The Child's Elephant (15 page)

The sense of relief washed over Bat in great waves; but a painful new realization was dawning upon him too. He reached out for Muka’s hand. She took it without looking. Her eyes were bright with wonder. But, even as they stood there, caught up in this moment of miraculous witness, they both felt the same loss welling up in their hearts. However much they loved Meya, they had not managed to save her; they had not been able to care for her in the way the wild elephants could. Bat felt something change at some deep level inside them. He knew from that moment that Meya would have to go.

That night, as the young elephant drowsed under the mango, the wild herd came looking for her. Bat could hear them moving about in the scrub near the
village, cracking through the bushes, backs brushing low boughs. He could not sleep. What if they broke through the thorn hedges around the shambas? What if they wandered right into the village, raiding the grain stores and pushing over the huts? They could break any barrier if they wanted to badly enough. They would flatten wooden fences and stroll through cattle enclosures. New-laid roads, Bitek said, would be ploughed up with their tusks. They had even learned how to get through electrified cordons, the fisherman had told him, by throwing branches to short-circuit them and then just shoving past.

Bat got up from his mat and stood amid the dense buzzing darkness. The herd was so close he could hear their low growling, the scratch of their hides as they jostled and shifted; their thick breathy sighs exhaled upon the night. Meya was their kin and they had come to claim her. She had awoken and was answering them, flapping her ears and shuffling, lifting her trunk as she smelled them on the drifting night air.

Bat’s ears strained the blackness. The blood sang in his head. The wild elephants had stopped. They were coming no closer. They stayed at the brink of their mysterious borderlines . . . but they were just waiting, the boy thought; waiting for Meya to cross those unfenced boundaries between the world of the village and the wild’s vast expanses; and he knew in his heart that she was already on the edges. She was hovering upon the fringes. She was already half in that land in which a human could never have a true part.

The first night Meya spent with the herd, Bat was distraught. For more than five years, the elephant had been his most constant companion. ‘What if they leave her behind? What if they lose her?’ he fretted. ‘What if she’s calling for me and I can’t hear?’ Straining his ears, he listened out in the darkness. Nothing but the shrill of the cicadas, the boom of the frogs came back.

Bitek tried to reassure him. ‘They’ll look after her,’ he soothed. ‘They’ll only have taken her up to the forests. They’ll be teaching her how to follow their paths. If she was going for ever she would have said goodbye to you properly. It won’t be too long before she comes back.’ But Bat couldn’t settle. The next morning he set off for the forest himself, scrambling through the creepers that covered the boulders which had tumbled in ancient times from the escarpment’s great cliff. He climbed
further and further through thick spiky branches. The bird song collided with the cackle of monkeys. A troupe of baboons swung by, babies clinging to their backs. They ambled easily through thickets that tore his skin to shreds. A grizzled old male paused and bared his fangs; then, barking, he loped off to catch up with the rest. They vanished into the undergrowth but, when Bat tried to follow them, the wild sisal speared him. Swarms of vicious black tsetse flies alighted and bit. The itching lumps maddened him. He scratched and scratched.

Bat sat down. Big tears of missing welled up in his eyes. It was hopeless, he thought. A butterfly settled on his shoulder; wide as the span of his outspread hand. He watched its red and blue wings slowly opening and closing, its tongue curling and uncurling as it tasted the salt of his sweat. Normally Bat would have smiled at a creature so beautiful; but now he stared drearily. It fluttered away. Rising to his feet, he turned, dejected, and followed his tracks home.

Several days later Meya returned. Bat was in the middle of splitting the firewood so that his grandmother could start cooking when, pausing for a moment to wipe at his brow, he saw something approaching down the track: a grey apparition shambling slowly towards him through the gathering darkness. The panga dropped slack at his side. For a few long moments he waited, suspended without breathing upon a swell of rising hope, before suddenly, recognizing that this was reality, he landed back in the world with a thump. A gasp of sheer happiness was jolted from his lips. He felt light as air. It was as if some great load that for days he had been carrying
had all at once been lifted. His panga dropped with a clatter as he ran forward.

Meya was back; she was well; she had come to no harm. He wanted to throw his arms round her, to tuck himself in beside her and hug her as tight as he could, but instead as he ran closer he found himself slowing to a halt. It was as if he was seeing her suddenly through fresh eyes. She was massive. He could hardly imagine that the creature which now rose above him so tall and broad-shouldered and magnificent and strong had once been no more than a tiny crumpled heap in the grass. The last light of the evening gleamed upon her great tusks. And he could feel her new wildness, an invisible barrier around her. She seemed possessed of a strange power that he had never before felt.

Bat thought of old Kaaka who could talk to the spirits. When you met her most days she was just like any other villager, scolding and chattering as she went about her work. Sometimes she would come and sit with his grandmother, squatting in the shade of the mango, swapping stories. Her face would dissolve into laughter when something amused her, all its wrinkles and creases drawn suddenly inwards as if at the tug of some single secret string. But when she was working her magic, calling the souls of lost people to answer her questions, her lined face would simplify into a mask of great strength. She would grow distant and strange. No one would have dared to touch her at those mysterious moments. She was moving through worlds in which ordinary life had no part.

Bat gazed up at Meya and felt suddenly abashed. But
even as he hesitated uncertainly before her, waiting for her permission before taking another step, she reached out her trunk and twined it gently about him and, drawn slowly inwards, the boy felt himself relaxing as he was pressed into the crinkled underside of her throat. He gave a deep sigh of contentment. It felt so very familiar. He filled up his nostrils with her rich musky smell.

From then on Bat knew that he could no longer hold Meya; that, although he had reared her, she was a truly wild creature. And now it was he who, for the first time, determined that she should finally go. He would refuse her food when she came to the village, turning his back and ignoring her when her trunk crept towards him, searching his pockets for the treats that she hoped he had hidden. He would slip quietly away once she had met up with the herd and, when she looked back to find him, he would already have left. Later, when he returned to check up on her and she came running to meet him, he would pat her only briefly before pushing her off. Meya was confused; she would look at him quizzically, shaking her head and blinking reproachfully before eventually lumbering back to her companions’ side. Then she would turn to face him, her eyes never leaving him as she watched him walk off. Often, Bat faltered. Occasionally, unable to bear it, he would have to turn back. He would run towards her and fling his arms round her. But little by little he learned to harden his heart. ‘The links in the chain must be broken one by one,’ Bitek said. ‘Like a jackal that crosses the water so that nothing can track it, you must break the trail that leads your elephant back to Jambula. If she is to survive,
she must learn that men are not to be trusted. She must look for her safety to the herd alone.’

As the seasons passed, Meya began to stay out longer and longer and her visits to the village became increasingly brief. When she was not there, Bat yearned for her. He would think back to the days when he had curled up beside her, the thump of her heart like the beat of a drum in his blood, and then he would stare into the cook-fire, his calabash of food untouched.

Muka would try to distract him, telling him stories of what the cattle had done, of how Kayo had trapped her foot in a bush-hyrax burrow or Kila’s new calf had found a kitten to play with, and she would watch Bat smile as he remembered his own days with the cattle, while the boy’s grandmother, in her turn, kept watch on Muka’s face. She would see from the way the girl lifted her head, clenching her jaw muscles to stop her mouth trembling, that she too was missing the young elephant. Sometimes the tears would film over her eyes. The girl would blink them away before they rolled down her cheeks, but not before Bat’s grandmother had taken notice. ‘I think tomorrow you need not go out with the cattle,’ she would say. ‘I’ll send Bim instead so that you two can go elephant-tracking. It’s always better to journey with a companion,’ she told them. ‘You never know when you might need someone to remove a grass seed from your eye.’ And Muka’s eyes would brighten and a smile would flash over her face.

Muka loved nothing more than those days when she and Bat wandered together, their hearts humming with excitement as they spotted the elephants surging their
way through the savannah’s wide spaces, silent as ghosts as they steamrollered along.

It was on one of those days, after one of the now rare occasions when Meya would return to the village, that the two children set off together with the elephant at their side. It was bright, though a few clouds were still chasing across the sky. Bat gazed across the open plains. The grass fled like water in the strong wind and in the distance he could see a herd of wildebeest, their horns and high shoulders poking out from the scrub. There must have been about twenty of them, he thought as he squinted: a sure sign that the dry season would soon begin. As pastures grew sparser, the nomads began to gather. Soon they would begin the migration which carried them across the continent. Soon the damp earth would be nothing but dust.

They had been walking and browsing and ambling all morning, hoping to meet up with the other elephants, but by the time the sun had dropped more than halfway down the heavens, they still had not found a trace of the wild herd. They were on the point of giving up and going back when Meya suddenly paused and lifted her trunk. She had sensed them. The children stood quiet and alert. Bat could sense their presence too. It was a feeling far inside him, a strange visceral stirring: like the sound of a song before it reaches the tongue.

Meya was moving now. They followed her forward, ducking through a thicket of thorn bushes, climbing a low rise and skidding down a slope that led towards a riverbed. But still they saw nothing. And then Bat, who was just ahead of Muka, found himself drawing to a
sudden stunned halt. He put a hand on the girl’s arm to restrain her. There, on the far side of the water, was a great baobab. It towered over the scrub like a gaunt sentinel.

The boy recognized it. He didn’t know how; but he had been here before. His thoughts scooted about like a flock of scared chickens. What was alarming him? His flapping mind confused him. And then, like a child in the fowl pen trying to catch a bird for dinner, he got a firm grip on the memory: there he was . . . many years back . . . a little boy of just seven . . . crouching on the far bank . . . just behind that big boulder. Bat blinked and shook his head. He wanted to dislodge the picture, but it was too late. The past was flooding over him. He was huddled amidst it, small and so frightened that even now he could feel himself starting to shake. He was staring giddily up at a dead elephant. The carcass loomed above him, filling his whole horizon. He was watching a gang of poachers . . . they were scrambling up onto the great bloated corpse . . . they were clambering around like beetles . . . the blood whined in his ears like the engine of a chainsaw. The memory flooded his senses. It stickied his breathing and clung to the back of his throat. Muka could feel him trembling as his fingertips gripped her. He was beginning to hurt her; but she did not cry out. She glanced at him, confused. And then she felt his hold loosen as he returned to the present. He stared stricken at Meya as she waded into the shallow river. For a moment his mouth opened as if he wanted to call her; but no sound came out. Instead, stepping forward as determinedly as if he was going finally to
confront some hidden fear, he started to follow her. Muka hitched up her wrap and slid into his wake. The waters were already shrinking; they barely reached up to their knees. It wouldn’t be long before this bed had run dry.

Clambering up the far bank, the children slipped between two boulders and then stopped. Muka was gazing, eyes shining, as she spotted the wild herd browsing a short way beyond them; but Bat seemed barely to notice them. His stare was glassy and fixed, as if what lay before him was only a surface reflection and what he was searching for lay in the depths below. This was the very scene of that long ago slaughter. This was the place where Meya’s mother had been shot. Bat had never returned since. He could not even have remembered how to find it. So why had the elephants come there? he wondered. Why were they leading Meya to this terrible spot?