About a hundred years ago the De Beer family went to live in a little frontier house in the foothills of the Drakensberg mountains where the winters are white and deathly cold. Herman de Beer was a poor farmer with just a few cows, some sheep and goats. He had two children. The girl, Rachel, was small for her years and slender, but she was hard-working and a great help to her parents.
The De Beers had not been living in the little hartbeeshuis in the foothills for long when one afternoon at the onset of winter, they saw great clouds massing over the mountains. Soon a great wind came howling from the heights, bringing a black mantle of storm clouds in its wake. Now, the De Beers had not yet wintered there, but neighbours had told them that neither man nor beast could survive a Drakensberg snowstorm without shelter.
So, as the black clouds sank over them and the wind lashed the long grasses, Herman de Beer called to his labourers and family to run and bring the animals to the shelter of the Kraal. Rachel helped to carry the lambs into the warm house and then ran out to watch the storm.
It was almost dark and driving sleet stuck to her face. Just as her father was closing the kraal he noticed a calf was missing. At his shout everyone ran into the failing darkness to look for it. Rachel's mother hesitated. She did not want to leave her small son in the house alone. He was barely five years old. Let him go with Rachel, she'd keep him safe.
Rachel took him by the hand. "We won't go far, Kleinboet," she said.
They ran down the hill through the hissing grasses while the thunder in the mountains and the scream of the wind broke loose upon the world. Snow whirled around them and the wind turned the rain to ice.
They ran, calling the lost calf, straining their ears for and answering bleat. But only the dark bushes flapped at them and the falling snow wiped out all the familiar landmarks that could have let them home. They had lost their way.
Rachel stood still then and knelt down beside Kleinboet. He was crying and his body trembled with cold. His icy hands were too stiff to hold hers any more, his dark eyes huge with fright. Rachel took off her jacket and wrapped it round him and then picked him up and began to stagger uphill in the direction she thought home might lie. Still there was no flickering light ahead and Kleinboet cried from the cold so she took off her bonnet and wrapped it round his head. But the driving sleet soaked him to the skin and so again Rachel stopped and took off her dress, binding it tightly about him.
For a while his crying stopped and Rachel stumbled on, dazed with cold. She knew now that they would not find the little house. If only, somewhere... Then she stumbled on an antheap, half hidden by snow. It made her think of the back yard in which Mother baked her bread. Now, if only she could get Kleinboet into the antheap, then surely she could keep him warm?
Quickly she laid him down and scratched with her numb fingers at the antheap. After a while she found a stone. Digging and shoveling she began to carve out a hollow and she told Kleinboet to scrape away the loose earth. Her arms ached and she no longer felt her frozen hands but she went on hacking until there was a little cave there, just big enough to shelter Kleinboet from the piercing wind.
She was shaking now as she took off even her shirt and put it on him. Then she pushed him into the hollow antheap and lay against him, sheltering him from the wind's cold fingers with her body.
By now, away on their ridge, Herman de Beer and his wife were no longer looking for the calf but calling their lost children. With blankets under their arms and lanterns held high, Herman and his labourers stumbled through the snowy veld shouting for Rachel and Kleinboet, firing shots. But in vain. It was not until a red dawn bled slowly across the white mountains that a farm hand came upon the antheap. Beside it, half-covered in snow, lay the naked body of Rachel.
Her body, as white as the snow upon it, covered the entrance to the hollow antheap and there, curled up, stunned with cold, but alive, was Kleinboet.
No wonder that one of the most loved and remembered names we know is that of Rachel de Beer, who at twelve had the courage and devotion to give her own life so that her brother might live.
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