4. TRACES IN THE DEW
CHAPTER 1
Unease suddenly grabs her when she no longer sees the twenty or so black and white cows where they should be. Hastily, she urges her horse on and rides through the trees so that she can see from the height. But they are not grazing there either, and they are certainly not closer to the house.
The bushes around her are dead silent and look strangely empty because she had definitely expected to find the cows here between the bushes where they graze every day. After all, there is lovely grazing long sweet grass between the sparse trees, so why would they have wandered off? It is the best grazing on the whole farm, and that is precisely why it was chosen for the herd of young cows and heifers. These are her cows, which her father bought at her urgent insistence, because she believes that it is best to buy full-blooded animals when you buy.
Perhaps that is why the unease is suddenly eating at her heart. Tears suddenly well up in her eyes. Could there possibly have been cattle thieves here today? Would they have been so brazen as to come and carry out a raid in broad daylight, and only a mile and a half from the house? It is unbelievable to her... Besides, at twelve o’clock that day the heifers were all still there. Piet Lategan, her father’s foreman, had told her so himself. No, they must be somewhere here between the trees, a little strayed from their usual grazing place.
She rides further.
Her unease increases when she sees that the sun is not very far from setting. She is now in such a hurry that she rides with her legs wide apart, and she tucks her long skirt under her legs. When she left the house, she was sitting neatly across the saddle, as is befitting a woman in this year, 1884.
She had just hastily put on her wide black leather riding leggings because she expected that she might have to get off her horse to help some of the small calves out of the thickets, and in the past she had already experienced what it means to walk through the grass and thorns of these Lowveld plains with stockings and a long skirt.
Quickly and at a gallop, she rides between the trees, ducking low here and there so as not to be scratched by a branch, and weaves with the horse between the thickets of another small rise. When she is up there, she can see far between the sparse trees. The faint rays of the late afternoon sun strike her golden-red hair and create a bright glow on her slightly sweaty face. Her hair is simply tied back at her neck with an old ribbon, and her sleeves are still rolled up as she was working at the soap pot under the big old wait-a-bit tree at the house.
When she was just busy at the soap pot, it suddenly occurred to her that Piet Lategan had not yet returned from the town, and he had asked her that if he did not return in time, she should just quickly ride and round up the cows, because the other two men, Duvenhage and Botha, were going to sleep that night with the other cattle near the Devil’s Bridge in the hope of bewildering or catching the cattle thieves who had become so brazen lately.
Lettie now suddenly wonders why Piet Lategan had to decide to go to town in the middle of the day. He had said it was to go and get medicine, but couldn’t it have waited until there was another opportunity to go to town? With resentment, she thinks of the many times that her father’s foreman, Lategan, had done things that she did not like or that made the work here on the farm more difficult rather than easier.
There are already so many difficulties here...
A year or two ago her father bought this farm, and then they moved here with all their cattle and belongings. It was partly at the insistence of people who knew them well in this area, including the old magistrate, Mr. Willem van Graan. She, Lettie, was herself full of fire and enthusiasm. Land was exceptionally cheap here in
