The Child's Elephant (27 page)

He thought of the elephants; of those animals that for so many years had formed the horizon of his whole world. He imagined the great matriarch standing watch over them. He saw her deep hollowed cheekbones and her sagacious look. If only he too now had someone to guide him. If only he also had someone who could tell him what to do.

He looked up. Muka was hovering near him. There was a perplexed frown on her face, but when she saw his eyes lifting, she allowed a faint smile to flicker across her drawn features. It shone for a moment like a star between two parting clouds. Bat just dropped his head. He felt ashamed and confused.

‘I don’t understand, Bat,’ he heard her murmur as she drew a few steps closer, pausing only when she was a few paces off. ‘I don’t understand what is happening. But whatever it is, I know you’ll do what is right.’

Bat lifted his eyes helplessly. ‘But I don’t know,’ he said sorrowfully. ‘I don’t know what’s right. I don’t know what’s right and what’s wrong any more.’

‘But you will discover,’ Muka whispered. ‘You will find out when you face it. And I know that when the time comes you will find that you know too.’

Bat wanted to get up; he wanted so much to touch her, to take her hand in his own. He wanted to explain everything and hear her reassuring him. He wanted to hear her tell him that it could all be put right. But she was already leaving. He felt the air stirring as she brushed lightly by him; and then she was gone. A sob rose in his throat.

The next thing he knew, the Leopard was assembling a squad. Bat was trotting across the compound, he was falling into file. Lobo and the ranger were in line ahead of him, and behind him slipped four of the camp’s most trusted child leaders: Bonyo, the locust; then the Thief and the Goat, then the boy called Kamlara because his temper was hot as a pepper, and last and most ruthless, the one nicknamed Kwet which meant ‘brat’. All except Bat carried rifles slung over their shoulders. All had pangas and knives and ammunition belts. Bonyo and the Thief both also carried knapsacks, and Kwet and Kamlara had coiled ropes around their waists.

Bat didn’t look behind him as they set off. He knew Muka would be watching. But what was the point of meeting her eye? It wouldn’t be him any more she was watching. The village boy from Jambula had vanished long ago. Now Bat was a soldier. He was an instrument of the army. Like a melted-down hoe that is turned into a panga, he had been transformed into a weapon of war.

The Leopard took the lead as the forest closed around them. They were following a narrow trail. It was the very
one that he and Muka had been forced along all those moons ago, Bat suddenly realized, as they jogged down a slope towards a stream. It was here, at the bottom, that he and Muka, still bound, had knelt to lap water. But what had been a pool was now no more than a parched fissure. Thin yellow weeds clawed their way across the cracked earth.

Eventually they reached a clearing where, just as Bat remembered from before, a jeep had been left beneath a covering of hastily hacked branches. The Leopard crossed to it quickly and, pulling a chainsaw from the back, slung it around his shoulder on a makeshift harness of rope.

‘Let’s go,’ he growled.

This time it was the Goat who went first. He was leading them back to the elephants.

Scuttling across a wide track that cut straight through the forest, they headed into dense brush. They were climbing uphill now. Their faces were streaming with sweat. Flies clung to their foreheads, to their eyes, to their nostrils; they crawled up their necks and glued themselves to their mouths; but still they trudged on, hacking through thickets and pushing through the thorny underbrush, lifting their elbows to part hanging creepers and scrambling over fallen trunks. They were like machines, Bat thought, driven by the pump of their lungs and the crank of their muscles, by the tug of their sinews and the thud of their hearts. He listened to the sound of his breathing, but it seemed to come from another person who was walking beside him. An eerie quietness roared like a river in his head.

He prayed that the elephants had gone by the time they arrived. But the squad moved as swiftly and efficiently as a pack of wild dogs. It slipped through the shadows with barely a sound, and the sun had not even yet reached its noon zenith when they found themselves cresting a ridge. The slopes fell away below them into a dark gulley. The Goat raised a clenched fist. ‘Down there,’ he hissed.

The Leopard grunted and, pausing only to readjust his rope harness, gave a signal for his little posse to go on. They descended the slope in a long, slewing skid, their progress unbroken except once or twice when a dislodged rock rattled and they all froze in their tracks, ears straining for the sound of any answering motion, for any warning of other living creatures about.

When they were almost at the bottom they paused again. The Goat glanced briefly around. He had slipped and cut his elbow. His jacket was stained with drying blood. But he seemed not to notice. He was getting his bearings. With a sudden forward scoop of his arm he beckoned them, and once again they were travelling, this time following the line of a stream that crawled through a deep rocky fissure far below. And then, all at once, they were stepping into a small scrubby clearing and the Goat was un-shouldering his rifle; he was gripping the stock. His eyes were sweeping about him and the others were following suit. Weapons at the ready, they were scanning the trees, tuning their senses to every slip of a shadow, to every rustle in the bushes, to every crack of a branch . . . but nothing . . . the forest was quiet save for the endless unbroken scream of
the cicadas. The jungle was drowsing in the sweltering noon heat.

But the Goat was right, Bat thought. There had been elephants there. He glanced at the Leopard. A marauding smile was creeping over his face. He too had noticed how the underbrush had been trampled, how the branches of the trees around had been snapped, and now he was dreaming of ivory . . . of the money it would bring him, of the guns it would buy.

Bat lowered himself to one knee. He knew that he had been brought along as a tracker. Now he simply did what they expected him to do. There was a pile of elephant dung among the leaves. He picked up a piece and broke it open. Forage was not good, even here in the forest, he noticed. He could see strips of undigested bark in the bolus and the jagged ends of torn twigs. But the ball was fibrous and dry. Beetles had already buried their way into the heart of it. The elephants must have left a while ago. He let the dung drop. The glossy insects spilled out onto the earth like black beads.

The Leopard was watching him carefully as he rose once more to his feet. His eyes were prowling his face. A sudden flood of bile rose into Bat’s mouth. For a moment he feared he was going to be sick. He swallowed. It tasted as bitter as his thoughts. He looked around helplessly. The trees were reeling about him. What should he do next?

‘Here!’ It was Kwet who was calling, his voice urgent and low. He had found the onward tracks. It was inevitable, Bat thought. The elephants too would be following the line of the gully; they would be looking for a way to
get down to the water, for a place to rest, drink and wash. He moved over to the spot at which Kwet was now pointing; saw the scuffmarks left behind by soft pads in the dust. They were pockmarked with drops of long-since dried morning dew.

Now the Leopard pushed him forward. It was Bat’s moment to lead, and obediently, he moved on. The shadows were closing more thickly about them. The elephants, Bat thought, would see well in this dimming light. He followed the broken thread of their trail. At least they had been travelling swiftly, he noticed. They had descended this path at a fast swaying walk. He could tell by the side-to-side straddle of their tracks, and the way the ovals that were made by their hind pads had been planted in front of their more rounded fore-prints. But still, it was only a walk. Why hadn’t they trotted? Why hadn’t they hurried as fast as they could? Elephants could move at great speed when they wanted to. ‘Streaking,’ Bitek called it. Elephants will hang around in the same area for days, he had said, and then suddenly they’ll go: moving without stopping along their secret corridors, and you won’t see them again. They will vanish for months to some far-off feeding place. Was it possible the elephants would do that now? Was it possible they might be gone before the squad could catch up with them?

Please make them not be here. Please make them not be here
, Bat prayed. Over and over he repeated the plea, but even as his lips stirred with his secret utterances, he seemed already to visualize them in his mind’s eye up ahead. Soon the slender thread of water that ran
downwards through its narrow fissure would seep outwards and broaden into a pool, and it would be there that he would find them, the cows indolently drowsing, swashing about lazily amid cooling currents while their freshly scrubbed calves scrambled playfully about. Bat shook his head rapidly to get rid of the picture. He had somehow to slow up his pace. Every moment that he could delay this posse of armed killers could be the moment that mattered most to the animals he loved. He began to let his steps drag. The barrel of a gun jabbed into the small of his back.

‘Keep moving,’ the Leopard growled. Bat could feel his breath burning the tender skin of his nape.

And now he saw that the elephants had slowed up too. The mark of the hind foot was behind that of the fore foot. There were faint S-shaped patterns where a trunk had dragged. The ground was getting damper. They were closer to the water. Bat felt his heart thumping as they reached a place where, if the rains had fallen, the stream would have spilled over and spread into a pool. In a patch of moist earth he spotted a footprint. Only the elevated edges were now dry. It couldn’t have been left long ago. The elephants weren’t far now. Bat turned away abruptly. He didn’t want the Leopard to see his confusion. But the sound of the stream laughing, bubbling and chuckling as it pushed through hidden cavities, seemed to him now as mocking as the laughter of fate.

The gorge narrowed again. The stream vanished down a crevice. It taunted its pursuers with its echoing call. There were rocks underfoot now and the canopies were
thinning. The tracks had all but disappeared. Only the occasional scuff mark or a scattering of dropped leaves, discoloured and drying, betrayed the recent passing of an elephant herd. Bat was careful not to point them out. Maybe he could tell the Leopard that he had lost the trail? He moved closer to the water course. Ahead there were falls. He knew it. He could hear the subtle change in the song of the flow.

A slab of grey rock soared up ahead of him. With a spring he was upon it, he was clambering up to its highest pinnacle. He was looking out over the forests that rose and fell endlessly around him. And then, suddenly, all at once he knew that at last he had found them. He could not see them: but he sensed them as surely as if he did. The air felt electric. The hairs prickled on his neck. They were there. They were there, far below him. He looked down, his head reeling. The water slid by through its deep chasm of rock. The falls lay just beyond. And below it were the elephants. That was where they would find them. It would only take a few minutes. They would steal up upon them in their world of ferns and wet mosses. They would trap them against the sheer cliffs of rock.

Bat felt the surge of his heartbeat. His pulse scudded and flew. He could almost hear the stutter of the gunshot in his head; the panicked screams of the youngsters as their mothers stumbled and fell dead. He imagined the water as slowly it ran red. He reached out for a branch. He had to steady himself. He had to regulate his breathing. He had to take stock. But there was nothing to cling to.

For a few moments he stood there, a frail silhouette against the splintering light. Eight sets of eyes were fixed upon him. Eight guns were loaded. Eight bullets were ready. He was trapped in a hinterland between this world and the next.

And then, suddenly, like an elephant that charges without any sign of warning, Bat knew precisely which was the right course to take. It was not a conscious decision. It was an act of pure instinct. He could no more have stopped it than he could have stopped the stream flowing, than he could have prevented the eagle that sailed through the skies far above him from slinging its slow lassoing loops around the world.

What mattered was something far more than just him and Muka; far more even than Meya. It was something that mattered to the whole of the world. What would life mean in a land without the elephants? How could a future without them be worth fighting for? These vast gentle creatures belonged to a place that lay beyond all passing struggles. They came from time immemorial. To betray them, he knew now, would be to betray everything.

With a sudden leap he launched himself from the edge of the rock. The world fell away below him. It was too far to jump. He could never cross the ravine. He was hanging suspended in the middle of nowhere, poised between rocks that opened their ragged jaws far below him and the reeling blue spaces of the sky far above. There was a ringing in his head. The whole universe was singing. He was hanging in space. And something like sheer exultation was surging right
through him. Something like glory was shining from his face. He was alive with pure freedom. His spirit was flying loose.

And then he landed and sprawled, and his bare knees burst blood. He gasped for breath and his fingers scrabbled. He hauled himself slowly up a steep rock face and struggled to his feet.

Turning, he looked back across the chasm he had jumped. It was the gap he had opened between the elephants and their hunters, he thought, and he would have smiled with satisfaction had he not known that they would see him, that they would realize that he had deliberately made the leap to lead them off course. A gun on the far side of the gulf was trained directly on him. A dark scowl bridged the space. But he had faced death once already. It had lost its power over him. ‘They’ve gone that way,’ he shouted. ‘I missed them. They must have crossed further up.’

Kwet and Kamlara rapidly unslung the ropes around their waists. With the efficiency of trained soldiers they hurled a line across the ravine. Bat caught it and fastened it, and the soldiers, pangas gripped between teeth and guns strapped to their backs, inched their way one by one across the chasm that fell away below them. The Leopard cast Bat a look of disbelief as he landed. The ranger was trembling. Lobo’s furrowed brow was beaded with sweat. ‘Madman,’ muttered Kwet as, last in the file, he crossed over. He scratched at his louse-infested dreadlocks and grinned.