Preface
If parts of this story seem to be unnecessarily gory, then I have to give you an explanation: these things really happened, just like this, and I have tried to be faithful to the truth. I cannot get this memory out of my mind. It has plodded after me these last fifty years. This is my memorial to a Springbok.
_________________________
Many, many years ago when I was in my second year at UCT my parents decided to embark on a road trip to visit various members of our family distributed all over the face of South Africa. We had met all these people at the funeral of my grandmother, who was a kind of a matriarch (one of the biggest funerals I’d ever attended) a few months previously, when we discovered the apparently hitherto unknown fact that she had an enormous family who we had never met and they, too, knew nothing about us.
I suppose we must have been something of a curiosity to them, we being Jews and all, but these were deeply religious Christian people who had their own ideas about “The Old Testament” and they viewed our religion as the precursor of their own, and they treated us with hospitality and respect. To top it all this was the year 1973 and the memory of Israel’s spectacular and apparently miraculous victory in the 6-day war (1967) was still fresh in everyone’s mind. Israelis were heroes to them. There would never be another moment like this.
You must remember that culturally the Afrikaans people regarded their own history in South Africa as a God-ordained parallel of the biblical history of the Jews in Israel and there was a strong affinity and sympathy in that respect. You only need to listen to their telling of the story about the history of the Voortrekkers to understand how deep that undercurrent ran. So we were feted at every stop. On the very farm that this story plays out, they took some family photos with us and one old Tannie (“aunty”) said to my dad, “Kom sit hier lanks my, ek’t nog nooit lanks ‘n Jood gesit nie!” (“Come and sit next to me, I have never sat next to a Jew before”) Today a statement like that would have everyone hopping up and down with accusations of racism and anti Semitism but I know, deep in my soul, that that was not how she meant it. There was no malice in her heart. These were simple farm folk, they saw us as city slickers, and that’s how they spoke.
So there we were. "Oppie plaas" (“On the farm”). We were there for about a week and a half – maybe two weeks. I don’t remember.
As a special treat they had arranged a Springbok hunt for us, not anticipating that we would recoil in horror at the thought of killing an animal for sport. My parents politely but firmly declined, my brother excused himself to go on a climbing expedition in the Drakensberg (and we didn’t see him again until we got back to Cape Town), which left me to decide for myself, so almost by default and because I was too spineless to take a moral stand on the issue, I ended up agreeing to join the hunting party.
Imagine, if you can: a thin, bespectacled un-athletic little Harry Friedland in a hippie-style cheesecloth top made by his mother, with shoulder-length hair and bell-bottom jeans with colourful braiding round the bottoms and a pair of rubber-tyre sandals, in the company of these REAL MEN, about three times my height, hands like steam-shovels, clutching rifles that looked like toys in their hands.
We had breakfast at about 4 a.m., consisting of half an ox (pan-fried, with many eggs) washed down with huge chunks of homemade chocolate cake and endless mugs of magnificent coffee (“Jy moet sterk wees” à “You must be strong!”)
Utterly terrifying. Oh, I could tell you some stories… And we hadn’t even got onto the truck yet.
Breakfast took about fifteen minutes (believe it!) and then we were off. Two jeep-type vehicles stood outside in the darkness. The sun probably wouldn’t be up for another hour and a half. Our shoes crunched loudly on the cinders in the dead silence and the clear, ice-cold air and the cheerful, deep-voiced banter of the men rang of their excitement at the prospect of the hunt (by the way when I refer to “men”, I subsequently learned that two of them were boys, one of fourteen and the other eleven – I had estimated them at about age thirty).
I had been given a rifle. I had never even seen a rifle up close, let alone held one. It smelled of steel and oil. It was heavy, and it looked old. I learned that it was called a Mauser, which caused me to wonder whether it had been prized out of the hands of a dead Nazi soldier. Creepy? – Much! It was long, and it had a curious, octagonal barrel. I recognised the trigger for what it was but there were one or two other little switches or levers without labels, instructions or explanations and not wanting to reveal my ignorance or bother any of these busy-looking people I just decided to not touch them. Good thinking, Friedland! I was given a few minutes of demonstration with it. "You'll get the hand of it" I was told. I carried it pointing straight upwards, so as not to accidentally kill anything. Spacecraft and aeroplanes would have to take care of themselves. Nobody paid any attention to me, so I just bumbled around, holding my rifle vertically as if I was proceeding up the Via Dolorosa with a crucifix. I was really getting into this Christian thing!
Guys were climbing onto the bakkies
(Explanation: in South Africa, the vehicle which Americans and Canadians would refer to as a “truck”, all South Africans call by an Afrikaans name, “bakkie”. Initially, “bakkie” would have been the diminutive form of what the English would have called a bowl, such as a pudding bowl, so to refer to a vehicle as a “bakkie” was to refer to the fact that it had an empty, open back that you could load things in to. To us, a truck would be a much larger vehicle. So a bakkie and a jeep or Land Rover would be much the same, just adapted to the terrain.
And another thing: you don’t just “drive away” in a bakkie: you roar off with spinning wheels and burning rubber, spraying pebbles and cinders and clouds of dust and fishtailing left and right as the wheels try to gain traction on the loose ground. And you do it all with affected nonchalance so that everyone – driver and passengers alike – don’t notice or comment, while conducting a conversation about something else entirely. That, dear reader, is THE STYLE!
It's a long drive off the farm and into the veld. Everyone is in high spirits. We’re travelling at breakneck speed. This vehicle has no sides or doors or roof or roll bars and beyond the edge of your seat is – nothing. I thought of saying the Shema but I couldn’t remember the words.
Suddenly we took a sharp left off the tar and onto a really rough gravel road, still speeding, so that you were airborne more than seat-bound. No-one notices, apparently, and the conversation continues unabated.
Now we are in the foothills of a mountain range. What mountain range? - who knows? The dry, brown and yellow grasses are giving way to olive-drab greenery (there is no English greenery in South Africa) and trees. We have slowed down to a crawl. No-one’s talking now. They scan the vegetation attentively. After a while they kill the engines but no-one disembarks. Sitting motionless in the silence, we hear the sigh of a light wind in the grass. The hot engines of the vehicles make a steady, tick-tick-tick sound as they cool and the metal contracts. Our driver drums his fingers on the steering wheel and the sound appears unnaturally loud in the silence.
Then suddenly a bird breaks out of the long grass, shrieking as its wings claw their way into the sky. Everyone is straining to see the point where the bird broke cover.
“Daar’s hy!” the older boy shouts, pointing at the spot. I’m straining to see, but I can’t see what he’s referring to. And then faintly – very faintly – I think I see a curly horn at the height where the grass starts to look thinner. Whether I could actually see the head of a buck, or whether I just imagined it, I can’t tell. But then the grass stirred violently and a buck who had obviously lost his nerve and couldn’t stand still any longer, or who thought the danger of the hunters had passed, makes a break, leaves the cover of the long grass and streaks off to the side of us. He was probably doomed anyway because the bird had betrayed him.
Now, everyone in the bakkie is yelling their lungs out. The driver has started the engine, and we’re rolling, building speed, chasing that buck, which has already put a lot of distance between us. He’s big, and he’s running like hell.
But we’re on rough, open veld, in grass at bonnet height of the vehicle, so the driver is pretty much guessing what the ground contour is under the wheels. Suddenly the bakkie drops out under us and for a minute we’re in free fall until the two wheels on the left side hit ground with a bang, and then a fraction of a second later the two right wheels do the same, putting the vehicle at thirty degrees but still going forward at speed.
I had let go of the seat with my left hand, probably involuntarily, and that hand brushed against my top pocket. I was used to feeling my asthma pump in there (little Jewish boy with his asthma pump – virtually a movie cliché!) – but now that pocket was empty. Generally, one doesn’t need an asthma pump until you realise that you don’t have one. And it is impressed into the hearts and minds of Jewish parents and their darling children that in spite of all the great medical advances of the last two centuries, asthma is still a potential killer disease SO YOU NEVER, EVER, GO ANYWHERE WITHOUT YOUR ASTHMA PUMP!!!
I knew immediately what had happened. That pump must have jumped out of my pocket on that last bump. “Stop! Stop! Stop!” I yelled, and the bakkie came to a skidding, screeching halt.
Four strong, healthy faces were looking at me in complete bewilderment. I guess they’d never heard of asthma, or asthma pumps. They were staring at me, but out of the corners of their eyes they were watching their prize heading for the horizon. There was growing anguish in their eyes. I couldn’t deny them this. But I absolutely had to have my pump. My mother would go berserk if she heard that I didn’t have it.
“OK drop me here, you go on, and you can pick me up on the way back”
I read the relief in their eyes. I leaped off, giving my ankle a vicious twist, and immediately they disappeared in a spray of sand and pebbles. And then, at ground level, I hobbled back to the point where the bakkie had taken off and immediately it became clear what had happened.
The long grass concealed the fact that there was a substantial donga (Australian: “billabong”; Arabic: “Wadi”; English: “big fat hole in the ground”) the left-hand wheels got to the upper part of the slope first, and the right- hand wheels touched down a fraction of a second later, hence the twisting motion of the vehicle. But it had been airborne for a second, and hence the drop and the impact. And even with that, we were very lucky: looking at this donga now, I realised how deep it was. The bakkie could have rolled.
I realised that I was looking for a needle in a haystack. I gazed around hopelessly. I could hear the sound of the bakkie disappearing into the distance. I was alone. A minute or two later I heard the sound of several gunshots and I felt something akin to a physical pain, out of sympathy, because I knew what they were doing.
And then I spotted a tiny glint of something reflective in the grass right at the bottom of the donga. I stared at it in disbelief. As I got closer I realised that it was my pump, almost buried. I reached down in joy and scooped it up. Definitely mine! I always write my initials on the label, “just in case”, so there was no doubt.
And then I heard a sound – a soft, shuffling, unidentifiable sound coming from the top edge of the donga. I looked up. There was a buck, looking down at me. Not a big one. Must have been quite young. For a moment we froze and then there we were, staring silently at each other. I had the rifle in my left hand and the asthma pump in my left. My nature said, go on, move, wave it away – but my new-found spirit of bravado said, “Shoot it. Show them you can do it!” No-one would have known if I had waved it away. The buck and I were alone in the veld. All I would have to do is not talk about it. No-one would believe this story anyway. As far as I knew I was not a killer – but I had never been in this position before. Or I could shoot and miss, and the shot would scare it off. Suddenly it exhaled loudly, sort of like a sneeze, and I realised that it was so close that I could hear it breathe. In truth it couldn’t have been more than three metres away.
Very slowly, I slipped the asthma pump from my right hand into my pocket and then even more slowly I swung the butt of the rifle across my body, my left hand with a white-knuckle grip on the stock. I settled the butt into my right shoulder, as I had been shown, and used my left to raise the barrel to the buck. But then I made a terrible, terrible mistake, and the memory of it will remain with me for the rest of my days. I was so hypnotized by the face of the poor creature that instead of aiming for its shoulder, as instructed, I aimed straight at its face. The difference is that if you are a really good shot you can shoot it in the head and it will drop immediately – but most shooters aren’t that good, so you are told to aim for the shoulder. It will take longer to die, and it will suffer, but what the hell, its only an animal after all, and hunters don’t think like that.
I had no idea what would happen when I pulled the trigger. I’d only ever seen this sort of thing in the movies. I also didn’t understand the difference in force between a hunting rifle and a handgun (come to think of it that wouldn’t have meant anything to me as I had never fired a handgun either!).
The “bang” was deafening and the recoil of the rifle nearly knocked me backwards off my feet. The barrel jerked upwards towards the sky (but of course by the time it did that the bullet has already left the barrel) and to my horror I saw half the buck’s face get ripped away, revealing the inside of its head. But instead of falling down, to my horror the poor animal remained on its feet, and then it wheeled around and started to run away. At that point I realised that the reason that I was moving with such difficulty was that my twisted ankle was swelling like a balloon. I couldn’t stand or walk and I ended up crawling out of the donga on all fours. I looked around and in the distance I saw the wounded buck blundering around in the middle of a piece of open veld. Obviously it couldn’t see where it was going, or half its brain was gone, or both, and it moved erratically, like a crazed thing. I was too far away to even think of taking another shot and anyway I was so emotionally destroyed by the incident that I was quite irrational myself.
After some time (a long time? A short time? – who knows?) I heard the sound of the returning bakkie. I thought that I absolutely had to stand up so that they could see me, to avoid being run over in the long grass – but then I realised that they weren’t coming for me: they had seen the wounded buck. The bakkie came to a halt, two guys stood up in the back and started shooting at it. Perhaps they missed, I don’t know, but the damn animal remained on its feet. It was running, stumbling, falling, getting back up, running again. The guys in the bakkie stopped firing. The bakkie was moving again – straight towards the buck – and then I realised what they were doing: they were simply going to run it down. There was a bit of crazy back-and-forth across the veldt and then I saw the bakkie’s bull-bar connect with the animal’s shoulder – but it didn’t fall – now it was running on three legs, one of the front legs dangling uselessly – and then there was one final crunch, the bakkie went right over the animal, and it was done.
The bakkie rolled to a stop. The excitement had dissipated. We were all quiet. It was a sickening sight, with broken bones jutting out in all directions, the neck ending surprisingly in half a head, smears of blood on the bakkie's bull-bar. In spite of the bar, the front of the vehicle was dented. Obviously some of the animal must have gone between the bars.
"I had to do it" Said the driver, with a tone of desperation in his voice.
Everyone murmured agreement, without taking their eyes off the mess.
Then came the task of lifting the broken animal into the back of the vehicle. Everyone was covered in blood – arms, necks, faces, clothes. The body was still as hot as a live creature and there was a stench of blood and faeces. As it was a very broken body many of the pieces were only connected by skin, tendons, strands of bloody flesh. There was only one eye, open, staring at nothing. Big, brown, clear and beautiful. You had to be mindful of the sharp fragments of shattered bone. Guys were speaking in low, desultory tones. My heart was banging in my chest, fit to bust, my mouth so dry that I couldn’t move my tongue. We were working as quickly as we could – flies and other flying creatures seemed to have come out of nowhere. I had originally noticed one big bird overhead but now there were three.
As we worked I looked over the edge of the bakkie and noticed that there was another – much larger – animal in there. A big buck, with a magnificent set of antlers. It lay as if it was sleeping and it took a few seconds before I noticed the neat hole just above its shoulder, but save for that hole, there was no sign of anything untoward. It wasn't breathing, and it didn't move. It was dead, of course, but it was kind of hard to believe. The pieces of the smaller buck were dumped next to it, but I noticed a peculiar kind of gentle movement with which the pieces were being handled. Even the death of a wild animal demands a certain kind of respect – possibly even more so than it would have received in life. It is the phenomenon of death, not the creature itself, which demands that respect. You feel it instinctively.
And then we all climbed up, and the bakkie took off. Slowly, conversation returned. I found it best not to look into the floor of the bakkie. I concentrated on the scenery. I wasn't really part of the conversation anyway, but the general tone and spirit of the party was improving. Blood was still draining out of the bodies of the animals, and the floor of the bakkie was awash with it. As the bakkie bounced and swayed the blood sloshed around. I was going to have to throw these shoes away – they were soaked in hot, red blood. Every time the bakkie bounced, the antlers of the big buck banged horribly on its metal floor, so that just became part of the general cacophony that accompanied us back to the farm. I really, really needed this day to be over.
We re-entered the farmstead gates like a conquering army coming home. It was all triumph and bravado, cheering womenfolk, servants and labourers, everybody knew that there would be spoils to be shared. Not having any experience in these things, it had never occurred to me what was going to happen now, and it happened so fast that I was completely unready. Many hands helped to drag the animals off the bakkie, someone with a hose jumped up there and started hosing the thing off and I remember a red cascade of water and blood flowing off the back and into the hot dry earth. I followed the crowd as the animals were carried to a nearby outhouse, the purpose of which I had never previously considered. There were two large roughly-hewn but incredibly heavy looking ancient wooden tables in there. The animals were dumped on the tables. Large knives were hauled out from somewhere and immediately things which I did not understand, started to be done to the animals.
What they had started doing, of course, was making biltong. The most highly prized of the numerous kinds of biltong which are available in South Africa is Springbok biltong – in the cities it is the most expensive kind and it is rare compared to beef biltong. I think it's called jerky in America, but it never acquired the status of a delicacy there the way it did in Africa, and the reasons are both practical and historical: in the days before refrigeration, curing, or spicing and drying meat, was a good way of preserving it. Today you can get biltong made out of dried fish (“bokkoms”) - which is the most disgusting, repulsive, vomit-inducing thing in the world but the fishermen like it and you can buy it straight from the fishermen at most of the fishing harbours; in the Karoo you can buy Ostrich biltong, which is very hard, dry and fibrous but actually tastes quite nice – and then there are novelty biltongs made from giraffe (very rare); crocodile (for the tough-guy show-offs) and so on: but the standard supermarket favourite is beef biltong and quite honestly I think it’s the nicest. Springbok biltong has a sort of a wild taste about it which you have to be in the mood for.
The animal has to be skinned cut into manageable portions. The skin is handled with care because it has a value of its own. The guts, brains, lungs and other organs have to be removed. The heart has special value to some tribes but all the parts have their uses. The horns are, of course, trophies, and their fate is already sealed with promises on the bakkie on the way back to the farm. Some people seemed to revel in covering themselves with the blood that is everywhere, and there seemed to be an awful lot of it around, and the smell was overpowering, and I decided that it was time for me to leave the party.
"Good God,”said my mother, looking at me in alarm, "what's happened to you?"
I must have been a scary sight - skin and clothes glistening with wet red blood, face as pale as a sheet (probably still in shock!), my long hair stiff with dried blood and standing up like a spirit possessed – "you can't come in – go and stand out there!" The fact that I was a grown man didn't deter her at all – I think all her old nursing instincts must have kicked in at the sight of the blood – she tore the clothes off me - "Lift up your foot!" She instructed, and pulled off one bloodied shoe - "Other one!" - everything was thrown aside – and there I was, kaalgat in the yard, fortunately out of sight of the commotion on the other side of the farmhouse
"Shower!" She yelled, and miraculously a shower that I had not been aware of, appeared against the outside wall of the house. Things were happening very fast, and apparently I was just an object in someone else's life. The water was freezing cold but I got under it obediently and ma disappeared into the house. A moment later she was back with a bar of soap. "Soap!" She said, and I complied. Then more freezing water. She produced a towel from somewhere. "Towel!" Jesus! OK!
Then I was wrapped in the towel, bustled into the house and pushed into my room. The door slammed, and finally I was alone.
I stood motionless in the centre of the room for a good few minutes. The commotion outside had become louder, if that was possible. Some sort of celebration was brewing. But I never saw it, because I had climbed into my bed, and fell asleep, and slept till the next morning.
I got up late. The place was dead quiet. The men were out on the land and the servants, young Zulu girls explained in broken Afrikaans and gestures that the women had gone off to town. I wandered round to the shed. It was locked, but the smell that emanated from there told me that the meat was hanging in there. I could visualise it, each piece on its own string, hanging from overhead beams, in the relative dark and cool.
And then as I turned to walk away. I walked round to the other side of the farmhouse. Then I noticed what I at first thought was a small, furry animal up against a wall. On closer examination I realised that it was the remains of my veldskoen shoes, but completely caked with dried blood. Then I remembered that that was where ma had stripped me down. The clothes were gone, but the shoes had been abandoned there.
On an impulse, I picked them up and carried them round to the tool shed. I got a shovel and walked out into the veld, some distance away from the house. I dug a hole and for reasons which I would not be able to explain, I lowered the shoes gently into the hole, and covered them up, and tamped the red Transvaal sand down tight.
Then I walked back to the house.
POSTSCRIPT
That was all of fifty years ago. But sometimes in dreams, I can still see the faint outline of a young buck standing at the top of a ravine, looking at me in innocent surprise
___________________________________________________
©HARRY FRIEDLAND December 2022
