Pond: usually smaller than a lake.
By
R P Bezuidenhout
Published by
R P Bezuidenhout
Copyright 2014 R P Bezuidenhout
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I grew up on a farm in the South African bushveld. It was not a very big farm and it was about 40km outside of Pretoria but it was as far from civilization as one can get without being a hermit or a full-blown recluse.
My parents both worked and that meant that they had to drive very long distances every day. I use to get to school via an hour and a half bus ride in the morning and the same to get back home; this was however a small price to pay for living away from the noise and being able to live as one with nature, and we all knew it.
There was only one thing that killed me as a child and still haunts me into adulthood and that is my burning love for KFC. Living at least an hour’s drive from the nearest KFC meant that if you craved the Colonel’s crispy delicious- like no other chicken on earth- pieces of heaven, you had to forget it as nobody is driving a two hour trip for chicken, if you have perfectly fine chicken in the freezer. Colonel Harland David Sanders would have wept if he saw the baby tyrannosauruses they compared to his magnificent, yet petite birds. We slaughtered our own chickens that lived wild on the farm and ate a staple diet of small snakes and puppies.
I am kidding about the puppies…but I did once see a chick snatch an eagle out of the air as it swooped down to take a meerkat. My memory is not what it used to be and some of the details might have become distorted so there is a chance that events did not play out exactly as I retell them. That is neither here nor there, but those chickens were big red and as mean as a junk yard dog.
It was not that our free-range killers of all things smaller than two feet in height were tasteless it was the opposite. They had so much taste if you ate chicken at night, in the morning when you ate your Frosties, you could still only taste chicken and that was after brushing your teeth several times.
My brother and I grew up without grandparents as they died early… or we were born late. So as my favourite time of year rolled closer the excitement started to grow in my young heart. The Summer school holiday and we living in the southern hemisphere it meant that was also almost Christmas. My lack of grandparents meant that right until the week before Christmas my parents would be working and we would be on the farm all alone, well the whole day, my parents would be back at night, but a whole day is a lifetime of possibilities to a child, and we were not alone. I had a friend that lived behind a big blue-gum wood. His name was Jaco.
Time as always, when you have plans and ideas and adventures to be had, slowed to cold trickle. It was excruciating waiting for the holiday to start. We had tests at school, I did not care, I had chores, and I did not care. My mind and my hopes were all on the coming vacation alone at home the whole day. We were going to hunt with airguns; we were going to fish in every available pond or farm dam. It was going to be weeks of total freedom and bliss.
Two days before the summer vacation started I was almost catatonic and hardly heard my mother when she suggested that we should go and visit with our cousin. “They are all at home and Auntie Magda will look after you during the day.” Nooooo! I shouted in my mind, a bellow that reverberated over the canyons of my despair, only getting dampened towards the ends of infinity by the shards of my shattered dreams.
I had to remedy this situation and I needed a plan, a good plan, and it needed to be laid post haste, but you know what they say about best laid plans…sometimes they turn out great!
I phoned my cousin and asked if he remembered the last time we vacationed together. It was still on a landline phone that had like seven people on one line. You needed to press a button that patched you into the line and then you asked the people, who you interrupted in mid conversation to please get of the line as you needed to phone. When the line was not in use the light on it would be dead and you could call who you wanted.
My cousin answered and we spoke a few seconds getting the how are you(s) and what have you been doing out of the way. Then I asked him if he remembered the big fight we had. He said yes and I asked if he remembered I left with a black eye, again he said yes. I told him that I could not remember how the fight started but I am practising and intend to return the favour as soon as I get there. While he was trying to apologise and also to find out what brought this to heart I kept telling him he had a fat lip in his near future. Hanging-up on him, having rattled his cage quite badly, I felt that my plan was going to work like a charm.
It did, only a day later and thus a day before the vacation Auntie Magda phoned and told my mother that she did not think it was a good idea if we came to stay. She did not elaborate but apparently my cousin was seen doing push-ups and stockpiling an arsenal of pipes and sharped sticks. When asked what he was doing he told her he was getting ready for my arrival, both our mothers immediately reached a consensus that it was better if my brother and I stayed at home.
The sun came up on that first day. It was a wonderful day. It was a day unlike any other day ever. The air smelled of adventure and the rays of the African sun kissed my face through the window. As I looked over at my little brother’s bed he was also awake and looking in my direction he had on the biggest grin I had ever see. If he did not have ears his head would have split in two. I could not help smiling back.
My mother eventually left for work after she and my father each gave a lecture and a promise to skin us if we were wicked. We looked at them with big eyes, not listening but nodded in the correct places, we were going to have the best time ever. I suppose, pellet guns, vacation and all the space you could want is heaven for a preteen boy or as close to heaven as you can get before you learn of things like girls… which at this stage were still yucky.
My mother’s car disappeared down the gravel path and when it was completely obscured by the tall grass that lined the road we sprang into action. First we raided the pantry to get provisions. The following items made it into our backpack:
One tin of sardines
One can of baked beans
One pack or Marie biscuits
One potato
One tomato
And a hand full of chocolate éclair toffies (hard as bullets and only suitable for young teeth without fillings)
Our backpack was also stuffed with a blanket and a two litre Coke bottle filled with water. We had one last item that we have been begging for, for months, and only received about two weeks ago; Rambo survival knives, the plastic handled ones with the big-ass compass on the back. These we strapped to our waists by means of our church belts. Our look was quite eccentric. We wore shorts and non-matching t-shirts, big ass knifes, and I had a pellet gun slung over my shoulder over our backpack. We never wore shoes and hats were for old people. I suppose that is why Afrikaners are so well tanned from young, and our sun is a merciless sun.
We met Jaco about a mile from our house and hurriedly asked if he had the lighter. He did, we, my brother and I exhaled a sigh of relief as a Rambo knife only has three matches and we were both saving the last one for an actual emergency. The other matches we lit on various occasions while showing of our knives and I of course was never, ever, never-ever supposed to have anything flammable with me, in my mother’s words; if I set fire to one more curtain she was going to break my neck just above my coccyx. Till today I have never understood that, but she seemed angry when she said it, so I took it for what it was, a middle-aged woman close to the
edge of breaking. In my defence I liked camping and late at night trying to make fire in the corner of your room to set the atmosphere…the curtains often got in the way, and they burn like a dream especially those gauzy things.
We walked down the gravel road singing and skipping and kicking rocks with our bare feet. With the pellet we took a few shots at trees and stuff but never at actual birds as I once shot one and as it was struggling I had to cut its head off the other two was with me then too. After that it seemed that our aim became very bad as we have not been able to shoot one bird since. The pellet gun however never stayed home on our adventures.
There was a spring that opened in a little dam, maybe pool or pond is a better word, it is about six by six meters and surrounded by huge blue-gum trees. Our oasis, it was in the middle of no-where’s middle.
The previous holiday if one of us went to a dam or anywhere near water we would use improvised nets or fish traps of our own making to catch small fresh water fish and then we would try to keep them alive, until we could come to the