Fiela's Child (Fiela se Kind)

Five days have passed since Benjamin left the courthouse. He has no plans to adjust to life with Elias and Barta, and thinks about escape constantly. One day, Nina tells him that she wants to show him a secret. She takes him deep into the forest and reveals that she knows the way to the gravel road. Benjamin knows the road would take him back to Fiela eventually, if he could find it. He tells Nina he has five shillings, and she can have it if she will show him the road. Nina says she will consider it. Then she shows him a secret stash of bottles she has collected. She blows on them to make music.

Elias is increasingly impatient with Lukas’s stubbornness. He decides it is time to put him to work making beams. Lukas does the work well enough to suit Elias, who decides to put Nina to work as well, hoping it will keep her out of mischief. A woman named Malie visits, and while she talks to him, Elias does not realize that it has grown quiet. Nina and Lukas are gone. Nina returns around midday and Elias demands to know where she has gone. She says that Lukas ran away and she went to find him. Elias tells Barta that he is going to find him and bring the boy back. 

Fiela arrives at Knysna and finds the magistrate’s place. Night is falling and she is unable to find a place to sleep, so she beds down on the ground behind the school, hoping that she will not be discovered. In the morning, she cleans herself and approaches three men who are going into the magistrate’s building. They each tell her that the magistrate is busy, but she is let inside to wait. The constable eventually arrives and tells Fiela the case is closed. The child has been returned to its parents. In shock, she returns home and tells her family that the magistrate ruled against them. Benjamin is the forest woman’s child. 

Three days have passed since Elias brought Lukas back. He is encouraged: Lukas is making progress and, once he outgrows his stubbornness, will be a valuable worker. As he watches him, Elias thinks about how he had caught Lukas. He had not been hard to track, and Elias was able to move silently when he needed to. When he caught up to Lukas he threw a lasso around him and forced him to call him Pa and to name Willem and Nina as his brother and sister. He whipped him each time he answered, and finally the boy admitted that his own name was Lukas. When he brought him home, Barta was afraid. The boy was covered in welts and if the magistrate visited to check on his well-being there could be problems.

From Benjamin’s point of view, nothing has changed. He marks days off on the wood of the scaffold, and despairs over the diminishing prospect of Fiela appearing to take him away. 

Fiela has her children look in the Bible for the story of King Solomon and the two women competing for ownership of a baby. She then returns to the magistrate’s building several weeks in a row. Finally, she speaks to the magistrate, who says that his ruling stands. Fiela protests, saying that the forest woman picked the child out of the lineup by accident or luck. She says that he should ask the woman what the child was wearing the day he disappeared. She will give an answer, and so will Fiela. Whoever is right should have the child. She says there is no way the boy could have made it across the mountains at age three. The magistrate loses his patience and sends her away, threatening legal action if he sees her again.

Back home, Petrus visits and asks what it wrong. Fiela tells him everything. He says that he will do whatever he can to help locate Benjamin, even going to court on their behalf if necessary. Fiela wakes one morning to the sound of Kicker bellowing, signaling that he is ready to mate. 

Elias makes a plan to build an elephant trap. He will dig pits, then cover them with brush. When an elephant falls into a pit, he will only have to wait for it to die in order to harvest the tusks and profit from the ivory. While he is thinking about this, a messenger arrives to tell him that the forester is coming soon to check on Lukas’s well being. The forester arrives and asks to see Lukas, but he and Nina are in the forest. Elias and Barta tell him that Lukas is doing well, but the man wishes to wait and see for himself. At nightfall, he is no longer able to wait, but he says he will tell the magistrate that the boy is developing nicely and that there are no problems. He tells them that Fiela has been pestering the magistrate, and that they are to tell him if they see her.