In the beginning, wagons trundled over the tall, sweet grasses, laden with sun-dried, salted meat and muzzle-loading rifles. Treaties were drawn up with neither language nor commitment. And then, the guidebook cites with the authority of the South African Ministry of Tourism, Chief Dingane famously cried, “Kill the wizards!” and the bloodletting began with screams, castration, and disembowelment. Maybe, that was when the wagons began to circle around the fires at night and the ears pricked to listen too closely to the cold air whistling in the long grasses. The days drew on and the land did too, the green and the blue, as new men replaced the old and the dead to scrawl new treaties with callused hands. Later, these treaties were broken with the pounding run of hardened impi feet and spears beating against assegais, with flexing of tendons underneath cattle hide armbands, with rifle smoke wafting amongst rushing skirts and canvas wagon coverings. The men in large brimmed hays and austere wool pants took remembered what happened at the river with the day of the vow, because that was the day the river turned from blue to red. They renamed the water, “Blood River,” and set the name in cold stone on a hilltop somewhere else.