The Child's Elephant (39 page)

Far, far above, in the last fading dazzle of the dying sun, an eagle screamed. Its cry rang out like a peal of laughter that made a ring around the world.

No one knew what had happened to Lobo. Some said he had been shot by the government soldiers sent into the forests to rout the child army; others whispered that he was still out there, wandering lost in the trees. A goat herder swore that he had met someone whose uncle had seen him mending bicycles in the town; but another man who seemed to be equally sure said that he had become a corporal and was living in the land across the mountains. A nomadic tribesman had met him at a border post, he said; he had even mentioned the viper scar.

All the villagers knew was that Lobo had vanished from Jambula as surely as the smoke from the medicine woman’s fire. ‘He will never come back now,’ his mother had told them and, following their tribal custom, she had laid four large stones outside the door of her hut.
They marked the site where his body would have been laid had it ever come back.

But then one day a stranger was seen approaching the village: a wavering outline upon the horizon inching closer and closer, his broad frame supported by a stick. It was Lobo returning, limping like a lost spirit through the lands where he had once lived. He had been in prison, he said. He had been starved and beaten and his leg had been broken, and now he had come back because he had nowhere else to go.

Bat had a hut of his own in the village by then. It was close to his grandmother’s. The same blue and yellow flowers spilled from the old paint tins that had been nailed to the lintels and he was sitting beneath them when the news reached him.

‘Lobo! Lobo is back!’ It was one of Fat Rosa’s grandsons who came running to tell him. Even in the soft warmth of a low evening sun, Bat felt himself shiver. For a long while he said nothing. He just sat. Behind him, through the doorway, he could hear someone singing. He listened to the low gentle hum of the voice and, so faint he could barely even hear it, the small snuffling murmurs of his newborn baby son.

He dropped his head in his hands. His heart flooded with anger. He folded his fists as dark memories rose up around him. They bumped about in his mind like black flies around a wound. They filled the air with their buzz.

‘Let them go.’ It was his grandmother who was now standing before him. ‘Throw your heart out in front of you and then run ahead to catch it,’ she said.

Several more minutes passed. Bat’s grandmother waited until finally he looked up. She laid her old wrinkled hand on his head. ‘When two elephants fight, it’s the grass that suffers,’ she told him. ‘Lobo was cruel. But he had had cruelty shown to him. Now he is broken. Let him find a better way to mend.’

That evening a young couple left the village. Side by side, they kept pace as they went down the track. He was tall, lithe and strong with a quick, agile gait. She had a spring in her step, like the bounce of a ball, which set her braids swinging. The tassels of her wrap fluttered out behind as she walked. A little snuffling bundle was slung on her back.

When they got to the river, they both sat down and waited. A herd of elephants was grazing in the distant brush and one of them, spotting the two people watching, looked up and ambled across. The couple stood up at once, and the woman, unfastening the blanket that was knotted around her shoulders, gathered a tiny kicking baby into her arms. She held it out to the animal and hummed a low song.

For a few moments the elephant just blinked. Then, reaching out gently, trunk tip to naked tummy, she blew softly until the child chuckled and squirmed and stretched out chubby hands to clutch. The elephant seemed delighted and shook her great head.

Suddenly, she turned, but even as she shambled away she was watching, as if checking that the couple were not thinking of leaving. She slipped into the brush. The young mother, talking softly to her husband and
smiling, bundled her baby back up into its blanket and, wiping the dampness of the elephant’s touch from its skin with one corner, knotted it firmly again round her back.

A short while later the elephant returned. This time she was not alone. A tiny crumpled creature was tripping along at her feet, peeping out coyly from behind the barricade of her legs. Its trunk bobbed up and down like a piece of elastic. Its ears were snug as two cabbage leaves folded round its head.

And the faces of the young man and his wife spread in a pair of broad smiles. Each reached out for the other, their hands joining together in a movement that linked their shared memories and carried them both back to their own childhoods. But neither drew closer to the tiny wild creature. The other elephants paused in their grazing to look, shifting and snorting and warily shuffling. The man scanned them watchfully with a herdsman’s keen eye. The old matriarch that he had known as a child was no longer with them. It was the mother of the tiny creature who now, turning slowly away from him, swung her leg to and fro and gave the soft ‘let’s go’ call. She ambled away, the herd gathering behind her, drawing the stumbling newborn into its protective heart. It was she who took the lead as they drifted away into the fading light.

Bat and Muka watched the elephants go, retreating across the vast spaces of the endless savannah as if they had some appointment to keep with the end of the world.

This story is a fiction, but it finds its roots in fact. In 1986, a Ugandan warlord named Joseph Kony launched a rebellion against his country’s government. But what began as a fight for the rights of the Acholi tribe, soon escalated into a brutal guerrilla war. For more than twenty years, Kony rampaged through Northern Uganda, turning on his own people, accusing them of betraying him, of sinning against God. His rebel army – The Lord’s Resistance Army – has been responsible for the kidnapping of thousands of children. Thousands of young boys and girls, just like Bat and Muka, have been captured and forced to fight. Their parents have been driven from their farms and murdered. Their villages have been burned. The stories of Bat and Muka and the people they meet are based on written testimonies of these children, and on interviews which I did with them in Northern Uganda.

Although Kony, at the time of writing, has still not been caught, his Lord’s Resistance Army has at last been driven out of Northern Uganda. Families are returning to the farms which for so many years they had been forced to abandon. They are picking up the pieces of their broken lives. There are many charities which try to help them. They work on the rehabilitation of the former child soldiers and on the rebuilding of their rural communities. One of them is Send-A-Cow Uganda, a non-governmental organisation. If you are interested in reading more about it, or in trying to help, you can
look up their website:
www.sendacowuganda.org

The African elephant is also entering a time of extreme peril. These magnificent creatures are being pushed to extinction, by the poachers who slaughter them mercilessly for their ivory, and by the loss of their habitats, as they are increasingly forced to compete with humans for territories that were once theirs alone. Great beasts like Meya could have completely disappeared from this planet in your lifetime if something does not change. There are several conservation charities which work to prevent this. Among them is Tusk, which runs field projects right across Africa. These work not only to protect endangered species such as the elephant, but also to encourage sustainable development and education among the rural communities who live alongside them. If you want to know more about Tusk or would like to support it then you can look up its website:
www.tusk.org

I would like to thank my agent Georgina Capel and Rachel Conway of Capel Land for their winning combination of ebullience and measured advice; inspirational publisher David Fickling and his assistant Matilda Johnson; Hannah Featherstone and Lauren Bennett at Random House and Bella Pearson, my editor, who turned the book around with her invaluable expertise.

I am hugely grateful to my first readers: Alex Gilbert who marked the manuscript as diligently as any school English teacher; Xavier and Jude Woodcock who nagged their mother to read another chapter every night; and Ellie Miles, my god-daughter, who was so percipient.

I would also like to thank Josh Nickerson and Jess Denyer for practising being parents while I was away in Africa; Alfie Nickerson for giving me more than just my opening line and Ella Nickerson for being such a loveable step daughter.

Thank you to my father and mother, my sisters Anna and Tid and my brother Ben for their unflagging support and for putting up with so many elephant conversations. Alice Miles was, as always, an inspiration – but this time quite literally. Catherine Goodman, Noj and Katy Barker, Jamie and Ann Nickerson and their daughters Daisy and Flo, Clare Conville, Emily Patrick and Michael Perry, Jessica Berens, Adam and Katie Hilton,
and Louise Starling are just a few of the people who have offered me refuge and help. I am particularly grateful to Tom Blofeld, a fellow children’s author and his wife Leslie Felperin who gave me, when I most needed it, a home from home. And I am also indebted to Annie Blunt without whom I am not sure I would ever have managed the last hurdles.

Thank you, Aggrey Nshekanabo from Send-A-Cow in Uganda. More than just a guide and translator, you gave me so many insights into your culture.

I would like to acknowledge works that I drew on for details of elephant behaviour, among them Ian Douglas Hamilton’s
Among the Elephants
; Daphne Sheldrick’s
The Orphans of Tsavo
, Martin Meredith’s
The African Elephant: A Biography
, Cynthia Moss’s
Elephant Memories
and Rachel Payne’s
Silent Thunder
.

And lastly, thank you to Bear and Flea for keeping me company during the writing.

Rachel grew up in the country with her sisters and brother and a menagerie of animals which became her main companions.

She would work on the farm as a school child, and learned how to shepherd and work dogs in the Outer Hebrides. When she finished school she travelled to the Falkland Islands as a shepherd and had been there almost a year when the islands were invaded. Rachel, who at the time was taking a brief holiday in South America, couldn’t go back. Instead, she moved on to Peru and found a job in the high Andes, working on an agricultural project with the indigenous people. She learned to speak Spanish and Quechua.

Rachel went to the University of Edinburgh to study Zoology but changed to read English Literature which she had always loved. In the Easter holidays she continued to shepherd in Cumbria to earn money. She spent two summer vacations in El Salvador, working in a camp for displaced people during the civil war. She drew on this experience – particularly the way war affects the lives of children – for this book.

After university, Rachel went to live in the Amazon rainforest – in a very remote area,120km walk from the nearest village. She lived with a family of rubber tappers and learned to speak Portuguese. She was there for almost two years. She draws on her memories of this too for her children’s story.