exemplary Kevin, who was now lying down, sharing a blanket with someone Ray had not been introduced to. There were so many of them. He counted ten sleepers by this fire.
Kerekang was away. Kevin was asleep. Ray didn’t want to call the disorganized or unorganized state of things at the center of the band of fighters dysfunctional. He had to believe that there were organizing templates that were expressing themselves in this casual scene, people sleeping, smoking dagga, that made sense. Meetings must have taken place earlier, when he was out of it, and decisions reached that left everyone in a relaxed, recreational mood. But things looked askew, lax.
“Stay by the fire, doctor,” Ray said.
Morel sat down and mechanically began to feed branches into the fire, bending them in the attempt to break them into shorter lengths but giving up when they didn’t break because they were too green and setting them across the fire anyway.
“I’m going to get Setime,” Ray said.
“Who?” Morel asked.
“Kerekang. Don’t use too much wood. Don’t use too much at once.”
“I’m cold.”
“I know you are. But still don’t.”
At first he couldn’t find Kerekang anywhere. Ray went entirely around the monadnock without finding him. And then it occurred to him that Kerekang might be up on the monadnock itself. And, probing with the torch, he located him, at the summit, sitting and smoking.
Ray hailed him. Kerekang signaled vaguely back. Ray decided to take it as an invitation.
Everything is too much, he thought. He had to find a route through and over a mound of boulders ranging in size from medicine balls to very large refrigerators. And he had to do it with one hand, because he had to keep the torch in use, and one good leg. And he had to avoid various thorn-bearing types of vegetation. And he had to be alert for whatever animal menaces there might be, scorpions, snakes, although they had eaten whatever snakes the monadnock hosted that they could find, presumably. There was a way up, obviously, because Kerekang had found it.
He began his climb.
“I am coming, rra, with difficulty,” he called out. He was hoping that Kerekang might be moved to come down and give him a hand up.
The monadnock was more bell-shaped than pyramidal, much less pyramidal than it looked from ground level. He was at the top, with Kerekang. The climb had been mildly difficult, but he had found what appeared to be a pathway, although who had pioneered it and who would ever use it constituted mysteries. The pathway had circumvented the large monoliths or gone behind them winding steadily upward to the top and the stars. The night was moonless.
Ray had to take a moment for the view. It was beautiful, he supposed, perfect in its emptiness, an endless flat surround dotted with small, isolate, gnarled trees. They must have come a good distance because there was no sign of burning or smoke from the direction of Ngami Bird Lodge, or from what he assumed was the direction it lay in, what was left of it. The smoke would be showing black against the stars unless it was all too far away, or unless the burning was over with.
Kerekang had brought a camp stool up the monadnock with him. He had been sitting, smoking, smoking dagga. Ray didn’t like that. It was too continuous. Ray found a place to sit, on a patch of sand with a boulder to set his back against. He scratched at the sand before lowering himself onto it. The idea was to dislodge creatures like scorpions.
The stars were distracting they were so brilliant.
One thing in the landscape was bothersome to Ray. He could just make out another monadnock, of about the same caliber, in the distance, to the north. He was worried that he might not be able to find the right monadnock when he came back, or more likely when he sent someone out, someone hired, to retrieve Wemberg and, while they were at it, the other two bodies buried down below them.
“What is the name of this thing we’re sitting on, this little mountain?”
“It is a knob, Pieter’s Knob. I can mark it on a map and give it to you.”
“And over there, then, what’s that?”
“Oh, that one. That one is Pieter’s Other Knob.”
Ray was puzzled, until Kerekang said, “I’m joking. I can’t tell you what it is. But I’ll find it on the map, too. I have British army maps, the best there are.”
“Don’t let me forget to get that from you. And another thing, I would like to have the names of the two men who were buried on either side of Rra Wemberg.”
“Gosiame, on the right it is Paphani Shagwa and on the left hand it is Mido Nthumo. I can write them down for you.”
“I’ll forget, otherwise.”
Kerekang had a pocket-size book in his hand and opened it and wrote the names on a blank fly. Ray knew what the book was. It was Palgrave’s
“These two men are from Shakawe. They were good friends, to one another and to me and to all of us. No one will know their names in Gaborone. But there you have them.”
He proffered a hand-rolled dagga cigarette.
“No thanks, I don’t like that stuff. And I wanted to talk to you about it, too, by the way.”
“Please, it’s okay. I know what you want to say. Don’t say it. I use it very little. It helps me, like a drink. When this business is over I won’t be using it. When this… all this…”
“I wanted to talk to you about that, too. Here’s the thing. Listen to me. You have to think about how to get away, get out of this. You can’t go on with it much longer.”
“There was no killing at first.”
“I know, but now there is. You can’t control something like this once it gets into killing.”
“There was no killing. Not even of cattle, not one beast, at first. We were trying to teach a lesson.”
“What lesson?”
“The lesson was for the big men who were bringing their herds into the sandveld and pushing the people out, the Basarwa and the Bakgalagadi and everyone, rra. We talked to the people. And then we began with the boreholes, to show we were serious. We blew them up.”
Ray said, “And some of the large owners withdrew. That’s where you should have stopped, stopped and reconsidered. You needed to bring your case to the capital…”
Kerekang laughed. He continued, “Then we opened some kraals. We let some beasts out. And we burned some kraals…”
“That’s when you should have stopped, before anything could be traced to you. There could have been attention paid by Gaborone. You could have stood by, blinking your eyes, saying how terrible it was, but that it was symbolic and stood for injustices still going on that needed to be taken up by government…”
“By Domkrag, those people! Goromente!”
“There were people who could have helped you.”
Kerekang was swilling dagga smoke, it seemed to Ray, holding it in, expelling it, taking in more. Ray wanted him to go on, say more.
Finally Kerekang said, “It’s bad, rra, what this has come to. I know it better than you. We knew of two cattle posts where there were great abuses of the San people working there. Terrible treatment, terrible. We went there. Beasts were killed for the first time. The word of it spread. Attacks we had no part of began. We had no control.
“Then, when we went for the San people, that was when we were robbed. A man stayed behind, Ponatsego Mazumo. You must know him. He came to us in Toromole from St. James’s. He was the devil. He took all we had, and what was it for, to buy cattle for his lands at Pandamatenga. The love of cattle came to destroy us through Pony.”
