by Wilbur Smith
In one endeavour she could not match him, although she tried with all her determination and often came close to doing so. This was in shooting. On Sunday afternoons after dinner, Jim set up targets at fifty, a hundred and a hundred and fifty paces. Louisa shot with her little French rifle, while he used one of the pair of heavier London guns. The trophy was the bushy tail of a giraffe, and the winner of this weekly competition was entitled to hang the tail on the front of his or her wagon for the rest of the week. During the rare weeks that Louisa had that honour, Smallboy, the driver of her wagon, strutted, preened and fired his great whip more often, and with more force, than was necessary for the encouragement of the ox team.
Gradually Louisa developed such a sense of pride and fulfilment in the running of the camp and the ordering of their existence, and came to derive so much pleasure from Jim’s companionship, that the dark memories of her old life began to recede. The nightmares became less frequent and terrifying. Slowly she regained the sense of fun and the enjoyment of life that more suited her age than defensiveness and suspicion.
Riding out together one afternoon they came upon a tsama vine in full fruit. The green and yellow striped melons were the size of a man’s head. Jim filled his saddlebags with them, and when they returned to the wagons he cut one into thick wedges. “One of the delicacies of the wilderness.” He handed her a piece, and she tasted it gingerly. It was running with juice, but the flavour was bland and only slightly sugary. To please him, Louisa pretended to enjoy it.
“My father says that one of these saved his life. He had been lost for days in the desert, and would have died of thirst had he not chanced upon a tsama vine like this one. Isn’t it tasty?”
She looked at the pale yellow pith that filled the shell, then up at him. Unexpectedly she was filled with a girlish mischief she had not known since before the death of her parents.
“What are you grinning at?” Jim demanded.
“This!” she said, leaned across the camp table and mashed the soft wet fruit into his face. He gaped at her in astonishment as juice and the yellow flesh dripped off his nose and chin. “Isn’t it tasty?” she asked, and dissolved into peals of laughter. “You look so silly!”
“We shall see who looks even more silly.” Jim recovered, and snatched up the remains of the melon. She squealed with alarm, leaped up from the table and ran. Jim pursued her through the camp brandishing the melon, with pips in his hair and juice down his shirt.
The servants were astounded as Louisa dodged and ducked around the wagons. But she was weak with laughter and at last Jim caught her, pinned her against the side of a wagon with one hand and took aim with the other.
“I am mortally sorry,” she gasped. “Please forgive me. I am abject. It will not happen again.”
“No! It will never happen again,” he agreed. “I’ll show you what will happen if it does.” He gave her the same treatment, and by the time he had finished she had yellow melon in her hair and eyelashes, and in her ears.
“You are a beast, James Archibald!” She knew how he hated that name. “I hate you.” She tried to glare at him, but burst into laughter again. She raised one hand to strike him, but he caught her wrist and she stumbled against him.
Suddenly neither of them was laughing. Their mouths were so close that their breath mingled and there was something in her eyes that he had not seen before. Then she began to tremble and her lips quivered. The emotion he had seen faded and was replaced with terror. He knew that all the servants were watching them.
With an effort he released her wrist and stepped back, but now his laughter was breathless. “Beware, wench. Next time it will be a cold slimy lump of melon down the back of your neck.”
The moment hung precariously, for she was on the edge of tears. Bakkat saved them by breaking into a pantomime of their contest. He picked up the remains of the melon and hurled it at Zama. The drivers and voorlopers joined in, and melon rind flew in all directions. In the uproar Louisa slipped away to her wagon. When she emerged later she was demure in a fresh frock, her hair in long plaits. “Would you like a game of chess?” she asked, not looking into his eyes.
He checkmated her in twenty moves, then doubted the merit of his victory. He wondered if she had purposely allowed him to win, or whether she had merely been distracted.
The next morning Jim and Louisa, with Bakkat, rode out before dawn, taking their breakfast with them tied in the canteens behind their saddles. Only an hour ahead of the wagons, they stopped to water the horses and eat their breakfast beside a small stream that meandered down from the line of lightly forested hills that lay across their path.
They sat opposite each other on fallen logs. They were shy and subdued, unable to meet each other’s eyes. The memory of the moment from the previous day was still vivid in their minds, and their conversation was stilted and overly polite. After they had eaten, Louisa took the canteens down to the stream to wash them while Jim resaddled the horses. When she came back he hesitated before helping her to step up into Trueheart’s saddle. She thanked him more profusely than the small act called for.
They rode up the hill, Bakkat leading the way on Frost. As he reached the crest he wheeled Frost back off the skyline, and raced towards them, his face contorted with some strong emotion, his voice reduced to an unintelligible squeak.
“What is it?” Jim shouted at him. “What have you seen?” He seized Bakkat’s arm and almost yanked him out of the saddle.
Bakkat found his voice at last. “Dhlovu!” he cried, as though in pain. “Many, many.”
Jim threw his reins to Bakkat, jerked the small-bore rifle from its sheath and sprang out of the saddle. He knew better than to show himself on the skyline and stopped below the crest to gather himself. Excitement had clamped down on his chest and he could hardly breathe. His heart seemed on the point of leaping out of his mouth. Yet he still had the good sense to check the direction of the breeze: he picked a few blades of dry grass, shredded them between his fingers, and studied the drift of the tiny fragments. It was favourable.
Suddenly he felt Louisa’s presence close beside him. “What is it, Jim?” She had not understood the word Bakkat had used.
“Elephant!” Jim could barely enunciate the magical word.
She stared at him for only a moment, then her eyes flared like sunlight in blue sapphire. “Oh, Jim! Show me!”
Even in the turmoil that had overwhelmed him, he was grateful she was there to share something he knew, deep in his heart, would stay with him all his days. “Come!” he said, and, quite naturally, she took his hand. Despite all that had gone between them, this trusting gesture came as no surprise to him. Hand in hand they went to the crest of the hill and looked over.
Below them lay a vast bowl of land hemmed about with hills. It was carpeted with new growth, freshly sprung after the recent rains on ground that had been burned by grass-fires during the dry season. It was green as an English meadow, and scattered with clumps of tall mahoba-hoba trees, and copses of thornbush.
Spread out in the bottom of the bowl, alone or in small herds, were hundreds of elephant. For Jim, who had imagined this first encounter so many times and in so many ways, the reality far outweighed all his fantasy. “Oh, sweet Mary!” he whispered. “Oh, God, oh, beloved God!”
She felt his hand shaking in hers and tightened her grip. She recognized this as a seminal moment in his life and suddenly she was proud to be beside him, to share it with him. It seemed that this was her place: as though she had at last found where she belonged.
He could see at once from their relative size that most of the elephant herds consisted of females and their young. They formed grey agglomerations like reefs of granite, and the shapes of the herds changed only slowly, coming together, then flowing apart again. In all this mass of animals the great bulls stood apart and aloof, massive dark shapes, even at this remove dominating the herds that surrounded them, unmistakable in their majesty.
Close below where Jim and Louisa stood o
ne particular animal made all the others seem insignificant. Perhaps it was merely the way the sunlight played upon him, but he was darker than any other. His ears were spread like the mainsail of a ship, and he fanned them with a lazy, flapping motion. With each movement the sun caught the curve of a huge tusk, and shot a ray towards them like the reflection of a mirror. Once the bull reached down with his trunk, and gathered up the dust at his feet and threw it back over his head and shoulders in a pale cloud.
“He is so big!” Louisa whispered. “I never expected them to be that size.”
Her voice roused Jim from his trance of wonder, and he looked back to see Bakkat hovering close behind him.
“I have only this small-bore gun with me.” Jim had left the two big German four-to-the-pounders with the wagons. They were awkward weapons to carry and handle and, having been so often disappointed, he had not expected to run into elephant today, and certainly not in such numbers. He regretted the oversight now, but he knew it would be folly to use the little London rifle he had with him against a creature endowed with such bulk of muscle and sinew, such massive bone structure. Only with great luck could he hope to send such a light ball into its vitals.
“Ride back, Bakkat, as fast as Frost will carry you, and bring the two big guns to me with the powder flask and shot-belt.” No sooner had Jim finished speaking than Bakkat was up on Frost and going back down the hill at a mad gallop. They did not watch him go, but Jim and Louisa crept forward, using a small bush to break up their silhouette as they crossed the skyline. On the far slope they found a clump of thorny acacia that offered concealment, and settled among the fluffy branches and yellow blossom, sitting side by side while Jim focused his telescope on the great bull below them.
He gasped aloud, amazed at the animal’s enhanced size when seen through the lens, and he stared in awe at the length and thickness of those shafts of ivory. Although he had not yet had his fill of such a magnificent sight he passed the glass to Louisa. By now she had learned to use it with expertise, and she trained it on the great animal. But after only a few minutes her attention was diverted to the playful antics of a group of calves further on: they were squealing and chasing each other through the forest.
When Jim saw the direction of the telescope wandering away from the patriarch he was strongly inclined to take it out of Louisa’s hands and continue his study of the bull. Then he saw the tender smile on her face as she watched the calves at play, and he restrained himself. This in itself was a mark of his feelings for her: he was almost consumed by the hunter’s passion and his heart beat hotly for the chase.
Then, to his delight, the bull left the shade of the mahoba-hoba tree and started ambling up the slope directly towards where they sat. He placed his hand on Louisa’s shoulder to warn her. When she lowered the telescope he put a finger to his lips and pointed at the approaching bull.
Louisa’s expression changed to awe as it drew closer, and loomed larger. Even in broad daylight there was something ghostly and unnerving about the utter silence of its walk: it placed its feet with a precision and grace disproportionate to its size, and the huge spongy pads absorbed all sound. The trunk hung slackly, almost to the ground and only the tip unrolled and touched the earth, picking up a leaf or a seed pod with an extraordinary dexterity that matched human fingers, toying with it then tossing it aside.
Closer still, they could see clearly that its one visible eye was set in a web of deep grey wrinkles, like the concentric rings of a spider’s web. A wet stain of tears ran from one corner down its weathered cheek, but the eye gleamed with a sheen of intelligence and sagacity. With every few slow strides the tip of one of those long tusks touched the ground and left a tiny furrow in the earth.
Closer it came until it seemed to fill the sky above them, and they held their breath, expecting to be trodden on or at least stabbed through by a thrust from one of those gleaming ivory shafts. Louisa stirred, ready to spring up and run, but Jim tightened his grip on her shoulder and restrained her.
The bull was making a deep rumble in his throat and belly, which sounded like distant thunder. Louisa trembled in sympathy, excitement mingling with dread. Slowly, so as not to alarm the animal, Jim raised the little rifle to his shoulder and looked over the sights at the great grey head. Beside him he felt Louisa stiffen in anticipation of the shot. Then he remembered all that his father had told him, where to aim for a shot to the brain.
“But only a fool and a braggart tries that shot,” Tom had told him.
“’Tis such a tiny mark to hit in the huge bony castle of the skull. The true hunter makes certain of the kill. He uses a heavy bore that throws a weighty ball, and he shoots for the shoulder, for the heart and the lungs.”
Jim lowered the rifle, and beside him Louisa relaxed. The elephant passed their hiding-place with its stately stride, and fifty paces further on it reached a small gwarrie tree, began to strip its purple berries and lift them fastidiously to its mouth. When the withered, baggy rump was turned towards them, Jim rose cautiously and led Louisa back over the ridge. He picked out the feather of dust coming towards them from the direction of the wagons, and the pale shape of Frost at full gallop.
As Bakkat came up, Jim said, “That was quick work, and well done.” He snatched one of the great guns from his hand before Bakkat had a chance to dismount. Quickly he examined the weapon. It was unloaded and thick with grease, but the flint was new and well shaped. Quickly he set about loading. He rammed the huge, glistening ball down the barrel. At four ounces, it was almost twice the size of a ripe grape. It had been rendered adamantine by the addition of pewter to the molten lead. When it was seated firmly on the wad and the heavy charge of black powder, he looked to the priming, then exchanged the weapon for the second of the pair Bakkat held out to him. When both were loaded, he said, “There is a magnificent bull feeding close by, just over yonder ridge. I will attack him on foot but as soon as you hear my shot, bring up Drumfire and the second gun with all speed.”
“What must I do?” Louisa asked, and he hesitated. His instinct was to send her back to the wagons, but he knew that would be unfair. She should not be deprived of the excitement and adventure of this first chase after the mighty beasts. More importantly, she would probably refuse to obey him, and he did not have time now for an argument he would almost certainly lose. On the other hand he could not leave her here. He knew, from vivid accounts that his father had given him, that once the first shot was fired the bush would be swarming with panic-stricken beasts running in all directions. If one came upon her when she was unprotected she would be in mortal danger. “Follow us, but not too closely. You must keep me or Bakkat in sight at all times, but you must also keep a watchful eye all around you. Elephant might come from any direction, even from behind. But you can rely on Trueheart to carry you out of danger.”
He drew back the hammer of the big gun to half-cock, ran to the crest of the ridge, and peered over. Nothing had changed in the time since he had last seen the bull. He was still feeding quietly on the gwarrie tree, facing away from Jim. The herds below were resting, or feeding quietly, and the young calves were still frolicking around the legs of their dams.
Jim paused only to check the direction of the breeze once more. He felt its cool, light touch on his sweaty face, but he took a few moments to dribble a handful of dust through his fingers. The breeze was still steady and in his favour. He knew that there was little reason for concealment now. The eyesight of the elephant is poor, and they are unable to distinguish the form of a man at fifty paces, as long as he remains motionless. On the other hand, their sense of smell is phenomenal.
With the breeze in his favour, and stepping lightly, Jim crept up behind the feeding bull. His father’s words came back to him: “Close. Always get as close as you can. Every yard you close with the quarry makes the kill more certain. Thirty paces is too far. Twenty is not as good as ten. Five paces is perfect. From that range your ball will drive to the heart.”
As he drew in closer
Jim’s steps slowed. It was as though his legs were filling with molten lead. His breath became laboured, and he felt as though he was suffocating. The gun in his hands was becoming heavier. He had not expected to be afraid. I have never been scared before, he thought, and then, well, perhaps just a little, sometimes.
Closer and still closer. Then he remembered he had forgotten to fully cock the hammer of the big gun. He was so close that the bull would hear the click of the mechanism, and take fright. He hesitated, and the animal moved. With that ponderous, deliberate stride it began to circle the gwarrie tree. Jim’s heart jumped against his ribs as its flank was exposed to him, and he could make out the outline of the massive shoulder-blade beneath the riven, creased hide. It was just as his father had drawn it for him. He knew exactly where to aim. He lifted the butt to his shoulder, but the bull kept moving round the tree, until its shoulder was covered by the twisted branches and thick, shiny green foliage. It stopped on the far side of the bush from him, and began to feed again. It was so close that Jim could see the individual bristles in its ear, and the thick, matted eyelashes surrounding the knowing little eye that seemed so incongruous in the ancient, mountainous head.
“Only a fool and a braggart shoots for the brain,” his father had warned him, but the shoulder was covered and he was so close. Surely he could not miss from this range. First he had to fully cock the rifle. He placed his hand over the action, trying to muffle it, and he inched back the engraved steel hammer. He felt the moment when the sear was about to engage and bit his tongue as he concentrated on easing it through that last fraction of the arc.