Every night at 10 o’clock, when my mother has taken a book to bed, my father, a farmer and game lodge owner in the hills of eastern Zimbabwe, gets his shotgun out of the cabinet, slides a cartridge into each barrel, and goes to sit with it in the garden chair under the giant fig tree facing the front gate. He’s keeping guard.

The bait is in the tin roof shed to the right: two heavy barrels of unleaded fuel fresh in from Mozambique—a rarity and a fortune these days, as in demand as a South African visa or a reliable currency dealer, one who won’t rip you off or shop you to the secret police.

“They stole it before, they’ll try again,” he told my mother.

“And what are you going to do when they come?” she asked.

“Shoot them,” he replied, a little exasperated. “What do you think the gun is for?”

He’d bought the fuel soon after the thieves stole his last two barrels, along with all his tools, on New Year’s Eve, and he made a good show of letting the workers on the farm know he had a new supply. He had John Orange and John Old offload it; watched Rosie the maid see them carry it to the shed; saw Sydney the young barman clock it as he walked past the gate down to the backpacker camp at the bottom of the road.

Word would get around. It always did. This was Africa, and you couldn’t stop talk. They had the oral tradition, after all. The oral tradition! He chuckled to himself as he sat there. What a cunning thing. So open to interpretation. When your history wasn’t written down, who knew how it changed in the telling? How it was modified, improved upon, exaggerated over generations? It just became storytelling after a while, didn’t it? And everyone had some bullshit story about how they really owned the land and how they were here first.

He thought back to the robbery.

It wasn’t so much the theft of his fuel that had enraged him. It was the tools. Who steals a man’s tools? Take anything but leave the tools. He had been lost without them these months. His wrench was gone, the new spanners he had bought in Pietersburg, even a shitty old pair of pliers. He had been unable to fix the pump for the borehole, the grill on the coffee roaster, the leak in the geyser in the roof.

The timing could not have been better, too. On New Year’s Eve, the one night in the year they were sure to be out. What a start to the year it had been! As if he didn’t have enough shit to deal with. There were the squatters—“new farmers” they called themselves—across the road who’d slaughtered all the zebra and antelope he’d stocked the farm with. And there was the Section Five, that document from the government: “We hereby inform you that the above mentioned land has been allocated for resettlement.”

The place was falling apart before his eyes. But there was no way he was just going to give it to them.

He felt good with the gun on his lap. A ripple of moonlight pressed through the leaves of the fig tree and shimmered on the barrel. Next to his tools, this was his favorite possession in the world. True, it wasn’t the best weapon to have in the circumstances. That would have been the FN FAL, the Belgian-made automatic he had during the bush war in the 1970s. Now there was a gun! Back then, when they had the chicken farm across the valley, he would ride shotgun with it in the car as my Mom drove my sisters and I to school, eyes peeled in bush for “terrs”—terrorists—ZANLA guerillas who would attack the farms. At night my parents would sleep with it next to the bed in case of an attack, and in the morning, unload the magazine, check that the barrel was empty, and start all over again. And somehow, all those years, when everything was being shot up and blown up around us—including our neighbors—we had miraculously been left alone. What could explain that? He reckoned it was the gun.

Of course, when the war ended in 1980, he returned it to the police. Idiot, he thought. But how could he have known, 25 years ago, that he would one day need it for another war? Instead, the shotgun was the only weapon he had left, and it would have to do. It was a beautiful vintage 12-gauge and a good hunting gun. He knew that. But could it do the bigger job?

A fruit bat flapped over his head and swooped over the front lawn. Crickets chirped out a ragged chorus. He liked being out here on his own. He heard a lone bus on the main road that ran along the southern boundary of the farm belch its way towards Harare, the capital city. There was a time when that road was busy, the country’s main link to the ocean in Mozambique 400 miles to the east, but now so few people could afford fuel that it was quiet and almost deserted during the day. And who wanted to drive at night?

Soon his eyes had adjusted to the dark, and his hearing became more attuned. He heard voices drifting over from the camp, voices he was starting to get familiar with the more nights he spent out there keeping guard. The backpacker camp was half a mile beyond the front gate, past the long grass, the avocado trees and the umbrella thorns, but it might as well have been on the front lawn, so clear were the voices. He recognized John Old’s baritone; the cackle of Mrs. John, his toothless wife. Some of the staff, before they had to lay most of them off, had thought she was a n’anga—a witch. He hoped against hope that she was one. He liked and trusted her more than the others. And he could do with a good witch.

He wondered, as he listened, why it was that African voices seemed to carry so far in the darkness, seemed to float as naturally in the inkiness as the wood smoke and the shards of weed grass. Did it have something to do with that oral tradition of theirs?

He tried to picture the scene down there. They were either in the bar getting drunk or around a wood fire by the compound, drinking and smoking dagga. He could smell the dagga from here—a green, bittersweet tang, mingling with the oak of the wood smoke. He wondered if the weed was from his own crop, the plantation he had started with John Old behind the house. People were doing anything for money these days and he was no different. And he wondered what dagga tasted like. He’d have to try it sometime. Perhaps his son would roll him a joint one day. He was sure I would know how.

The last light in the house went off behind him. My mother was going to sleep. The light from the cottages on the hills to the north blinked off, too. Mrs. Herrer in No. 3, an 80-year-old Afrikaner woman, the best cattle farmer in the valley in her day. Delaney in No. 11. And at the bottom of the hill in No. 8, Harry Venter, his latest tenant, the most recent white farmer to lose his land. Old Harry. What a bullshitter. The man claimed to be friendly with the Vice President, claimed she could get him his farm back. Now that he’d like to see!

Still, he was glad these people had homes, and he knew it was because of him. When he bought this farm, when his kids had all left home, there was nothing on these hills but bush and stone. And in five years he and my mother had created a small empire: 16 cottages for rent, each with wide verandahs and sweeping views of valley; the backpacker lodge with its chalets, swimming pool, and restaurant-bar that once pulled in tourists from the world over. They had named it Drifters and the guidebooks the travelers carried with them all wrote well about it. They had had some wild parties at the camp bar over the years. It hadn’t really been a business at all; it was more like an extension of their home.

And now? Now the cottages were refugee camps for dispossessed whites. And the camp? Jesus, he thought. It was what it was. It made them money, but it also made them embarrassed. He tried not to think about it. Then he thought about it. Maybe they should start renting chalets by the hour? The whole country was whoring itself, why shouldn’t they cash in? He made a mental note to suggest to my Mom the next day that if the marijuana side-business didn’t kick in they should start renting chalets by the hour, formalize operations so to speak.

It must have been well after midnight now because the voices were gone. The moon had ducked behind the Chikanga Mountains and even the crickets were quiet. Now he didn’t feel so comfortable. Did crickets usually stop chirping? Was that normal? He hoped the fruit bat would come back and he wished he’d brought a blanket. Maybe even a flask. The kitchen was behind him; it would be easy to go inside and make some hot tea. But what if they came when he was making tea? What an idiot he’d be then. He stayed put.

He thought again of his suspects. It could be John Old or John Orange, but he doubted it. They would know he would accuse them first up—which he did—and besides, he didn’t think they had it in them. Too old. More likely it was John Old’s son. He had seen the little bastard down at the compound a few days before, skulking in the bushes. Like every other kid in the country he was unemployed. And how did he buy those new running shoes?

But most of all, he suspected the Political Commissar.

Now there was a bona fide bastard. A fat, lowly, party official, he had appointed himself headman for the area and claimed for himself the farmhouse of old man Fritz Barnard across the road. He was too low on the ruling party ladder to be given a car, but high enough to be given a farm, and therefore, like all middling-to-average people everywhere, all the more dangerous. With his long grey raincoat and leather briefcase he would stand on the road in the mornings and ask my Dad for a lift into the city where, he was unembarrassed to say, he had a “townhouse.” That was how it was. The bastard had two homes! My father could easily see himself shooting the Political Commissar.

His arms were growing heavier now. The leaves and branches of the fig tree seemed to sink warmly around him, enveloping him like the blanket he wished he had. He could barely keep his eyes open now. His head was heavy, too. Slowly his grip loosened on the gun.

The noise came from the bushes beside the front gate. He woke up with a start. Had he fallen asleep? What time was it? Jesus. Someone was out there! He gripped the gun, leaned forward, trying to keep silent while adjusting his position. It came again. A light rattle of the chain-link fence. Someone was out there! His heart pounded, the sudden exhilaration making him dizzy. He saw two red eyes in the darkness, staring straight at him. He stared straight back, trying to focus, easing the gun up to his shoulder now. It was happening! They had come back! At last, it was payback time!

He saw it clear as if it were day. It was a giant full-grown antelope, a magnificent bull Eland with tall twisted horns like acacia branches grazing in the long grass beside the fence. His heart was pounding. Jesus. An Eland.

He had bought a herd of them years ago when the camp and the cottages were being built, along with some zebra and impala, but he had not seen them in four years. He thought the squatters and the war vets and the Commissar had wiped them all out. They set wire traps made from his farm fence they ripped down; they hunted them with their mongrel dogs; others they just shot. He and my mother would hear gunfire in the middle of the night, and in the mornings find skinned carcasses in the hills. He had presumed the animals were all dead, but now, right here in front of him, one had showed itself.

It stared at him with those magnificent sad eyes and he stared straight back. He had never felt so much pity for a mere animal before, and yet so much love for one, so much elation that something out there—something else out there!—had managed to survive.

The animal bent its neck, chewed more grass, then looked up at him again. It seemed to be nodding at him. He wanted to nod back, but he didn’t want to scare it. Then the creature wheeled away and loped off into the long grass, past the avocado trees and the umbrella thorns. My father watched it go. For the first time in months, the rage he had inside him seemed to have gone. He felt light-headed and dizzy.

He walked back to the house. He set the gun by the dresser table and rolled into bed next to my mother. Maybe now he could get some sleep.