Doris Lessing: Stories
Traitors
At the back of our house the ground sloped up to where the bush began: an acre of trailing pumpkin vines, ash heaps where pawpaw trees sprouted, and lines draped with washing where the wind slapped and jiggled. The bush was dense and frightening, and the grass there higher than a tall man. There were not even paths.
When we had tired of our familiar acre, we explored the rest of the farm: but this particular stretch of bush was avoided. Sometimes we stood at its edge, and peered in at the tangled granite outcrops and great ant-heaps curtained with Christmas fern. Sometimes we pushed our way a few feet, till the grass closed behind us, leaving overhead a small space of blue. Then we lost our heads and ran back again.
Later, when we were given our first rifle and a new sense of bravery, we realised that we had to challenge that bush. For several days we hesitated, listening to the guinea fowl calling only a hundred yards away, and making excuses for cowardice. Then, one morning at sunrise, when the trees were pink and gold, and the grass-stems were running bright drops of dew, we looked at each other, smiling weakly, and slipped into the bushes with our hearts beating.
At once we were alone, closed in by grass, and we had to reach out for the other’s dress and cling together. Slowly, heads down, eyes half closed against the sharp grass seeds, two small girls pushed their way past ant-heap and outcrop, past thorn and gully and thick slumps of cactus where any wild animal might lurk.
Suddenly, after only five minutes of terror, we emerged in a space where the red earth was scored with cattle tracks. The guinea fowl were clinking ahead of us in the grass, and we caught a glimpse of a shapely dark bird speeding along a path. We followed, shouting with joy because the forbidding patch of bush was easily conquered and made our own as the rest of the farm.
We were stopped again when the ground dropped suddenly to the vlei, a twenty-foot shelf of flattened grass where the cattle went to the water. Sitting, we lifted our dresses and coasted downhill on the slippery swathes, landing with torn knickers and scratched knees in a donga of red dust scattered with dried cowpats and bits of glistening quartz. The guinea fowl stood in a file and watched us, their heads tilted with apprehension; but my sister said with bravado: “I am going to shoot a buck!”
She waved her arms at the birds and they scuttled off. We looked at each other and laughed, feeling too grown-up for guinea fowl now.
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