But they are really only cats — the demons. Descendants of two kittens, a pretty black queen with a beauty patch of white on her cheek and a ginger tabby torn, who kneaded the pillows of a member of one of the meteorological teams in his lonely nights and were fed tit-bits at the only dining table for thousands of sea-miles around.
The meteorologists have tried poisoned meat, and being scientifically-minded, infection with cat flu, so deadly to pets on any mainland. But these feral creatures know no mainland. The soft beds and tit-bits have disappeared in ancestral memory. They have forgotten the comforts and dependence on humans natural to them; to succumb to the forms of eradication devised by humans would be a form of atavism. Their howls are the only cries heard on the island; they have eaten all the eggs of the sea-birds. They have caused the giant turtles to disobey, in amphibian wisdom, the imperative of their slow drag up the beaches to lay their eggs; the turtles have learnt something they did not need to know before in thousands of years in the chain of their existence: that cats, the claws of cats will dig up their eggs no matter how much breath — and how agonizing it is to breathe, out of water! — is expended in burying them in the sand. The hares are fast being eaten out; and even the butterflies — caterpillars are milky-bodied and nutritious.
The meteorologists have no trouble with mice, of course. But two kittens, so soft and small, have almost destroyed the ecology of the island, and this (apart from the infernal wails of feline rut) is an embarrassment to the team. When the SPCA protests against the cruelty of inflicting on animals a painful death by germ warfare, the meteorologists cite the near-extinction, by those non-indigenous animals, of wildlife. But this only emphasizes the careless disregard for ecological balance shown in the first place; why were the kittens not spayed, in the case of the female, and castrated, in the case of the male (a precaution against his mating with some kind of wild feline that might have existed on the island)? Well, they were pets, and nobody thought of it, nobody could have dreamt of the consequences: of such fierce fecundity in that place where there were no women. It was simply out of mind; out of the mainland.
A new solution is to be tried.
The fact is, there is an emergency on the island.
As the solution involves an element of sportsmanship — who could be persuaded to carry it out, otherwise? — it was never intended to get into the papers, but due to another indiscretion on somebody’s part, it has. Only a line or two: the cats are to be shot. If the hunters are good marksmen the death will be far quicker and less painful than death by arsenic or cat flu. The meteorologists are not the sort of men who shoot for sport, of course, they don’t handle firearms, so others must be found to do it. The army would be the obvious choice, but another sort of State of Emergency exists in the mainland country and all troops are required to man the borders, take part in pre-emptive raids across them, and install themselves with tear-gas, dogs, and guns in the vast areas where blacks live. Every young recruit is needed: there are boycotts, strikes, stay-at-homes, refusals to pay rent, all of which bring blacks into the streets with stones and home-product petrol bombs and sometimes grenades and AK-47s that have somehow been smuggled past the troops on the borders.
But there are thousands of young white men outside the army who are proficient in handling firearms. Only temporarily out of the army: all these healthy males have done their initial period of military service, but they are called up for short periods wherever an emergency within the Emergency arises. No one has had time enough in civilian life to lose his touch, handling an automatic rifle, or needs practice to get his eye in on target. Under command, and sometimes out of panic, they have shot chanting black schoolchildren, black mourners dispersing from those children’s funerals, black rioters fleeing, black men and women who happened to go out for a pint of milk or a packet of cigarettes and crossed the path of an army patrol in the streets. Pick them off. They’re all black. There is no time — it is no time — to distinguish the bystanders from the revolutionaries.
A large party of these healthy young white men from a university in the capital city of the country has been invited on a holiday that will also serve a useful purpose. Not exactly a study vacation, although the students will be shown round the meteorological station and have its complex and sophisticated weather-satellite system explained. More like a spree, taking them abroad to an unusual and little-known destination. They are going to the island under orders to shoot the cats. They are game for it. Among them is the young fellow who could have lost a blue eye by means of a stone thrown by a black, but was merely grazed to ooze a little of his Teraloyna blood-line. He is going, soon, to see through the oval of the aircraft window (pushing and shoving among his pals) — Look! Look down there—
The island we left for the mainland, all wrinkled and pleated in erosion, just topping out of the sea mists: the dark ravines where the goats held out long before felines did, the dark shores edged with bright surf, its movement frozen by the vertical distance of thousands of feet, before the aircraft slowly loses height.
He is going home to the island.
He is looking forward to the jol he and his mates will have, singing and stamping their army boots in the aircraft, the camp they will set up, the beer they will drink, and the prey they will pursue — this time grey, striped, ginger, piebald, tabby, black, white — all colours, abundant targets, doesn’t matter which, kill, kill them all.
The Moment Before the Gun Went Off
Marais Van der Vyver shot one of his farm labourers, dead. An accident, there are accidents with guns every day of the week — children playing a fatal game with a father’s revolver in the cities where guns are domestic objects, nowadays, hunting mishaps like this one, in the country — but these won’t be reported all over the world. Van der Vyver knows his will be. He knows that the story of the Afrikaner farmer — regional Party leader and Commandant of the local security commando — shooting a black man who worked for him will fit exactly their version of South Africa, it’s made for them. They’ll be able to use it in their boycott and divestment campaigns, it’ll be another piece of evidence in their truth about the country. The papers at home will quote the story as it has appeared in the overseas press, and in the back-and-forth he and the black man will become those crudely-drawn figures on anti-apartheid banners, units in statistics of white brutality against the blacks quoted at the United Nations — he, whom they will gleefully be able to call ‘a leading member’ of the ruling Party.
People in the farming community understand how he must feel. Bad enough to have killed a man, without helping the Party’s, the government’s, the country’s enemies, as well. They see the truth of that. They know, reading the Sunday papers, that when Van der Vyver is quoted saying he is ‘terribly shocked’, he will ‘look after the wife and children’, none of those Americans and English, and none of those people at home who want to destroy the white man’s power will believe him. And how they will sneer when he even says of the farm boy (according to one paper, if you can trust any of those reporters), ‘He was my friend, I always took him hunting with me.’ Those city and overseas people don’t know it’s true: farmers usually have one particular black boy they like to take along with them in the lands; you could call it a kind of friend, yes, friends are not only your own white people, like yourself, you take into your house, pray with in church and work with on the Party committee. But how can those others know that? They don’t want to know it. They think all blacks are like the big-mouth agitators in town. And Van der Vyver’s face, in the photographs, strangely opened by distress — everyone in the district remembers Marais Van der Vyver as a little boy who would go away and hide himself if he caught you smiling at him, and everyone knows him now as a man who hides any change of expression round his mouth behind a thick, soft moustache, and in his eyes by always looking at some object in hand, leaf of a crop fingered, pen or stone picked up, while concentrating on what he is saying, or while listening to you. It just goes to show what shock can do; when you look at the newspaper photographs you feel like apologizing, as if you had stared in on some room where you should not be.