Life Times Stories - By Nadine Gordimer Page 0,197

human, to him. All four went to the spot to have a look. The Kleynhans place was so isolated, except for the passage of life on the road, to which it offered no reason to pause. They had felt themselves safe from intruders.

The hard twist of excreta was plaited with fur and sinew: Charles picked it up in his bare hand. ‘See that? It had rabbit for supper. A jackal.’

Joy gave a shivery laugh, although there was no prowling man to fear. ‘So close to the house?’

Vusi was disbelieving. ‘Nothing to eat there.’ The converted shed with its roll-down metal door was just behind them.

‘Well, they pad around, sniff around. I suppose this place’s still got a whiff of chickens and pigs. It’s quite common even now, you get the odd jackal roaming fairly near to towns.’

‘Are you sure? How can you know it’s jackal, Charlie?’

Charles waggled the dung under Eddie’s nose.

‘Hey, man!’ Eddie backed off, laughing nervously.

Vusi was a tester of statements rather than curious. ‘Can you tell all kinds of animals’ business?’

‘Of course. First there’s the shape and size, that’s easy, ay, anyone can tell an elephant’s from a bird’s—’ They laughed, but Charles was matter-of-fact, as someone who no longer works in a factory will pick up a tool and use it with the same automative skill learnt on an assembly line. ‘But even if the stuff is broken up, you can say accurately which animal by examining food content. The bushmen – the San, Khoikhoi – they’ve practised it for centuries, part of their hunting skills.’

‘Is that what they taught you at Scouts, man?’

‘No. Not Scouts exactly.’

‘So where’d you pick it up?’ Eddie rallied the others. ‘A Number Two expert! He’s clever, old Charlie. We’re lucky to have a chap like him, ay!’

Joy was listening politely, half-smiling, to Charles retelling, laconically self-censored, what had been the confidences of their early intimacy.

‘Once upon a time I was a game ranger, believe it or not.’ That was one of the things he had tried in order to avoid others: not to have to go into metal and corrugated paper packaging in which his father and uncles held 40 per cent of the shares, not to take up (well, all right, if you’re not cut out for business) an opening in a quasi-governmental fuel research unit – without, for a long time, knowing that there was no way out for him, neither the detachment of science nor the consolations of nature. Born what he was, where he was, knowing what he knew, outrage would have burned down to shame if he had thought his generation had any right left to something in the careers guide.

‘You’re kidding. Where?’

‘Oh, around. An ignoramus with a B.Sc. Honours, but the Shangaan rangers educated me.’

‘Oh, Kruger Park, you mean. They work there. That place.’ Vusi’s jerk of the head cut off his words like an appalled flick of fingers. Once, he had come in through that vast wilderness of protected species; an endangered one on his way to become operational. Fear came back to him as a layer of cold liquid under the scalp. All that showed was that his small stiff ears pulled slightly against his skull.

Charles wiped his palm on his pants and clasped hands behind his head, easing his neck, his matronly pectorals flexing to keep in trim while waiting. ‘One day I’d like to apply the methodology to humans – a class analysis.’ (He enjoyed their laughter.) ‘The sewage from a white suburb and the sewage from a squatters’ camp – you couldn’t find a better way of measuring the level of sustenance afforded by different income levels, even the snobbery imposed by different occupations and aspirations. A black street-sweeper who scoffed half a loaf and a Bantu beer for lunch, a white executive who’s digested oysters and a bottle of Fleur du Cap, – show me what you shit, man, and I’ll tell you who you are.’

That afternoon a black man did appear in the yard. He was not a prowler, although he probably had been watching them, the Kleynhans place, since they’d moved in. He would have known from where this could be managed delicately, without disturbing them or being seen.

He was a middle-aged farm labourer dressed in his church clothes so that the master and the missus wouldn’t chase him away as a skelm. But he needn’t have worried, because the master and the missus never appeared from the house. He found the two men who worked