The Child's Elephant (35 page)

For days the children walked. They would be up before dawn. They needed to get going before the sun rose. It did not come up gradually: it burst over the horizon, a glaring red ball, kindling the dry scrub and singeing the thorn trees. The hornbills that roosted among their bare branches looked gnarled as old bones that have been charred by the fire. They ruffled their feathers and squawked at the elephant as she passed.

The heat mounted fast, and with it came a dry wind that kicked up the dust. It whirled about the children in rough gritty eddies, clogging their breathing and chafing their skin. At their feet, the dead grasses had been gnawed right down to the nub. Herds of scattered grazers still tugged at the roots. But they couldn’t find enough food. The once butterball-fat zebra were gaunt and lethargic. Wildebeest stood like boulders draped
with moth-eaten rugs. Even the buffalo, normally so formidable, had grown too listless to do much more than shuffle. When Meya brushed right by one, shoulder grazing against horn tip, it barely even bothered to lift its blunt muzzle.

The children followed the river, as Yambabo had told them. At this time of year its flow should have been swift, spilling over the banks into emerald marshes. Now, there were only a few stagnating pools left, thick with mosquito larvae and the droppings of parched drinkers. The children had to fill up their water-skins from this slimy soup.

‘It’s better than nothing,’ Gulu said when on the first day he noticed Muka shrinking. He seemed possessed by a new determination. ‘Drink as much as you can. I don’t want you flagging. I will get you back home, if it’s the last thing I do.’

Muka grimaced as she took a great gulp. ‘I will drink.’ She took a second long draught. ‘But it won’t be the last thing you do.’ She sucked at a third palm-full. ‘You will come to live with us in Jambula,’ she said, eyeing him from over the rims of cupped hands. ‘You will find a new home.’

A smile hovered tremulously upon Gulu’s lips. The despair that for so long had held him tight in its grip was beginning, little by little, to release its cruel fingers. ‘Will you want me?’ he murmured.

Bat sprang instantly towards him. He threw his arms about him. ‘Always!’ he shouted, almost knocking the boy flat.

For the rest of that morning the children were full
of plans as they trudged along. They talked of Jambula and the people who lived there, of Bat’s grandmother and Fat Rosa and the headman and Marula and Bitek the fisherman and old Kaaka who could summon spirits up; they talked of the crops and the goats and the chickens and the cattle and, though Bat flinched deep inside when he remembered Kila, he ran through their names in his head one by one.

‘Imagine their faces when they see us returning with Meya!’ cried Muka. It was the first time since their escape that they had dared conjure such hopes.

But as noon drew nearer, as the sun clumped up the dome of the sky and the wind dropped and their shadows shrank to specks, they gradually fell silent.

The heat beat down on the dry earth, and then beat back up again. The skeletal thorns could offer no respite. Sweat ran down their faces; it dripped off their eyelashes and coursed down their cheeks. Meya fanned her ears constantly. She creaked as she walked, like a dry tree in the heat.

In the afternoons, when it was finally unbearable to go even a step further, they would descend to the dried river, Meya kneeling to lower herself down the crumbling bank.

‘Be careful,’ Muka warned the first day as they hopped across the cracked bed, jumping from one sun-bleached stone to the next as they looked for the last murky pools from which they could drink. ‘Crocodiles lurk in places like this.’ Like all village girls who have to go and fetch water, she feared more than anything these fierce scaly monsters that, even as they winked
and pretended to slumber, would surge up to grab you between savage jaws. They didn’t eat you straight away, the women always said. Instead, rolling you round and round in a whirlpool of coils, they drowned you before lodging your body in one of their muddy larders. They would then pick at your corpse like a kola-nut snack.

But the children had to risk going right to the brink. They needed the water and the grazing was often a little better on the far side of the river too. While the children ate food from their little woven baskets, Meya would pick at whatever sparse forage she could find. Twirling her trunk around the dry brittle stems, she kicked with her foot at the base of the clods, dislodging clouds of dust. Then, placing the strands in her mouth, she began slowly chewing while the whole laborious process of twirling and kicking was started over again.

When there was no grass, she had to tusk the ground for roots, stabbing the soil with short, hard prods; or stretch for the high acacia branches which most foragers couldn’t reach. Their long thorny twigs had to be carefully manoeuvred, but the bark, which she peeled off in strips and then folded, was easier to manage.

But still, by the time they reached the fourth day of their journey, her belly was growling with hunger. Bat thought of the days when he would place a whole pineapple in her mouth; watch her as she crushed out the ecstatic rush of juice. He dreamed of the spreading jambula tree in his village, of the bitter-sweet freshness of its ripe fallen plums, of the soft throaty cooing of a dove in its shade; but now none of them spoke of it. They were beginning to feel the folly of their first excited hopes.

Meya longed for better times too. She was growing thin again. Her hide was beginning to sag and her back, where the ridge of her spine rose in a line of hard knobbles, was burned raw by the sun. The claws of the ox-peckers felt like sharp licks of flame. Sometimes she would pause, rumbling out a long low alarm call to her family, but the earth was too compacted to carry the vibrations. Occasionally she would trumpet through a lifted trunk, then listen for an answer, eyes downcast and ears spread. But she never got a response. The insects shrilled out their long strands of sound in the relentless noonday heat.

When the day was at its most harsh, the little band of travellers would fall asleep in whatever sparse shade they could find. But it never seemed long before they awoke, their lips parched, their tongues puffy. Sometimes wild dogs would be watching them with glittering eyes.

Not until the sun had begun its slow downward journey would the posse move on again. The air felt close as an oven. The dry grass would crackle and the ground burned their feet. Their soles began to bleed. Meya’s steady lumber grew slower and slower. She breathed in short puffs that blew dust from the ground.

Then, in the late afternoon, the wind would get up again, sending storms of dust crashing across the open plains. They coated every branch of the swaying acacias, filmed every last surviving leaf of every scattered bush with red. Dust filled the children’s nostrils and choked their parched throats. They tried not to drink from their water-bottles too often but, on the fifth day, Bat, in a fit of sudden desperation, drained his in one
go. The water sloshed about in his belly as he walked; but his thirst was not abated. ‘If anything it feels worse,’ he moaned.

‘Never drink too quickly,’ Gulu warned him sternly. ‘It just blows up your stomach without slaking your thirst. Just take a small gulp and rinse it round and round your mouth. Let it soak off the dried slime before you start, tiny bit by tiny bit, to let it trickle down your throat.’

But later that afternoon they found some tamarind beans still hanging. They were far too high for the children’s clawing fingertips to reach; too high even for Meya’s stretching trunk. Placing her tusks either side of the tree, bracing her great baggy legs and heaving her whole body slowly back and forth, she managed to shake it so hard that its last scattering of pods fell. Inside the hard twisted shell, the little dry beans were wrinkled and brown.

‘Suck them,’ Gulu said, ‘and they will slowly grow softer.’ The others did as he said and a welcome mouth-watering sourness began to leak out.

Wearily they plodded onwards, eyes slitted against the dust. Meya was hearing and smelling rather than seeing her way forward now. She moved with a sense of slow purpose and direction, her trunk raised in the air, sniffing the wind. The children barely spoke. They were far too thirsty. Their breath wheezed from their throats in short shallow gasps. Sometimes they would pass a dead animal lying stretched in the dirt, a zebra or antelope that had finally given up the ghost, staring up at the sky from which the water that they had longed for so desperately had never come.

‘Keep going,’ Gulu would encourage. ‘The lake can’t be too far away. There we can rest, find fresh pasture for Meya.’ But though Bat and Muka would marshal their energies and, adjusting the thongs of their baskets, try to quicken their pace, it was Gulu himself who was now always lagging. His lame foot was dragging and he was troubled by a harsh cough which, when it started, would send him into chest-racking spasms. Sometimes, when he had finished, there would be blood on his lips. ‘I’m all right,’ he would say. ‘I can go on all right.’ But still Bat decided to empty out Gulu’s basket so that he could carry its contents himself.

Only at sunset, would the wind finally drop. The land would smoulder in the fading red light. The children’s thin shadows would lengthen upon the baked earth. Nightjars would sweep by on soft wings, scooping up flying insects. The cooling darkness would steal across the plains. The fireflies would flicker on and off in their branches. It was as if days and nights were passing in mere moments. But then time didn’t mean very much any more, thought Bat. There was only ever the present, only the endless slow rhythm of their onward plodding feet.

When the moon rose vast and eerie over the desert, the whole world seemed to glow hard and brittle in its glare. Things that in the day had looked perfectly ordinary now seemed menacing presences. The tall fleshy clusters of the candelabra-like cactuses reared up in the darkness like great citadels. The children kept well away. Just to touch the white sap of these plants left a burn on the skin. Their poison would kill any animal
that tried to feed. And yet, sometimes, thought Muka, these lone plants seemed the only living presences to stalk the dead lands around them. Beyond was nothing but the night sky. It wept shooting stars.

Before sleeping, the children always kindled a fire from the smouldering dung that Yambabo had taught them to wrap in a leaf. Blowing on it gently, they ruffled up twists of smoke which burst into flame as dried leaves and scraps of tinder caught. Then they cooked. There was no shortage of meat, and even as the supplies in their little baskets grew lighter and lighter, Gulu cut more from the carcasses of the famine-stricken animals that they found on their path. Then, clearing sharp stones and twigs from the ground, they would dig a shallow hollow with their heels for their hips, scrape up a little heap of sand for a pillow and lie down. It was cold at night. After burning all day, they would begin to shiver. Even when they huddled together, they could never get warm. They would stare up at the sky. The stars were so far away and yet often, amid the vast expanses of the desert, they seemed to the children their closest companions.

‘Maybe it might rain tomorrow,’ Muka would look up and say every night. But it never did.

As each day passed, the little posse grew weaker. The days seemed to grow hotter; the nights starker and more cold. The children’s parched lips were cracked. Their joints ached all the time. Their ribs stuck out like bars on their chests. They had finished all the cassava that the pygmies had given them; eaten the nuts and the mushrooms and berries. They longed for something other than meat. But it was Meya who was starving. She looked like a spectre. All her great bulk of muscle had fallen away. Her shoulder-bones jutted and her hips jagged out through skin that hung draped in slack folds. Desperately she foraged, tusking for grass roots and devouring bitter scrub. Once she found a hidden cache of buried tubers that not only sustained her but helped take the edge off her terrible thirst.

It was the thirst that tormented them. They felt as if
they would choke on their own swollen tongues. By the sixth day of their journey, the riverbed was all but dry. The few pools that remained were no more than damp sludge. Meya swung her trunk, sniffing and snorting for water, smelling its delicious freshness far beneath the hot sand. She sunk in her tusks and began gouging, deeper and deeper. A trickle of liquid seeped into the hole. It took several minutes for even a small calabash to fill. It was thick with silt. But still they drank. And when the children had filled up their goatskins, Meya stayed there, sucking it up mouthful by tiny mouthful with the tip of her trunk. When they finally left, a cheetah slunk swiftly down after them, ears flattened, sleek body hugging low to the ground. Twitching her tail from side to side, she frantically lapped. An impala looked on. Its saffron shiny coat had dulled to a matt brown.