Excerpt from Skinner's Drift by Lisa Fugard, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

February 4

A day of unpacking and trying to understand this house, this new life. The world here is so different from the Eastern Cape. No ocean, no smell of the sea, instead we smell potatoes! There's a plant that grows on the banks of the river and it smells exactly like chopped raw potatoes. Dolf Claasen our neighbor visited today with tales of leopards and elephants. The era of big game roaming in this area is coming to an end, but there is still plenty of wildlife on the Botswana side of the Limpopo. It's just dawning on me what it means to be living on the border. Right now I could take my cup of tea, walk across the dry riverbed (nervously, because Dolf has spooked me with his elephant stories), and be in another country. And I love the fact that I am finally living in a double-story house. Call me hoity-toity if you like, but we're coming up in the world. No more one-bedroom farm managers' homes for us, buckets in the kitchen to catch the leaks and an outside toilet. Eva will have her own room and we'll have an office downstairs. In a few days I'm driving into Louis Trichardt and Johanna will show me the shops.


February 6

An African man showed up at the door this morning, hat in hand, saying that he would work hard, asking us to please give him a chance. His name is Ezekiel and he worked for the previous owners and my sense is that he's a good, trustworthy man. Martin has him tearing down old chicken coops, clearing away a lot of rusted junk. He lives in a shack near the river. I gave him a few slices of bread for lunch and asked him if he isn't scared when the elephants come through. He laughed and said that when he hears them he lies very still on his bed.

Eva closed the composition book and placed it back on the floor. She wrapped her arms around herself, trying to tear away from the image of Ezekiel standing at the kitchen door, crumpling his hat in his hands, hoping the baas will give him a job and he won't have to move on. It would have been better if he had. She hadn't seen him since the day her mother was killed. She'd left, traveled far away from Skinner's Drift, and he'd continued to work for Martin.

Her chest felt tight, the room airless, so she opened the window and slipped her hand through the burglar bars. She rubbed her fingers together as if feeling the texture of the night. The Soutpansberg was two, maybe three miles away. It was still wild country, and her thoughts skittered around the leopard that would be prowling the ravines at this hour, the anxious baboons huddling together on rock ledges. No jackals, though. Phukubje, that was the Sotho word for jackal, Ezekiel had told her. They mated for life and they preferred flatter, more open terrain.

Copyright © 2006 by Lisa Fugard. reproduced by permission of the publisher, Scribner.