IF YOU THOUGHT MY DAD WAS TOUGH ...

IF MY father was a god to me, then Grandpa Courtney was a god to my father. My grandfather Courtney James Smith had been a transport rider during the Witwatersrand gold rush in the late 1880s, and had led a Maxim gun team in the Zulu war, decimating the enemy with 600 rounds a minute.

With his dazzling blue eyes and magnificent moustaches, Grandpa (left) was something out of adventure books I loved, and was himself a fountain of stories.

I remember the day he told me the tale of the sjambok — a long, stiff whip originally made of rhinoceros hide. ‘One time I won a dog in a game of poker,’ Grandpa told me. ‘It was the biggest, dumbest boarhound you ever saw. Four foot high, a big jowly brute, totally untrainable. I called him Brainless.

‘One night, we were camped in the Lowveld. I was laid out to sleep in the cot in the back of one of the wagons — but that dog, that dog just kept barking, on and on, keeping us all awake. I groped around and I found my sjambok, and I slipped from the wagon and clobbered that dog until, suddenly, on the fourth or fifth strike, the dog started acting in a different way.

‘It made a new sound, a sound it never made before. I was a bit taken aback. I reached into my pocket, struck one of my matches and held up the light.

‘Right where Brainless the boarhound should have been was a fully grown male lion, its eyes mad with fury, its mane matted with blood. It had eaten my dog!

‘I froze. Because there I was, giving this beast the hiding of its life with the sjambok. I turned and ran back to the cabin, jumped inside and stood there panting with horror and relief.

‘And then I felt the sjambok twitching in my hand! I lit another match. It was no sjambok I was holding. It was a snake. I’d been beating that lion with a black mamba!’

Grandpa Courtney hollered with laughter, his guffaws echoing around the room.