The White Giraffe

by Lauren St. John

  In the meantime, she was determined to try to get a good look at the men. Using the tarp as a cover, she raised herself up inch by inch until her eyes were level with the bottom of the dusty cab window. The first pink stirrings of dawn were in the sky and Martine saw immediately why she’d found it so difficult to make out the features of the men at the waterhole. They were dressed in gray long-sleeved shirts, and black ski masks covered their faces. All she could see was their hands—the driver’s powerful paws gripping the wheel, and his accomplice’s hairy ones holding his rifle.

  She lay back down again. One of the men was black, with a tattoo of a tiger on his wrist, and one was white. It didn’t really tell her anything. It didn’t even tell her if they were the same men who had shot her grandfather and the two giraffes.

  A lightbulb went on in her head. What if the clue lay not with the men but with the giraffe?

  From what Tendai said, the police and everyone at Sawubona had always assumed that the poachers had been after ordinary giraffes, mainly because it was ordinary giraffes that had been found dead, and most people believed that the white giraffe was only a legend. But what if they had been trying to catch the white giraffe instead? That would change everything.

  Martine wriggled deeper into the folds of the stinking tarpaulin. It made total sense. For the poachers to have known of the white giraffe’s existence, they must have had very close links with Sawubona. That meant they were either friends or relatives of someone who worked on the game reserve, or they worked at Sawubona themselves. Martine shivered at the thought of these possibilities. She knew that Alex had befriended her grandfather in the year before he died and had been promised the job of game warden if anything ever happened to him. Alex had also threatened Martine herself, had shot the kudu and found it amusing, and had made it clear that he knew the value of the white giraffe and was very sure it existed.

  But maybe he was too obvious a suspect. In Martine’s mum’s favorite detective show, the villain had never turned out to be the weird postal worker with the limp or the gun enthusiast or the eccentric, wart-ridden spinster. It was always the least obvious person—the clean-cut doctor, the wholesome housewife, or the new vicar.

  The least obvious person at Sawubona was—and Martine felt guilty for even thinking such a thing—Tendai. He claimed he’d been away in the north of the country at the time of the shooting, visiting his relatives. But what if he hadn’t been away at all? What if he’d been right here? What if the reason he didn’t find the poachers’ tracks was because he didn’t want to?

  But no, that didn’t work either, because Martine refused to believe it was true. She would trust Tendai with her life.

  The vehicle slowed. Martine readied herself for the jump. She dreaded to think what would happen if the driver or his gun-toting companion noticed her reflection in the mirror.

  In the end it was easier than she expected, largely because the poachers swerved to avoid a startled springbok and Martine flew over the side. She landed in a clump of dewy, elephant-dung-padded grass, which had the double effect of cushioning her fall and quickly obscuring her from view. It did not, however, improve the fragrance of her jeans. By the time she had established that her left leg was bruised rather than broken, all that remained of the poachers was the fading drone of their engine. She checked around her for animals in search of breakfast. She was not, as she’d hoped, close to the house, but she could see the faint outline of the Sawubona sign and knew that she was close to the road.

  With dawn unfurling like a scarlet banner above her head and the birds competing to announce the arrival of another perfect summer’s day, Martine managed a limping jog through the bush to the game gate and was home in under ten minutes. Usually her heart would have been full of the magnificence of the morning and the fizzing freshness of the air, but today all she could think about was the danger Jemmy was in and how close they’d both come to falling victim to the hunters.

  A couple of hours later Martine had showered and put on her uniform, and she was in the process of shoving her jeans to the very back of the washing machine and thinking how nice it was to have the house to herself, when she heard what sounded like a stock car race in the yard. She rushed outside expecting to see her grandmother returning from Somerset West and was confronted instead with an extraordinary sight. Police were spilling out of two squad cars. But that wasn’t what stopped her in her tracks. In the center of the lawn, roped together like the bad guys in a cowboy film, were the poachers. Their ski masks were gone and their faces were as sour as milk, but there was no mistaking them.

  Tendai, Alex, and her grandmother were in a huddle in the driveway, talking intently, but they broke apart when Martine walked up.

  “Martine, thank goodness you’re okay,” said Gwyn Thomas, rushing forward. Her overnight bag and car keys were still on the lawn where she’d dropped them. “I’ve just arrived home to find police swarming all over Sawubona. Alex here has managed, almost single-handedly, to catch the poachers who have been plaguing us for nearly two years.”

  “Alex?” Martine burst out before she could stop herself.

  Her grandmother gave her a reproachful look. “Yes, Alex,” she said. “In an act of extraordinary bravery, he shot out the poachers’ front tires as they left the game reserve. Then he radioed for help and managed to pin one of the men to the ground until Tendai could get there and assist him to catch the other.”

  “It was nothing, ma’am,” said the game warden. “That’s what you hired me for. I just wish I could have done it sooner.” He put his arm around the Zulu’s shoulders and said warmly, “But I couldn’t have done it at all without Tendai’s help.”

  Martine caught Tendai’s eye, but he looked away quickly.

  Her grandmother glanced at her watch. “We’d better get you to school, Martine,” she said. “If you collect your things, I’ll take you in myself.”

  Martine, who in the space of ten hours had ridden a white giraffe, escaped from men with guns, and seen her destiny written on a cave wall, was struggling to cope with this unexpected turn of events, but she went crossly back to the house to collect her lunch box and backpack. Alex, the hero! How sickening. How maddening. Was it really possible that she’d been mistaken about that strawberry-blond troll?

  She was on the kitchen step when footsteps pounded up behind her. “Martine,” called Alex. “Wait up.”

  Martine turned with a scowl, but the arrogance that usually marred Alex’s face had been replaced by a puppyish eagerness.

  “Martine,” he said, “I owe you a huge apology. Over the past year I’ve become so obsessed with catching the people who were stealing your grandmother’s animals that at times it’s clouded my judgment. I don’t know what came over me the day I drove you to school. Threatening you like that—it was unforgivable. But I was worried that a stranger to Sawubona, someone not familiar with the wildlife, might get in the way of my investigation. All I can say is I’m sorry. If there’s anything I can do to make it up to you, let me know.” He reached into his pocket and brought out an exquisite kingfisher feather. “Peace offering? ” he asked.

  Martine accepted it grudgingly but didn’t answer. She was remembering the bullet splitting the tree above Tendai’s head and the haunting eyes of the fallen kudu.

  Alex’s mouth gave a twist. “Yeah, I know what you’re thinking. The kudu: Why did I shoot it? Believe me, it hurt me to do it. But I’d become suspicious of everyone by then and it was a test. I wanted to see how Tendai would react. And he reacted the way a man who cares about animals should react. So he was in the clear. But you never know in this game. When there’s a lot of money at stake, even the best can be tempted.”

  Martine wasn’t convinced, but then she didn’t not believe him either. She decided that the best way forward was to trust nobody and say nothing. After the night’s adventures, one thing was perfectly clear: She and Jemmy were on their own.

  17

  It was late summer in South Africa
. More than a month had gone by since Martine had first met Jemmy and in that time her life had changed beyond imagining. in that time her life had changed beyond imagining. Not that it had all been easy. After her flight from the Secret Valley, nine agonizing days had passed before she caught so much as a glimpse of the white giraffe, and then it had been so dark and the vision of him so fleeting that she sensed he was there rather than saw him. Naturally, her grandmother had chosen that very evening to embark on an all-night session with the game reserve accounts and there was absolutely no chance of Martine sneaking out undetected. She just had to sit in her room and fume.

  By the tenth day she was ready to tear her hair out. It didn’t help that ever since the incident at the Botanical Gardens, the Five Star Gang had tormented her. They put chocolate on her chair so that when she stood up she had a brown sticky mess all over her uniform. It happened at nine a.m., which meant Martine had to spend the rest of the day being snickered at by the whole school. She found umthakathi and witch scrawled all over her books, and on another occasion she opened her pencil case to find a hairy baboon spider—an African tarantula—lurking inside. Martine screamed so loudly that Miss Volkner immediately banned her from speaking for the rest of the day.

  Not that that was very difficult. After what had happened at Kirstenbosch, few children talked to Martine anyway. The Five Star Gang had turned them against her. And Ben, to whom she would have liked to speak, remained a mystery. When he passed her on the way to class, his mouth curled up at the edges as if he was happy to see her, but he never spoke. Even after he rescued her, he hadn’t said a word. And at recess he no longer sat under the far tree in the playing fields but took himself away to some unknown location.

  All these things conspired to make Martine feel tearful and lonely again, even though she was getting along much better with her grandmother. With the white giraffe gone, the emptiness she’d felt after losing her mum and dad returned. What if Jemmy was caught in a snare? What if he, too, was gone forever? Oh, why hadn’t she spent any time trying to teach him some sort of signal so that she could call him?

  She scoured the books in her bedroom and in the school library for more information on giraffes, hoping to learn something that might help her, but the only new fact she came across was that the Romans had called the giraffe camelopardalis, meaning “camel marked like a leopard,” which was interesting but of no use at all.

  Then, out of the blue, she had a brainstorm. It happened when she came across a book on dogs on her bookshelf. In his youth, her grandfather had apparently been a very fine dog trainer and there was a jade box on top of the cabinet in the living room containing three of his old dog whistles. In a rare moment of sharing, her grandmother had told her that one of the whistles was completely silent to the human ear because it was pitched at a frequency that only dogs could hear.

  But what if giraffes could hear it too?

  That night, Martine crept out to the garden and experimented with the silent whistle. For nearly an hour she blew and blew, but nothing happened. Martine stood shivering and frustrated under the mango trees, convinced that she’d never see Jemmy again. Then, a miracle. The white giraffe came striding out of the darkness and stood beside the skeleton tree. Martine did a double take. She’d imagined seeing him again so many times that she wondered for a second if she’d conjured him up. But he was real. Not only that, he was looking right at her, just as he had done on the night of the storm.

  Martine didn’t even pause to check for lions or leopards. She just went tearing through the game park gate and running and stumbling along the water hole track, sending all manner of night creatures fleeing for their lives. When she reached the giraffe he lowered his head and she flung her arms around his neck with such enthusiasm that he snorted with alarm and backed off a little, even though he was obviously just as pleased to see her. “Jemmy,” said Martine, “thank you for coming back to me.”

  In her fantasies, she’d always followed this moment by hopping on the white giraffe’s back and being whisked away to the Secret Valley, but in real life Jemmy was an untamed animal as tall as your average tree, and Martine knew as much about training wildlife as she did about riding a unicycle on a high wire at a circus, so there were one or two practicalities to overcome.

  She found, for instance, that there really was such a thing as beginner’s luck. The first time she rode Jemmy he stood quietly beside a tree and allowed her to climb onto his back, but this concept seemed to have vanished from his mind entirely. Now when she attempted it, Jemmy waited until she was suspended between the tree and his back before spying some juicy acacia leaves and moving away. Martine had to improvise a sort of flying dive and latch on to his neck. There she dangled until her arms nearly came out of their sockets. At that point, she tumbled the very long way to the ground.

  Jemmy didn’t understand what he’d done, but he made his low, musical fluttering sound and nuzzled her with his silver nose until Martine forgot about the pain in her backside and remembered how much she adored him. I have to be patient, she told herself. She also tried to put herself in his position. If she were a giraffe and someone rubbed the back of her forelegs and tugged gently on her knees, she figured that eventually she’d understand that they wanted her to lie down. So she experimented with Jemmy and, after some trial and error, he did. And before the night was over, Martine was flying through the moonlight again on the back of a young giraffe.

  That was only the start of it, though, because she then had to learn to steer Jemmy and stop him. It didn’t happen overnight and there were several close calls over the next few weeks while they got to know each other—once the giraffe shied away from a bristling porcupine and Martine was nearly impaled on its black and white spines—but through it all Jemmy was gentle and loving and when he did grasp what she was trying to teach him, he grasped it completely, and it was as if he’d always known it.

  For Martine, it was then that the door opened on the real Africa, the hidden Africa; the Africa that few human beings apart from the Bushmen ever witnessed. Those nights with Jemmy were the most magical of Martine’s life. It was rare for the other animals to notice her, and those that did seemed to accept her as an extension of the white giraffe. Safe on Jemmy’s high back, she was able to watch baby warthogs play and move close enough to elephants to touch their parched, grooved skin. Once, when Jemmy was drinking from a lake as black as ink, she found herself just yards from a party of bubble-blowing hippos. With their tubby bodies, piggy eyes, and tiny ears, hippos were among the cutest creatures in the wild, but they were also among the most lethal. Their huge pink jaws could bite boats as well as people in half—and frequently did—so Martine took special care to stay still and respectful whenever she was anywhere near them.

  But her favorite thing was to ride the white giraffe up the escarpment where she and Tendai had had breakfast, swivel around so she could use his withers as a pillow and his hindquarters as a footrest, lie back, and gaze at the canopy of stars. So clear and cold were the nights, with summer sliding into autumn, that she was able to see the Southern Cross and Orion’s Belt and even Mars, glowing red in the navy blue sky.

  Sometimes she talked to Jemmy about what had happened to her. About the night of the fire and how scared and heartbroken she’d been. About her mum and dad and how much she missed them. About school and her struggles to fit in. About the Egyptian goose and the kudu, and the strangeness of her gift. Jemmy’s ears flicked back and forth and he made his musical fluttering sound, and somehow she felt that in his giraffe way he understood everything and she felt comforted.

  The whistle, it turned out, worked perfectly. Jemmy always responded to it if he could hear it, although how long it took depended on where he was in the reserve. Martine took to wearing the whistle around her neck, even at school, because it made her feel close to Jemmy. It also meant that she didn’t have to hunt for it when she went sneaking out to see him late at night. But as much as she missed him, she was very careful
to vary the hours when she called him and never to do it more than twice a week. She was well aware that each time she went into the reserve she was taking a risk.

  Still she continued to get away with it and she managed to persuade herself—mainly because she wanted more than anything for it to be true—that she and Jemmy could go on like this forever.

  18

  A part from her mum and dad, the person Martine thought more about than any other on those star-flung nights was Grace. It was Grace, she was convinced, who held the key to the questions she had about her gift. She hadn’t forgotten the African woman’s wonderful food, nor how warm Grace was to her on that traumatic first day and how determined she’d been that Martine should know the truth about the secrets at Sawubona. Yet Martine hadn’t seen her since. Once or twice she’d considered skipping school to try to find her, but she wasn’t sure where Grace lived and Tendai refused to be part of it.

  “Your grandmother would not like it,” was his last word on the subject.

  Later that same evening—at half past midnight, to be precise—Martine thought how much less Gwyn Thomas would like it if she could see her granddaughter crouched low over the neck of a white giraffe as he galloped at full speed for the black mountain that marked Sawubona’s boundary. She was going in search of answers. If Tendai and her grandmother weren’t going to tell her anything about the past, and if she was banned from seeing Grace, who possibly could, then she would find the information for herself in the only place she could think of to look: the Secret Valley.

  It was a balmy night. The wind in her face was pungent with the smell of the bush, and the moon was a bold yellow sliver. As she rode, she remembered a wonderful Bushman legend she heard from Samson, the old man who cared for the animals in Sawubona’s orphanage. In the story, the moon was a man who had angered the sun. Every month, when the moon was full, the jealous sun would take his knife and cut away a piece of him until only a thin slice remained. The moon would plead for that piece to be left for his children. His wish granted, he would build himself up again until he was once more prosperous and whole.