They had barely done so when Stompie came bounding out into the open. Not far behind came my brother. The lone buck saw him first. Again and again he flashed his warning colours high in the air in a series of prodigious leaps. The herd, unsettled, needed no persuasion. Almost at once the buck were on the move again, not running full out but trotting with their easy, elegant, long-distance stride. Occasionally they would stop, look quickly over their shoulders as if to make certain that indeed a horse and a man with a gun were really on their spoor. Then the sight of my brother still darkening the blue of their day as he came doggedly onwards would huddle them together in panic, and they would mill about uncertainly, as if demanding of that empty sky and lonely plain what they had done to merit such a situation. But then, inevitably, some natural leader would emerge, and provoke the herd into following him, at the trot, deeper into the open veld and nearer to me.
This was for me, always a most moving sight and full of real excitement. Until the very last moment I could never tell what the herd would do. Often when the buck were nearing reasonable rifle range they would suddenly change their instinctive plan, break away at right-angles from their line of advance, out-circle their drovers, and go back the way they had come. It needed only one mistake from my brother to bring this about. He had only to press them too hard, or appear too eager to turn them on one particular flank rather than another, to make them suspicious of his secret intent. Then in a flash they would wheel, break through that wide gap between him and me, and make for the familiar ground from which they had been driven. Considering how indifferent my brother was to sport of this kind the risk of this happening was never remote. Perhaps it was awareness of this that made me over-anxious and, as I watched their progress, tempted me into exposing myself once too often over the shoulder of the ant-heap. Suddenly Stompie began to run as never before, coming fast round on the far flank of the herd which was still trotting easily towards me. Soon he appeared at its head and with arched back and glistening coat did his warning dance in full view of the main body. The herd stopped in a ragged, irresolute line looking rapidly from Stompie to my brother and back. Again Stompie bounded. At that moment he was barely 200 yards from me and as his finely moulded and superbly arched frame appeared high above the grass, the lace of the white ruff on his pastel coat flying wide open from the violence of his bound, I saw him cross and uncross his finely pointed feet twice in the air before he came down to earth again. It was a difficult and brave act, beautifully executed, and perhaps possible only to some lonely outcast denied other forms of expression in life. But, unhappily, on that day it only filled me with fury.
No sooner had he landed and bounded away again at an incredible angle to his descent, than the herd reacted. It wheeled right like a battalion of Royal Guards on parade and charged at incredible speed in the direction that Stompie was pointing, straight for the hills and the invisible plains of home. In fact so rapidly did the herd change course and run that it got between my brother and Stompie, who in obedience to herd tabu had now stopped bounding and had dropped into a slow walk behind the herd whose hooves were still making the plain reverberate like a drum. Then, when he was once more rightly distanced from the fast receding herd, he did not follow them as he normally did, but turned and stopped so that he was standing sideways on to me. From this position he looked first at the pink and sea-foam surge of buck on the fringe of the blue hills, and then straight back at my ant-heap with, as I believed, a look of pure triumph. It was more than I could bear.
In my way I, we all, had been good to that buck. Yet, before I knew what I was doing, I had laid my sights on him thinking, ‘You’ve bloody well asked for this!’ and pressed the trigger. I have always enjoyed the smack of the bullet as it hits the game I’m after, particularly game that has tested my patience and skill. On this occasion I liked it too, but only for as long as the sound lived in my ear. Stompie took the shock of the bullet without a bound or a stagger. For one second he remained in position looking at me without surprise as I stood up from behind my ant-heap. Then his fore-legs began to give way. He struggled to remain upright, gave one last, wild glance at the hills where the herd had fled, before he sank down on to his knees. Like a destroyer holed in the bows and sucked down into smooth waters so his body took a swift glide forward to sink steeply into the hissing grass and vanished from my sight.
Immediately I ran forward to put him out of unnecessary pain. However, he was dead when I reached him, lying on his side with large brown eyes wide open, filled with hurt and turning purple between the blue of the day without and fall of night within. I cut his throat quickly. I stood up to wipe my hands and knife. The last of the herd was vanishing down the pass. Behind me a horse snorted and jingled its bridle chain. I swung about. My brother was there sitting on his horse, his face white as chalk, looking at Stompie.
‘Well?’ I asked, pretending to take it for granted that he was about to dismount to give me a hand cleaning the buck: ‘Not much of a bag for all that work, is it?’
He made no answer but went on staring past me at the stained earth.
That put me on the defensive. ‘What’s biting you?’ I said. ‘Aren’t you going to help?’
He shook his heavy head and said with difficulty, his eyes bright with the unanswerable rhetoric of tears: ‘No, Ouboet. I’m not going to help.’ Then he burst out suddenly, ‘How could you? How could you do such a thing?’
‘Don’t be an ass,’ I answered, more perturbed than I cared to show. ‘Stompie asked for it. Besides I probably did him a kindness. He can’t have enjoyed himself much. No one wanted him around.’
It was then that my brother became more violent than I had ever seen him. ‘How d’you know?’ he asked passionately. ‘Life must have wanted him or he would never have been born.’
This time there was no holding his tears. I became so upset that I sent him off home on his own, thinking I could then clean and truss Stompie at peace. But all the time I was haunted by that look of living hurt still lingering in the dead buck’s eyes. I seemed to have known that look all my life though never so poignantly or at such close quarters. For instance, had I not seen something of the sort a year before in my brother’s eyes at school? The question of it gripped my mind like the first nip of winter frost in the shadows cast by a watery autumn sun. It made me shiver and I tried to dismiss the association as sheer fantasy. Yet from that time onwards, although I continued shooting for years, I never again enjoyed it as before. I shot purely out of habit. My liking for it ended that morning with Stompie on the wide plain on the far side of the prehistoric ridge at the back of the white walls of our home. And my liking for Stompie? How and when had that died? Was Stompie perhaps condemned on the afternoon when I abandoned my brother to the school’s strange hunger? But I am better at questions than answers. All I know for certain is that it is on such dubious trifles as these that the ‘nothingness’ of which I have spoken feeds and grows great.
fn1 Kalwerhok: calfpen.
fn2 Boggeclass="underline" hunch; Tjie: diminutive.
fn3 Stompie is the diminutive of stomp – stump, but it is also slang for the discarded fag-end of a cigar or cigarette and is used as both here.
4 The Growth of Nothing
MY BROTHER AND I never spoke of Stompie again. The incident seemed to glide into place naturally beside the other unmentionable episode and to form a pair of creatures waiting in the shadow of my mind for their native night to fall. There were even long periods when I succeeded in forgetting them altogether. I was aided and abetted in this by the fact that life afflicts the young with appetites and longings so violent and vivid as to lend reality to the illusion that they are permanent and that their satisfaction is purpose enough. I had my university to get through, then my law studies to conclude and finally my own legal practice to set up. I did all this in a manner which satisfied the high expectations everyone had of me. True, towards the end of my law examinations I was conscious for the first time of a slightly sagging interest in the mechanics of learning. From time to time I wondered whether what I was doing was as important and urgent as it seemed to be. This may even have been noticeable in the results of my examinations. However, the change was so slight and there were so many valid excuses to be made for it since I had so many interests that it escaped both particular and general comment. Yet sometimes in the very midst of my activities and at all sorts of odd and unexpected moments, something would stir in the shadows: there was a movement of things long forgotten as if to remind me that they were still waiting for their own night-fall. This awareness always was accompanied by a feeling of indefinable dismay; a startling of my whole being. And I never got used to it. Perhaps because what we call ‘forgetfulness’ and ‘neglect’ are the favourite sustenances of a certain part of ourselves. Suddenly, in a street crowded with traffic, my step would falter because some leopard light on a white wall reminded me of that morning when my brother and I rode out of the white gates to shoot on the other side of the hills on the great plain. Sometimes at the climax of a complicated plea for the prosecution I would find myself stammering and forced to play for time by drinking a glass of water I did not need because the look in the black eyes of a handcuffed African prisoner waiting his turn in the dock had reminded me, poignantly, of my own past with my brother. I told myself that it was absurd, even unjust that such remote events should be allowed to keep such determined pace with my grown-up self. But none of these admirable and undoubtedly valid considerations influenced their behaviour or their effect on me. They lived on from year to year, thriving apart from the main stream of life within me, with a volition and dark reason all their own and in time their self-announcements seemed to gain in vigour. But even worse than their disconcerting reappearances in a recognizable dimension of my spirit was their invisible subversion.