The Child's Elephant (18 page)

A huge moon came up. The trees shone silver-grey. The night wind blew softly down from the cliff face. In the far distance the children could still see a line of dark forms swaying slowly though the blackness. They looked almost like phantoms. The moonlight shimmered upon them. It sparkled and glinted as it caught their tusks. Meya was among the elephants, they knew, but however hard they strained their eyes they could not single her out. She was part of the group. She had rejoined her wild herd.

PART TWO

Bat returned to the way of life he had known before Meya. All through the short dry season he went out with the cattle. The herd had expanded. It was the calves of the calves of his first cows that he was now caring for, spotting in them the traits of their familiar forebears, discovering that Kayo’s offspring were all just as inquisitive as she was and so all just as liable to get into trouble; that the speckled heifer which came from Leko’s sturdy line was, like her, a daydreamer and hence last in the file. Though several of his original cows had now gone, Kila had always been kept. She shambled along, though increasingly stiffly, Bat noticed, her curving horns balanced like some cumbersome crown on her head. But she still threw a single sound calf every year and, though her silvery hide was now cross-scarred with scratch-marks and worn bare in patches,
Bat still loved to stand at her side and stroke her, finding solace in all the memories that they by now shared. He would still lean against her as they looked out over the water, and run his long fingers down her rippling neck-flaps.

Together Bat and his cattle roamed the savannah, drifting from marshy riverbanks to forested foot-slopes but, although he was constantly scanning the horizon and hoping, his heart skipping a beat at a rustle in the bushes, his breath stilled in his throat by the sight of a far distant rock, he never caught so much as a glimpse of the elephants and gradually, as the moons waxed and waned, his expectations subsided and the slow peaceful shifting of his cattle browsing the undergrowth ceased so often to stir up the fretful memories.

‘Don’t worry,’ Bitek the fisherman tried to reassure him. ‘It’s quite normal for elephants to leave like that. They’ll be high in the forests where no one can find them. They’ll be following paths to feeding places that even you don’t know. But before you know it, they’ll be back.’

Still, Bat couldn’t help feeling anxious. The forests were no longer safe. Only a few days earlier, the charcoal burner had turned up in Jambula. His camp had been robbed, he said. Everything had been taken: hunting knife, water bag, rice sacks and stock of salted meat. He had had to return. ‘Not that I would have wanted to stay out,’ he added. ‘There are bad people travelling through the trees nowadays.’

The villagers had given him green bananas and maize meal and Bitek had contributed a few strips of
dried fish. But there wasn’t much food to spare. Times were hard in Jambula: even Fat Rosa was beginning to shrink. The exuberant rolls no longer bulged from her waistband and her round face had new angles. Only when she puffed out her cheeks, her eyes squeezed with laughter, did she look like she used to, and that wasn’t so often now: there was less to laugh about.

One evening, Bat found himself watching his grandmother as she prepared the supper. Her cheeks were losing their burnished copper glow. Her skin had grown dry and shiny. It was thin as the paper in the books with which she had taught him to read. When she lifted a heavy cooking pot, he noticed how nearly she let it slip. Her fingers were buckling. They curled like the claws of the lizards that clung to the thatch.

Once she would have worked all morning in the shamba, pausing only occasionally to wipe the sweat from her brow, but now she breathed heavily as she bent over her hoe. She had to stop frequently. She always walked with her stick. She was wearing out, Bat thought, and suddenly all the feelings he had for her boiled up inside him and he flung his arms round her and squeezed her as tight as he could.

‘I love you,’ he told her, as he breathed in the smell of the wood-smoke that always clung about her.

‘If you love me, stop squeezing my old bones so that I can stay alive a bit longer,’ she laughed.

Bat was fourteen now. He had grown tall and strong. He had a proud bony face with high cheekbones, a wide nose and full, clear-cut lips. His eyes were
bright as the freshest leaf on a twig. ‘He burns like a new flame,’ Bitek said to Bat’s grandmother. ‘He’s like a thorn tree in flower: it becomes the focus of the entire landscape.’

‘You are a man,’ the village chief told him. ‘Up until now, your grandmother has always looked after you; now the time has come for you to look after her. You are the head of the house.’

From then on, Bat’s grandmother found that she no longer had to chivvy him. She no longer had to spit in the dust when she set him a task. He would always have done it before the wet patch had dried. Nothing gratified him more than to be sent for to help with some manly duty, with the splitting of firewood or the lifting of some maize sack, and although, when it was one of the small boys who delivered the message, he liked to raise his eyebrows and grumble, ‘What now?’ even they could tell that in truth he was only pretending, that he was proud to have become the man whom the women had to ask. He seldom had to be told what to do twice any more.

Outside the village, he and Muka cleared a new plot for planting. He sliced through the dry brush with fast, efficient strokes, making sure that he covered more ground than the girl did, and, although at the end of the morning his shoulder muscles were aching, he went on to help her collect the firewood, cutting it into short lengths which she then piled up in a stack. Even the repair of the huts in the compound, a job that in the past would always have been done by Bat’s grandmother, was now left for the two children. Mixing mud up with
cow dung, Bat smeared the wet plaster over walls and floors before leaving the sun to bake it, while Muka, with quick fingers, knotted grass stalks to mend holes in the thatch.

When the long rains came, there would be planting for the pair of them to do. The first puffs of cloud were already drifting over the escarpment. They were the messengers. It would not be many days now, they thought as they squinted. But, where once the villagers would have awaited the arrival with chattering expectation, this year the mood was strangely subdued. The headman no longer stood in his gumboots, surveying the scene around him with quiet satisfaction. He no longer folded his arms contentedly over his barrel chest. The musical voices that had once gossiped and argued around cook-fires in the evening were muted. The bright printed cloths that the women wrapped round their waists were tattered. But no one went to buy new ones. The market was not safe. ‘The rebels will attack in broad daylight,’ people said. Even Marula wore a faded old turban. Her pink and blue plaid that had once been so jarring had now been washed so many times that its colours were muted. ‘You can barely distinguish it from the dust,’ she said as she sat beside her doorway. ‘People will start tripping over me soon.’ And when Fat Rosa sat down beside her, her plump thighs no longer splayed like a pair of wallowing hippos. Her family hadn’t had enough to eat for some while.

Bat’s grandmother decided to kill one of their cows. She never liked doing this. ‘Without cattle you are naked,’ she always said. ‘But Mutu is old and her hind
legs are weak. We can’t afford to keep anything out of compassion any more.’

Bat could not bear to be there when Bim’s father came with a knife to dispatch the beast, to scoop out the entrails and strip the glossy black hide from her muscles. But at least the whole village had eaten well that night. Marula hadn’t even waited for her sons to carry her over to the feast. Scooting down the path on the palms of her hands, she had arrived in Bat’s compound and dropped herself down in eager anticipation. Fat Rosa puffed out her cheeks and smiled like she hadn’t smiled for months. Even the medicine woman crept out to join them, a huddle of angles and sharp teeth at the fringe of the gathering, while the village children stared with eyes that looked too large for their faces.

Afterwards they had all lingered for far longer than had become usual by the fire, the men belching contentedly and spitting in the dust, the women chattering softly as they brushed the mosquitoes from their drowsy youngsters. The headman put his empty pipe in his mouth and sucked and blew meditatively, surveying them all through his empty spectacle frames while toothless old Kaaka, whom everyone now said looked set to live for ever, sucked and sucked at each lump of meat until it was soft enough to mash.

Bat was light-hearted the next day as he followed the cattle. He and Muka had been working so hard in the shamba of late that the cows had all but entirely been entrusted to the care of mute Bim. The whistle with which Bat had taught him to speak to the elephant worked well for the cattle, and they would come trotting
at the sound of his chirruping call. But that day, Bat went out in the morning, like he had so often done and Muka met him in the evening, as she had always liked to do. Now, perched side by side on a stone, they watched the sun as it lowered itself towards the horizon, bathing the tops of the acacias with its shining, and splashing great swatches of pink onto the escarpment wall.

Suddenly, Bat tensed. He had heard a movement in the scrub. ‘Shhh, there’s something there.’

Muka froze.

They strained their ears: but nothing.

A porcupine shambled off through the brush.

Muka laughed. ‘It was only him!’

Still, porcupines were night foragers: it was time to get home. Bat bundled up his pile of cut grass and, collecting his panga, called to the scattered cattle. They lifted their heads and lowed. Muka heaved a huge knot of firewood onto her head and the pair set off. The backs of the cows gleamed in the fading light. A soft brown duiker, disturbed from its hiding place, skipped delicately away on its dancer’s light feet. A mourning dove uttered its soft growling call. It sounded so peaceful. And it felt to the children, as they wandered home together, as if everything would always stay that way.

But suddenly, in the time it takes for a bird to flit from one branch to the next, the whole world changed. Nothing would be the same any more.

An arm locked round Bat’s waist. He let out a shout. A hand clamped his mouth. He kicked as hard as he could. A knee was brought up into the small of his back. He gasped and doubled over. Someone dragged him back upright. Who was it? He couldn’t see them and yet they were right there behind him, one crooked arm round his neck crushing down on his windpipe, the other pressing a rough hand hard down on his lips. He could feel their breath bursting in hot pants on his cheek. He struggled for air. His own lungs were exploding. His heels scuffled helplessly. He could get no grip in the dust. The whole world was blearing. A vast sea of blackness was drowning his head.

He heard a scream. Muka! Her cry cut right through him. It sliced through the darkness and awoke every nerve to new fear. For a moment he froze. Then fresh
energy surged through him, flooding his body with a wave of wild fury. Biting down as hard he could, he sank his teeth into the flesh of the hand that was holding him. Someone gave a sharp gasp. It might have been him. Lashing out with his nails, he ripped himself free and ran, racing as fast as he could through the twilight, knees skimming the bushes as he zigzagged for cover. The blood tasted bitter as iron in his mouth. The cattle were scattering, veering and kicking about him. He twisted like a bat through the shadows and escaped.