breathing until I shot the beast, fat as a stall-fed pig. Mostly she darned while I fished.
Once a week, we took a canoe across to Livingstone for a night out. Old Mopane had moved his trading company there and opened a bar and a couple of hotels. He always knew how to take advantage of a situation, even on shifting grounds. On our way to dinner or dancing, Kate and I would walk by his bar, and I’d peek in. The same old story: all classes from barrister to bricklayer tossing for drinks at the bar, singing raucous songs, and many a man laid out on benches. Naturally, I missed it, but ah, I was no longer a bachelor, roaming wide and handsome. I was a family man now, knee-halted and married – and happy! We were expecting, you see.
The great event drew near, preparations were made, and out popped a boy with a lovely head of black hair. He lived only a few minutes. Kate was nigh swallowed in grief. We kept tame guinea fowl in our yard and she often mistook their calls for his cry. We buried ‘Jimmy’ in the grounds of the Victoria Falls Hotel, there being no consecrated land. But remarks were made that touched us on the raw – I won’t say who made them – so we reburied ‘Jimmy’ in our garden.
A year later, another child came early. There was a terrific storm that night, thunder trundling across the sky and a torrential downpour – seven inches in six hours! Staying dry was impossible: the thatch was an open net, the floor an ankle-deep swamp. Kate was feverish, I furious with anxiety. Time stomped on, heavy-footed. Well, the medico knew his job; my worry just made him seem slow. This time it was a girl. But we have two sons now, one named Victor to record our association with the Falls.
* * *
With my curios and pictorial postcards, the shop did a roaring trade, and as the years passed, the flood of excursionists put us on a fair footing. I saw an opportunity and started some transport companies: canoe, cart, trolley, rickshaw. The Victoria Falls Hotel stole each of those ideas straight from my pocket! The Rhodesian Railway Company owned it now and management was an excitable Welshman, always fuming about. I liked to smoke my pipe in his office to fumigate him further – to my detriment. When I refused to lower my price of a half-crown per head, he bought the rickshaw company out from under me! They still have the gall to sell my guidebook in the hotel giftshop. I do seem plagued by the unpunishable crimes of others.
But luck comes with lawlessness, too, and I did finally earn my due. In 1907, a shooting club was formed at Victoria Falls Town. Government issued us rifles and ammunition at a cut rate and the prize was a silver cup for the best score over six months. Some of the shooters got wanderlust; others gave up or left; at the end of six months, I was the only one competing. I beat the top score in a rather amusing fashion. One afternoon, I was out hunting pheasants and I spotted a pig moving through the bush. Up went my barrel, and I let him have it. There was a yell, and a nigger jumped up in the air and disappeared. Here was my ‘pig’! I saw at once what was what. The boy had been sent to cut grass but he had been loitering in a donga, or ditch. Fearing I’d report him, he had cut for it, stooping low to escape notice, but not quite low enough – just about as low as the back of a young pig.
I found the boy unconscious, a crowd already standing around. I patched him up and sent for a doctor and set off for home. I soon became aware that a pair of native police constables were walking behind me.
‘What the blazes are you on about?’ I demanded. ‘We were told to bring you in to the police station,’ came the stilted reply.
This got my goat. Native police are never sent to take in a white. Had they no respect?
‘You had better get,’ I yelled, ‘unless you want to get shot too!’
They got. Naturally, I reported to the colonial police myself. By the greatest of good fortune, I was not asked to produce my shooting licence – I didn’t have one! Anyway, the