My brother did not care much for animals, particularly game, but when I first told him all this, he was greatly interested. This buck henceforth found an assured place in his imagination. He began to keep a close and affectionate watch on it. It was he who first called the buck ‘Stompie’. Soon he surprised me by telling me things about the buck which even I had not noticed. It was he, for instance, who one day observed that although the herd had rejected ‘Stompie’ yet he was bound more closely to the herd by that rejection than any of the other animals. They all mated and fought and roamed away on long foraging parties with comparative freedom. But ‘Stompie’ felt compelled to do only what the assembled herd did. When we rounded-up the main body of buck for shooting and drove them down towards the line of guns lying in wait for them, although we ignored Stompie and left him safely outside the ring of mounted drovers, nevertheless he would insist on taking the same fatal route that the herd had taken and, undeterred by the sound of firing ahead, he would come up from behind and with extraordinary and solitary courage run the gauntlet of deadly guns. He would have been shot many times over had we not all contracted for him the compassion which his own kind so conspicuously denied him. So he was spared to live a sort of moon existence, a fated satellite, condemned to circle forever the body which had expelled it. In this role he was not without great value to the herd. Exposed to the danger of man and beast, constantly alone, he developed a remarkable intelligence and heightened presentiment of danger. He was always the first to feel it and then to give the alarm by making a series of prodigious bounds into the air, his pastel coat, sea-foam belly and black-lacquered feet of Pan flashing in the sun. Often an exasperated gun would threaten to shoot him for spoiling our chances in this way, and sending us back to an empty pot. But a curious compassion for the deformed animal always restrained us.
Then came this vacation at the end of my school career. On the first morning I came out of the house at dawn to see the great herd mistily burning in the shadows of the veld. I took a deep breath. It was wonderful to see everything again as it had always been. At that very moment the first level ray of the sun picked out Stompie, standing like a statue on a pedestal of golden earth far to the left of the main herd. Immediately the feeling of contentment fell from me. I could not account for it. All I know is that at that moment I felt about Stompie something I had never felt before. Somehow he spoilt the view for me. In the past I had tended to feel reproach of the herd and even some slight gratitude to the lone buck for giving us the constantly recurring opportunity of displaying a certain magnanimity to life. Now the sight of him in the natural vista that I had loved so long disturbed me. I took it to be merely a temporary emotion but the reaction gained rather than diminished in vigour.
At the end of my vacation I went to continue my studies at University. For six months I never gave Stompie a thought. I came back on holiday again as ready to accept the familiar as ever before. It happened to be our first shooting season since I had left school. On the night of my arrival I was asked if my brother and I couldn’t try next day to relieve the monotony of our winter diet with a taste of the venison we all loved. No sooner had we ridden out into the open than I saw the forlorn shape of Stompie standing to attention in the distance.
‘He’s seen us,’ I remarked to my brother with a trace of exasperation that drew a surprised glance from him. ‘He’s getting more cunning each year. I bet you we’re going to find it difficult to come up to the herd today.’
I had hardly finished when Stompie suddenly left the earth, almost vanished for a second from our startled gaze, and then reappeared flashing high in the blue air. He must have turned round completely in the course of one of the greatest jumps of his life. Again and again he repeated this astonishing performance until the shimmer of fire on the coats of the herd was arrested and it steadied into a front of unwavering flame. For a moment it remained so, a thousand delicate heads moving backwards and forwards between us and that far empty flank where Stompie was dancing out his concern for the safety of the herd. Then the alarm beat too, in the hearts of the animals. Fear is the deepest of our vortexes and determines its own cataclysmic dance in the heart. I never cease to marvel at the immediacy with which terror turns the animal soul inwards upon an empty centre with whirlwind paces. But the speed with which the herd before us contracted even after a cycle of seasons free from fear, seemed to me unusually poignant. It spun across the sleep-indifferent veld like a cyclone of fire, turning and returning upon itself in an anti-clockwise direction as if it believed that there was magic strong enough in devout movement against the sun to turn back Time to its Elysian source and leave behind the threatening present.
‘Told you so,’ I remarked with gloomy satisfaction to my brother riding silently at my side. ‘It’s no good going on.’ I paused. ‘Unless you go on alone and drive the herd to the far side of the farm. Remember that ant-heap near the boundary fence where we dug out the ant-bear last year? I’ll lie up there, and if you can send the herd streaking by between the ant-heap and the fence, I’ll do the rest.’
I had no fear my brother would reject the suggestion since he disliked shooting intensely. Now, to my amazement, however, he seemed to hesitate.
I asked brusquely: ‘Well, what is it?’
‘Sorry, Ouboet, I was just wondering –’ He made no effort to ride on.
‘What?’
‘I don’t know –’
I asked deliberately, ‘Would you rather do the shooting and I’ll round them up?’
A shiver of distaste went through him. ‘No, it’s all right. We’ll do as you said first.’ He pulled his horse into a gallop and rode off.
Watching him go I felt rather sorry for him. Poor devil, he rode so badly! I could see daylight between his seat and the saddle at every stride of the horse. Then I wheeled about, put my horse into a brisk canter and rode for the hills.
The long line of hills ahead my brother and I called the ‘dinosaur hills’. We called them that because in the light of Africa’s Götterdämmerung sunsets they looked like the vertebrae of some fabulous prehistoric fossil. I rode quickly through them, the incense of wild-olive and black-leopard ferns stinging in my nostrils and my horse’s hooves sounding almost blasphemous in the silence. I read an Arabic scribble of wind in the grass’s silken parchment as I emerged, alone, on the great plain beyond. It was as if I had burst a time barrier and come out into a world that had existed before the Word and man’s articulation of it. Far as the eye could see the plain was empty. Not even a lone wanderer’s smoke hung over it. Above, the sky was filled to the brim with blue and only the morning air feebly complained in my ear for neglect of sound.
I rode steadily across the plain towards a tall clump of wild-raisin bushes near the ant-heap of which I had spoken. At the clump of bushes I dismounted, put my horse under cover and then walked to my pre-arranged position behind the ant-heap. I got there none too soon for as I unslung my rifle, carefully laid it down out of the sun’s sparkle and stood up for a last look round, the head of the herd was just emerging from the dark eye of the pass in the hills. For a moment I stood immobile watching them. All our high-veld buck are from birth afflicted with claustrophobia. This fear was drawing them now strung out in a long line through the pass as fast as they could go. At that distance the hills were a smoky purple and the buck themselves a coral and white glitter, but so swiftly did they follow on one another’s heels out into the glittering plain that they looked like a twist of silk threading some ancient needle. However, once clear of the pass they slowed down, stopped, re-formed their tight circle, and faced about.