Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

Squatting by the fire, alfus shovelled coals into a patch alongside, for the egg pan. The rattle of the land cruiser hitting the bump behind the far hill outside the camp told him it was time to put the warthog bacon over. Nothing wrong with his ear. But his legs were stiff. You can’t go on forever. He grinned so his gums showed. But you can go on pretty long.

   On either side of the pan he placed a sprig of magic guarri to keep the flies from the food, another one close to hand to swat them off in case that didn’t work.

   The magic guarri was one of Alfus’s best friends. It helped him all the years he was a tracker with wood for his cattie that saved many lives, including his own. More effective than the ranger’s .450 soft noses. Out in the bush he brushed his teeth with the ragged edge of a magic guarri twig. And now he was a cook and a helper in the camp, the magic guarri kept his food clean of flies. Trees were the kindest of the earth’s creatures. They stood and waited for your need and let you take without complaint. They fed the elephants and the impala, the waterbuck, kudu, giraffe, gave a place for the leopard to drag her prey. The weeping werbie provided seats for the baboons among the rocks; the baboons ate the werbie fruit and scattered the seeds. Leadwood gave perches where the buzzards could sleep while they waited for an updraft. And what the trees did for men! Wood for your fire, leaves to heal you — silver clusterleaf to stop you vomitting, common spice leaves for a runny tummy, acacia thorns to pick your teeth and leadwood leaves for toothpaste, boiled knobthorn for a toothache, sour plum tree after too much wine or gin and the soft leaves to wipe your bum. And how many things you could do with the buffalo thorn: the leaf stopped a wound’s bleeding and a branch would catch the spirit of the dead if brushed across the place the person fell so you could bring the spirit home to rest in peace. Impala ate buffalo thorn leaves and an impala buck had to keep many she’s happy. Helped a man, too.

   Alfus grinned so his gums showed. He wasn’t finished there yet either. The trackers got first pick of the new young women who came to the main camp, but older women knew things. He thought about the old cook in the main camp and how she walked past him last week, what her hip said to him, and then she turned and her shoulder folded forward so he smiled now just to remember. He popped a buffalo thorn out of his pocket and into his mouth. He would be back in the main camp next week, drink wine in the compound, and then go out in the dark when she was cleaning the pots and talk with her, tell her watch out for those Dugger Boy buffalo by the water hole, scare her a little and pass the bottle.

   It had been long since Alfus’s last woman, who left him because the manager had scolded her for sloppy bedmaking. Alfus understood. She had no choice. You could not allow another man to correct your woman. Yet Alfus had no recourse. He had already been moved down in the compound when he could no longer track. The manager was young and knew no better. There was no one to blame. Few people knew Alfus’s real name, his Xitsonga name, Mariband — too cool to lose his temper.

   The bacon began to sizzle in the pan, and Alfus could hear the cruiser not five mile beyond the outpost and remembered that he had not filled the latrine buckets. One of the new guests, a fat grey-faced man, drank and ate so much that Alfus had to fill the bucket behind his tent three four times a day. It was a sick smell of a man who drank gin every night, sat up late laughing in the mess tent, so you could feel the animals fall silent and listen all over the reserve. Alfus gave the man a secret Xitsonga name almost like his own but for one sound — Maraband, one who eats too much.

   Alfus rose on his stiff legs and moved swiftly, tightkneed, to the watertank, filled both buckets and carried them up the rise, circling behind the Maraband’s tent to place them on either side of the toilet. He grinned to see that toilet there, glowing white against the brown dirt. Crazy white men. That morning he had heard the Maraband out there calling to his companion in the next tent, “There is nothing like a  crap beneath this cool South African sky. God bless porcelain!” Maraband came from America and the tracker had told Alfus he was wealthy.

   Alfus waited for a moment to catch his breath there behind the plank walls, gazing down into the dry pit of the river bed just behind the latrine. The floor of the bed was dotted with fresh elephant droppings, bright brown and orange melon-sized balls. He smiled, wondering what the American might think if he knew elephant walked behind his tent at night. They moved more quietly than he. All you heard was the crumple of grass beneath their feet and the cracking of the trees they ate. Alfus had seen them the night before standing in the dark on the little clearing behind the place where he slept. He watched them there, huge black shadows against the blue and green darkness of night while in the dining tent, oblivious to it all, the American drank gin by the flickering kerosene light, and laughed at the stories he told the others.

   A giggling lady flew past overhead. Alfus blinked. As he stepped from behind the plank walls, the ranger was just killing the motor of the cruiser at the foot of the incline. Alfus was startled. He hadn’t heard the vehicle. He smiled to cover his embarrassment. Moses slid down off the tracker’s seat mounted on the left front fender, and Maraband climbed down carefully from the middle benchseat. His face was pale as he hurred up the incline, tight-mouthed, his camera and binoculars bouncing off his big belly. Alfus could see it was good he had filled both buckets. He tore some leaves from a common spice to put into the American’s food, for his stomach.

   Another of the three Americans, a thin crease-faced man, said, “Looks like that rhino about scared shit out of Walter there,” and the other one, a bony redhaired man opened his mouth with silent laughter. The other two stood apart — a young French woman and a German man. They spoke quietly together, in whispered French.

   Moses had his cattie out and was laughing, too.

   “Can I try that?” the ranger asked and took the slingshot, loading it with a stone and drawing back the rubber sling. Suddenly he turned, aiming it at Alfus who laughed self-deprecatingly. At the last moment, the ranger turned and fired his stone at the water tank. He hit it, but the rubber sling recoiled, smacking his hand so he yelped and dropped the cattie. Moses chuckled and retrieved the weapon as the ranger cooled his stung fingers in the air. Moses loaded and fired at the trunk of a tall slender tamboeti tree. The stone whacked the bark, chipping it. He quickly loaded again and fired, slicing off a cluster of ticking seeds that fell and lay twitching on the earth, eager to release their blood-sucking larvae.

   The ranger shook his head with wonder and said to Alfus. “Never saw anything like it. We got chased by rhino out on the Riebuck Plane. Two of them. Whites. Male and female.”

   “And they were pretty damn big,” the crease-faced American said.

   “Caught scent of us from about eighty meters,” the ranger said. “Couldn’t see us they’re so blind, but they stood right there and it looked like they could see us all right. Started to run at us. A rhino hits full speed in three strides and full speed is forty miles an hour. They were at stride two when Moses there let fly, caught the male right in that soft lower flank, and they changed direction, 90 degrees!”

   Alfus showed his gums listening, ignoring the bruise to his pride where the young ranger had teased him aiming the imaginary pellet, thinking how many years it had been since he was out tracking. Next week in the compound he knew Moses would tell this story and then pick out which of the young women he wanted for that night. Alfus remembered once many years ago hitting a Dugger Boy square in the nose with his cattie. The owner gave him a fifty rand bonus for that, knowing the Dugger Boy was a rogue and didn’t mock charge the way other animals would. The most dangerous ruthless animal on the veld. A buffalo in a herd, powerful as it was, would run from a sneeze into the comfort and safety of the herd, but a Dugger Boy was mean and wouldn’t tolerate anything getting too close.

   Alfus could still remember the way that bull had looked, raising its nose so it could look at them when they stumbled out of the bush toward him, twenty meters away. Alfus could smell him then before he even saw him and had a rock in his hand before the bull could even start running. He wished he could tell that story now, but it had been so long ago.

   “Alfus,” the ranger said. “We got some hungry men here been walking in the bush for moren three hour. Let’s get those eggs frying.”

   Alfus smiled. “Okay, Mariband,” he said. His private joke. He gave this young ranger his own name to use, too cool to lose his temper, because he knew it made him happy. The tracker’s real name was a frightening one: Die Lan. Alfus did not know what “Lan” meant but the other word terrified him, having been given as a name to a baby. He had heard the ranger one night tell some guest about his name. He said that he had been born by mistake and his parents had no name for him, but the nurse would not let them take him from the hospital without a name. She suggested this name, Die Lan, which she said was the name of a famous writer, a poet, from a country called Wales. The ranger Die Lan, had asked the guest if they knew about this writer and when they said they did, he said he had heard two different things about the writer. He had heard that he had had many women in his short life and also that he had had many men. The young ranger wished to know which was the truth. The guests laughed, but Alfus, sitting by the fire alone with his plate, had been terrified for the boy and decided to give him his own Xitsonga name to make him stronger. He was a good young man, this tracker. He stood firm before the lion and the rhino. He deserved a good name.


   After breakfast the guests and the ranger and Moses took a siesta while Alfus washed the plates and cooking gear. The sun was high now, and sweat rolled from beneath the rim of his cap as he swabbed the plates, thinking about how many sausages Maraband had eaten, deep in Alfus’s hot onion sauce. He wanted to tell the man that it was not meant to have so much of the sauce, the spices were too strong, but he did not know how to talk to them. Instead he had crushed another handful of silver clusterleaves into his coffee for his stomach, but he had been out behind the tent again right after breakfast anyway, groaning, so Alfus would have to fill the buckets again.

   He decided to use the dishwater this time rather than drain off more sweet water. Otherwise they would run short. He worked at a plank table set up on the edge of the river gully and stared out across the yellow plain on the other side, across the silver water of the dam to the green bank on the opposite shore where yesterday he had seen two young lion running on the bank. Nothing wrong with his eyes. His hand had shot up the way a tracker’s hand does when he spots something and felt satisfacation when the ranger responded, saying “N’goni,” and the whole group fell silent there outside his camp kitchen and looked across at his lions running on the green bank, their golden French girl never even saw them at all. But the others, when their eyes finally focused, drew in their breath sharply and fell silent, watching his lions. It was the best way to see the animals, far off, when they had no idea they were watched. Young lion across the water.

   The young ranger, Mariband, had glanced at Alfus with respect and nodded. He was a good man, young but strong and brave. Moses had even invited the ranger into the compound once to drink with the trackers and workers, a lone white man among black faces, eating rice with a fork while they scooped it into their fingers. Alfus had been twenty years old when the black and white were separated by the white law and it made him uneasy to see the white man with his fork in the compound.

   Alfus looked again now, hoping to see the two n’goni once more, but all he saw was a hooded vulture circle in the sky and land on a dead leadwood tree on a long narrow island in the middle of the dam where a crocodile lay in the sun.

   A cut-throat finch called out from a tree and a blacksmith plover clicked overhead. Alfus stacked and covered the clean plates and cook gear, then carried the pan of dishwater behind the American Maraband’s tent. He could hear the man snoring inside as he circled around the plank wall, recoiling. The smell was very bad and there were many flies. He held his breath as he poured the dishwater into the buckets and retreated.

   Now his work was done, and he sat outside his tent, smoking a cigarette, staring out across the dry river bed and the glittering dam to the green shore on the other side. Up above, on the crest of the hill, silohuetted against the sky he saw a giraffe running and an ostrich. There were not many ostrich anymore. The lions ate them all. His mind was far away, watching, as if he were in the air above the dam, moving across to the bank there, a place he had tracked years before. Even now he could see things he saw then. Here a leopard had climbed up with his prey, you could see the bark chipped away by her claws. And here the elephant had walked, dragging their trunks through the dust, and these were zebra prints and there the lionness had overtaken it. That hippo floating there so quietly with the oxpicker on its snout is called Sapo and it once bit a woman’s arm off who tried to beat it with a broom for stealing her carrots. He was thinking about the American named Walter Maraband with his bad stomach and his camera. All the pictures he took. Alfus wondered what they used all the pictures for. The ones he saw always seemed very flat to him and they shined in an unreal way. Some of the guests who came had many cameras, and Alfus thought they didn’t look at the animals at all, never saw them, but only let their cameras see them in order to produce flat pieces of paper with images of the animals their own eyes did not see.

   Once, a woman, a white woman with yellow hair, had taken a photograph of Alfus when he danced to chase away a lion who was too interested in the group they were leading. It was a hungry lion, a he with a great black mane and too young to know it was better to stay away from the people, and Alfus thought someone was going to be taken, so he danced and shook his arms like a chimp up over his head to look bigger and made his eyes big and barked like a dog baboon while the lion decided what it wanted to do. And all the while the white woman with the yellow hair circled around him with a camera in front of her face with a very long eye in it and she took pictures of him dancing and pictures that had both him and the lion. Before she left the camp, she gave him two of the pictures and she looked very pleased with them and with herself, and Alfus grinned at her so his gums showed, wondering if she knew how close she had come to being food for a lion she never even looked at.

   He heard footsteps in the grass, looked back to see the young ranger approaching. “Alfus, I want you to do something. The American. The heavy one. His toilet is all jammed up. Would you clear it for him please.”

   Alfus nodded curtly. He saw the ranger did not like asking him, he was sharp enough for that even if he was still very young, so he said “please” carefully, even if Alfus didn’t care much for that word. Too many white men said too much please and never enough thanks.

   The ranger nodded, stood there a moment following Alfus’s gaze across the dam. “See more lion today?”

   “No more n’goni today.”

   He nodded again and turned back toward the camp trail, while Alfus thought some words. He thought, I am one of the Shangan, even if I never knew my father. But he was a tracker for sure because that is where I got my eye from, and his father was surely also a Shangan and had been a hunter long before when the Shangan were free here, when they hunted with spears and arrows, long long ago. Alfus was not smiling. On a dead tree in the veld he saw half a dozen buzzards sitting, waiting for an updraft.

   Alfus stood. His legs were stiff and his ears were weak, but his eyes were still good. On the other side of the reserve in a fenced in land he had a place where he could grow vegetables, where he could sleep and do nothing and be nobody at all, a man behind a fence on a little piece of land.

   Behind the plank wall the smell was even worse and there were more flies. He lifted the seat and looked in, let it drop and backed quickly to the edge of the river bank. He looked down into the empty bed at the elephant spoor, orange and dried out now in the midday sun. Further to the right were hyena spoor, white from the bones they ate. His lips moved wordlessly over his teeth, and he thought of living behind a fence on a piece of land eating carrots and lettuce without ever again having a woman or work to do.

   Then he went out and got a bucket and a small shovel. The American was already up and had washed his face in the metal basin outside his tent. Now he was walking up toward the dining tent where the ranger would open the bar before lunch. Alfus carried his tools behind the plank wall and stared at the dirty porcelain and the flies, held his breath and went to work.


   Afterwards he took a drink of gin out behind the work tent. The American had eaten half an impala pie for lunch, smothered in onion sauce with a bottle of red wine. After lunch, he had gone to Alfus and pressed a ten rand note into his hand and nodded without a word, eyes closed, then went back out behind his tent. The ranger said to Alfus, “He is a doctor. He operates on people’s brains.” He tapped his skull. “In here.”

   Now, as Alfus swallowed one more draft of gin, staring across the yellow plain toward the dam, he saw something strange. Out in the middle of the plain he saw an ash-grey figure standing in waist high grass straight up with his right hand raised. It was a strange being. Not a man but maybe a ghost. Maybe his father, whom he had never met. The figure stood very still. Right arm raised. Hand out flat. In greeting. Or warning. Or farewell. Some people when they left did not turn back to look.

   Alfus recapped the gin bottle and returned it to his pack, took out his cattie and put it in his pocket. Then he slid down the bank of the river and climbed up the other side into the yellow field. He set out across the grass. He followed an animal path across, toward the figure. An animal path did not swerve around thornbush as a human path would. It was a truer path, better to follow. A brown snake eagle lifted from a tree as he approached and a yellowfaced little bee eater flitted away, green coat shining in the sun. Alfus kept his eye fixed on the ash-gray figure and out behind almost at the dam he saw a wildebeest dancing madly whipping its head in agony with the maggots planted in its brain. Off to the left a herd of bachelor impala,
startled at his approach, leapt off into a run through the tree line.

   Alfus was sweating in the afternoon sun. He heard a baboon cry out in the distance: WAhoo! WAhoo! He should not have drunk the gin so early in the day he knew. It was not good. Yet he paused for a moment to get his breath and let the blood settle in his stiff legs, and as he waited, he unslung his pack and reached for his water bottle but took instead the gin and uncapped it. Even as he swallowed it, his eyes were still fixed to the ash-gray figure with its raised arm, and he began to think of his mother when she died, the way her dark brown face had looked so gray, and he remembered then stories he had heard from uncles, cousins about the land where food was clay and drink was ash. His heart was beating quickly. It did not matter. He would not run from a lion and he would not run from a gray man who waved to him from the high grass.

   He began to walk again, stepping high and stiff through the deep grass. He saw things and he remembered things as he moved across the plain and what he saw and what he remembered became as one thing. He saw the hole of a baboon spider, big around as a fat plum and sheer as a polished pipe and he saw a jackal pup asleep in a drain pipe, one he had never told anyone about because he knew the guests would want to see it, would go in poking at it where it hid there waiting for its mother in the night. He saw a dozen giraffe in a great circle while two males fought for the herd, swinging their necks, their skull horns down at one another’s belly. He saw the women who spoke to him with their hips as they walked with burdens on their heads and smiles on their lips when Alfus was the tracker and they smiled to draw his eyes to them. He saw bush babies and vervid monkies, waterbuck, and zebra. He saw wild dog with their spotted hides and big ears staring up above the grass at him.

   Now the gray figure was so close, on a low rise in the plain just above him. He stopped, staring full at it. It was a dead tree broken by an elephant, one branch hooked upward like an arm, but there was a face in the bark. Even here, this close, he could see the face in the bark, eyes and nose and mouth, all black, like a ghost, this face had stared at him across this plain where he stood on the bank of the
dry river. It was a leadwood tree. Leadwood lived a thousand years and stood two thousand after death. Rhino came and scratched their hides on its dead bark for more seasons than any man, any tribe, any nation lived.

   Alfus pressed his face against the ash-gray bark of the dead tree, closed his eyes and breathed deeply. When he looked up again, across the dam, he saw the young lion once more running on the green bank of the other side. He watched them there and had no further thoughts, thought only with his eyes, informed by the color and the movement of what they took in.


   That night after dinner the young French woman and the German man asked Alfus to fill their shower bucket for them and went off to their tent. Then Alfus cleared away the dishes and washed them by the firelight before walking down to the other side of the camp and slipping into his tent. The three Americans and the ranger sat up in the dining tent by the kerosene light. There was much laughter because there had been more danger that afternoon, and after danger there was always laughter and gin and stories in the dark by the flickering light of the kerosene lamp. The American laughed so loudly that Alfus could see the animals lifting their heads in the dark all over the reserve, heard the screech of a young baboon followed by the silencing grunt of the dog leader, heard the cry of a spots owl, then a bat, then the burbling of a zebra.

   The American’s laughter was distant now, and Alfus was far away, in a dream, where two young lion ran through the grass on the distant shore.