Written piece
The Forest Thieves
Michael Schmidt
South Africa
About this piece
This is true story of some men who stole a train, drove it from Durban into a yellow-wood forest, home to a rare parrot species and of the declining amaBhaca culture, and logged it, their selfish greed thus destroying an ecosystem and undermining the culture it supported.
When the cicadas’ trill hits the soprano’s register, the baseline growling of a disappearing motorbike on its drawn-out Doppler offers the curve of melody, and the sashaying swish of the white-noise downpour delivers the counterpoint of brushed cymbals.
But the rhythm section underscores it all. First, there’s the metal-knuckled fist-bump of the rolling-stock coupling, which has a delicate lock-click nestled like the tongue of a hummingbird within the round hardness of the join. Then there’s the heavy expressed breathing of the minotaur-engine firing up, its unstoppable shanking drive, it’s ghastly casting of gritty black ashes to the low wind and rain.
Lastly, there’s the long, articulated spinal grind of the flatbeds and lone boxcar feeling the inexorable pull of the engine, snapping to like a python skeleton poised to launch.
Entering the umbral forest a fortnight previously, the train had been lighter by several hundred tons; now it groans under the weight of fresh-cut rare yellow-wood, still sharply redolent of resin, lashed down on the flatbeds with chainlink, an easy fortune.
Cowled in the near-darkness of the engine’s cabin under the battered brim of his old miner’s helmet, the driver grins, rows of gleaming teeth like mielies on a fat cob, as he recalls how easy it had been to steal the train entire in the port city railyard, drive it with his scratched-together crew into the Umzimkhulu forest enclave where a handful of locals speak the dying Bhaca tongue, and start logging.
Choirs of parakeets had protested the chainsaws’ rumble and gnash as the canopy came crashing down – but had to flee for new abodes. Now, at sunset, there remains only the squalid racket of the mynah’s jazz-freestyling clarinets in the banyan trees and the rhythm of the train’s departing skein which unravels forest, parrots, and amaBhaca altogether.