Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight_ An African Childhood - Alexandra Fuller [61]
“They drink blood,” he tells me.
“Who?”
“Leopards.”
“Why?”
“For fun. Leopard beer.” He laughs.
Cephas has been designated the family’s tracker. For most of the time, while I am at school, he is tracking wild cattle for Dad and wild game for the pot. During the holidays, I can go anywhere on the ranch, as long as Cephas is with me—he tracks to make sure we are not walking into a leopard’s tree or the place where a snake likes to sleep. And in this landscape, which is turn-around-the-same no matter which way you face (more mopane and scrub and acacia), Cephas makes sure we don’t get lost.
Within a tall security fence near the entrance to the ranch, there are several houses for white people, although all but two are abandoned. The ranch manager and his wife live in one house. They kill leopards, and Vanessa and I skulk close to their house and see the stretched-out skins on wire racks at the back of their yard. We tell Dad.
We say, “They’re poaching leopards.”
Dad says, “Oh, hell.”
“Oh, hell, what?”
“Don’t say ‘hell.’ ”
“You did.”
“Do what I say, not what I do.”
We live in a small, white house surrounded by bare sandy ground and, for shade, two acacia trees. In the garden, left over from the war, is a snake-infested bombproof bunker which is accessed through a heavy metal door in the floor in my room. There is a generator at the workshops, which provides a spluttering, surging electricity for us from six in the evening until ten at night. At ten o’clock the lights dim once, to warn us to climb into our beds or light candles, and then in a minute the whole place is plunged into darkness and the kind of shattering silence that comes after a generator has been shut off.
To my relief, I discover that we do not have to rely on the rivers for water. We receive thin, saline water from a borehole within the security fence. There is just enough for baths and flushing the loo, and for pots of tea, but hardly enough to keep a few struggling vegetables in the garden. During the long, hot, dry months, we find miraculous isolated dams in the far reaches of the ranch. They are almost forgotten-about reservoirs constructed forty years earlier by the original cattlemen who settled this place.
The house is surrounded by a gauze-covered veranda on which there is a meat safe to keep recently shot impala carcasses, and bins where we store horse feed. The meat safe is an old one, a wooden-framed closet with metal gauze on all sides to allow for a cross breeze. The carcasses grow an oily translucent skin, which protects the meat below from going off too quickly, although we must still eat the entire animal within a week.
We eat impala at each meal. Fried, baked, broiled, minced.
Impala and rice.
Impala and potatoes.
Impala and sadza.
Tinned beans.
Tinned peas.
Tinned peas and beans with impala.
Bran flakes for breakfast if we’re lucky, oats porridge if we’re not.
We drink thin, animal-smelling milk, which comes from a small herd of skinny beef cows. These are cows caught and tamed from the wild herd. The milk they give is reluctant.
We eat Mum’s cottage cheese, which hangs from mutton cloth dripping into a basin in the hot kitchen.
And fresh rolls of bread made by Thompson every morning and baked in the woodstove and which we also sell to the ranch laborers from a little store in the compound. Five cents for a bun. Twenty cents for a bun and a Coke.
Last thing at night we are allowed a glass of milk with Milo in it—a crunchy, sweet, supposedly chocolate-tasting powder. But nothing can disguise the taste of the reluctant milk.
Mum and Dad
MUTARE GENERAL
The doctor in Mutare is old—old for anybody. He is especially old for a doctor and especially old for an African. But he doesn’t have the luxury of retirement to look forward to. There aren’t enough doctors