”
“You can help me round up the cattle.”
“Okay.” I am not enthusiastic.
“There are wild horses, too.”
“Oh. Can we train them?”
“Perhaps.”
“How long will we live there?”
Dad smokes and squints up his blue eyes. He says, “I’ve told them if they give me a year, I’ll give them their herd back.”
“And then?”
“We’ll cross that river when we get to it.”
The Turgwe, Save, and Devure rivers flood once or twice each year, each flood within a few weeks of the last. A great wall of water gushing brownly through the scrubby low mopane woodland makes a roaring sound like a thousand Cape buffalo galloping over hollow ground. Floating carcasses of large animals are caught, legs poking up among washed-away trees. Smaller animals, still alive, cling wide-eyed to the branches of the barreling trees, bodies hunched, wet faces pinched with fear. By morning, the flood is over. The rivers lie almost still, swollen, sluggish. And then the rivers dry into smaller and smaller pools, stinking and lurking with scorpions, until nothing is left of them but glittering white sand.
The Africans and animals who have learned to live down here near the ranch, in the lowveldt, dig deep wells into the dry riverbeds until they reach the black, dank water that lies there. For nine months out of every year, these warm, barely ample wells feed everything that is alive within a fifty-mile radius.
Which will, very shortly, include us.
Between the Turgwe and the Devure lies Devuli Ranch. Seven hundred and fifty thousand mostly flat acres of scrubby, bitter grass, mopane woodland, acacia thorn trees, thorny scrubs, and the occasional rocky outcrop. The cattle have not been touched for ten years—almost the entire war. There are second-, third-, and fourth-generation Brahman cows running wild on the ranch.
Brahman cows are the wildest of all domesticated cattle, notoriously jumpy and hard to handle even when they do have frequent human contact. They are strangely feral-looking, with their elaborate humped shoulders and sweeping dewlaps and floppy ears. And these cows have been alone so long that they have become hardy and prone to spooking, like prey animals.
For there is also an abundance of leopard in the kopjes. Kopje, Afrikaans for “head.” That’s how these small hills look, like buried black giant heads in the hot sand. The leopards are as still as dappled blankets rumpled against the gray rock, their flanks beating in the heat like fluttering leaf-shadows. They watch the young spring Brahman calves by day and they hunt by night. Leopards kill at the throat, one efficient, powerful bite to the jugular. Which is why they can hunt alone.
We bring our new cook, Thompson, with us from the farm, and our nanny, Judith, who has recently changed her name to Loveness. They step out of the car and their faces twist with disgust.
“It’s alone,” says Judith/Loveness.
“Alone what?” asks Mum.
“All alone.”
Thompson says, “Too much sand, madam.”
Cephas, our tracker, has also come with us from Robandi and it is as if his feet have hit the earth on which he was