The Child's Elephant (38 page)

The rain dripped steadily from the mouth of the cave, falling and landing in a pool of lying water. Droplets leaped out from the surface where they struck. They jumped up and down like soldiers marking time on the spot.

All that day the children remained high on their hidden plateau. They were mourning the life of the friend they had lost.

‘Without him we would never have made it,’ Bat whispered. ‘Without him I don’t think I could have survived the camp.’ Tears streamed down his face as he remembered how they had shared not just a blanket together, but the comfort of each other’s closeness on those long cold army nights. ‘He could have come home with us,’ he sobbed. ‘He could have lived as our brother.’

‘He saved us,’ Muka murmured. ‘Without him we would never have found a way out. And he was prepared to give his life for us,’ she whispered as, bathing his body in their tribal ritual of cleansing, she thought back to that moment when he had left them behind in
the crawlspace, ready to face the wrath of the Leopard alone rather than give up his two hidden friends.

Together the two children drank water beside Gulu’s dead body as a sign that, as his clans-people, they shouldered their part in his life. Muka drew the line around his body, which would have to serve as a fence around his grave. Bat cut a stick for the spear which, in their traditional ceremony of forgiveness, would have been solemnly broken as a symbol that all violence had been finally renounced.

Meya waited quietly until all their rites were over. Only then did she approach, lifting one of Gulu’s fallen hands and then laying it back down softly, brushing the lifeless body with the tip of her trunk. Then, gently, she covered it with a coffin of branches, as elephants often did in their own ceremonies for the dead.

‘This place felt like his home,’ Muka murmured. ‘It was here for the first time that I ever saw him find peace. His spirit will be happy to return to this place.’

All day the three travellers rested and stood guard over Gulu. Sometimes Bat and Muka spoke of their memories, sometimes they sobbed or smiled. More often they just sat in meditative silence, listening to the birds as they chirruped and rustled, the rush of the river as it spouted over the rocks. Clouds of white butterflies fluttered over the bushes. An iguana hoarded its trove of sunlight. Muka watched a small dark snake sliding like an arrow through the undergrowth. Slipping into the water, it glimmered like a living rainbow.

From the lip of the escarpment, the children could clearly see the course of the river, a silvery vein of new
life winding out across the earth. A fresh tinge of green was already covering the ground and amid it they could see the scattered dots of distant grazers. They were all feeding eagerly for the first time in several months.

Soon they would be down there in that world, the children thought. And the next day, bowing their heads in a last sorrowful farewell to Gulu, they set off. Neither of them could see a way to get down that great cliff. But Meya, in the lead, didn’t pause. Barely waiting to check that the scrabbling children could keep up with her, she forged her steady path back up onto the escarpment’s lip. She seemed in a great hurry now. She strode along, scenting urgently, ears flared and trunk stretched.

Huge clumps of scrub had slipped away down the cliff in the rain. They left raw fan-shaped smears on the face of the rock. How would they ever get down there? Bat wondered. It looked completely impossible. But Meya was more confident. She pushed on ahead, continuing without pausing for what felt a long while before suddenly plunging down the slopes of a ravine so steep that the children had to clutch at exposed roots to stop themselves from sliding.

At the bottom the path levelled and grew suddenly easy again. Meya ate hungrily as she walked, snapping at boughs and cramming their bursting foliage into her mouth. The children gazed around them in delight at so much green. The smell of wet leaf mould filled the air, and sometimes they found themselves moving through patches of sticky sweet fragrance. Opening blossoms draped the damp air with their scent. Doves gurgled. It sounded like water pouring from a narrow-necked jar,
Muka thought. A troupe of black-and-white monkeys bounded through the trees overhead, their feathery tails flowing in the wind of their flight. Once they saw a leopard slipping low through the trees, a newly caught bird still flapping feebly in its mouth. It gave a muffled grunt of alarm and the children heard the high answering miaow of a kitten hidden somewhere not far off. They hurried on by as fast as they could.

It was only on the evening of the second day that Meya slackened her urgent pace. She stopped in a wide forest clearing to feed, stuffing in grasses which, releasing their rich juices, sent dribbles of green running down her bristly chin. Swathe after swathe she greedily plucked. And then, suddenly, she stopped. Bat and Muka saw her tense. The whites of her eyes rolled as she lifted her head and, raising her trunk, let its load of stems fall. Her pale tusks gleamed in the low evening light. She uttered a piercing squeal.

For several minutes the children heard nothing. They waited, hearts pounding, and then came the first sound of movement far off in the trees. They strained their ears: it was a low scuffing noise, almost as if something heavy was being dragged through the brush. Bat recognized it instantly. A dizzy rush of excitement flooded his brain. He closed his eyes for a moment, and when he opened them again a great shadowy form was emerging from the shadows. It loomed up before them. Bat’s blood raced. Clutching at Muka, he drew her slowly backwards towards the edge of the clearing. This was the matriarch. This was the leader of Meya’s herd.

The huge animal paused for a moment. A loud,
high-pitched rumble rolled out. It was a sound that produced an instant reaction in Meya. The two elephants were moving rapidly towards one other. When they were only a short way apart, they broke into a run, coming together in a turmoil of flapping ears and shrill screaming; of jubilant trumpeting and loud clicking tusks. And then they lifted their heads together and, twining their trunks, rumbled so deeply that it rolled through the trees like the breaking of a storm. Only then did the rest of the herd emerge, spinning and backing in their wild excitement, trampling the clearing and breaking down bushes, rubbing and leaning upon their lost friend. They slipped their trunks into her grass-stained mouth. Muka, who had never before witnessed this exuberant greeting ceremony, stared round-eyed with amazement. Tears of sheer happiness coursed down Bat’s cheeks.

Only after several minutes did the elephants settle. The cows slowly calmed and began to feed. They were thin, Bat noticed: very thin. Their skin hung from gaunt bodies in deep leathery folds, and the little calves that now crept curiously out from their mother’s legs were as wrinkled and wobbly as a litter of new-born dogs.

That night, Bat and Muka moved amid a forest of huge feet, and when the whole family lay down, one by one, on their sides, they too slept. Curled up amid the sound of the elephants’ deep rhythmic breathing, they felt as if some great canopy had been stretched out above them, protecting them from the night with its slow puffing breaths.

In the morning the children rose with the dew wet on their skins. The elephants were ready to leave. The
matriarch rumbled as she shambled towards the edge of the clearing. She wanted to lead her herd back to the plains; to take them to the river where the grasses would be sprouting and the leaves lushly unfurling.

Meya lingered uncertainly while Muka stroked her rough flank. She was humming a low song. But Bat could not speak. His heart was bursting. He knew that without the elephant beside them they would have been lost. His feelings welled up so thickly that he thought he would choke.

Meya stared into his face with her deep guileless eyes and Bat, blinking away the tears that swam blearily before him, stared back into depths of that infinitely trusting look. With the flat of his palm, he softly stroked her trunk.

At the edge of the clearing, the matriarch was rumbling, flapping her ears and swinging her foot.

‘Go on, Meya, my little one,’ he whispered as he pushed her. It was not like his first parting. He knew now that he had never lost her. And slowly Meya turned and, with her long graceful lumber, strolled off. She looked back only once, at the fringes of the forest. A low vibrating rumble rolled out across the air. The two children waved.

‘Thank you, Meya, thank you. Thank you!’ they called.

She lifted her trunk in a last farewell; then melted back silently into the trees with her herd.

Bat started to recognize trees and rocks. They were nearly home.
Not long now
, he kept thinking, and each time a surge of excitement would rush through his head. He thought of his grandmother. His pulse would flicker and skip. And then his worries would steady it. What if she wasn’t there? What if the child army had raided the village? What if she was dead? Then his head would fall silent as a pen of goats after nightfall. He would try to focus on nothing except the movement of his feet. The red soil of the jungle was giving way to a paler sticky mud. It dragged at their steps.

And then, suddenly, turning a corner they came upon the honey-gatherer, his broad-face fogged by the smoke that puffed up in clouds from the fat roll of leaves that he held between his lips. When he saw the children
coming, he drew it from his mouth and wiped the sweat from his brow.

‘Will you help me to carry this back to the village?’ He nodded over his shoulder at the comb that was slung dripping from his back. It was as if they had never been away, Bat thought. Perhaps he didn’t recognize them?

‘I’m looking forward to a plate of your grandmother’s groundnut stew,’ he said.

The hearts of both children leaped.

And then they were leaving the shade of the forest, walking down the dirt track that wound southwards, away from the escarpment. The ground that for so long had baked in the sun had now been turned to red clay. It squeezed through their toes and made them laugh as they slipped. There was a strong smell of wet earth and new grass on the wind. A flock of tiny red birds alighted, all twittering, and Bat heard the familiar call of the francolin. Crickets were chirruping from the unfurling bushes and a carpet of pink flowers unrolled across the plains. In the distance they could see the smoke of the village, the roofs of the huts squatting low to the earth.

A herd of cattle, thin as grasshoppers, foraged not far away, and Bat, hearing a familiar whistle, saw a little boy leap up. He stopped abruptly and stared as he saw the group approaching, and then, as they drew closer, ran bounding towards them, dancing and capering, his face split wide in a grin. It was Bim. The cattle, suddenly recognizing the figure of their old herder, were now trotting obediently in the direction of Bat, but
Bim dashed off. He ran for the village, arms waving and whistling as hard as his breathing would let him.

Bat wanted to drop his basket of honeycomb and start to run too; but the honey-gatherer was sauntering along calmly ahead of him, almost as if he did not know the meaning of haste. Bat recognized the way the wind fell on his face now. It was the feeling of home. He grinned at Muka. His thoughts were racing. Every step he took felt as if it was releasing him. He could hear the sound of the pounding cassava pestles now, see the women who were gathering at the end of the track, jostling and shouting and pointing as they started towards him, their children tagging behind them and tugging at the hems of their wraps. He recognized the bright turban of Marula, the legless woman, carried high on the back of one of her strong sons. He heard the loud ringing laugh of Fat Rosa . . . and was that Bitek the fisherman who was pushing his way to the front? Bat’s heart was bursting open like a blooming hibiscus.

And then, there, in a space that was opening between them, was the figure of his grandmother. Hitching up her wrap with one hand, she was raising the other to her brow and squinting. Dropping his basket, Bat grabbed at Muka’s hand and the pair tore down the track, arms flailing, feet slipping, eyes shining with light. She did not call out to them; but amid the hush of the watchers, her silence struck sparks that were bright as pure joy. Her old face shone with new light. The children fell into her embrace. They filled up their lungs with her dry wood-smoke smell. They clutched
tightly around each other as they laid their heads on her heart.