The Child's Elephant (37 page)

Ahead of them reared the slope of a sudden steep incline. Bat braced himself for the gruelling ascent. Wearily he climbed, Muka struggling behind him, one dragging foot planted in front of the next. The dusty air scoured their lungs. Meya’s breath came painfully in stertorous grunts. Gulu clung to her neck, but he didn’t look up.

And then they were at the top, standing on the brink of a vast windswept ledge. The cliffs fell all but sheer to the bottom far below them. But the children gazed over the grasslands that rolled away ahead: a dizzying vastness that reached to the furthermost rim of the world. This was the savannah, Bat thought. His heart thumped as he reached out for Muka. They were standing on the escarpment. These were the rocks that for so long had formed the horizon of their lives. Somewhere down below them lay the place they called home.

‘Look, Gulu! Look!’ he cried, his voice cracked by the tears which his body was too dry to send. The little boy raised his head weakly. He felt his burning face cooled by the draughts from Meya’s great flapping ears. But his dark eyes were glazed and his grasp was so weak that, when the elephant moved, Bat and Muka now had to walk either side of her, holding his dangling legs so that he would not slip.

For a while they followed the line of the cliff edge.
Bat remembered the words of the fisherman Bitek: sometimes the elephants would be away for as long as three years, he had said, travelling secret paths that led over the escarpment. Was Meya searching for one of these ancient ways now? Did she know a track home? He felt something change place somewhere deep inside him. It was the groundswell of despair giving way to a fresh surge of hope.

Then, suddenly, Meya was branching off, stumbling down a ravine that looked utterly impassable. She eased herself through a gap between two massive boulders. Gulu slid down her neck. He was clutching at her ears. But the elephant was unstoppable. She picked her way purposefully onwards down a dried watercourse, pushing through tangles of dead vegetation, forging a path so obscure that no one, Bat thought, could possibly ever have tried it. He tucked himself close in behind her. There was nothing that he and Muka could do now but trust.

Inch by skidding inch, Meya continued her descent. Probing at uncertain stones with her trunk, grasping at dried roots and testing loose stones, she transferred her great bulk from one treacherous foothold to the next. The rays of a lowering sun beat against the cliff, frying them like ants on a griddle of hot rock. How much longer could this go on? Bat wondered. How much longer before they slipped?

Just at that moment, Meya stopped. Reaching behind her, she twined her trunk around Gulu and, lifting him gently, laid him down on the ground. Then she knelt on her hind legs to lower herself over a rocky lip. For
a few heart-stopping seconds Bat was sure she would fall. But no . . . she was safe . . . she stood waiting below. Muka scrambled down next, hanging from the ledge by her hands before she let herself drop. Then Bat passed Gulu down into her outstretched arms. It was easy. He weighed little more than a bundle of dry kindling. He groaned as she grasped him and then doubled up in a fit of frame-racking coughs. Bat and Muka bent over, putting their arms round his back to support him. His shoulder-blades felt sharp as wings.

It was only when they stood up again that they saw for the first time that they had reached a wide plateau: a magical platform poised midway between earth and sky. A huge cave was cut into the wall of the rock behind them. Meya had already entered. Picking Gulu up, they followed the elephant in. It was cool inside; blissfully cool: like plunging your face into a calabash of cold water. And somewhere far at the back they could hear a faint trickling. They blundered into the darkness. Meya was already there, sucking and sucking, as if she could never stop.

It was only the thinnest of runnels, Bat realized as he stretched his fingertips towards it; but it was fresh and clean, springing straight from some repository hidden deep in the rock. Scooping handful after handful, he and Muka drank desperately. Then they returned for Gulu, pouring cupped palms of water into his blistered gape. They moistened his face and bathed his burning temples. They splashed his hot limbs and cleaned the pus from his foot. And then they returned to drinking themselves.

Outside, where a waterfall would have plunged downwards in the rainy season, they saw whiskery grasses still growing about the fringes of the rocks. Meya was wrenching them up in swift eager mouthfuls, the first scraps of fresh fodder she had tasted for many days. Hank after hank, she swept it into her mouth. Her gut whined and groaned. Bat pulled out the last of the salt meat that the pygmies had given them, and he and Muka ate too, but Gulu waved it away.

‘Take it.’ Muka bent over him, gently encouraging. But Gulu couldn’t see them. The cave was so dark, and yet the light in his head was too bright. He was shivering, but his brain was boiling. ‘Let me rest,’ he sighed and he lay down to sleep on a bed of dried leaves.

They left him and went out. A bush of marula plums grew nearby. The fruit had all fallen and fermented, but with cries of delight the children gathered it up in damp handfuls, cramming it eagerly between parted lips. Streams of sticky sourness flowed down their chins, running down wrists and forearms, dripping from elbows and splashing onto feet. Meya feasted beside them, her eyes closed in sheer relish, as she mashed at vast mouthfuls of pulp. But when Muka carried some into the cave for Gulu, when she shook him to rouse him, he just lay without lifting his head.

‘I can’t eat now,’ he murmured, and his eyes closed again.

With one hand behind his thin neck, she lifted him, squeezing the acid succulents between parted lips. ‘They will help you sleep better,’ she pleaded. The juices ran down Gulu’s throat and the boy swallowed weakly. Then
he lapsed once again into a fit of violent coughs. Muka could feel his skin burning. His whole body was trembling. She wanted to hold him against her; she wanted to promise that it would all be all right; but, the spasm now over, the boy’s eyes were once again closing. Gently she laid his head back down again and Gulu, turning on one side, folded himself inwards, drawing knees up to elbows, and lay without stirring. His fists were clenched tight as a pleader’s before his parted mouth.

The fermenting plums were making them all feel faintly giddy. Even the elephant was blinking and swaying. They looked dizzily about. Hastily, Bat set to work in the cave, coaxing a fire from the embers that he carried. Kneeling, he blew at the sparks, fanning the flame gently, feeding it fragments of dry tinder until it finally leaped up. Shadows flickered over the walls of rock. A flock of bats scudded outwards into the twilight and, following them, the children sat at the rocky mouth, watching the sun as it slipped below the far horizon, the gathering clouds flaming bright vermilion and gold. The first stars began to appear. Soon the heavens would be studded with millions upon millions, packed sharp and close as a porcupine’s quills.

Meya’s tusks glinted silver in the moon’s rising light. The children gazed up at her. But neither of them would have dared at that moment to have reached out and touched her. She seemed somehow transformed, somehow magical, they both thought. It was as if she had been invested with some power that lay far beyond them; as if she was part of a lost world that they would never reach. Quietly she stood there, silhouetted against
the great darkness, a vast looming presence as ancient as the prehistoric rocks.

Only when it was dark did they turn back to go into the cave. Gulu was calling. ‘Look! Look!’ he was crying. He was stretching his arms out and pointing. His black eyes were glittering. Bat and Muka peered through a darkness that was hazed with drifting smoke. And it was then that they saw it: a great elephant appearing, a huge shadowy form painted onto the surface of the rock. A tiny calf peeped out from under her belly, and nearby a man with an armful of firewood had been drawn, and a mother carrying the bundle of a baby on her back.

The children stared transfixed. This was the cave that the pygmies had told them about, the secret haven that only the elephants now knew. This was a place that went back to a time before history, to the days when man and elephant had walked side by side. Bat felt a chill at the back of his neck, as if some hidden presence was blowing upon him softly. But Meya merely lumbered over to lick at a rock. There were minerals here too for the elephants.

They slept deeply that night. Meya made a bed of mulch at the rear. Sighing and grunting she shifted until finally she settled, leaning her rump against the cave wall, while the children curled up nearby round the warm fire. It must have been somewhere near the middle of the night when they woke. The embers had faded to a rich orange glow and Gulu was calling out, as he so often did in his sleep.

‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry,’ he cried in the blackness. But this time he was not dreaming; he was sitting up. His
thin legs were folded into arms of stretched sinew. The knobbled blades of his shoulders stuck out from his back. ‘I’m sorry, so sorry,’ he called to the night. The tears that, until then, he had always kept locked up in his head now flowed down his face. His sorrow and grief were pouring out in a flood. And, as if the dark world was lying there and waiting and listening, a long rumble of thunder rolled answering back. Great bolts of lightning broke open the skies. They lit up the cave with their eerie blue light, flashing over the carvings until they flickered with a mystical life.

When the children woke again at dawn, Gulu was sleeping. They could see his pulse flickering, a faint beat in his temple, but he looked calmer, more peaceful. His fear had passed. His face was still hot but his brow was smooth and clear and a smile drifted over his wide face as he woke. He looked like a little child again, Bat thought. When Muka put her arm around him, he did not shrug her off. He let her support him, while she lifted a palm full of water to his lips. ‘This is a lovely home,’ he whispered. ‘I would like to stay here for ever.’ And he looked at the carvings on the rocky walls. ‘Did the wild elephant really carry me?’ he asked in a voice full of wonder.

It was extraordinary how quickly the clouds appeared, as if conjured out of nowhere. One moment they had been streaking the rim of the horizon; the next, blown by the gusts of sudden fierce wind, they were massing and swelling and racing out across the sky. A little after noon, the wind dropped abruptly. The air thickened.
Then the whole world turned black. Bat waited in silence. The quietness was eerie. He could hear nothing but the piping of a plaintive hornbill. Everything seemed frozen, all motion suspended, as if every living creature was holding its breath. Then, suddenly, the silence broke with a great earth-shaking crash. Thunder rolled through the trees, echoing off the escarpment, rumbling back outwards in waves over the plain’s dry expanse. Lightning flashed and hissed. Bat, crouching by the entrance of the cave, could almost taste it, sour as a piece of tarnished metal in his mouth.

A splat fell on his skin. It was a raindrop: and then another and another and yet another fell; plopping fat to the ground and pitting the dust. A few moments later, Bat heard a loud rattling. And then a sheet of rain swept across the mouth of the cave. It lashed down in ropes as thick as his fingers, crashing and beating upon the undergrowth. Where a minute ago there had been a dried watercourse, a surging torrent now raced, rushing between rocks as it tore its mad pathway, rearing and plunging as it hurled towards the great drop. It fell sheer down the cliff face, flinging out a cloud of spray.

Bat, Muka and Meya ran out into the storm, laughing and trumpeting in their wild delight. They gazed up, exhilarated, into the skies, their shouts and their squeals ringing out from the rocks. The water clung to their eyelashes and streamed down their cheeks, dribbling from elbows and tails and ear tips. They lay down and rolled in it and stood up covered in mud. Then they flung out their limbs and let it wash them again. At last, at long last, the rains had arrived.

The storm eventually passed. The downpour grew steadier, the rain slowly thinned. Patches of blue started appearing in the clouds. Sunlight flashed and sparkled. It glinted off stones and dripped from wet trees. Below, the parched plains sucked in the lying flood. Steam rose like a mist as the land gave up its stored heat. A lone rainbird called, its notes falling like water, and the children stood, heads cocked and listening. Their faces were almost broken in two by their smiles. ‘We look like a pair of wet chickens,’ Muka laughed. Bat gave a loud squawk. A glimmering rainbow leaped across the sky. It spanned its great dome, shining as brightly as if it had been painted on.

Then they heard Gulu calling, and they both ran in. He was lying on his back, staring up at the walls. ‘Am I home?’ he cried out to them. ‘I am home,’ he said. ‘I can hear my stream. I can hear my stream calling me. “Gulu,” it’s saying. “Gulu . . . Gulu,” as it runs down the rocks.’

Muka knelt over him. She damped his brow with fresh water. She could feel it still burning, but his hand in her own was chill. ‘Mama?’ he muttered. ‘Mama, is that you?’

‘Gulu, it’s me, Muka. It’s Muka,’ she cried.

‘Mama,’ he answered and he tried to sit up. He was whispering. Both children leaned closer to hear what he said. But his words were like lizards on the walls of a hut. He couldn’t catch them. They kept slipping back into the crevices of his thoughts. He stared at the carvings as if transfixed. Then he turned his head sideways and gazed slowly at Meya. His lips were framing lost syllables.
The elephant reached out for him with a slow gentle trunk. She laid it upon him like a father lays his blessing on a son. There was a look of infinite understanding in her eyes. But Gulu’s own eyes were withdrawing. He was vanishing, sinking further and further away into his own world of thoughts. His last breath was fading. Bat slid a hand inside the boy’s shirt. He thought he could still feel the flutter of a heartbeat, but it was only the blood beating in his fingertips. Gulu’s own hands, always clutched into a fist, had slowly uncurled. They lay open amid the leaves. It was as if, at long last, he had finally managed to let something go.