The Child's Elephant (16 page)

He searched the ground for some clue. Only a few bones remained, bleached and broken and strewn about the dry grasses; and now, even as he watched, the elephants were slowly moving towards them. Their silence was unsettling. The only sound in that lonely gravesite was the sigh of their breath. Softly, they reached out the probing tips of their trunks. He watched one of them pick up a bone, turn it over and examine it, stroke it softly and then gently lay it back down again. He saw the matriarch reversing slowly towards another great rain-smoothed fragment, nudging it delicately with a hind foot. It was a movement Bat recognized. That was how a mother elephant would have woken a sleeping
baby from the herd. So why was the matriarch doing it now? Was she trying to rouse the lost memories? Was she awakening the secrets that slept in that bit of bone? Bat watched as the elephants hovered and circled and sighed and came back again and reached out and stroked.

Meya, beside him, waited transfixed. It was some time before she too approached. She reached out with the tip of her trunk for the skull. Grass had long since grown through the empty eye-sockets. The teeth had come loose and lay scattered about. Lowering her head, she sniffed at one gently. With a delicate precision she turned over a detached jawbone. She stroked its long curve with a wandering trunk; then she let her touch stray across the slope of the skull, probing its cracks and its knobbles and cavities, picking a loose stone from the place where an eye had once looked. She tried to dislodge it from the clambering grasses; first with a gentle push and then by a harder shunt. She seemed to be searching for something, Bat thought; for some hidden meaning that these fragments held.

He had often seen her pass the remains of other dead animals, the leathery cases of buffalo picked clean by scavengers, the strewn bones of antelope that wild dogs had brought down, and once even a giraffe that had fallen, legs stretched as if still running, neck slack as the stem of a wilted flower. But she had never paused to investigate. She had simply walked by. So why did she now stand for so long at this gravesite? It could only be, Bat thought, because she understood what had happened. The other elephants had led her there so that
she could know the truth. They wanted her to share in their moment of mourning, in their memories of the days when her mother had been part of their herd, of the long years when she had wandered the savannah at their side. They wanted Meya to know how deeply she belonged to them.

Bat felt something huge and mysterious welling up inside him. He was in the presence of a force far beyond that which he could explain. He glanced at Muka, but she didn’t look back. She just stood there, eyes lowered in respect. And Bat remembered the stories of Bitek the fisherman. ‘Elephants have powers far greater than you can understand,’ he had said.

Meya returned home to the village with the children that evening again, but though they walked in her shadow, she felt a long way off. They wandered homewards, lost in the world of their thoughts.

Neither of the children was alert as they should have been at that hour on the empty plain. They didn’t notice the shadows lengthening as the sun sank towards the horizon, nor the fact that the antelope which liked to graze upon the woodland fringes had long ago left for the greater safety of the grasslands beyond. They didn’t see the lioness slinking low-bellied through the undergrowth, stealing towards them, her ears flat to her skull. But Meya did. She jerked up her head; her whole body tense. With a bellow of anger, she broke into a spanking trot.

The children, jolted out of their daydreaming, clutched at each other, confused. They didn’t know what was happening. Their eyes darted about. And then, with
a half-stifled scream, Muka pointed. Bat’s heart jumped a beat. The lioness was rising. Any moment now she would be launched in a swift grappling rush. Her claws, sharp as meat-hooks, would be dragging them downwards. There would be nothing they could do. But, even as the boy sprang instinctively before Muka, the elephant bore down on the crouching animal. It twisted and leaped sideways. Slewing around in a cloud of red dust, Meya pursued. Ears flared and trunk lifted, she screamed her mad rage. The lioness slunk away with furious growls. Still Meya did not stop.

She bore down on the big cat like a creature possessed. If she had caught it, she would have crushed it; she would have picked up its body and smashed it with one blow. The lioness, with a last enraged lash of its tail, turned and bolted. It did not stop running until it was long out of sight, but it was even longer before the terrified children could steady their legs enough to continue their homeward walk.

‘Meya drove a lion away,’ Bat told his grandmother, as he swallowed the last bit of sesame paste from his supper and put the calabash back down. He was trying to sound calm as he told her the story, but his hands gripped his knee-bones, and one of his feet jittered nervously against the floor. His grandmother glanced across at Muka. She was crouched in a huddle of angles, her big eyes still glittering with remembered fear. Both children knew that they had been foolhardy; they had been warned again and again of the dangers on the savannah at dusk. They knew they had had a narrow escape. If it had not been for Meya, the lions would,
even now, have been snarling and snapping around their dead bodies, cuffing at each other as they fought for the choicest bits.

For a long while Bat’s grandmother remained silent. She examined her hands. She had been pulling groundnuts all day but, with the soil now drying, the plants were hard to uproot. Her palms were blistered and raw. From time to time she looked up at the children and shook her head. The fire flickered, sending their shadows leaping about the mud walls. They rocked and wavered, wildly exaggerating every gesture. The big white moths fluttered perilously close to the flames.

‘You must be careful,’ she said at last. ‘How many times have I told you that?’ She searched their faces for answers, but neither of them would look up to meet her eye. ‘Well, I want this to be the last time,’ she declared, rising slowly to her feet. ‘Both of you, go to bed now and think about that while I go outside and thank the gods . . . and that elephant . . . that you have been brought home to me.’ She made her way towards the door of the hut, but just before she ducked under the lintel she turned one last time. ‘You must always be watchful,’ she said solemnly, fixing her stare upon each child in turn. ‘It is not just the lions you must fear on the savannah these days.’

Life in Jambula returned to normal for a while, its rhythms as steady as the rise and fall of a pestle, its routines as settled as the melody of a song; but in this undisturbed soil the rumours were still growing. Gossip was brought home by women from the market, stories were carried across the plains by the herders of goats, and now, even from this side of the town, there came troubling tales. Voices had been heard out on the savannah. A cow had been stolen from a nomad by night. A child had vanished. No one knew how or where. Families were beginning to leave their villages in the evenings, to carry their mats out into the bush to sleep; and a few with relations who lived in the south were talking of packing up and travelling, crossing the plains with their children and possessions. They were planning to stay away until the danger passed.

Soon, even in Jambula, people began to grow nervous. Rumours whipped like wildfire across the savannah. Fears, sharp as burned grass stalks, were left behind in their wake. Villagers would look over their shoulders if they heard footsteps approaching. A rustling in the trees, a shadow flickering over grasses, a cry of an animal in the darkness, could all make them jump. An abandoned bicycle was discovered by one of Marula’s sons a short way from the river. He didn’t go near it but dashed immediately for home. Bitek the fisherman saw strange lights in the bush.

The headman was worried. He had left for a visit to a fellow chieftain and, on the way, been passed by a pack of wild dogs. ‘They cantered right by me,’ he said, ‘looking neither right nor left . . . travelling so fast . . . as if with some fixed purpose . . . and so close I could see the white tufts of their tails.

‘These dogs are an omen,’ he declared. ‘They are carrion eaters. They arrive with a war.’ And he puffed at his pipe, even though its bowl was empty. He had run out of tobacco quite some time ago, but his wife no longer felt safe making the walk into the market. She was frightened of being ambushed upon the path.

A twelve-year-old boy from a village not far off had been snatched. ‘He and his mother were on their way to town to sell eggs,’ said Mama Brenda, who had heard the story first-hand from a friend, ‘when two strangers suddenly leaped out in front of them and trapped them with sticks which they held to their throats. One was a boy but he looked more like a wild animal. He had long matted hair and he smelled sour as a goat. The other was
a girl,’ Mama Brenda told her listeners, ‘but she had no gentleness. When the mother looked into her eyes and implored her, she saw that they were completely cold. Her little boy was sobbing. “If you cry any more, we will kill you!” the rebel girl said. And she meant it. So his mother just turned away. She turned her back on her son so that he would not see her, so that he would not shout for her and be killed. And then she just walked away. She had to. She had to leave him to save him. And he has not been seen since.’

‘Who are these rebels? What do they want?’ Bat asked his grandmother that evening.

But the old woman had no answer. ‘Nobody is quite sure,’ was all she could say. ‘Their leader lives wild in the forests and no one can catch him so no one knows why he’s fighting or what he hopes to get. But his army is said to be growing every day. You must be careful, Bat.’ She paused and looked in turn at the two children who squatted by the cook-fire. ‘This is a violent country,’ she said. ‘On the map, it is shaped like the holster of a pistol. That’s what the white people I used to work for would say; and one day, they said, the firing will begin. You must be alert, both of you. You must always be watching . . . and don’t go too far into the forests,’ she warned Bat.

But now that the boy had learned his way into the mountains, he loved them. During the heat of the dry season, there was no greater pleasure than to pad his way cautiously along the elephant trail. The forest felt secret and shadowy. Its rich sappy smells filled his lungs and refreshed him. Its paths, trampled to softness by
the passing of hundreds of thick-soled elephant feet, were so easy to walk on. He would watch the colobus monkeys grooming in the high branches, the bush pigs grubbing for roots in the dark crumbly loam. He would listen to the cuckoo as it sang from its hiding place in the bushes. It felt like he was hiding at the heart of the world.

And yet, where once the sound of a buffalo browsing in the thickets would have spelled his greatest danger, now the snort of a forest hog could make him freeze in his tracks; and one day, when an eagle had come crashing through the canopies, talons outstretched for some clasping potto, he had fled so fast that by the time he had stopped running he had looked all around him and not been able to recognize where he was. He started imagining eyes watching him from amid the striped shadow. They belonged to fierce children with glittering eyes and guns.

One afternoon, returning home, he saw a person ahead of him and his chest grew so tight that he could hardly breathe, but it was only the honey-gatherer strolling down the pathway, puffing at his fat roll of smouldering leaves. The smoke calmed the insects as he raided their store-houses. Too dopey to sting him, they just crawled helplessly about. A block of comb in his hands dripped its sweet golden syrup and he broke off a piece and gave it to Bat.

The boy’s nerves calmed a little when the short rains arrived in November and the elephants returned to the savannah to feed. Like the antelope, he felt safer out there in the open. On the plains he could spot
danger from much further off. But then came the day when he stumbled across a set of strange footprints. He followed the tread of heavy boots through the dust. He knew that they could not have been left by one of the villagers because the villagers wore only sandals if they were not barefoot. He cast his eyes watchfully over the disturbed ground. A car had passed down the track.

Bat ran back to the village expecting to find strangers, only to find that Lobo had returned unexpectedly that afternoon. It was the first time he had been back for months.

Lobo was sixteen years old now. He had learned to walk with a confident swagger that made him look like a man. But his hands gave him away. They were too big for his body and he could never decide what to do with them. As he sauntered about they were constantly shifting, now beside him, now behind him, now stuffed deep in his pockets, now touching the moustache which he was constantly hoping would thicken. He would sit there stroking it meditatively with the crook of a forefinger; but what he was thinking the villagers could only guess at.

‘He does not fit,’ they whispered, ‘not with himself, nor with the rest of our community.’ They were beginning to distrust him. They did not trust the way he disappeared for months, vanishing like the smoke from the medicine woman’s fire, leaving only his memory, a dark smell on the air. Nor did they like the way, just when they were beginning to believe that he had left for ever, he would arrive back unexpectedly, with no word of warning.