Scenes From Provincial Life - J. M. Coetzee [37]
There is no point in going out to hunt in the heat of the day, when the animals they want to slay are dozing in the shade. But in the late afternoon they sometimes go touring the farm roads in the Studebaker, with Uncle Son driving and his father in the passenger seat holding the .303 and he and Ros in the dickey seat at the back.
Normally it would be Ros’s job to jump out and open the camp gates for the car, wait for the car to go through, and then close the gates behind, one gate after another. But on these hunts it is his privilege to open the gates, while Ros watches and approves.
They are hunting the fabled paauw. However, since paauw are sighted only once or twice a year – so rare are they, indeed, that there is a fine of fifty pounds for shooting them, if you are caught – they settle for hunting korhaan. Ros is taken along on the hunt because, being a Bushman or nearly a Bushman, he must have preternaturally sharp vision.
And indeed it is Ros, with a slap on the roof of the car, who sees the korhaan first: grey-brown birds the size of pullets trotting among the bushes in groups of two or three. The Studebaker comes to a halt; his father rests the .303 on the window and takes aim; the clap of the shot echoes back and forth across the veld. Sometimes the birds, alarmed, take flight; more often they simply trot faster, making their characteristic gargling noise. Never does his father actually hit a korhaan, so never does he get to see one of these birds (‘bush-bustard’, says the Afrikaans-English dictionary) from close by.
His father was a gunner in the war: he manned a Bofors anti-aircraft gun shooting at German and Italian planes. He wonders whether he ever shot a plane down: he certainly never boasts of it. How did he come to be a gunner at all? He has no gift for it. Were soldiers just allotted things to do at random?
The only variety of hunting at which they do succeed is hunting by night, which, he soon discovers, is shameful and not to be boasted about. The method is simple. After supper they climb aboard the Studebaker and Uncle Son drives them in darkness across the lucerne fields. At a certain point he stops and switches on the headlights. Not thirty yards away a steenbok stands frozen, its ears cocked towards them, its dazzled eyes reflecting the lights. ‘Skiet!’ hisses his uncle. His father shoots and the buck falls.
They tell themselves it is acceptable to hunt in this way because the buck are a pest, eating lucerne that should go to the sheep. But when he sees how tiny the dead buck is, no larger than a poodle, he knows the argument is hollow. They hunt by night because they are not good enough to shoot anything by day.
On the other hand, the venison, steeped in vinegar and then roasted (he watches his aunt cut slits in the dark flesh and stuff it with cloves and garlic), is even more delicious than lamb, tangy and soft, so soft that it melts in the mouth. Everything in the Karoo is delicious, the peaches, the watermelons, the pumpkin, the mutton, as though whatever can find sustenance in this arid earth is thereby blessed.
They will never be famous hunters. Still, he loves the heft of the gun in his hand, the sound of their feet tramping the grey river-sand, the silence that descends heavy as a cloud when they stop, and always the landscape enclosing them, the beloved landscape of ochre and grey and fawn and olive-green.
On the last day of the visit, according to ritual, he may shoot up the remainder of his box of .22 cartridges at a tin can on a fence post. It is a difficult occasion. The borrowed gun is not a good one, he is not a good shot. With the family watching from the stoep, he fires off his shots hastily, missing more often than he hits.
One morning while he is out by himself in the riverbed, hunting muisvoëls, the .22 jams. He cannot find a way to release the cartridge-case stuck in the breech. He brings the gun back to the house, but Uncle Son and his father are away in the veld. ‘Ask Ros or Freek,’ his mother suggests. He seeks out Freek in the