Life and Times of Michael K by J. M. Coetzee

of an old shoe and strips of rubber from an inner tube, made himself a catapult with which to knock birds out of the trees. He buried the remains of the goat.
    He explored the single-roomed cottages on the hillside behind the farmhouse. They were built of brick and mortar, with cement floors and iron roofs. It was not possible that they were half a century old. But a few yards away a little rectangle of weathered mudbrick stood out from the bare earth. Was this where his mother had been born, amid a garden of prickly pear? He fetched the box of ashes from the house, set it in the middle of therectangle, and sat down to wait. He did not know what he expected; whatever it was, it did not happen. A beetle scurried across the ground. The wind blew. There was a cardboard box standing in the sunlight on a patch of baked mud, nothing more. There was another step, apparently, that he had to take but could not yet imagine.
    He followed the perimeter fence all the way around the farm without meeting any living sign of neighbours. In a trough covered with a sheet of iron he found mouldering sheep-feed; he picked out a handful of mealies and put them in his pocket. He returned to the pump and fiddled with it till he discovered how the brake mechanism worked. He rejoined the broken cable and stopped the crazy dry spinning of the wheel.
    Though he continued to sleep in the house he was not at ease there. Roaming from one empty room to another he felt as insubstantial as air. He sang to himself and heard his voice echo from walls and ceiling. He shifted his bed to the kitchen, where he could at least see stars through the hole in the roof.
    His days he spent at the dam. One morning he took off all his clothes and washed them, standing chest-deep in the water and pounding them against the wall; for the rest of the day, while the clothes dried, he dozed in the shade of a tree.
    The time came to return his mother to the earth. He tried to dig a hole on the crest of the hill west of the dam, but an inch from the surface the spade met solid rock. So he moved to the edge of what had been cultivated land below the dam and dug a hole as deep as his elbow. He laid the packet of ash in the hole and dropped the first spadeful of earth on top of it. Then he had misgivings. He closed his eyes and concentrated, hoping that a voice would speak reassuring him that what he was doing was right—his mother’s voice, if she still had a voice, or a voice belonging to no one in particular, or even his own voice as it sometimes spoke telling him what to do. But no voice came. So he extracted the packet from the hole, taking the responsibilityon himself, and set about clearing a patch a few metres square in the middle of the field. There, bending low so that they would not be carried away by the wind, he distributed the fine grey flakes over the earth, afterwards turning the earth over spadeful by spadeful.
    This was the beginning of his life as a cultivator. On a shelf in the shed he had found a packet of pumpkin seeds, some of which he had already idly roasted and eaten; he still had the mealie kernels; and on the pantry floor he had even picked up a solitary bean. In the space of a week he cleared the land near the dam and restored the system of furrows that irrigated it. Then he planted a small patch of pumpkins and a small patch of mealies; and some distance away on the river bank, where he would have to carry water to it, he planted his bean, so that if it grew it could climb into the thorntrees.
    For the most part he was living on birds that he killed with his catapult. His days were divided between this form of hunting, which he carried on nearer the farmhouse, and the tilling of the soil. His deepest pleasure came at sunset when he turned open the cock at the dam wall and watched the stream of water run down its channels to soak the earth, turning it from fawn to deep brown. It is because I am a gardener, he thought, because that is my nature. He