The Child's Elephant (2 page)

‘Leave it. It’s nothing.’ The command grated like metal.

But the man with the gun remained unconvinced. Raising his rifle, he began to move outwards. He was heading directly to where the boy was now crouching.

‘I heard someone.’

‘Who?’

‘Could be a ranger.’

‘What are the chances of a ranger being here?’

Bat’s heart thumped so wildly he was sure they would hear it. Through a chink in the rocks he saw a blood-spattered face. Every step brought it closer. He listened to the slow crunch of boots.

Should he run now, he wondered? Should he make a dash? He glanced at the riverbank down which he had stumbled. There was no way he would make it. He tried to pretend he was stone. A fly crawled over his lips. He didn’t so much as twitch: if he did he was dead.

The footsteps came nearer. A shadow slipped past the rock. The man was so close, Bat could smell his sour sweat. Somewhere in the bush a francolin was singing. It’s clacketing call was so very familiar . . . and this would be the very last time that he ever heard it, the boy thought.

‘Who’s that?’

The man with the rifle swivelled. A vehicle was approaching. A sudden silence fell as the poachers all strained to see.

‘I told you we’d come too far!’ Bat heard one of them
crying. ‘We’re too close to the village. Anyone could have seen us.’

‘No one has seen us.’ The tall one remained calm. ‘Look! It’s only the jeep.’

In the distance, a Land Rover was bouncing towards them, kicking up billowing clouds of red dust.

‘Still, I don’t like it here,’ one of the men was grumbling. ‘It’s time to get out!’

‘Get out?’ It was the driver of the still-running vehicle who was now shouting.

‘There was a noise!’ the man answered. ‘Anyone could be watching. They could be right over there behind one of those rocks.’ He nodded towards the boulders beyond which Bat was hiding.

The driver slid out of the jeep. He was wearing a pair of dark glasses. The boy couldn’t tell where his eyes were looking. His gaze swept over the very spot in which Bat was now crouching. For one heart-pounding second, he thought it was going to stop. But then the man turned back. ‘For God’s sake! No one’s going until the job’s been done.’

The next thing Bat knew, two figures were scrambling onto the elephant’s corpse. A third fetched the chainsaw. This time it ripped into life at first tug and, snarling, lunged forward, ferocious as a chained dog. Bat heard the long rising whine as it finally bit. Its blade spewed bloodied flecks. Surely they would leave soon, he prayed, as he clutched at the rock face. Surely they would go when they had the second tusk. The machine choked and stopped.

One of the men dropped, half climbing, half tumbling,
down the slope of the animal and was lost from view. Bat heard him grunting as he shouldered the weight of the tusk. An argument broke out but Bat couldn’t tell about what. Then the booty was loaded into the back of the jeep. It fell with a
thunk
that made the suspension rock. The chainsaw clattered in behind. Then the tailgate was slammed. The idling engine revved up. Bat could hear the gears grinding as the jeep ploughed off.

Little by little, the silence washed back in its wake. But it was only after the first of the rock hyraxes had begun to creep from their crevices that Bat felt that at last for him too it might be safe. He scanned the horizon for a glimpse of the Land Rover but it was by now out of view. Clouds of red dust were re-settling. The hyraxes grunted and then, seeing him rising, edged back bottom-first into their holes again.

The boy slipped through the boulders. There, right before him, loomed the dead animal. It rose like a mountain from a lake of purplish blood. Flies stumbled drunkenly about on its surface. They sunk into deep sticky pools and drowned. And for a long while Bat could do nothing but stand and stare numbly. He felt as if his whole mind had been swept away by force. He gazed at the baobab, a vast solitary mourner.

Soon the vultures would come. The first pair had already settled. They were shuffling impatiently in its silvery branches and Bat could see several more circling greedily above. As soon as he had gone, they would glide down to feast.

A marabou stork paced to and fro at a distance, its pink gizzard swinging, its black shoulders hunched.
The boy rushed at it angrily, flapping his arms. ‘Shoo! Shoo!’ he shouted. ‘Get back! Go away!’ It fluttered onto a fallen branch and rattled its bill. A jackal yipped in alarm and slunk a little further off.

Bat did not pursue it. What would have been the good? It was already too late. Taking one last slow look, he turned and set his step homewards. The sadness was so deep that it made his bones ache. Above him, in the depthless blue spaces of an African afternoon, he noticed an eagle. It inscribed its great circles upon the sky’s emptiness.

‘Only the eagles know everything in this country,’ his grandmother had told him.

The bird gave a thin scream. It sounded more like a wail.

The next morning, Bat drove his cattle out of the village to graze. By the time the sun was touching the tops of the acacias he was already well on his way: a small, lithe figure with a light, easy gait jumping through the undergrowth and leaping over branches, chivvying his cows outwards with whistles and high piping calls. In one hand he clutched his steel-bladed panga. He used it to cut the forage that he would later bring home. His other hand he kept free to flap and wave at the cattle or to hitch at the waistband of his pair of too-big brown shorts. A small sisal satchel with some lunch in was slung over one shoulder, along with a length of rope. A gourd to scoop water bumped against his hip. But, although he did own a pair of twisted hide sandals, his feet, as so often, were bare. He preferred it because he could run faster like that.

Sometimes, on his way along the paths that led out to the pastures, his cattle would stray onto somebody’s crop. They would snatch greedy mouthfuls of maize leaves and uproot millet stalks. If the owner was there, they would yell out and scold them; but if they were not, Bat was likely to pinch something too: a small plump banana or perhaps a ripe avocado. He would eat it later once he was out of sight, his black eyes sparkling with pleasure through their fringe of thick lashes; a big gap-toothed smile brightening his small round face.

The cows moved ahead of him, their pace gradually slowing until he caught up with them when, with a burst of new energy, they trotted briskly on. They wove this way and that, their gaunt hipbones jutting, their long curving horns borne aloft like great crowns on their heads and, although now in the dry season their spines poked up like ridges, after the rains when the grasses swiped their bellies, they would soon grow sleek and fat. Then their hides would shine like polished wood.

Bat had eight cows in his herd, eleven if you counted the trio of still suckling youngsters that jostled along, nudging at their mothers’ flanks. But he wouldn’t have told you that if you had enquired. When anyone asked him how many cattle he looked after, he would just smile and say: ‘As many as I looked after yesterday’. And yet he knew each of the animals as well as if they were part of his own family: he knew their names and their characters, their habits and their moods, their strong points and their failings, their preferences and dislikes. He knew that Kayo was inquisitive and could easily get into trouble; that Leko was a daydreamer with a
tendency to lag; that Toco always slouched, head low and back sagging, unlike Tara, her chestnut twin who stood upright and foursquare with her muzzle stretched out. He knew that the pale freckled Anecanec had a scar under her belly from the time when, as a heifer, she had met a bush pig; and when he found watercress, he would always call Bwaro because she, more than any of them, relished its damp bitterness; but he knew that black Mutu would also slip in beside her because, wherever the restless Bwaro chose idly to wander, Mutu would slide along like a shadow at her side.

But Bat’s favourite cow was the silvery Kila with her deep curved horns and her dark violet eyes. They had been born on the same day and had grown up together. Bat couldn’t remember a time when she had not been there by his side and often, down by the water, they would lean contentedly together, the boy’s arm draped companionably across the cow’s sun-warmed back, gazing dreamily outwards as if lost in some land of shared memory. The water that dripped from the cow’s lifted muzzle would fall through the air in sparkling droplets of light.

The boy was proud of his herd. Cattle are like their owners, his grandmother always told him: thin, wretched beasts had thin, wretched handlers; listless creatures belonged to those without direction to their lives; dishonest men owned the sort of sly animals that would steal from the cattle that stood right beside them; and ill-tempered cows would lash out because they themselves had been beaten by someone too ill-tempered to be trusted to bring them up. But Bat’s animals were all
good-natured and lively and strong. He had inherited his grandmother’s eye, the villagers said; he had that inborn ability to detect hidden traits, to know when a calf would blossom into maturity, to tell whether a puny animal would eventually flourish and fatten or if it would only further sicken and fail. They would always back his judgement when they wanted to buy.

The cows trusted Bat too, and now, though all morning they had wanted to move on, to follow the course of the river like they usually did, they remained with him instead on the grasslands that lay nearer the village. Bat did not want to stray too far that day. He didn’t want to risk running into the gang of men with guns again.

His grandmother had tried to reassure him. ‘Poachers are terrible people,’ she had said. ‘They will betray their own tribesmen just for the money. They will kill anyone who crosses them rather than risk being caught. You were brave to try to face them; but you were stupid too,’ she had scolded. ‘If you ever come across them again, just run. Run as fast as you can and don’t stop even to think. But there’s no need to worry now. Those poachers will long since have left the savannah. They’ll have gone to the city in search of a buyer of ivory and people like that don’t belong to these parts.’

But still Bat was edgy. As he squatted in the shade of a spreading acacia, his eyes flicked about nervously, constantly watching. It was almost noon. The sun was rising to its sweltering heights and the cattle were dozing, heads lowered and tails swinging. Every now and then a breeze stirred through the branches, sending a shower of golden flowers tumbling onto their backs. The cows
blinked their long lashes and breathed out with great lazy blows. Not a care in the world troubled them. But still Bat couldn’t rest.

He jumped to his feet the moment he spotted a far distant figure. It wasn’t a villager, even though this was the way girls occasionally came to draw water, because the girls always travelled in chattering gaggles; you would hear the noise of their laughter wafting over the grasses long before you saw the tops of the water pots that they carried on their heads. With a single big leap and a short burst of scrabbling, Bat swung himself up into the boughs of the tree. He flattened himself against a branch. All his fears of the previous day were flooding back. His lips started fizzing. He bit them so hard that he tasted his own blood.

But it was only a girl who was coming after all. He recognized her from some way off by the bounce of her gait. The enormous clay water jar that she carried almost dwarfed her and yet still she stepped out as if crossing the first springy grass of the rains. It was Amuka, the solitary stranger who had only recently come to live in the village. Her mother was sick, he’d been told, and her father lived in the city, and as she had no one at home any more to look after her, she had been sent here instead to stay with an aunt. Bat had heard the woman moaning away to his grandmother. ‘It’s just another mouth to feed,’ she had complained. ‘As if I haven’t got five already; and they’re all eating like locusts. What would I be wanting another daughter for?’

That had been less than a moon ago, but Bat had seen the girl often enough about the village since. He
had watched her bending over her hoe as she planted cassava, halving the longer stalks with a single slice of her knife, stamping with a heel as she pressed down the dry earth; but she had never returned his gaze. She had never called out a greeting like the other girls did. And the time she had caught him staring as he had yawned his way through a village meeting, she had just stared straight back at him with her usual fierce scowl. That, he presumed, was how she had earned her name.

Everyone in Bat’s tribe had two names: the one they were given at birth by their parents and the tribal nickname that they later earned. The second would be chosen because it described them, and it would often be the one by which they were from then on known. Hers was Amuka. It meant ferocious creature. At first, when he’d heard it, Bat had been surprised. She had looked so graceful. She was slim as a sesame pod and, while the rest of the village girls had their hair cropped short as his or else tugged up and knotted into tight little spikes, she had long shiny braids that swung to and fro as she walked. Her black eyes were fringed with long fluttering lashes that fell onto the cheekbones of an oval face. But when she looked up you would see their whites flashing and you would soon understand how she had come to be called what she was. If anyone crossed her she would fly into a fury. She was like a mongoose, the villagers laughed, slender and sinuous and sweet enough to look at, but as soon as you meddled, she would bristle and attack. Like a mongoose, they said, her claws were never retracted, and so Bat, who by nature preferred avoidance to encounter, had tended to stay clear of her.
He didn’t want to get scratched – and especially not by a girl.