The White Giraffe

by Lauren St. John

  “Jemmy!” sobbed Martine. “Oh, Jemmy. What have I done to you?”

  Jemmy raised his head at the sound of her voice. His eyes were dull and empty.

  Martine fell on her knees beside the container. “Jemmy, please don’t die. I love you so much.”

  The white giraffe flopped down again and his eyelids drooped. His breathing was shallow. Martine slid back bolts on the cage door and knelt down beside him. She began to stroke his face and neck, feeling again the now familiar tingle.

  “Please wake up, Jemmy. Please.”

  There was no response.

  Martine closed her eyes and put her hands on the white giraffe’s heart. Unbidden, Technicolor memories of their time together came flooding into her mind. Of the evening she first saw him, standing in the storm, shimmering against the night sky. Of the unforgettable moment when he rested his head on her shoulder. Of lying on his back high up on the escarpment, staring at the Milky Way. Of their exhilarating rides among the hippos, elephants, and lions of Sawubona.

  Through it all, Martine was aware of her hands becoming hotter and hotter and a pure feeling, like love, flowing through her.

  A huge shudder went through Jemmy’s body. He gave a great gasping breath, as if trying to reclaim the life that had nearly been taken from him. His eyes opened at the same time as Martine’s. The light came back into them and Martine knew in that moment that he still loved her and still had faith in her.

  Martine pressed her face against his velvety shoulder and gave him a kiss. She sat up. Fingers trembling, she fumbled in the pouch for one of the bottles that Grace had given her on the night they’d met in the cave. “For bleedin’ or to numb any pain,” she’d instructed. Privately, Martine had resolved never to use it. It was the most alarming color, and the smell of it—somewhere between minced-up frogs and Brussels sprouts—made her want to vomit. But right now she had very few options. She knew she had the power to heal, but she wasn’t yet sure how much her gift could do. She’d gotten the impression from what had happened with the kudu that she still needed the help of traditional medicine in certain situations. Martine didn’t know how badly injured Jemmy was or even if he was capable of walking, but she did know that they had no chance of getting out of the shipyard unless he could gallop. She removed the cork from the bottle and, holding her nose with one hand, daubed the mixture onto his cuts with the other. It sizzled on application.

  The ship gave a lurch that almost sent her flying. She held her watch up to the light. Only six minutes till they sailed.

  Martine was frantic. The mixture would have to work its magic along the way. She stroked the white giraffe urgently. “Jemmy,” she said, “we have to go.” After what seemed an eternity, he lumbered to his feet and stood there swaying. Martine started for the door and breathed a sigh of thanks when he followed her, stumbling a little.

  They were almost at the exit when a glint of gold and black caught Martine’s eye. Leopard cubs! Martine was pretty sure that they, too, had been stolen from Sawubona. They could even be the cubs whose spoor Tendai had shown her at the escarpment. But even if they were, there was no way she could help them now. They were lying in a heap in the corner of their cage, clearly drugged.

  With a last anguished look at the cubs, Martine guided Jemmy through the steel door and into the cargo elevator. It was at least three times the width and depth of a normal elevator, but the giraffe still had to bend his neck. He snorted with alarm. Martine pressed the button for level three and the elevator began to rise. She realized then that she hadn’t thought past the point of rescuing him. With Martine on foot and the white giraffe running fear-crazed around the dockyard, pursued no doubt by men with guns, disaster would quickly follow. She would have to ride him.

  Jemmy was quaking in the clattering, claustrophobic elevator, but he stood quietly when she indicated that she was going to try to mount him. Using the support rail as a foothold and doing everything she could to avoid touching any of the cuts on his neck or shoulders, Martine scrambled onto his back just as the elevator shuddered to a halt. One minute to go. The doors opened. Alex du Preez was standing in front of them, talking on his cell phone.

  “In the end, it was much easier than we thought,” he was saying. “Like taking candy from a baby.”

  He saw Martine and Jemmy at the same moment they saw him. His face went the color of a frozen turkey. He dropped his phone and whirled around. “Raise the gangplank! ” he roared. “Stop them!!”

  “Run, Jemmy!” screamed Martine, but the white giraffe was already in full flight. He swept across the deck, striking Alex a glancing blow with his hoof as he went. Alex dropped like a stone. There was a loud grinding noise and the gangplank began to rise. On the jetty, men were shouting and pointing and tearing across the dockyard from all directions. The ship began to move. Martine’s heart was ready to burst out of her chest, but Jemmy never hesitated. He galloped up the gangplank as it rose and took a flying leap. Martine looked down. There was nothing below them but ocean.

  24

  The first thing Martine noticed when she and Jemmy crashed down onto the jetty was the police cars. They were streaming through the shipyard gates in a blizzard of flashing lights and sirens. The second thing she saw of flashing lights and sirens. The second thing she saw was the path leading up the hill.

  “That way!” she cried.

  Jemmy had stumbled when he landed and then swerved to avoid the guard dogs, and Martine had nearly fallen off. Now she clung hard to his mane and gripped with her legs as he steadied himself and raced up the slope toward the iron gates. They were open, just as Ben had promised. As they galloped through, Martine caught a glimpse of Ben behind the wall. He had an excited grin on his face and he was waving.

  Martine lifted her hand and smiled back. “Thanks, Ben,” she shouted, “I won’t ever forget this.”

  As they left the shipyard it occurred to Martine that she didn’t know the way to Sawubona. Nor had she given any thought to the complicated question of how to ride a wild animal through the traffic in Cape Town. But she needn’t have worried. Jemmy was guided by the instincts of his ancestors to follow the sun on an unerring course for home. He never faltered. He turned away from the city, with its hooting cars and crowded beaches, jumped over a stream, and began to run as if his life depended on it. Which, in a way, it did.

  For the first mile, Martine fully expected the police cars to come screaming over the horizon, but they didn’t. Nothing interrupted the steady thud-thud of the giraffe’s hooves. Apart from a brief pause for a drink when they crossed a rushing river, Jemmy ran without tiring, leaping fences whenever he came to them. Whatever Grace had put in the foul-smelling potion, it had worked a miracle.

  They traveled inland, away from the suburbs and the stormy coast. Sometimes the landscape was nothing more than parched gray desert, with ostriches strutting jauntily through the scrub. At other times, low-slung hills gave way to valleys carpeted in wildflowers, purple mountains of protea, and heathery fynbos, or golden acres of wheat. They traveled so swiftly and so silently that few people saw them go by. And those who did either toppled over in a dead faint, checked their mugs of tea for alcohol content, or carried on about their business with little more than a shake of their head, convinced that their eyes were deceiving them.

  Only when they reached the outskirts of Storm Crossing did Jemmy slow to a walk. The sun was still shining, but a fine misty rain had begun to fall. Martine had learned from Tendai that the Africans called these sunshowers “monkey’s weddings,” although he wasn’t sure why. Ahead of them, Martine could see a crowd of people gathered. As they drew closer, people started coming out of their houses and shops and pointing and clapping, and once or twice Martine thought she heard cheering. She tried to persuade Jemmy to take a different route, but he turned down the main street. From the bakery onward, men, women, and children lined the street three deep. From her lofty perch, Martine could see for hundreds of yards in any direction, but there was no
sign of any festival or passing parade. It was only when a group of little kids began chanting her name that she realized that all the fuss was for her and Jemmy.

  Martine could hardly take it in. They passed a police car parked outside the post office. Alex was glowering in the back in handcuffs, a swollen purple egg on his forehead. He shot Martine a poisonous glance as she went by. A smartly dressed black man, whom Martine recognized from the newspapers as Xhosa Washington’s father, was being led out of the mayor’s office by two constables, protesting his innocence as he went. Behind the police car was Tendai’s jeep. An outraged mewing was coming from inside. The leopard cubs, thought Martine, and she could have wept with gladness.

  The jeep doors opened and Tendai emerged beaming and covered in scratches. When he saw the white giraffe and Martine riding high, he took off his hat and stared in amazement. “The white giraffe,” he said. “So many times, I wished . . . I hoped . . . He’s truly a creature of the gods, little one, like a horse made of stars.”

  Martine smiled down at him, tears of happiness in her eyes. The only thing missing now was her grandmother.

  As if reading her mind, Tendai said, “Your grandmother is waiting at Sawubona for you, little one. She knew your friend would carry you home safely.”

  Martine thanked him and Tendai opened the jeep doors again to deal with the leopard cubs. Later, he would tell her that he’d suspected for a year that Alex was stealing animals from Sawubona, but he’d never come close to proving it.

  “I just didn’t want to believe it,” he confided to Martine.

  After Alex’s arrest, detectives found that he was the mastermind of a massive poaching operation that had lasted nearly three years. During that time, he and his accomplices—one was Xhosa Washington’s father, the mayor, who had processed the export licenses—had sent hundreds of animals, many of them rare, to collectors around the world, the main culprit being a billionaire from Kazakhstan. He wanted them for his private safari park. There, they were hunted and eaten at exotic feasts, or stuffed, and their heads and skins used to decorate his mansion walls. The poachers Alex had heroically caught at Sawubona were a rival gang that he was only too pleased to get rid of. He certainly hadn’t done it to protect the animals.

  When questioned, Alex was adamant that Martine’s grandfather’s death at Sawubona had been an accident, claiming that a gun had discharged when Henry was wrestling with another member of the gang. He insisted he’d patched Henry up as best he could before fleeing with the other men. He also said that he had taken the job at Sawubona in an “attempt to put things right.” How Martine laughed when she heard that.

  It would be some time, however, before any of this was known, and for now all Martine was aware of was that Jemmy and the leopard cubs were safe. She smiled so much, her cheeks hurt. When she caught sight of the Van Heerden twins ducking red-faced into an alleyway, embarrassed, no doubt, by the part she suspected they’d played in helping to steal the silent whistle, she began to laugh out loud.

  What a difference a day makes, she thought to herself.

  It was almost sundown by the time Jemmy turned in to the sandy road that led to Sawubona. Doves were cooing in the thorn trees and the air smelled the way it had on Martine’s very first evening at the game reserve—of cooking fires, wild animals, and herby earth and trees. The fading sky was threaded with gold. Ahead of them was a perfect rainbow. It arched over Gwyn Thomas’s thatched house and ended in the game park, close to the water hole. Martine had a lump in her throat. She and Jemmy had been through so much together. He was her best friend and her loyal protector, and she loved him more than anything else on the planet. But he needed his freedom. Once again, she was going to have to let him go.

  When she reached the game park gate nearest to the house, Martine put her arms around Jemmy’s neck and he lowered her to the ground. “Good-bye, my beautiful friend,” she said. “I’ll miss you.”

  But Jemmy refused to leave. He made his musical fluttering sound and pushed his nose against Martine’s chest. She ran her hand over his silken mane and cinnamon-tinted patches. “I’ll always be here if you need me, I promise, ” she said tenderly. “But right now you need some rest, and for that you need to go home to the Secret Valley.”

  Martine watched the white giraffe gallop away through the reserve until she could no longer see him. He’d be back, she was sure of it. She resumed her walk to the thatched house, where her grandmother was waiting.

  As she approached the gate, she saw Grace. The sangoma was seated on a tree stump in her indigo, yellow, and burnt honey dress, wearing a matching headdress. She gave a pink-gummed smile, stretched out her arms, and swept Martine to her breast for an ecstatic squeeze. “You done well, chile. The forefathers, they be very proud of you,” she said.

  The last remaining dark cloud lifted from Martine’s heart. “Thank you, Grace,” she panted when she managed to extricate herself. “But I still feel very ashamed. I let everyone down. Jemmy trusted me and I behaved so stupidly.”

  “We arl make mistakes, chile. That’s human. But not everybody has the courage to admit what they done and go out into the world to try to mend things. You be very brave. Like I told you, the gift can be a curse, not just a blessin’. When all was said and done, you made your decisions wisely.”

  “But Grace, surely this wasn’t the reason I was chosen?” asked Martine. “I mean, I know I managed to save Jemmy, but it was my fault he was stolen in the first place.”

  “You’re right, chile,” replied Grace. “This ain’t the task that you been chosen for. This be a test, nothin’ more. There be many, many challenges to come. You will travel to the ends of the earth and have a whole lotta adventures before you’re done.

  “This is not the end, you see. This is only the beginning. ”

  Author’s Note

  I’ll start with a confession. Until a couple of years ago I had never, in quite a long career as a journalist and biographer, entertained the idea of writing a children’s book, mainly because I’ve never been one of these people who thought that writing a children’s book would be easy.

  Then in December 2004, I was walking along a blustery street in London, England, when out of nowhere an image popped into my head of a girl on a giraffe. When I was a child I actually had a pet giraffe and I thought: Wouldn’t it be the coolest thing on earth to be able to ride a giraffe? And right there on the street the entire story, right down to the girl’s name, Martine, came into my head almost fully formed.

  I went home and wrote it down. I thought: One day when I’m retired, I’ll have a tinker with it. But soon after, I went to Africa for a safari on a game reserve, and the whole time I was there, the book was on my mind. When I returned to London, I was very busy with other projects but I decided that I’d spend a few hours every Saturday writing it. Well, the first Saturday came and I wrote the first chapter. It just came to me like I was watching a movie. After that, I found I couldn’t stop doing it. I put my other projects aside and carried on!

  And it was so much fun. I was writing the novel during a gray, rainy winter in London, but every morning I’d sit down at my computer and think: Where should I go today? And within seconds I could be sitting with, say, Martine and Tendai, the Zulu tracker at Sawubona, enjoying a campfire breakfast on an escarpment, looking down at a herd of buffalo and watching the sun come up over the African bush.

  For me, the best part was being able to revisit the landscape of my childhood. When I was Martine’s age, I lived on a farm, which was part game reserve, in Zimbabwe, which borders South Africa. Apart from our giraffe, Jenny, we had two cantankerous ostriches, a wildebeest, a herd of fifty or sixty impala antelope, and a troop of monkeys. As a family, we were animal crazy and so apart from hordes of cats, dogs, and horses, we were forever adopting stray goats or taking in wild orphans, like our two warthogs, Miss Piggy and Bacon.

  For a long time I wanted to be a veterinarian. I had a “vet kit,” which was full of bandages and syringe
s and various wound treatments that I used to patch up injured birds or antelope or other animals that were carried to our door. My father did a lot of non-emergency animal treatment on the farm, so I learned from him. Plus I read anything I could on the subject. Those experiences helped a great deal when I was thinking about Martine’s gift of healing and the situations in which she might apply it.

  Like Martine, I was fascinated with bushcraft. Because I spent a lot of time alone in the game reserve, I was constantly at risk of being bitten by snakes or chased by ostriches or even devoured by one of the crocodiles in the river beside our house. I was always on the lookout for survival tips. There’s a scene in the book where Martine uses soldier termites to stitch up a wound, and that’s something I’ve actually tried, although using a leaf rather than a living creature. It works!

  The reason I set the story in Cape Town, South Africa, rather than Zimbabwe, is because I wanted the best of both worlds—the awesome scenery of the Cape, with its ocean and mountains and vineyards, and the savannah of Zimbabwe. In South Africa, real savannah occurs much farther north than I’ve located it, but the best part about being a novelist is that you can move things around! Thus, Storm Crossing, where Martine lives, is a fictional town about two hours from Cape Town, and Sawubona has a mix of savannah and fynbos, a plant kingdom unique to the Cape.

  Grace and Tendai are composites of Africans I’ve known. I sometimes feel that if the only experience a person ever had of Africa was what they saw or heard on the news, they could be forgiven for thinking that the whole continent was mired in disease, famine, and conflict. It is true that large sections of it do suffer from those things, but in between are areas of breathtaking beauty, rare and amazing wildlife, and beautiful, talented, giving people, like Tendai and Grace.