Jock Of The Bushveld by Sir Percy Fitzpatrick ( Chapter 14 )( Page 1 ) The Berg

The last day of each trip in the Bush veld was always a day of trial and hard work for man and beast.  The Berg stood up before us like an impassable barrier.  Looked at from below the prospect was despairing-- from above, appalling.  There was no road that the eye could follow. Here and there a broad furrowed streak of red soil straight down some steep grass-covered spur was visible: it looked like a mountain timber-slide or the scour of some tropical storm; and that was all one could see of it from below.  For perhaps a week the towering bulwarks of the High veld were visible as we toiled along--at first only in occasional hazy glimpses, then daily clearer higher and grander, as the great barrier it was. After many hard treks through the broken foothills, with their rocky sideling slopes and boulder-strewn torrent beds, at last the Berg itself was reached.  There, on a flat-topped terrace-like spur where the last outspan was, we took breath, halved our loads, double-spanned, and pulled ourselves together for the last big climb. From there the scoured red streaks stood out revealed as road tracks-- for, made road there was none; from there, lines of whitish rock and loose stones and big boulders, that one had taken for the beds of mountain torrents, stood revealed as bits of `road,' linking up some of the broken sections of the route; but even from there not nearly all the track was visible.  The bumpy rumbling and heavy clattering of wagons on the rocky trail, the shouts of drivers and the crack of whips, mixed with confusing echoes from somewhere above, set one puzzling and searching higher still.  Then in unexpected places here and there other waggons would be seen against the shadowy mountains, creeping up with infinite labour foot by foot, tacking at all sorts of angles, winding by undetected spur and slope and ridge towards the summit--the long spans of oxen and the bulky loads, dwarfed into miniature by the vast background, looking like snails upon a face of rock. To those who do not know, there is not much difference between spans of oxen; and the driving of them seems merely a matter of brute strength in arm and lung.  One span looks like another; and the weird unearthly yells of the drivers, the cracks--like rifle-shots--of the long lashes, and the hum and thud of the more cruel doubled whip, seem to be all that is needed.  But it is not so: heart and training in the cattle, skill and judgment in the driver, are needed there; for the Berg is a searching test of man and beast.  Some, double-spanned and relieved of half their three-ton loads, will stick for a whole day where the pull is steepest, the road too narrow to swing the spans, and the curves too sharp to let the fifteen couples of bewildered and despairing oxen get a straight pull; whilst others will pass along slowly but steadily and without check, knowing what each beast will do and stand, when to urge and when to ease it, when and where to stop them for a blow, and how to get them all leaning to the yoke, ready and willing for the `heave together' that is essential for restarting a heavy load against such a hill.  Patience, understanding, judgment, and decision: those are the qualities it calls for, and here again the white man justifies his claim to lead and rule; for, although they are as ten or twenty to one, there is not a native driver who can compare with the best of the white men. It was on the Berg that I first saw what a really first-class man can do.  There were many waggons facing the pass that day; portions of loads, dumped off to ease the pull, dotted the roadside; tangles of disordered maddened spans blocked the way; and fragments of yokes, skeys, strops, and reims, and broken disselbooms, told the talOld Charlie Roberts came along with his two waggons.  He was `old' with us--being nearly fifty; he was also stout and in poor health.  We buried him at Pilgrim's Rest a week later: the cold, clear air on top of the Berg that night, when he brought the last load up, brought out the fever.  It was his last trek. He walked slowly up past us, to "take a squint at things," as he put it, and see if it was possible to get past the stuck waggons; and a little later he started, making three loads of his two and going up with single spans of eighteen oxen each, because the other waggons, stuck in various places on the road, did not give him room to work double-spans.  To us it seemed madness to attempt with eighteen oxen a harder task than we and others were essaying with thirty; we would have waited until the road ahead was clear. We were half-way up when we saw old Charlie coming along steadily and without any fuss at all.  He had no second driver to help him; he did no shouting; he walked along heavily and with difficulty beside the span, playing the long whip lightly about as he gave the word to go or called quietly to individual oxen by name, but he did not touch them; and when he paused to `blow' them he leaned heavily on his whip-stick to rest himself.  We were stopped by some break in the gear and were completely blocking the road when he caught up.  Any one else would have waited: he pulled out into the rough sideling track on the slope below, to pass us. Even a good span with a good driver may well come to grief in trying to pass another that is stuck--for the sight and example are demoralising-- but old Charlie did not turn a hair; he went steadily on, giving a brisker call and touching up his oxen here and there with light flicks. They used to say he could kill a fly on a front ox or on the toe of his own boot with the voorslag of his big whip.e of trouble.