The Child's Elephant (31 page)

‘Sergeant!’ The Leopard roared from the cab.

Lobo glanced nervously back.

‘Sergeant!’ the scream came again. But Lobo ignored it. The Leopard was trapped. The steering wheel, rammed inwards, had pinned his slumped body. The arm that dangled through the open window looked broken. The barrel of an unreachable rifle sliced a dark line across the back of his neck.

The elephant drew back. The morning sun edged its way over the horizon and the first rays of light flared
across the crushed jeep. The Leopard was squirming like a creature whose spine has been smashed. Bat saw the glitter of his watch as a sunbeam danced over it. But now it was counting down the last seconds of his life.

The elephant flared its great ears and, with a bellow of sheer rage, rolled up its trunk for a third and final charge. A huge bony brow smashed headlong into the mangled jeep. The vehicle rocked for a moment on the edge of the cliff. Then, with a grinding of metal, the Land Rover tipped over. It looked almost like a toy as it fell through the trees. It bounced off the rocks, glass spraying all around it, winking and glinting in the brightness of morning before vanishing away into the shadow far below.

A scream of animal triumph echoed through the forest. The children no longer dared look. At any moment the next attack could be launched on them. Shrinking back into the bush, they squatted on their haunches, heads between knee-bones, hands clasped behind necks. They steeled themselves: they didn’t know for what.

The leaves around them were parting. Something brushed Bat’s cheek. It felt warm and damp. Still he didn’t move. There was a low rumbling growl. Bat’s whole body trembled. It was as if a great wave was rising up inside him, surging right through his body, pushing him to his feet. He stumbled out. An elephant reared up like a rock-face before him. He could not have run even if he had meant to.
It just has to know it can trust us
, he thought.
It just has to know that we mean it no harm
. And he stood there, eyes screwed tight shut
as he tried to muster his courage. Willing himself into calmness, he started to hum.

He heard the animal shifting. It leaned towards him. A current of warm air wafted across his face. He inhaled the heavy musk. It smelled so familiar . . . so very familiar. Tears bleared his eyesight as slowly he lifted his head.

‘Meya?’ he whispered. ‘Meya, is that you?’

How often Bat had dreamed of this magical moment: how often he had reached out in the darkness of the night thinking that his elephant was standing before him, only as he woke to find nothing but a vast emptiness. Could his dream this time be true?

He stretched out a hand. His fingertips brushed rough hide. Hundreds of wrinkles were criss-crossed about it. For a moment he traced them like lines on a map. A trunk reached tentatively towards him. An eye looked into his face. He could see his reflection: small as a fly trapped for ever in amber. It was Meya! He knew now. The certainty flooded him. It was Meya. And she had held him, held him there in her memory. She had come back for him. He felt so light-headed that he thought he would float.

Sobbing, he flung his arms around the animal. A trunk, strong and safe, curled about his back.

‘Muka,’ the boy cried, his voice choking with happiness. ‘It’s Meya! It’s Meya! Muka! It’s Meya! Our elephant’s come back.’

With a cry of pure joy the girl ran towards the animal. She threw her arms in a circle around the broad trunk. A deep growl of greeting was rumbling through its body. It slowly unfurled until it filled the whole air and, for a while, as they clung to this great creature, the two children felt as if the entire world had stopped moving. They were enfolded in a moment of perfect happiness.

But where was Gulu? They both turned. Their friend had vanished completely. They looked about: but no trace. Could he have fallen? Their eyes darted to the precipice. Their two hearts skipped a beat.

And then, suddenly, Bat spotted him, shrinking back into the bushes, staring outwards with a mixture of terror and astonishment, unable to believe what his eyes were now telling him, unable to trust in what he thought he now saw. A few moments ago this animal had been a bellowing monster, madly attacking the men in the jeep. Now it stood there as peaceably as a tame cow. Was he dreaming? He shot a furtive glance over the edge of the cliff. The morning sun glinted on a wreckage of metal. It caught a broken mirror with a sudden blinding flash. So, it really
had
happened: the Leopard really was dead.

Gulu felt dazed. And now he could see Bat and Muka, who were pointing and laughing; laughing so hard that they doubled over and clutched at their ribs. All the terror and sadness and pain was pouring out of them, and the sound he was hearing was an over-spilling
flood of unbridled merriment. And the longer Gulu just squatted there gaping, the louder and louder the bright clatter broke out, until even the dumbfounded boy found himself caught up by its currents. Shyly, he ventured a hesitant smile. It was the first time Bat had seen his face light up.

They could easily have stayed there for ever, explaining and talking and hugging each other in relief; but it was Meya the elephant who remembered that they were not out of danger, and now, with a low grumbling growl, she took the lead, setting off down the track at a hasty pace, kicking up clouds of red dust in her wake.

‘Where’s it going?’ asked Gulu.

‘She’s not an “it”, she’s a she.’ Muka smiled.

‘Where’s
she
going then?’ Gulu asked. His eyes swept the landscape that fell away below them. The forests rolled away endlessly, an unbroken swell of green.

‘I don’t know,’ said Bat as he turned to follow her. ‘We have to trust her. Just let her lead.’

For a while they continued down the track until eventually, where it grew less steep, the elephant shoved her way straight through the dense undergrowth and down a slope.

‘Where’s she going?’ cried Gulu a third time. The sisal leaves raked his skin. ‘We can’t follow her through this.’

‘We just have to trust her,’ Bat again assured him. ‘Elephants know ancient ways. They have paths which their herds have trodden for centuries and Meya will know how to find them. And then . . .’ He paused. And then what? He did not really know much more than
Gulu. He didn’t know how Meya had found them. Was her herd in the forest? Would she take the children to them? Or was she alone? Had she heard Bat shouting for help in the clearing and come looking?

‘Do you think she heard you screaming?’ asked Muka as if reading his thoughts. ‘Do you think she knew we were in danger? Has she come to take us back home?’

But Bat had no answers. He was as confused as she was. ‘Elephants have powers far greater than we can ever know,’ was all he could murmur. It was what Bitek the fisherman had always said.

The three ragged children pushed on. Spiny things scratched them. Branches sprang back and smacked them. Hanging vines blocked their paths. Sometimes they had to lie flat and wriggle under thickets that the elephant could just barge through. Sometimes they all had to scramble and climb until, suddenly, just as Bat had predicted, they found themselves standing upon a narrow track through the trees. It was easy to follow. The ground had been trampled to softness by hundreds of huge cushioned soles. This was the path they would now follow for days.

In the mornings the children were so weary that they could scarcely rise to their feet. Meya had to nudge them gently up from their beds, encouraging them onwards with her soft ‘let’s go’ rumble. Washing their faces in dew, they would follow her, step by endless step. There was only one pace, and Meya set it with her ponderous stride. Bat walked behind her, and next in line was Muka, silent as a forest creature. Her once springy step had long since lost its bounce. Gulu limped always
at the end of the file, fists clenched and eyes darting restlessly about him. He was trained as a soldier to keep constant watch.

They glided like ghosts through the silver-trunked caverns. High above them, the sun glittered through the foliage, catching the brilliance of butterflies as they fluttered and floated; it sparkled on spiders’ webs and glinted across leaves; but where they were walking there was only green shade. Sometimes the path narrowed to a long gloomy tunnel. Occasionally, where some great tree had fallen, a dense tangle of smaller plants made a mad dash for the light. A few of the creepers had poisonous spines; they raised hot itching welts on the children’s bare skin, but others were edible. Gulu would follow their stems down to sweet-tasting roots.

The boy knew how to find food. He knew that you could only catch grasshoppers in the morning when the dew was still damp. Later in the day, when their wings had dried, you could dash about wildly but only catch one or two. He would turn over stones and find crunchy black beetles and discover soft yellow seedlings in the shade of rotting trunks. On the first day he grubbed up a bed of wild yams, their pithy brown tubers the size of a baby’s curled fist; but on the second he found nothing but the leaves of a bitter shrub. A trickle of sour juices leaked into their mouths as they chewed, but it allayed the nagging hunger that gnawed constantly in their guts.

On the third day, Gulu spotted a honey-bird mewing in the branches, calling to them anxiously before dashing off. It led them to a comb in the hollow of a tree.
It would have been far too high and the bees far too furious for the children to fetch, but Meya, driving her tusks deep down into the loam, rocked at the trunk until the tree was uprooted and then, ears flapping, she waded blithely in amongst the buzzing swarm. The honey dripped down the hands of the children as they feasted, and when, only a few hours later, Meya drove a troupe of baboons from an avocado bush, they ate their fill for what felt like the first time in months. They would have slept peacefully that night had it not been for the bitter complaints of the ousted troupe leader. His deep
boh boh boh
beat for hours in the dark like a drum. Once the noise might have frightened the children, but by now they had grown used to the sounds of the night, and when the dark was so thick that they couldn’t see their hands even when they held them right up in front of them, they would lie there amid a wilderness of whoops, howls and grunts, picking out the snarls of the chimps and the screams of the hyraxes, the hoots of the owls or a civet cat’s cough.

A gaggle of bushbabies crept down from the blackness to inspect the strange band of humans huddled below them. Wonderment shone in the dark globes of their eyes.

‘What do you think the child soldiers are doing now?’ asked Bat. He was thinking of the little boy La, who for so long had refused to speak except to his tiny pet. He was remembering the sound of his whispers in the night.

Muka read his thoughts. ‘La will be so lonely,’ she murmured, recalling the tears that had rolled down the boy’s cheeks on the day they had left. The high-pitched
‘wheet’ of the abandoned bushbaby echoed in her head.

‘And what about the others?’ Bat said. ‘What do you suppose they are doing now; now that the Leopard is dead? Do you think they’re still out here, out in the forests? Do you think they are still following the commander through the trees?’

‘And will Lobo have found them again?’ Muka asked. She cast her eyes quickly about her, imagining him for a moment even now creeping up behind her in the black, hobbling and broken. ‘I know he saw me that night,’ she said. ‘I know he saw me that night under that hut.’

‘Then why didn’t he say so?’

Muka shrugged. ‘Maybe he was sorry?’

‘Maybe he hoped to come back with us to Jambula,’ ventured Bat.

Gulu shook his head. ‘That boy belonged to the army.’

‘But maybe Bat’s right,’ said Muka. ‘Maybe he didn’t want to be there any more.’ They were both remembering the words of Bat’s grandmother.

Bat nodded. ‘Perhaps.’

But Gulu was unconvinced. ‘Well, whatever he’s doing, don’t think that the army will have forgotten us,’ he muttered. ‘We’re not safe yet. The rebels have camps all over the forest.’ He glanced warily around him. They had camped among the trees at the top of a steep-sided gully. ‘It’s places like that down there that they like,’ he said, ‘with thick brush for an ambush and no chance of an exit. You will think it’s deserted, but the next moment you’ll be dead.’