The Canned Lion Incident

When Jan du Plessis stopped on his farmyard as he returned from two days' negotiations with the Land Bank in Pretoria, he knew something was amiss. He threw open the door of his Toyota Hilux bakkie, as the Blouberg farmers called pickup trucks, and vacated the cab, which he had filled up on his own. He had an empty Klipdrift brandy bottle in his hand, and a paper bag with fast food debris. Du Plessis kept a neat bakkie, just as he ran a shipshape game farm. No one in the Blouberg would raise an eyebrow about the Klipdrift — it was his standard practice to leave a quarter of the liquor in the bottle the previous night, and then fill it up with water, as refreshment for the road. It took much more than that to get Jan du Plessis drunk. A gentle man, thank God.
      He was curious about the to-do on his farm and a little bit worried. He was supposed to spend a week in Pretoria, doing business and visiting with his sister, so it couldn't be just the guys waiting with brandy and Coke and wors and chops in their coolers to give him a welcome home braai. He would fully expect that on Friday — in fact, that happened on Friday nights anyway — but not late on a Tuesday afternoon.
      His neighbour, Dirk Kotze, came and shook his hand; the Blouberg version of a hug. "Hell, old Jan, we only expected you back on Friday. We had a bit of a situation here, with Kenny Rogers needing to catch his plane tomorrow and all."
      "O ja?" said Du Plessis, and the feeling of foreboding grew in him. "What happened?"
      Dirk Kotze was all cordiality and explanation. Du Plessis didn't like that.
      "Japie's maned male just flippin died over the weekend," said Kotze. "The one he promised to Kenny Rogers. He's hoping it's not the TB."
      Jan dumped his empty brandy bottle and Kentucky bucket in a dumpster placed next to his driveway and started walking over to the tall electrified fence of his lion camp, not fifty yards from his front door. His neighbor and friend of more than thirty years stayed at his side.
      "We needed a replacement in a hurry. You know how you always help out with game and lions and shit when we have hunters? And then we just refund you when the hunters pay us?" said Kotze. By now, three or four other farmers, as well as the American, had joined them, and made affirming noises such as "Ja," and "That's right."
      "So what did you shoot?" asked Du Plessis. But he knew. It was his lion. "Hey? What did you need? A kudu?" His voice was low and soft.
      Little squabbles among the Blouberg farmers, even if there was money involved, were always loud and high-pitched and laced with obscenities. But Jan was not like that at all today. Kotze knew his neighbor had bottle-fed the cub after its mother died, but surely it wasn't a pet?
      "You shot my fokken lion," said Du Plessis. His hands, like bunches of Hazy View bananas, hung limp by his sides.
      "Jan, Kenny Rogers paid a record price. I knew you were talking to the Land Bank about your farm loan ..."
      "He was shot through the neck," stated Du Plessis flatly.
      "Ja, man," said Kotze. "Kenny shot him clean through the vertebrae. He fell like an ox."
      "Through the neck," said Du Plessis again.
       "Yes, Jan. A good shot. Is that a problem?"
      The next moment, without anyone seeing anything happening, there was a smacking sound like someone hitting a haunch of beef with a cricket bat, and Dirk Kotze, himself a powerful man, lay on the dusty ground. Out cold.
      Now, looking down at his fallen friend, Du Plessis' voice finally went up in pitch as well as in volume. "Shoot my blerrie lion! I'll kill you, you bliksem!"
      Charlie Harmse and the Engelsman from Carlisle, the farm right north of Charlie's, who both watched too many action movies on their Blueray DVD players, rushed over and sat on their haunches next to Kotze, feeling his neck for a pulse like Tom Selleck's policemen do in New York.
      Sally Harmse came out of Du Plessis' house with a Tupperware container full of cold water and a dish rag. "He's not dead, you idiots. He's just knocked out. Get out of the way."
      But Jan Du Plessis was not paying attention to all that activity. He strode up to his lion camp's gate, undid the hitch and kicked it open with a mighty push of his kudu-skin boot. He ran the last few yards to his fallen lion. As always happens, the ticks and fleas were jumping ship in large numbers, scuttling away into the stubby yellow winter grass. They would climb up the tallest stalks and wait for a new host.
      Up close, the dead animal's silky mane was a burry mess. The velvety cheeks you see in the photographs were, when you looked at them from three feet away, bristly like a shoe brush and crisscrossed with scars from many fights and prey encounters. And the thing stank, and not because it was dead. Lions just stink. Normal, sensible people just didn't get close enough to them to experience all these things.
      Jan du Plessis took one look at the large exit wound a couple of inches behind the animal's ear and fell down on his knees and buried his face in the bushy black mane. And he sobbed. His shoulders shook under his ironed khaki shirt, and he made a sound that none of his mates ever wanted to hear again.
      By this time a circle made up of all the men who were not self-appointed emergency medical technicians had formed around him. A wide, respectful circle.
      "Shit, guys, he's flipping out," said one of his friends loudly, hoping Du Plessis would lift his face with a huge grin and say "Gotcha!"
      Another signaled him to be quiet. Complete silence descended, the silence that only exists on a bushveld farm. It consisted of a goat bleating behind the farmhouse, a couple of Piet-my-vrou birds calling in the distance, a goatherd playing five notes over and over on his bark flute, and even a lorrie honking at something on the highway.
      The only sound that was not part of the silence was Jan du Plessis' weeping, which upset the crap out of them, because Jan wasn't supposed to ever cry. Maybe a couple of tears running into his beard at his mother's funeral. Okay, a lot of silent tears at his little boy's graveside that awful time when his school bus got blown up.
      And the year before that, when his wife wasn't looking where she was going and hit a truck head-on.
      Jan du Plessis took all of that like man, just standing there with his sunglasses on, holding his wife's hand at his son's funeral, and then the next time his sister's hand at his wife's. He handled all of that pretty well. But this? What if he was so broken that he couldn't even continue farming?
      The wise farmer who had silenced them said: "Jan, is jy okay?"
      But Jan du Plessis was crying.
      And his life-long friends, who loved him but didn't know it because they couldn't say it, stood in silence and waited. To go now and put your hand on his back or some girl crap like that would be to invite a nap in the dust like Dirk Kotze. Real quick.
      Jan Du Plessis cried about his lion, which he really liked. And, of course, he mourned his dead son and wife for the first time, really.
      He also wept for his makkers, his comrades, who were killed in Angola. His closest Army buddy had caught a piece of shrapnel from a Cuban red-eye rocket, a katyush, right through the neck. He was dead before he hit the ground. Jan had carried him a mile and a half to the helicopter casevac area, but it was pointless. He was carrying dead weight. He deposited his friend's body on a stretcher in between the columns of orange smoke going up, and waited for the Alouette to come — waited sober and dry-eyed.
      And what about his little boy? Thank God he wasn't there when they brought him down from the tree. And nobody in the Blouberg was willing to tell him about it; he had to steal the file from the coroner's van to get the details.
      And Sarah — well, at least that was just a car accident. Mind you, nobody had had the courage to tell him much about her either. What was going on in the blerrie Blouberg?
      He was sitting on his butt in the dust now, looking up at the purple V in the Blouberg that always formed where a deep gorge went up to the mountain top, where a famous native chief had fortified himself against the Boers for a long time. Forever, in fact — they never got him off the mountain.
      His breathing subsided. He inhaled deeply from the beloved air of his district, his country.
He became aware of the men standing around him. And he felt their support and their understanding and their love hovering over him like a canopy against all the shit raining down on him from Heaven.
      Jan's foreman arrived in a cloud of dust in the HiLux Du Plessis had presented to him at a big beer party two years before. The bush telegraph is much faster than the ubiquitous two-way radio communications — it operated at the speed of telepathy. The circle opened for him to go to his boss. In the ecology of huge bushveld farms a good farm foreman had privileges not even your brother enjoyed. Johannes was one of those.
      He walked up behind Du Plessis and put his hand on the man's shoulder.
"Boss?" he said. Old habits died hard in the Blouberg. Apartheid was long over, and Johannes now owned a portion of the farm, with title and deed. As a pretty successful goat breeder, he even had a couple of laborers of his own, who probably called him 'boss.'
       "Boss, they wouldn't listen to me. They said it was a lot of money, you'd be glad. But they didn't give me a chance to open the gate to the game area. They shot the lion right there in the enclosure, They said their hunter had to go to Johannesburg tomorrow morning to catch the airplane back to America." Johannes was snitching big time!
      Du Plessis held his arm out to be pulled to his feet by his servant-partner-friend. He wiped his eyes with both hands.
      He said, "Shoot my fokken lion? I'll kill you all!" but the anger was gone.
      By this time most of the men, including the hunter and his wife, had retired into Du Plessis' well-appointed barbecue enclosure for drinks. Dirk's kitchen staff had even started a fire in the hardwood-fueled grill. A day like this, filled to the brim with kak-en-drama, called for a drink. Or two or three.
      Outside, in the lion camp, Jan du Plessis finally responded to the quizzical looks of his friends and neighbors.
      "Kenny Rogers shot him in the neck just like they got Pieter in Angola," he says. His voice caught a little as he put two fingers to his neck and said, "Exactly in the same place," causing the men to steal worried glances at one another. Surely he had cried himself dry by now.
      One of the men ventured, "No, it's okay old mate, no problem, man."
      "Is Dirk all right?" asked Du Plessis.
      Charlie Harmse, who had managed to revive Dirk Kotze and who had rejoined the group said, "Ja, he's fine, but Jirre man, you must remember how big you are!"
      "Shoot my blerrie lion ..." muttered Du Plessis.
      Dirk, apparently still alive, approached him, pressing a wet dish cloth to the side of his head. He held out his free hand. "I'm sorry, Jan. I'll give you two lions."
      A slow smile formed on Jan du Plessis' face and the worry frowns disappeared all around like a mist being cleared by the rays of the morning sun. "No, no, no. Just give me the value of the lion from your client's fees, like you always do. No hard feelings?"
      "Hard feelings? Are you blerrie mad?" said Kotze. "I should have waited for you to come back." He hesitated a bit. "I know how much you hate canned shooting. I have no excuse. Kenny was in a hurry and I made a plan. I'm truly sorry."
      "It's just that old Angola kak, and Pieter ... "
      The men around them were silent. When Dirk spoke, he spoke for all of them.
"We know, Jan." The friends had served too, almost to a man.
      Du Plessis spoke and looked in the round—looked each man in the eye. "We're forgotten, my mates. It was all for fokkol. The guys from the other wars all have statues and monuments and kak." He pointed at the blood of the lion seeping into the dusty soil. "We're like that blood. We're just seeping away."
      Johan Smit, a poison rep from the farmers' co-op, said: "At least little flowers and tomatoes and shit can grow up on us."
      Someone said, "Not if they use that new fertilizer you sold us last year!"
      Everybody laughed. Things were getting back to normal.
      Then the American hunter, an older man with a white beard who looked exactly like Kenny Rogers and who was liked by everybody, spoke up. He owned small oil company that had prospected off Mossel Bay for quite a few years and was able to follow all that was going on.
"I'm the one who pulled the trigger, Jan," he said. "I am truly sorry."
      "No, it's okay, Kenny," said Du Plessis to the man, who used to be known as Patrick before the farmers renamed him. Du Plessis was a sincere man, and if he said it was okay, it was okay.
      But Kenny Rogers had more to say. "You guys fought hard in Angola. But you probably couldn't even tell your buddy's families how they died."
      Wise nods and murmurs of "Ja, Kenny," and "Yes, it was like that," all around.
      "Your politicians lost the war for you. You were on the wrong side of history," continued the famous country singer's living lookalike. "I was in Viet Nam. Got shot up a bit; have my purple heart."
      Everybody knew what a purple heart was. That's what Hollywood is for.
      "People spit on us when we came back," said Kenny Rogers. "But we did what we had to do."
      There were approving murmurs all around: "Ja," "That's true, mate," "Is so, yes," from these strong, broken men in their khaki shirts and kudu skin shoes and rugby socks; this ring of broad veld-colored backs — a human circle of wagons. And the American, a millionaire rancher from Arizona, although he understood very little of what was being said, was one of those wagons. The Boers' strict hospitality customs would not let them exclude him. A farmer is a farmer is a farmer.
      But he shouldn't have canned Jan Du Plessis's lion.