The Child's Elephant (4 page)

A tiny elephant lay at his feet. Bat stared in astonishment. It couldn’t have been much more than a couple of weeks in age. Its ears were still folded about it like the leaves of a cabbage; its back was still sprinkled with russet-coloured hairs; and it was thin, he now noticed . . . far too thin. Its spine stuck out in knobbles and its skin looked all crumpled. The dust filled its loose folds.

Bending, Bat reached out one slow gentle hand. The little creature tried to stand, pushing up with its forelegs, its trunk waving about; but it failed and flopped back bewildered, its eyelids opening and closing as its flanks rose and sank. It nuzzled at Bat with its long fumbling nose.

He backed away slowly and the baby elephant tried again to rise, managing to follow him for a few staggering steps before once more collapsing. Bat knelt down beside it. Its trunk fiddled weakly in the palm of his hand. Where was its mother? It would die without
her, he thought. He could already see the blue mist in its wide baby stare. And then, with a sickening thump, he remembered the dead elephant. Was that how the poachers had managed to single out so mighty a creature? Had she been lagging behind to protect her newborn?

Bat would have known what to do with the orphaned calf of one of his cattle. He could coax even the sickliest to suck milk from a bucket by letting them latch on to two of his fingers. But they had little blunt muzzles that could reach into a pail. A creature with a trunk would not learn to drink that way; and this tiny animal must be thirsty, he thought. He was parched himself. It must be so terribly thirsty. It had probably been wandering all night alone on the savannah. It was a miracle that it wasn’t already dead. Bat ran to fetch his calabash and, filling it with water, he held it out tentatively. The elephant ignored it. Bat tried opening its mouth, curling its trunk back over its head so that the damp, pink triangle of its under-lip was exposed. He poured the water in; but most of it dribbled straight back out again.

Kila wandered over. She snuffled at the baby with her damp, breathy nose; shunting it gently with the tips of her horns. The little animal shifted, its trunk drifting uncertainly in the direction of her udder. It could smell her sweet milk, but still it couldn’t drink.

Bat emptied the last of his water over the little animal’s ears. At least that would cool it. Then, hunkering down by the cow, he filled his calabash with milk. He tried to pour that down the baby’s throat next. The pink tongue wriggled as it tasted the warmth. Bat tried again:
it wasn’t very successful, but the boy kept on going, tiny bit by tiny bit, until all of the milk had either been swallowed or spilled.

He didn’t notice how quickly the afternoon was passing and the sun was already very low in the sky when, hearing a faint cry in the distance, he looked up and saw his new friend Amuka. So she had kept her promise! He had hoped so much that she would; and now, scrambling to his feet, he bounded towards her.

‘Come! Come and see! Come quickly!’ he shouted. He grabbed her by the wrist, gabbling out his story of the poachers as he pulled her into a run. ‘And they killed the mother . . . and there’s a baby . . . I’ve found a baby,’ he gasped, the tale tumbling out in broken snatches between big puffs of breath. She would know what to do, he was hoping. Between them they might be able to come up with a plan.

He watched Muka’s eyes widening in wonderment as, dropping to her knees, she stretched out one hesitant hand for the creature as though to check for herself that his story had really been true. No, she was not imagining it. Pity for the tiny animal welled up in her heart. They couldn’t just leave it. They had to find a way to help.

‘If we don’t take it home, the hyenas will be back for it,’ she murmured. ‘Somehow, between us, we have to help it to walk.’ She glanced about for a moment as if searching for the answer. ‘Perhaps it will follow the cows,’ she suggested. Bat nodded, and leaping to his feet he ran swiftly through the grasses, sounding the
low whistles that would set his herd trotting, bunching closer together as they started for the track.

Then, joining forces, he and Muka started trying to get the elephant to stand. Muka, using all her strength, shoved it from behind, while Bat got underneath it and pushed upwards as hard as he could. It staggered onto its wobbly feet and stood there for a few moments, swaying gently, before, step by tottering step, it set off in the direction of the cows. The two children walked on either side like props while Muka hummed softly to encourage it along. She had heard mother elephants singing to their young like that, she said.

The village was not far but it took a long while to get there, and the baby collapsed several times on the way. It got stuck on small roots and amid thickets of spear grass. Where a branch had fallen it stumbled and had to be pushed. At one point it stepped on its trunk and tripped over. And the children began to feel scared when they heard the low moan of a lion. It was dangerous, Bat knew, to stay late on the savannah. They glanced at each other, worried frowns in their eyes. But the going got easier once they had reached the track, and when they passed a muddy waterhole, still damp from the rainy season, they stopped to dig down and find a bowlful of water that they poured in cooling runnels over the little animal’s back.

Night had almost fallen when finally they reached the shambas, the little thorn-fenced gardens where the villagers grew their crops. Now Bat was kept busy hurling clods at the cows that, without someone to chivvy them constantly, would stray off the path in the hopes of stealing a bite. From there the track threaded its way through the village, the little groups of huts scattered all about it like the beads of a necklace whose string has been snapped. Bat’s home was right on the fringes, and he and Muka branched off towards it.

The cattle barged forward to get into their pen and Bat ran to the gate to count them in: not with his fingers but by remembering each individual and checking to see that she was safely back. The calves were separated off into an enclosure that they shared, reluctantly, with a trio of shaggy-haired goats.

Bat’s grandmother stooped as she came out of a doorway.
The lintel was not high enough for a grown person to walk upright. Pausing amid the profusion of yellow and blue flowers that had been planted in old tins and nailed up, she squinted across her yard to where the two children stood. Her eyes were not good. She was growing old. Threads of grey silvered her short unplaited hair so that it looked as if she had just brushed a hanging cobweb, but her skin had the glow of a sheet of burnished copper and she was wearing an old cotton wrap the same colour as the sun as it dips below the horizon. The sun was that soft orange now, and Bat knew he was late. He was supposed to get home before the guinea fowl had gone to roost. Their clattering squawks were his dinner bell.

‘Bat! Where have you been?’ His grandmother put her hands on her hips. ‘Do you grow your ears for decoration?’ Worry had made her cross. ‘I heard a lion, and how often have I told—’ Suddenly, she stopped. She had just seen the elephant. She stared at the creature that tottered before her, its trunk bobbing up and down like a piece of elastic. For one long moment she just stood there, her mouth open but silent. Her voice was a questioning whisper when at last she spoke. ‘Abili?’

The swallows that nested under the thatch swooped in and out of the doorway that framed her, catching the first flying insects of the night.

‘That little creature is too young to live,’ she snapped. ‘It’s too young to survive without its mother’s milk.’ And then suddenly she softened. She could hold out no longer against a growing hope. ‘But we will see what we can do about it,’ she said as she turned away into
the hut. ‘Abili?’ she whispered again as she stirred up the embers of her cook-fire. It was the name of Bat’s father. She turned to look at the boy as he hesitated in the doorway. A pan of milk slowly warmed. ‘You are just like your father,’ she murmured, ‘more and more every day . . . and now the elephants have come for you too.’

‘Throw your heart out in front of you and run to catch it.’ That’s what Bat’s grandmother always said. And now she hurled her own forward in the hope that she could somehow outrun it. The tiny elephant was weak. It would die if they could not feed it. It needed milk. But the little that she had prepared for it the previous night had all been wasted. The animal had refused to swallow.

All night, curled on her sleeping mat, Bat’s grandmother had pondered the problem. Now she had a plan. ‘I think I can come up with something,’ she told the boy as he hovered anxiously about her, ‘but not if you don’t get out of my way. You are like a pestering bee.’

Taking the gallon can that she used for carrying milk to the market, Bat’s grandmother cut a hole in the plastic cap. Through this she pushed a teat that she fashioned from the inner tube of a car tyre. The screw
top, when jammed down and twisted, held it tightly in place.

Bat hugged her tight. He knew that she had been saving that inner tube for some time. She had been planning to make a sofa: to nail the bouncy strips of rubber criss-cross over a frame. ‘Then, when I come home exhausted after a day at the market, I can lie here in state,’ she would tell Bat and the pair of them would break into laughter at the prospect, even though Bat still wasn’t sure what a sofa actually was.

But when they tried to insert the makeshift teat into the baby elephant’s mouth it started to fight them with a surprising strength; thrashing about wildly, even when Bat sat on top of it. He would have given up if his grandmother had not had another plan.

Each village homestead was made up of a cluster of traditional mud and thatch shelters: a kitchen, a grain store, a hut where the men and the older boys slept and another separate structure for the women and the little boys and the girls. But the men’s hut in Bat’s compound had for many years been used only for storage. He had not yet reached the age when he would be expected to sleep apart.

‘The elephant can make her home there for the time being,’ Bat’s grandmother now said and, having thrown out a tangle of drying firewood and swept the floor vigorously, she set about fastening a sackcloth blanket to the rafters. It sagged down from the ceiling in a low hanging swag. ‘This will feel to the baby like a mother’s belly,’ she explained, observing her handiwork with some satisfaction. ‘It can shelter underneath and imagine it’s safe.’

Shoving the bewildered animal in through the door, the pair returned to the struggle of trying to persuade it to drink. For a while it kept fighting the strange rubber protrusion. And then suddenly, almost by accident, it got the hang of what to do. Fastening its under-lip tight to the teat, it started to suck. And once it had started it did not stop. Soon the contents of the gallon can had been all but drained. Bat’s grandmother had added a small gourd of goats’ milk to the mix. It had natural sugars in it, she explained, that could make a child rest more deeply. Slowly the baby’s eyes closed. It was blissfully sleepy. It collapsed in a huddle beneath the hanging sackcloth. It looked just like a bag of maize, Bat thought and, folding up his thin legs, he leaned against it and fell back to sleep himself.

When he awoke, he found his grandmother watching him quietly from the doorway. He recognized her look. He remembered it from when he was tiny, when, exhausted by playing, he would lie drowsing in her lap while she fiddled with his curls and brushed the flies from his lips. Then he had dozed off and dreamed, knowing that when he awoke again, the first thing he would see would be her eyes staring deep into his.

Bat’s grandmother was kind and loving, but her concern for her grandson also made her strict. She would set him a task and then spit in the dust. ‘I want to see it completed before that dries,’ she would tell him and the boy would have to hasten if he wanted to avoid a scolding, although only too often he would get distracted along the way, spotting a lizard and pausing to try and catch it or making a detour to follow a snake-track in the
dust. ‘You can’t go on relying on an old woman for ever,’ she would tell him. ‘I don’t want you turning into one of those idlers who feed their families on millet porridge while they feast in the market on plates of stewed goat.’ That was why, even though men weren’t expected to, Bat’s grandmother had made the boy learn to cook. He knew how to fry plantains until they turned black and gooey and make matooke with goat meat and a gritty groundnut sauce.