To hell and gone. C. Johan Bakkes
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a slightly curved blade, razor-sharp, with a notch at the base of the blade. It is heavy and can serve as a bush knife, to clear a path through the jungle.
The little boy was barely fourteen when the doctors announced that his father was dying; time left together was limited. In front of my eyes a big, active man of the veld changed into a shrunken, emaciated invalid. This brush with death influenced us all. The men withdrew. My wife, a psychologist, stepped in, took his hand and accompanied him on his journey to meet death. We hunters, who had often been killers ourselves, no longer had any desire to spend time together and invented furtive excuses not to talk about rifles and knives any more.
And somewhere along the line the little boy disappeared as well.
To escape, I went to Nepal. Rambling around in the kingdom of the mountains made me forget about death at home. In Katmandu I came across a kukri. To recognise a good kukri, you have to know something about knives. The heavy Gurkha knife has a certain point of balance and you test it by balancing it on your finger. I bought a beautiful specimen, razor-sharp and well balanced. At home I hung it on the wall – it was too beautiful to lock away in a safe.
At his father’s funeral the boy was sullen and apparently unemotional. He kept his distance, as if he knew that the role of carer would now be resting on his fifteen-year-old shoulders. His mother had to do her bit to keep the wolf from the door and he said farewell to puberty alone and defiantly. Now and then he would call on my wife. What they discussed, I had no idea.
He was in matric when I came home one day to find that the kukri was missing. When I learned that he had come round earlier, I knew at once what had happened to it. My first reaction was to fly into a blind rage. But I realised that this was a private matter between him and me.
The next day during school hours, I had him summoned on the intercom while I waited outside. A tall young man came sauntering towards me, his hands pushed into his pockets. He was clearly ill at ease. I could see his father in him. When he saw me, his bravado and nonchalance started to wane.
“My boy, don’t even try to feed me shit today,” I plunged straight in. “I know it’s just about the most beautiful knife a man could ever hold in his hand. Where is it, so that I can fetch it?”
He opened his mouth half-heartedly to protest. “If you’re honest with me, no one will ever know about it,” I added.
The almost-man became a little boy as he told me where it was.
As I turned to leave, he spoke in a soft voice: “Oom, I miss my dad.”
My brother’s keeper
“Kalie is gone,” she told me. “It’s your fault – go look for him.”
What keeps me sane, is occasionaly escaping from what is considered normal. As a safari operator, I happen to show people the wild places of our continent. Ordinary people. People who pound away at a typewriter – these days a word processor – every day. Or who beat a path to the deeds office. Or who have to placate disgruntled customers.
In my company they have learned what it means to get away from it all.
Kalie farms. He started out on a combine harvester in a Highveld mealie field; later he began to cultivate grapes somewhere outside Stellenbosch for Dad. To farm on behalf of Dad, brothers and the rest, is no easy feat. “You’d better not stuff up our inheritance!” he was told.
Breaking free from the constraints of normality takes guts. Sometimes it starts with a small step. Just saying “I want to” can be hard. It’s even harder to return to reality and normality.
In gumboots vines were planted in the clayey soil. The family farm became a jewel; brothers were having a ball and Dad was growing older and more full of shit. And Kalie kept farming, without respite.
Shaking off your responsibilities, even temporarily, makes you think of what you have and don’t have. Joining in my adventures has seen many marital bonds suffer a setback. Many have ended up losing their jobs and for some abusing the bottle was the start of a downward spiral – for them returning to normality was no longer an option. Still, lonely people have formed lifelong friendships, single people have found partners and some returned to their mundane existence with newfound gusto.
It was after twelve years of thankless labour that Kalie phoned one day: “Ouboet, that longstanding invitation sounds about right to me now – I’m coming along.”
And together we hiked through the Fish River canyon. And later the Naukluft. And later Kilimanjaro. And later the Himalayas. And later we drove through Kaokoland. And later he drove through the Richtersveld on his own. And Botswana. And the high mountains of Lesotho.
And when Miranda said “Go look for him”, I did as I was told.
And never returned myself.
Angel
She came walking towards me through the sand in the moonlight. I thought I recognised her. She was wearing a long, flowing dress, and a straw hat pulled deep over her eyes . . .
It was a quarter to three in the morning and I was lying in my sleeping bag somewhere beside the lower Fish River in Namibia. I did not feel well – in actual fact, I felt extremely unwell. I knew from experience what was wrong – I was dehydrated. The desert sun and the gruelling days of hiking unremittingly over skull-shaped rocks, sand and boulders had taken their toll. My worn-out body, which I had systematically been reducing to ruin over the years, was protesting.
Once again we were in the middle of an inexplicable adventure. Once again we had tackled the near-impossible. The idea had been to start at Seeheim and walk along the banks of the Fish River, through the canyon, to where it joined up with the Orange River – a distance of 300 kilometres. Even worse – all this had to be done in only ten days, in other words at a rate of 30 kilometres per day. Crazy . . .
It was day nine, we had another 40 kilometres to go, and it looked as if the hike was over for me. I was losing fluid in every possible way. From the top, the bottom and even the middle. We had already lost Daan, and my comrades Kalie and Mario were anxiously trying to fill me up with fluids, for in that desert region they would either have to carry me out or cover me with rocks – no humans ever came there.
I watched her approach through narrowed eyes. Was it time to be fetched? I thought I recognised her . . .
My mind wandered . . .
I saw her for the first time when she grabbed my hand somewhere on a cliff in the Witels. I was on my own, jumping, climbing and swimming to Ceres, doing what is known as “kloofing”. I had left the group behind. We were behind schedule, as we had been snowed in in the Hex River mountains. An urgent appointment had made me act irresponsibly. On a rocky ledge fourteen metres above the river a stone had become dislodged, my backpack had pulled me over the edge, but suddenly there was a handhold.
I think she had brown eyes when she laughed.
My bakkie had broken down somewhere between the Ugab and the Brandberg. My technical know-how is limited to fuel supply and spark. I’m buggered, I thought, I won’t get out alive. No one knew that I was there alone. Dejectedly I sat down on a rock, while she fiddled under the hood. With a laugh she shook her brown hair back, a greasy smudge on her nose.
The mission hospital at Ngoma in Malawi had crawled with the sick and deformed. Malaria was consuming me piece by piece. I was pissing blood. Black water fever? it flashed through my mind. The bouts of fever came and went with monotonous regularity, and I felt that I was slowly becoming detached from reality.
“Have you come to fetch me?” I asked her as she sat down at the foot of my bed.
“Not yet,” she answered with a sad smile, one eyelid drooping slightly.
This hike had been one of the toughest of my life. The terrain