Jock of the Bushveld

Jock's² education begins immediately. The Boy¹ teaches him to lie with nose against the food bowl and wait for the command before touching it. He learns to balance meat on his nose while drool trails from his chin, his big puppy eyes fixed on his master.¹

In the puppy wars, Jock² stops wasting energy on noise and instead bites hard and hangs on — ears, noses, tails — until his rivals flee howling. One by one, the bigger puppies learn to leave him alone. His body transforms: legs straighten, neck thickens, coat deepens.

One day the Boy¹ notices sunlight catching the tips of Jock's² hairs like polished gold, the dark wavy lines now distinct. An old hunter offers to buy him, remarking, 'The best dog I ever owned was a golden brindle.' Jock² also learns about fowls: a hen pecks his nose so viciously that he reels backward, looking foolish while the camp laughs.

Along the Crocodile River, the Boy¹ shoots a duiker through the shoulder. The buck scrambles away on three legs, and the Boy¹ sends Jock² after it. The dog races up, makes a flying leap for the throat, and misses as the buck veers. Jock² springs again from behind, seizing a hind leg, and the two tumble together in the dust.

When the Boy¹ catches up, the duiker is down but not finished. It doubles up its body and kicks over its head — the sharp cloven hooves buzz like wheel spokes. One hoof grazes the Boy's¹ arm, drawing blood. The next catches Jock² at the shoulder and slices a line from shoulder to hip.

Jock² instantly adjusts, swinging his body away from the whirring hooves while keeping his grip on the throat. He tugs and worries until the duiker goes still. The scar remains, a pink cord under the golden brindle, his first lesson in the cost of hunting.

The Boy¹ picks up the spoor of six koodoo and follows them for hours through the hot afternoon, the image of a spiral-horned bull pulling him deeper into unfamiliar country. When the trail vanishes on stony ground, he is far from camp. He starts back confidently but nothing looks right.

He zigzags between half-familiar landmarks, each time sure he has found the way, each time wrong. The sun lowers. He fires precious signal shots; the answering silence is worse than noise. Night threatens. On a rocky rise he dimly remembers, he finds a half-burnt match and a discarded cigarette stub.

They are his own. He has walked in a giant circle for hours, passing the same kopje repeatedly. Understanding his folly at last, he sits still. Then Jock,² standing alert on a rock, turns back with ears down and tail wagging: in the distance, the oxen graze. Camp has been close all along.

Creeping along a dry donga, the Boy¹ unwittingly penetrates the center of a resting impala herd. When the animals explode on every side, the world becomes a whirlpool of plunging bodies. He fires wildly in the chaos; one bullet connects. Jock² races after the wounded buck and vanishes.

Hours pass. The Boy¹ gives up searching and returns to camp sick with dread. The Zulu driver, Jim Makokel',³ erupts — demanding a gun to search himself — and storms into the bush, returning hours later silent and dusty.

After dark, Jock² staggers into camp: hollow-flanked, parched, coated in caked blood from jaws to chest, a bluish line shaved over one eye. He has killed the impala and fought unseen enemies. Jim,³ overcome, launches into a frenzied Zulu war dance, chanting through the night, transported from the road's monotony to the glory of his fighting past.

A wounded koodoo cow leads Jock² into another overnight chase. He returns past midnight, exhausted but unbloodied. In the morning they track back and find where the koodoo finally fell: bare ground ringed with trampled grass, multiple fighting rings, one divided by a fallen tree.

The carcase is stripped, the bones crushed by hyena jaws. Aasvogels flap away as Jock² charges them, his mane bristling with old fury. Golden hairs on a broken branch tell his side of the story: he held his ground through the night, fighting off hyenas and wild dogs until numbers overwhelmed him.

The koodoo's head and leg bones lie scattered in the bush. Jock's² sides are scraped raw; his muscles flinch when pressed. Only the dog knows exactly what happened in the ghostly dark, but the forensic evidence speaks of a battle the master can only imagine.

Near a waterhole, the Boy¹ steps from behind a bush and stands twelve yards from a magnificent koodoo bull. For a splinter of a second they stare into each other's eyes. Then the bull whirls and crashes away with overwhelming speed. The Boy¹ fires; the right hind leg breaks, and the great animal staggers.

What follows is a running fight through scrub and fallen timber. Jock² dodges the slashing horns, tries for the broken leg, and is sent spinning through the air. He lands, scrambles up, charges again. The bull, crippled but furious, catches Jock² with a twist of its horns that flings him like a fish from a rod.

Finally Jock² seizes the dangling leg and drags; the koodoo stumbles and crashes down among dead trees. As the boy¹ clears his jammed rifle, Jock² leaps for the nose. The shot ends the fight. The dog has been battered, shaken, and thrown, but he never stopped.

Jim Makokel'³ was a fighting Zulu, present at Isandhlwana where the 24th Regiment was annihilated, and at Rorke's Drift where seventy men held five thousand. His kraal was massacred in civil war; he fled wounded, alone, into the Transvaal to work for white men.

The Boy¹ first witnesses him being flogged with a sjambok by a harsh master for begging meat at night — eighteen cuts while the Boy,¹ bound by the brutal code not to interfere between a man and his servant, listens in silent anguish. Later, Jim³ presents himself unbidden and announces with calm certainty, 'I have come to work for you.'

Despite warnings about his drinking and fighting, the Boy¹ takes him on. Jim³ proves a magnificent driver, but when drink gets him he returns at all hours of the night chanting his demand for meat, recounting his feats of strength, and pouring contempt on Christian converts.

An old chief begs the party to kill a leopard ravaging his kraal. That night, on the approach, Jock² and Jess⁴ fight a porcupine: Jess⁴ is skewered in foot and lip, while Jock² learns to swing the rodent by the throat to avoid its spines. The leopard escapes the trap and is tracked toward a cliff.

From across a ravine, the hunters witness an extraordinary scene. A baboon troop, panicked by the predator, suddenly halts and rallies. Forming a semicircle, they roar defiance and advance with coordinated fury. The leopard, crouched on a rock with a baboon pinned under its paw, loses its nerve and bolts into the bush.

The troop swarms the rock, rescuing their mauled comrade and dragging it uphill. Later the hunters spot the leopard stalking Jess⁴ and Jock² in the ravine bottom. Three rifles crack as one, and the spotted body pitches over dead.

While tracking a wounded buffalo through towering tambookie grass, the Boy¹ and his companion Francis realize a bushfire has been lit behind them. Pinned between a cliff and the river, with miles of dry vegetation ahead, they frantically burn a safety patch as the fire roars closer.

They huddle on the blackened ground, Jock² in the Boy's¹ arms, as the flames split around their island. Before the fire hits, a terrified procession streams past: a koodoo bull leading his herd with eyes shut and horns laid back, wildebeeste in grim single file, a rietbuck ram whistling for a vanished mate, a hare scuttling blind to the men.

Between them sails a black mamba, its head level with their faces, its tongue hissing once as it passes. The fire devil dies on the bare ground. They emerge scorched, blistered, and bootless, alive only because they burned their own refuge.

Chasing a wounded koodoo cow, Jock² repeats an old error: he jumps for a hind leg, and she kicks back with devastating precision. The hoof catches him under the jaw, whipping his head and neck backward and hurling him somersaulting through the air.

He lands limp, blood oozing from nose, mouth, and eyes, not breathing. The Boy¹ runs to him, shakes him, pours water from a leaky hat into his mouth, presses his sides in a frantic imitation of breathing. Slowly, Jock² heels over and raises himself, groggy and staggering.

But the moment he is upright, he tries to resume the chase, deaf to every command. Only later does the Boy¹ understand: Jock² can no longer hear. From that day, every command must be gestured. Jock² compensates by never taking his eyes off his master¹ again. Their silent language deepens beyond anything words had achieved.

A notorious man-eater is spotted basking on a sand spit. The Boy¹ shoots, and the crocodile thrashes into the river wounded but alive. Jim Makokel',³ watching from the bank, shouts a challenge and plunges in with his assegai. The Boy,¹ refusing to let his servant lead him, follows into the chest-deep current.

Jock,² deaf and reliant on sight, sees his master¹ go in and leaps past both of them, swimming straight for the crocodile while the Boy's¹ shouts go unheard. The crocodile dives beneath the dog and surfaces behind him, its tail lash flinging Jock² into the air.

Jock² twists in flight, already straining to get back. The chaos becomes a melee of bullets, assegais, foam, and blood. Jim,³ yelling Zulu war cries, and the Boy,¹ firing point-blank into the thrashing mass, finally kill the brute. A crowd of natives hauls the body ashore.

At a wayside store, Seedling⁸ the Field Cornet, drunk and vicious, entices Jock² toward his chained baboon, a brute that has killed many dogs for sport. He pushes Jock² toward the pole. The baboon charges but overshoots, its chain jerking it back.

Jock,² remembering how to dodge horns and sweeping blows, keeps outside the chain's limit, circling and feinting until the baboon stumbles onto its back. In that instant Jock² seizes it by the stomach and drags, choking it against its collar. Seedling⁸ tries to whip Jock² off. Jim³ intercepts him, gripping the raised sjambok and holding the white man powerless while shouting for the Boy.¹

The Boy¹ arrives, cuts Seedling⁸ free, and lets the fight finish. For this defiance, Seedling⁸ later has Jim³ flogged and his cattle seized. But Seedling⁸ flees before the law can catch him, and weeks later he dies of thirst alone in the bush, less than a mile from help.

The final transport season turns into a death march. The cattle, infected with tsetse fly weeks earlier, weaken day by day. Zole, the small fat ox, lies down and does not rise. Achmoed and Bakir, the mighty after-oxen inseparable since yoking, die on consecutive days.

Sam,¹⁰ the Christian driver, deserts with a leader boy. At a bad drift, Zwaartland — the great black front ox with eight-foot horns, the steady leader who had never turned or wavered — staggers in the yoke. His mate cuts and runs; Zwaartland is jerked backward and rolled on his side.

He struggles up, tries again, but can no longer hold the team. The Boy¹ leads him to a donga edge, shoots him, and burns the body under a dead tree. Waggons are abandoned. Loads are dumped. Only three oxen reach Barberton, and all three die within a week. The years of work are erased.

During a day's delay for the dying cattle, the Boy¹ crosses the Crocodile River alone. Jock,² slipping away from camp, follows his trail. They find a lioness circling a sable cow that holds her ground between calf and predator. A shot misses, and the lioness vanishes.

Then a sable bull rises from the shade and bolts; the Boy's¹ bullet wounds it. Jock² gives chase in a fencing match of feints and sweeping horns until, dodging behind a tree, he seizes a hind leg. The bull crashes down. As the Boy¹ works to cover the carcase, tsetse flies swarm.

Desperate, he rips off his shirt, cuts holes for legs and tail, and fashions a protective suit for Jock.² He carries the ridiculous-looking dog through the fly belt at a run. Later, resting between rocks, a waterbuck bull approaches so close the Boy¹ can see the rise and fall of its flanks. He does not shoot.

The Boy,¹ now in Barberton, cannot keep Jock² safely: the deaf dog² is nearly run over by a waggon. He gives Jock² first to Ted,⁶ then Jock² ends up with Tom Barnett⁹ at a store under the big Fig Tree. Jock² guards the place relentlessly, repelling kaffir thieves and their dogs by day.

But at night, behind the reed fence, fowls keep dying. Tom,⁹ woken by screams, waits at his window with a gun. A dog-shaped figure steps from the fowl-house into the moonlight. He fires. In the morning, sunlight slanting across the yard finds Jock² stretched on his side, the white chest marked by one red spot.

Inside the fowl-house lies the real thief, a kaffir dog, dead. Jock² had entered, killed the intruder, and was emerging when the shot found him. He died as Rocky's⁵ dog had died: seeing it through, doing his duty.