The Black Sheep

About The Author

Tod Collins has a day job as a veterinary surgeon. Well, he says it is frequently a night job too!

He spends most of his working hours on cattle farms in Underberg, a farming district in the mountains of South Africa.

Collins is a product of the KZN midlands and boys’ boarding schools Treverton and Maritzburg College, as well as Natal and Pretoria universities.

He and his wife, Trish, have three daughters, Carolyn, Leigh and Rebecca. Carolyn and her husband, Will, live in Surrey and have provided the grandparents with grandchildren Matthew Tod and Emily Louise. Leigh lives in Durban, where she works at training people to be fit ’n healthy. Rebecca is studying at Rhodes University in Grahamstown, where she keeps her tutors fit by staying on their toes marking her assignments on political and psychological topics.

Writing short stories became a form of stress relief for the author. As a member of a profession that has unusually high rates of depression and suicide, he finds writing, fly-fishing and mountaineering to be ideal pressure valves.

His stories and books have received accolades in writing competitions in South Africa and abroad. A farmer-publisher friend, the late John McKenzie, persuaded Collins to collect his writings in book form and their partnership resulted in two books. ’Til The Cows Come Home was published in 2010 and Bull by the Horns in 2013. Both these books have had to go into reprint to meet the demand. The latter was awarded the Jock of the Bushveld award for best book of short stories and animal tales (2013–2015) at the JM Coetzee and Athol Fugard Literary Festival in 2015.

In 2015, shortly after McKenzie’s passing, and with a penmanship given confidence by the earlier books, Collins self-published and released Cullen, his full-length autobiographic novel. The book has met with great success in South Africa and internationally. It was judged the best novel at the JM Coetzee and Athol Fugard Literary Festival in 2016.

Besides having put the finishing touches on The Black Sheep, the author is working on two further works. One, The Art of Being… An Awful Angler, is a light-hearted and philosophical look at life with a fly-fishing slant. Ivan is a novel and vaguely akin to Cullen.

Introduction

Welcome to sharing another collection of my short stories. I sincerely hope you will enjoy reading the works as much as I have enjoyed compiling and sculpting them over some years. I trust the more serious readers will enjoy the depths to which many of my writings have ‘plummeted’ – or soared?

The title of this book is twofold apt. The first reason The Black Sheep is suitable is because several of the stories were ‘culled’ from Bull by the Horns. After a huge amount of arm-wrestling, I agreed with my dear – and sadly late – friend and publisher, John McKenzie, that they were too dark for inclusion in Bulls. Thus, the fact that they were ‘outcasts’ or black sheep is appropriate, as is the reference to the pigment!

Moreover, if we’d included all these black sheep stories in Bulls, the tome would have been as fat as Lord of the Rings, and would then have been priced way beyond the average reader’s budget.

The other reason I chose the title is this. As with the first two collections of my short stories, ’Til The Cows Come Home and Bull by the Horns, the name of the book appears somewhere in the narrative of one of the pieces.

Darkness aside, I can’t resist including lighter stories that are laced with humour and have a surprise ending or a twist in the tale, as all short stories should, light or dark! Animals feature in many of the tales, as do their owners and the long-suffering vet who does his best to keep both of them healthy and happy. Yet again, the rest of the pieces in this book do not feature our four-legged friends at all, unless humans are raised to the status of animals.

The dark stories in the book are thought- and soul-provoking indeed. They created a lot of emotion in me while I sculpted or fine-tuned them, and while doing so I relived the pathos, despair, humiliation, fear, panic and oh so many more feelings that even the thesaurus can’t find.

Sir Winston Churchill has inspired me in so many ways. Most of us can recite some of his brilliant pieces of repartee or wisdom. As a fellow survivor of bipolar disorder with a smattering of depression, I take heart in what Churchill also went through, especially when he described the stages of writing a book.

"Writing a book is an adventure. To begin with it is a toy and an amusement. Then it becomes a mistress, then it becomes a master, then it becomes a tyrant. The last phase is that just as you are about to be reconciled to your servitude, you kill the monster and fling him to the public."

In the foreword to Bulls, I admitted that one of the stories was fictional and all the others were true. Many readers spoke or wrote to me to find out if their guesses were right. I again invite readers to decide which one of the twenty-five stories in The Black Sheep is entirely a figment of my imagination! It is a piece I created for the Underberg Writers’ Circle where even my colleagues, Slash Esprey (our doyen), Mike Clark, Aldo Berutti, Phyl Palframan, Jenny Rodgers, Mary Field, Robin Stayt and Keith Fey asked, Gee, did that really happen?

Some of the stories are a way of recording interesting – and amusing – and historical happenings in the Southern Drakensberg. The final story is long, and could even be made into a full-length book on its own, if not a movie. Sorry if this piece bores any ‘instant gratification’ type of reader. In this saga, I have indulged my poetic licence by giving substance to the skeleton of the 1862 epic tale of Thomas Hodgson and Robert Spiers. I have enclosed the bones in flesh and muscle, added some fat to give shape, a covering of glossy skin, buffed a bit of texture on that and then finally daubed on some make-up.

I am delighted to be able to bring these ‘lost’ stories back into the fold. In the words of our Lord Jesus: Suppose one of you has a hundred sheep and loses one of them. Does he not leave the ninety-nine in the open country and go after the lost sheep until he finds it? And when he finds it, he joyfully puts it on his shoulders and goes home. Then he calls his friends and neighbours together and says, ‘Rejoice with me; I have found my lost sheep.’

So, dear reader, turn the pages slowly, enjoy, digest and ruminate over my previously lost black sheep. For finest enjoyment, why not ration yourself to but one reading in a sitting?

1

You Raise Me Up

It’s a gut-wrenching feeling when we arrive at the surgery first thing in the morning, a full morning’s calls already planned, and there is an unexpected client waiting.

I should have skirted the practice on Wednesday and gone straight out to Wally’s farm, where a cup of tea and his hundred and fifty lovely cows were ready, but I had to nip into the rooms to collect some medicines I knew we’d be using.

As I emerged from the back door, a well-dressed Zulu man met me at the same time as Gail arrived for her reception duties. His greeting was slightly familiar and I vaguely recognised him, but couldn’t put a name to him. He wore dark glasses and a heavy, stylish coat. When he said he was a Dlamini from Bulwer, it still didn’t mean too much to me, as I had met a great many of that noble clan. He opened his nice tablet and showed me a photo of a massive Brahman-type ox with impressive horns. Well, one horn was curved outwards and forward; the other horn was drooping sadly.

My ox had a fight with a bull on Sunday and broke his horn and head open. Please can you come now to fix him? he asked earnestly.

I stammered, Mnumzana Dlamini, I have a herd of dairy cows waiting for me. Perhaps one of my younger partners can come sooner. As an afterthought, I added, "You do have a strong race, mguphu, to hold him in, don’t you?"

His reply jarred my now-ruffled morning. "No, there’s no mguphu. He is in a kraal and doesn’t allow anyone near him, but you can just inject him so he lies down."

And how can we inject him if he won’t allow anybody near him? I was getting exasperated.

Gail had been following the discussion and rolled her eyes skywards.

He shrugged and said he was sure I could make a plan, because, after all, I was an old animal doctor. He left his cell number with Gail and we zoomed off in opposite directions.

When I returned a few minutes before lunchtime, I was most dismayed that neither of my tusky young partners had already attended to the distant and belligerent ox! Trish’s lovingly prepared meal meant nothing to me; my nerves and certain sphincter muscles were behaving rather strangely.

A white Land Cruiser was waiting at the turn-off to guide me to my patient. Mr Dlamini’s house was about eight kilometres from the main road. Did I say house? It was a magnificent double-storey, face brick mansion and in his yard was a collection of huge earth-moving equipment. Cats, graders, massive tractors, you name it; they were gleaming clean and neatly parked in a long row! A little distance away was a reasonably sized feedlot containing dozens of young cattle being fattened for Creighton’s November sale. Between the feedlot and his yard was a smaller kraal about a quarter of the size of a tennis court.

The sides of the kraal were made of those metal plate sheets that the roads department has as barriers on bad bends, supported by extremely stout poles. The sides were about ten feet high; three metres. Inside this was the enormous ox, bristling with aggression and snorting fire. Well, he was as close to a dragon-beast as I’ve ever seen, so maybe the fire was almost real! The pen was surrounded by onlookers, their eyes flicking between me and the ox. My legs were feeling wobbly and I had that hollow gut feeling. This was impossible, ridiculous.

How on earth can I get in there with your angry ox, Mnu Dlamini? There’s no way I can inject him!

"I have thought of something, dokotela. He smiled quietly – I had to look closely to see his lips twitch – then he shouted, Sipho, dumisa, wozana!" (Sipho, start up, come!)

One of his huge machines belched to life and a cat with the biggest, longest back-actor loader I ever knew existed trundled closer. Its lengthy multi-bending arm had a tucked-up bucket-cup with a row of massive teeth.

"Dokotela, if you sit in there, Sipho will take you over to the ox and you can inject him! My client spoke calmly. He will also push the ox so my men can put a rope on his head. Do you have your powerful muthi ready?"

It’s very hard to describe the next ten minutes, I’m sorry. I wish there was a film crew handy to record it all. I clambered into the large bucket, crouched and held onto a tooth. Sipho raised me up and up, high over the ten-foot side of the kraal, then moved his caterpillar backwards until the tracks were against the kraal. Then he lowered the bucket – and me – towards the ox. It backed away, snorting at me and my bucket, until its tail was against the far corner of the enclosure.

A young bloke had climbed to the top of the kraal and most adroitly hurled a lasso over the ox’s head, whereupon a dozen tusky stevedores hung on for dear life! Sipho then moved his mechanical arm and me in my bucket towards the ox. My patient’s head was now being pulled against the barrier sides and my raiser-upper manoeuvred the bucket so we – the bucket and I – were above the ox, then slowly lowered me.

The great brindled beast was a moving target, swinging this way and that. Using my teeth, I took the protective cap off the needle, then, holding on for dear life with one arm to one of the bucket’s fangs, I leant out from under the great yellow arm. I leant down and waited until the ox paused, gasping for breath, then jabbed him in the rump with the sedative. I flopped back into the bucket, heart going like the clappers, and gave the now-applauding crowd a heroic thumbs up. Sipho again raised me up… and back over the kraal.

Once the brute was lying down, I could attend to his huge wound. The horn had to come off, the maggots had to be flushed out and the mess treated and dressed. I pumped a vast amount of long-acting antibiotic and a few other medications into the snoozing giant before clambering out of his den.

Mnu Dlamini and I sat in his gracious lounge, where we discussed various things like Sundowns winning the league and the very dry autumn. I gave him sufficient medication for further treatment of his ox, which was to be mixed with his feed, of course! Then I asked him frankly where we knew each other from.

"Dokotela, you had just come to Underberg when I was a mfana at Mnu Skonyongo’s farm, herding his cows. He later taught me how to drive and service a tractor."

I waved at the impressive array of neat machinery outside the window. Mr Arthur Turner must have taught you well! I exclaimed. I also learnt many things from him!

That quiet smile appeared again. "Yes, not only did he teach me about driving and looking after machines, he once scolded me for wasting my money and said I must save one third of everything I earn for the future. I still do that. He was a numsana, a real man!"

On my drive home, I had a nice inner glow. For some reason, I was glad my partners had found other reasons to avoid treating the ox.

I’m not sure who raised me up higher that afternoon, Sipho or Mnumsana Dlamini!

2

The Great Sheep Theft

The skyline of the mountains known as the Southern Drakensberg is dominated, about halfway between The Giant in the north and the Devil’s Knuckles to the south, by the twin peaks originally called the Giant’s Cup.

After a historic occurrence in 1862, those peaks have been ‘Hodgson’s Peaks’ and just about every map in existence now calls them that. They took on the name of one Thomas Hodgson after this farmer-come-transport rider met his fate up high in the lonely mountains of Basutoland. The final story in this book will follow that adventure closely.

The reason Tom and his companions made that trip up the great Drakensberg escarpment and into the wild Maluti Mountains of Basutoland was to retrieve stolen cattle and horses. That was in 1862 and stock theft into Lesotho has remained a stubborn problem for farmers ever since.

In 2011, an angry retaliatory force of Underberg farmers, under the bristling leadership of Messrs Chippy Watson and Nick Williamson, pursued another generation of rustlers. However, unlike Hodgson’s unsuccessful