Dave rode the South African veldt atop his waler. Apart from a ceaseless carpet of withered, grey stalks and the irregular dips in the ground, it was a featureless land. He patted the brown stallion’s neck as it reached down to pluck at the dry grass.

The horse was a cantankerous beast when he first met him. It shied away when he approached with his saddle for the first time, and it took three men to hold the animal as he cinched it down. He expected that. The horse was after all, an Arab horse gone wild in the outback. The Aussie government got all their horses from the bush. It made sense. They had a belief that none but the wild stock could deal with the South African landscape, or the heat.

Dave brushed off the flies and snorted. From where he came from in the small mining town of Wilcannia, the sun burned everything more intensely and indiscriminately, not to mention the ground could cut a good pair of work-boots to ribbons. Still, the horse had its advantages. It seemed to run harder and for longer than the local mounts used by the Boers. 

He tightened the chin strap on his slouch hat and brushed the sweat from his hands on the front of his uniform. Uniform? That was a joke, as was his training. It consisted of a set of workers clothes shoved into a large tub of khaki dye and a few shots fired from his .303 at a slender tree. 

In the shade of his hat, he appraised his frame. He was once mighty, now he appeared gaunt and yet he only joined the war against the Boers eleven months earlier. For all the talk of the land’s huge animals he saw very little game worth shooting. The occasional hare perhaps, and once his mates brought down what looked like a black buffalo of some sort. He draped his leg across his mount and rested his elbow on his thigh. Looks like bully beef again, he thought as he watched the sun almost visibly drop on the horizon. 

The might of the Pommy Empire, he thought in disgust. The English, or the British, as they liked to call themselves, had fought this war for two years now. In their arrogance, they believed they would quash the small county’s resistance in a matter of six months. Two years later, the war waged on. The tough little nation resisted to the point where the entire English army were shipped from home. It wasn’t enough, the Welsh were called. Later, the Scots joined them.