Wilbur Smith - C07 A Time To Die

by C07 A Time To Die(Lit)

  He was faced away from them, his huge ears flapping lazily, the edges torn and tattered, the thick veins twisted and knotted like a nest of serpents beneath the smoother skin behind their wide spread.

  A row of four egrets rode upon his back, perched along his spine, brilliant white in the sunlight with yellow bils, sitting hunched up but attentive, bright-eyed sentinels who would warn the old bull of the first sign of danger.

  While he was in the water, there was no way they could come at him, and he was well over three hundred yards away, far beyond effective rifle shot. So they watched him from the treetop as he made his slow, majestic Way across the channel toward the next island.

  When Tukutela reached the deepest stretch of open water, he submerged completely; only his trunk rose above the surface, waving and coiling in the air like the head of a sea serpent. He emerged on the far side of the channel with water streaming down his dark mountainous sides.

  Standing together on the branch of the fig, Riccardo and Sean were savoring this high point in both their hunting experiences.

  Never again would there be another elephant like this. No other man would ever gaze upon such a beast. He was theirs. It seemed they had waited a lifetime for this moment. The hunter's passion eclipsed all other emotion, rendering everything else in their lives effete and tasteless. Here was something primeval, sprung from the very wells of the soul, and it affected them as great music might affect others.

  The old bull lifted his head and turned aside for a moment, affording them just a brief glimpse of his dark-stained ivory, and they stirred unconsciously, affected by the sight of those long, perfectly curved shafts as by the creation of a Michelangelo or the body of a beautiful woman. At that moment there was nothing else in their universe. They were perfectly in tune, a bond of companionship and shared endeavor welding them together.

  "He's beautiful!" Riccardo whispered.

  Sean did not reply, for there was nothing to add.

  They watched the old bull reach the far island and heave his body from the water, climb the low bank and stand for a moment, tall and gaunt and shining wet in the sun, before he pushed his way into the undergrowth and it swallowed up even his bulk. The egrets were brushed from his back and rose up like snowy scraps of paper in a whirlwind. Sean tapped Riccardo on the shoulder, and he shook himself as though awaking from a dream.

  "We'll cross in the canoe," Sean whispered, and he sent Pumula to bring the craft around the islet.

  They sat flat in the bottom of the mokorro so their heads would not show above the tops of the reeds and propelled themselves across the narrow neck of swamp by pulling on the stems of the papyrus. Soundlessly they slid through the reed beds, and the light breeze held true and steady. Sean felt every light touch of it on his bare shoulders.

  They reached the shore. Sean helped Riccardo out of the canoe, and they pulled it up onto the bank, careful not to make the faintest sound.

  "Check your load," Sean whispered. Riccardo turned the bolt of the Rigby and drew it back just far enough to expose the shining brass cartridge in the chamber. Sean nodded approval and Riccardo closed the bolt silently. They went forward.

  They were forced to move in single file, following the path the bull had opened through the otherwise impenetrable growth.

  Matatu led them a few paces at a time, and then they all froze to listen.

  Suddenly there was4a loud crackling uproar in the bushes just ahead of them, ago they saw the branches sway and toss and shake. Riccardo-swung up the Rigby, but Sean restrained him, grabbing his forearm and pushing the muzzle of the rifle down.

  They stood stonily, staring ahead, hearts pounding, and listened to the old bull feeding. Only thirty paces away he was ripping down branches, swinging his ears back and forth to a leisurely rhythm, rumbling contentedly, and they could not catch even the barest glimpse of gray hide.

  Sean still had hold of Riccardo's arm, and now he drew him onward.

  Step by step they edged through the green press of leaves and vines and drooping branches. Ten paces, and then Sean halted. He eased Riccardo forward, pushing him ahead, and pointed over his shoulder.

  For long seconds Riccardo could make out no details in the jumbled growth and confused shadows. Then the bull flapped his ears again, and Riccardo saw his eye through a hole in the vegetation. It was a small, rheumy eye with the slightly opaque blue cast of age, and tears oozed down the wrinkled cheek below, giving it a look of great wisdom and infinite sorrow.

  That sorrow was contagious. It engulfed Riccardo in a black wave, weighing down his soul and transforming his ardent predatory passion into a devastating sadness and mourning for this life that was about to end. He did not lift his rifle.

  The elephant blinked his eye. The lashes surrounding it were thick and long, and the eye looked deep into Riccardo's own, seemed to pierce his very soul, seemed to mourn for him as he mourned for the old bull. Riccardo did not realize that the evil thing in his brain was once more bending and reshaping reality; he knew only that the sorrow in him was as insupportable as the black oblivion of death.

  He felt Sean tap him lightly between the shoulder blades, screening even that tiny movement from the bull. It was the urgent command to fire, but it was as though Riccardo had left his own body and was hovering just above it, looking down on himself, watching both the man and the beast with death in them and death all about them, and the tragedy engrossed him and robbed him of his will and power to move.

  Once again Sean tapped him. The elephant was fifteen paces away, standing perfectly still, a looming gray shadow in the undergrowth. Sean knew that Tukutela's sudden stillness was the old bull's response to the premonition of danger. He would stand still for only a few seconds longer and then plunge away into the dense undergrowth.

  He wanted to seize Riccardo's shoulder and shake him, he wanted to cry out, "Shoot, man, shoot!" But he was helpless. The slightest movement, the faintest sound would trigger the old bull into flight.

  Then it happened as Sean had known and feared it would. It seemed that Tukutela had been snatched away, had disappeared in a puff of gray smoke. It was impossible such a huge beast could move so quickly and so silently in such dense bush, but he was gone.

  Sean seized Riccardo's arm and pulled him along with him, dragging him after the vanished bull. Sean's face was contorted with rage and dark rage filled his chest and made it difficult for him to breathe. He wanted to vent that rage on Riccardo. He had risked his very LIFE to put him in the position to take this animal, and the man had not even raised his rifle.

  As Sean ran forward, his grip on Riccardo's arm was savage, and he dragged him through dense scrub and thorn, oblivious to his discomfort.

  He was certain Tukutela would try to reach the next island in the chain, and he hoped for another chance at him as he crossed the open channel. He would force Riccardo to take even a long shot, hoping to cripple and slow the bull, so he himself could follow and finish him off.

  Behind him Matatu screamed something unintelligible, a warning, a cry for help perhaps, and Sean came up short and stood listening. Something was happening that was totally unexpected and for which he was unprepared.

  He heard the sudden crash and crackle in the undergrowth and then the wild trumpeting squeal of an enraged elephant, but the sound was from behind him, not the direction in which Tukutela had vanished. For an instant Sean did not understand. Then reality dawned on him and he felt the goose bumps rise on his naked back.

  Tukutela had done something no elephant he knew of had ever done before. The old bull had not fled, but instead had circled downwind of them to get their scent. Even as he stood now, Sean felt the wind touch his naked back like the caress of a treacherous lover, bearing his scent down to where the great bull was rushing through the dense bush, hunting for him.

  "Matatu!" Sean yelled. "Run! Run across the wind!" He shoved Riccardo roughly against the trunk of a towering teak tree.

  "Get up there," he snarled at him. The lo
wer branches were easy to climb, and Sean left him and raced back to protect Matatu.

  He charged headlong through the bush, jumping over fallen logs, his rifle held across' his chest, while the forest rang to the elephant's wild and angry squeals.

  He was closing swiftly, like an avalanche of gray rock. Tukutela rolled through the forest, splitting and bending the smaller trees that stood in his way, seeking out the evil amid smell of humanity, following it down so that once again he could wreak on them the accumulated hatred of his long lifetime.

  Suddenly Matatu darted out of the bush just a few paces ahead of Sean. He would stand to meet any odds with Sean beside him, and now instead of running across the wind as Pumula had done, his instinct had led him directly back to his master's side.

  As he saw him, Sean changed direction in midstride, signaling urgently for Matatu to follow him. He ran a hundred swift paces out to one side, across the wind, trying to deny their scent to Tukutela.

  He stopped and crouched with Matatu beside him. His tactic had been successful. Pumula also must have got out of Tukutela's wind. For the moment Tukutela had lost their scent. The forest was absolutely still, the silence so intense that Sean could hear his Pulse beating in his own head.

  He sensed that the old bull was very close to them, standing as still as they were, listening with ears spread wide, only that long trunk questing for the smell of them. There had never been an elephant like this, he thought, a bull who actively hunted his persecutors. How many times has he been hunted, Sean wondered, how many times has man inflicted hurt upon him that he attacks so fiercely at the first hint of human presence?

  Then there was a sound in the forest, one that Sean had not expected, a human voice raised loudly, and it took him a moment to realize that it was Riccardo Monterro. "Tukutela, the Angry One, now I know why they named you. Tukutela, we are brothers!" he was calling to the elephant. "We are all that is left from another age. Our destiny is linked. I cannot kill you!"

  The bull heard him and squealed again, a sound so loud and high-pitched it was like an auger driven into their eardrums.

  Tukutela charged the sound of the human voice like a gray tank He crashed through the undergrowth, going straight for it, and within fifty yards the scent of man, loathsome and infuriating, filled his head once again and he followed it to its source.

  Riccardo Monterro had made no effort to climb the teak tree where Sean had left him, but had simply leaned against the trunk and closed his eyes. The pain in his head had come upon him as suddenly as the blow of an ax and it blinded him, filling his vision with bursting stars of light. But through the pain he heard the old bull elephant squeal, and the sound filled him with remorse and bitter despair.

  He let the Rigby slip from his hands and fall into the leafy trash at his feet. He reached out his empty hands and staggered blindly to meet the elephant, wanting in some desperate way to placate and make recompense to the great beast, calling to it. "I mean you no harm, we are brothers." Ahead of him the bush crackled and burst open and Tukutela bore down on him like a collapsing cliff of granite.

  Sean raced back to where he had left Riccardo, ducking under branches and bounding over obstacles in his path, hearing the terrifying rush of the bull and the voice of the man just ahead of him.

  "Here!" he screamed. "Here, Tukutela! Come! Come this way!"

  it was an effort to pull the elephant off Riccardo and onto himself, but he knew it would be to no avail. Tukutela had fixed on his victim, and nothing would deter him. He would carry his charge through to the death.

  The center of Riccardo's vision cleared, and he looked through an aperture in his head that was surrounded by shooting white lights and Catherine wheels of spinning fire. He saw Tukutela's vast gray head burst out of the green forest wall above him and the long, stained tusks came over him like the cross ties of a roof about to fall.

  In that moment, the elephant came to embody all the thousands of animals and birds that Riccardo had slaughtered in his lifetime as a hunter. He had a confused notion that the tusks and long trunk poised above him were the symbols of some semi-religious benediction that would absolve him and redeem all the blood he destroyed, had and spilled and all the life he had He reached both hands up to them, joyfully thankfully, and he remembered a phrase from his early religious instruction.

  "Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned," he cried.

  Sean saw the bull's head rear out of the thicket ahead of him. It was facing almost directly away from him, the ears cocked and rolled along the top edge. He heard Riccardo's voice though he could not understand the words, and he realized that he must be almost directly beneath the bull's out thrust tusks and reaching trunk.

  in a single step Sean plunged from his headlong run to a dead stop and threw up the.577 Express rifle. It was the most difficult angle for the brain shot, with the elephant angled away from him and the bulk of its shoulder covering the spinal column.

  The target was no bigger than a ripe apple, and there was no casket of indication of where exacttly in the huge bony skull it lay buried. He had to trust his experience and his instinct. For a moment it seemed as he looked over the open sights of the rifle that he could see into the skull, where the brain seemed to glow like a firefly in the bony depths.

  Without conscious effort his trigger finger tightened as the pip of the foresight covered that glowing spot. The bullet bored through the sponge of bone as though it were air. It cleaved the old bull's brain, and he felt nothing. His passage from full enra to death was a fleeting instant as his legs collapsed and folded under him. He dropped on his chest with an impact that jarred the earth and shook loose the dead leaves from the branches above him. A cloud of pale dust swirled around his massive carcass, and his head dropped forward.

  His right tusk drove into Riccardo Monterro's body, entering his belly a hand's breadth below the sternum of his rib cage, passing through him at the level of his kidneys, and coming out through his spine just at the point where it merged with his pelvis.

  The shaft of ivory Riccardo had coveted and risked both fortune and life to obtain now pinned him to the earth, skewered him as cleanly as a whaler's harpoon. He looked down at the tusk in surprise. There was no pain, no sensation in his lower body, which was twisted up under the bull's coiled trunk, no pain even in his head.

  For a moment his vision was clear and bright as though every thing he looked at were lit by brilliant floodlights. Then it began to fade and darkness closed in upon him. Just before the darkness engulfed him completely, he saw Sean Courtney's face floating before him and heard his voice fading as though he were sinking away into an abyss.

  "Capo, Capo," it echoed in his ears, and Riccardo Monterro made a huge effort and said, "She loves you. Look after my little girl." Then the darkness swallowed him and he saw and heard nothing more, ever again.

  Sean's first impulse was to free Riccardo Monterro's body. He tugged at the tusk that had impaled him, but it was so thick he could not get a fair grip on it. Riccardo's blood was oozing from the terrible wound, and it coated Sean's hands so that he left sticky red prints on the ivory as he strained at it.

  Then he realized the futility of his efforts and stepped back. The full weight of Tukutela's huge head and body was resting on those tusks. After piercing Riccardo's torso the ivory point had gone on to bury itself deep in the soft sandy earth. It would take half a day's work to free the body.

  In death the man and the beast were locked together, and suddenly

  Sean realized how appropriate that was. He would leave them like that.

  First Matatu and then Pumula appeared from out of the forest and stood beside Sean, staring in awe at the grim spectacle.

  "Go!" Sean ordered. "Wait for me at the canoe."

  "The ivory?" Pumula asked diffidently.

  "Go!" Sean repeated, and at the tone of his voice they crept quietly away.

  Riccardo's eyes were wide open. Sean closed them with a gentle stroke of his thumb, then unknotted th
e cotton scarf from around his neck and bound up his jaw to prevent it sagging into an expression of idiocy. Even in death Riccardo Monterro was still a handsome man. Sean leaned against the elephant's head and studied Riccardo's face.

  "it happened at just the right time, Capo. Before the disease turned you into a vegetable, while you still had most of your zest and vigor, and it was a fitting end for a man like you. I'm glad you didn't die between soiled sheets. I only pray I will be as fortunate."

  He laid his hand on one of the tusks and stroked it. It had the texture of jade beneath his fingertips. "We'll leave them for you, Capo," he said. "These tusks will be your headstone. God knows, you paid for them in full."

  He straightened up and followed Riccardo's tracks back into the forest until he found the Rigby lying in the dead leaves. He brought it back and placed it in the crook of Riccardo's right armA warrior should be buried with his weapons," he murmured.

  But there was still something missing. He could not go and leave Riccardo like this. He could not leave him lying exposed to an uncaring sky. He must cover him decently.