“Sure. You cut off his knockers.”
“More or less. Anyway, then he becomes a steer. Wait a few years and he becomes an ox. You castrate him to make him quieter and easier to work, but you owe him something for that. You owe yourself something, too, if you want a healthy animal.” He finished unhitching the final animal and watched it wander off to graze. He squatted down, tracing his finger in the soil a moment, watching the animals at their grazing, and then looked up at Barney. “Now,” he went on, “if you want the best from your oxen — if you don’t want them to lie down and die on you and leave you a long way to go and no way to carry your water or your mealies or your biltong — then you treat your animals right. You don’t work them more than eight hours a day, and six or seven is better, with a break at midday. An ox needs eight hours to graze and eight hours to sleep and chew his cud.” He suddenly smiled. “Probably work as well for a man if a man cared as much about himself or his Kaffirs as he does about his ox and his wagon.” He tilted his head, coming to his feet. “Come over here.”
Barney moved closer.
“Now, we’re going to be a fair spell on this trek,” Andries said, “and you might as well earn a bit of your keep. You saw me unspan the animals. Watch again in an hour when I span them again. Watch tomorrow. After that it will be your chore.” He smiled at Barney in an almost fatherly manner. “Now, go find some branches or some dried ox dung for a fire and we’ll have some tea.”
So he was going to learn to span and outspan oxen, and how to make a fire with dried cowshit, was he? You’re really startin’ at the bottom, Barney, me boy, he said to himself, and went out to find the branches or the dung.
They had been on the trail a week when one noon, over their tea and while the unspanned oxen grazed, Andries suddenly pointed. “Os,” he said.
Barney frowned. “Eh?”
“Ox,” Andries said, and pointed upward. “Hemel. Sky, or heaven. In Afrikaans. It’s a dialect, sort of, of Dutch.” He shrugged. “You seem to be so set on spending time in this country, you ought to learn the language.”
“Everybody talked English in Cape Town, an’ you talk English,” Barney pointed out logically.
“Not everybody speaks English, not even in the Cape. The farmers you’ll meet speak only Afrikaans. After all, less than a hundred years ago in southern Africa, nobody spoke English, and there were a lot of people here, even then. I think an hour every night before sleep, if we’re not too tired, would be good for a lesson. It wouldn’t hurt you a bit. Take your mind off all those diamonds you’re going to pick up in the street in Kimberley.” He made a chewing motion and pointed to the remains of some mealies. “Voedsel. Food. You’d better learn that word if you don’t want to go hungry someday, diamonds or no diamonds,” he added dryly, and pointed. “Let’s go. Os.”
“You said before sleep,” Barney said.
“This is extra,” Andries said, biting back a smile, and dug in his pocket for his after-meal pipe. “No extra charge. All right, let’s have it. Os.”
“Os” Barney repeated obediently. “Ox.”
The sky at night was clearer than Barney could ever remember; the millions of stars seemed almost within reach, pinpricks in a velvet dome seemingly hand-high. There was no moon to dissipate the sharpness of the starlight; in the far distance the shadows of mountains blocked out the edge of the sky. Barney lay beside the wagon, wondering that the oxen did not step on him as they moved about in the dark. Beside the dying fire a few feet away Andries was working on some tanned leather he had dug from the rear depths of the wagon; it seemed to Barney that the large wagon contained almost every necessity of life, in addition to the heavy crates of pumping machinery being taken to Dutoitspan, which Andries had told him was now a part of the new Kimberley. The older man finished whatever he had been doing with the leather and came to stand beside Barney.
“Got a decent hat for you, boy,” he said, and placed it on Barney’s chest. Barney no longer resented Andries calling him “boy.” “That derby of yours looks a bit out of place in the Karroo.”
They had been on the trail for three weeks and had become fast friends. Barney had become accustomed to his daily chores, to the endless walking, to his Afrikaans lesson each night, and had even come to understand that the small additional weight that he and Andries might have added to the wagon, were they to ride, would have been that much extra for the ox team, and would have cost them up to a mile a day, or as much as four or five extra days for the trip. He had also become accustomed to the tea and mealies and biltong, the dried maize and dried beef that served almost exclusively as their diet, supplemented by whatever bird or small animal Andries could bring down with his long gun, or by the rare decent meal served them as they came by some even rarer farm in that desolate country, the farther they came from the Cape and civilization. The land here was largely uninhabited, offering the barest minimum of forage for the animals; ahead of them during their day’s march the distant mountains seemed to maintain their position in the clear desert air, sometimes reflected from the flat pans, the shallow water holes that would be filled after a sudden desert downpour, and seemingly as quickly emptied either by the thirsty oxen or by evaporation under the hot sun.
On occasion they would be passed in the opposite direction by a mule train or coach filled with weary and discouraged passengers returning to Cape Town after failure in the diamond fields, or by an ox wagon with as many as twenty men inside and as many taking their turn walking silently beside it, making it back to the Cape and to decent amenities for those who still had a shilling in their purse. A rare horseman would also occasionally pass, although a single man with a single animal that far from civilization was taking a chance on being found together with his horse as mere bones bleached by the relentless sun, should they wander far from the trail and possible help. There were limits to the supplies one could carry in saddlebags, and a horse could not do on the slim forage that barely served for the oxen. And distances were great in that region, and the land inhospitable.
Barney sat up and tried on the hat. It fit loosely but he knew it would provide far better protection against the sun than the narrow-brimmed derby he had brought from home, a final concession to style from a mother worried that her youngest should not appear as gauche to the savages.
“Thanks,” he said gratefully, and grinned. “Harry won’t recognize me when I get there, I’ll look such a trekker.”
“Harry… Your brother, you said.”
“Right, me older brother by three years.” Barney smiled in remembrance. The memories seemed awfully far away here in the South African desert, almost as if he were recalling a distant place that did not really exist except in his mind, experiences he might have read of instead of having lived. “Him and me, we used to do lots of things together. Acrobats, we was, in the music halls. Songs and dance. You name it, if there was a shillin’ in it, we done it. Here, I’ll show you.”
He came to his feet, did a quick comio shuffle, a fast twist, and ended with a flip that tossed his new loose-fitting hat to one side. He picked it up, grinning, brushed it off and pushed it back onto his head. “We was called the Barnato Brothers, fast songs and patter, tumblers and clowns, and we was known all over the East End. That’s in London,” he added in case Andries did not know.