followed him from deepest gully to highest ridge, along winding game trails and farm tracks, down to the tall reeds on the shores of Two Tree Hill Dam and up along the rivers that held our home in their cradle. With every step that she took, she clapped her hands wildly, oblivious to her brother’s orders, his threats, his pleading looks. Every time she clapped her hands, the birds on which Jay had trained his pellet gun took off, a chaos of flapping wings and cries of alarm.
In this way, Jay was deprived time and again of his kills. At dusk, he tramped back into Crofton, dejected, his pellet gun still full. When he threw it down in disgust, Kate clapped again.
“Don’t worry, Jay. If Dad found you, you know what you’d have to do …”
Jay had been under strict orders ever since he unwrapped his prized pellet gun that he could shoot a bird only if he planned to eat it.
Jay looked at Kate.
“You’re just jealous,” he said, “that you can’t shoot, too.”
But when they lined up tin cans in the garden and took potshots at them, Kate won every time.
She took after her mother, you see.
In later years, Frisky began to wither. Pat had never known her true age, but the lines deepened in her face, she lost weight that she would never regain, and when she and Pat set out across the farm, driving what few cattle we had left into their crush for dipping or simply reliving the days of their youth, she lived up to her name less and less often. No longer was she frisky; now, she was stately, quiet, reserved. A gentle horse in her dotage, slowly winding down.
In 1998, she left the paddocks and moved into our garden. She liked to lie down on the grass, and Kate nestled contentedly between her legs, our daughter and our horse breathing in unison. She ate from our hands but was hidden away when guests came to Crofton. She was too old, now, skin and bones. Questions were asked when those who did not know her laid eyes on her: Wouldn’t her passing, they wondered, be considered a kindness?
It would not be the first time Pat had lifted his gun to shoot an old friend. Children on farms learn, very early on, that death is a part of life. Livestock are culled, poachers’ dogs are shot, horses with tumors and disease might need their master’s mercy. But, every evening, Pat went into our garden to put his arms around his oldest friend, and I knew he would not, could not do it. Frisky just grew older and older. Neither one of them would let go.
Pat was away from the farm on business when I stood in the kitchen window and saw Frisky lying in the shadow of the mango tree, her chest barely rising or falling. I left what I was doing and went out to see her. Kate and Jay followed, but instinctively they knew and hung at a distance. For the briefest moment, Frisky lifted her head, eyes rolling as if to search Pat out; then she laid her head down, and the only movement was the twitching of her nostrils. I sat with her for hours, her head in my lap, teasing her ears, whispering to her. I knew there was no coming back; her time had come. Her breathing grew low and ragged. It slowed. Then it was no more.
Kate and Jay sat with her for the longest time, but Pat would not be back until after dark. I was putting Kate to bed when I heard the telltale stutter of an engine that told me he had returned. I left Kate half tucked-in and went to meet him as he climbed out of the car.
Hanging above us, in a frame of lantern light, Kate watched from behind the bedroom curtains. Perhaps she had that old childhood terror of seeing your parents crumple, revealing themselves as mere mortals. She was watching, but she did not want to see.
I told Pat that Frisky was gone and he did not breathe a word.
When he went to her, Oliver and some of the other workers were trying to lift her from where she had lain. One by one, Pat waved them away. And then, almost thirty years after she first came cantering into his life, Pat knelt down beside her and put his arms around her for the final time.
He did not come to bed until late that night. He laid Frisky in the ground himself, gave her to Crofton. It is what she would have wanted.
The morning after Frisky left us, I woke early to find that the bed beside me was empty. Reeling downstairs and out into the morning sun, I saw Pat and Kate tending to Deja-vous at the bottom of the garden. Her leg was healed now, and Kate led her gently up and down on a lead rope. Her dark eyes glimmered.
I went to Pat and put my hand in his.
“Are you okay?” I asked.
It is a terrible thing to lose a beloved horse. Pat had known Frisky longer than I had known him. They had grown together, changed together. She had taught him to ride, and she taught our children, too. And, as we rode out onto the farm that day, I had the inalienable feeling that she was still there, cantering alongside us. She would be here forever. She was part of Crofton now.
In a way, I felt as if Frisky had entrusted Pat to me. I would be with him for the rest of his life, while Frisky cantered on alone.
I did not mean to let her down.
SOON AFTER WE came to Crofton, we drove over to the neighboring Two Tree Hill Farm to see trucks being unloaded at the farmhouse on top of the hill. The new neighbors, it seemed, had finally arrived. Our lives—and the lives of our horses—were about to become richer than ever, as we welcomed long-lasting, genuine friends into our world.
We had heard that new managers were moving into Two Tree from the farm’s owner, a middle-aged South African named Les De Jager. During the bush war, Les had fought with a unit of the SAP, the South African Police, who were supporting the Rhodesian army. On patrol deep in virgin bush, he and his unit had set up camp along the banks of a river. That night, Les had an epiphany: this was the perfect site to build a dam wall, opening the river for the irrigation of all the untamed land that stretched around. When he closed his eyes, he could see it: the bush driven back, the land opened up with tobacco, soybeans, wheat, and more. It was an image so vivid that, when the bush war came to its conclusion, Les left his native South Africa and came here to see the dream fulfilled. Two Tree Hill now stood, testament to the nocturnal visions of a soldier too long away from home.
As we reached Two Tree, we saw a slim man, perhaps the same age as Pat, rolling up his sleeves and stepping into the back of one of his trucks. He had the most wonderful smile, vivid blue eyes, and curly blond hair. He stepped into the darkness of the truck. He was out of sight for only a few moments before he reemerged, leading behind him a beautiful bay mare.
It was while he was turning to lead a second horse out of the box that he first saw us.
“You must be Pat and Mandy,” he began. “My name’s Charl. Charl Geldenhuys.” He took a step back, his eye line almost level with Kate’s. “And this must be …”
“Her name’s Frisky,” Pat cut in.
Charl stepped back, admiring the old mare that Pat and Kate were riding. Then, he turned, ambling back to the horse he had already offloaded.
“This is Lady Richmond,” he said, laying his hands on her flank.
Charl, it transpired, had been the manager on Two Tree some years before. He had spent five years managing the farm before meeting and falling in love with the woman who was to be his wife, Tertia. They had been married in South Africa and spent two blissful years there, Tertia giving birth to a wonderful daughter, Resje, who was only a little younger than Kate. Charl had talked so nostalgically about his time on Two Tree that he had convinced Tertia to visit it as a holiday—and it was then that Tertia, a city girl at heart, had fallen in love with the wild, open spaces of Two Tree Hill. The farm, she saw, was a paradise, its wild places teeming with reedbuck, tsessebe, kudu, and sable. Charl could do nothing other than petition Les De Jager for his old job.
When