CHAPTER TWELVE
The first night Meya spent with the herd, Bat was distraught. For more than five years, the elephant had been his most constant companion. ‘What if they leave her behind? What if they lose her?’ he fretted. ‘What if she’s calling for me and I can’t hear?’ Straining his ears, he listened out in the darkness. Nothing but the shrill of the cicadas, the boom of the frogs came back.
Bitek tried to reassure him. ‘They’ll look after her,’ he soothed. ‘They’ll only have taken her up to the forests. They’ll be teaching her how to follow their paths. If she was going for ever she would have said goodbye to you properly. It won’t be too long before she comes back.’ But Bat couldn’t settle. The next morning he set off for the forest himself, scrambling through the creepers that covered the boulders which had tumbled in ancient times from the escarpment’s great cliff. He climbed further and further through thick spiky branches. The bird song collided with the cackle of monkeys. A troupe of baboons swung by, babies clinging to their backs. They ambled easily through thickets that tore his skin to shreds. A grizzled old male paused and bared his fangs; then, barking, he loped off to catch up with the rest. They vanished into the undergrowth but, when Bat tried to follow them, the wild sisal speared him. Swarms of vicious black tsetse flies alighted and bit. The itching lumps maddened him. He scratched and scratched.
Bat sat down. Big tears of missing welled up in his eyes. It was hopeless, he thought. A butterfly settled on his shoulder; wide as the span of his outspread hand. He watched its red and blue wings slowly opening and closing, its tongue curling and uncurling as it tasted the salt of his sweat. Normally Bat would have smiled at a creature so beautiful; but now he stared drearily. It fluttered away. Rising to his feet, he turned, dejected, and followed his tracks home.
Several days later Meya returned. Bat was in the middle of splitting the firewood so that his grandmother could start cooking when, pausing for a moment to wipe at his brow, he saw something approaching down the track: a grey apparition shambling slowly towards him through the gathering darkness. The panga dropped slack at his side. For a few long moments he waited, suspended without breathing upon a swell of rising hope, before suddenly, recognizing that this was reality, he landed back in the world with a thump. A gasp of sheer happiness was jolted from his lips. He felt light as air. It was as if some great load that for days he had been carrying had all at once been lifted. His panga dropped with a clatter as he ran forward.
Meya was back; she was well; she had come to no harm. He wanted to throw his arms round her, to tuck himself in beside her and hug her as tight as he could, but instead as he ran closer he found himself slowing to a halt. It was as if he was seeing her suddenly through fresh eyes. She was massive. He could hardly imagine that the creature which now rose above him so tall and broad-shouldered and magnificent and strong had once been no more than a tiny crumpled heap in the grass. The last light of the evening gleamed upon her great tusks. And he could feel her new wildness, an invisible barrier around her. She seemed possessed of a strange power that he had never before felt.
Bat thought of old Kaaka who could talk to the spirits. When you met her most days she was just like any other villager, scolding and chattering as she went about her work. Sometimes she would come and sit with his grandmother, squatting in the shade of the mango, swapping stories. Her face would dissolve into laughter when something amused her, all its wrinkles and creases drawn suddenly inwards as if at the tug of some single secret string. But when she was working her magic, calling the souls of lost people to answer her questions, her lined face would simplify into a mask of great strength. She would grow distant and strange. No one would have dared to touch her at those mysterious moments. She was moving through worlds in which ordinary life had no part.
Bat gazed up at Meya and felt suddenly abashed. But even as he hesitated uncertainly before her, waiting for her permission before taking another step, she reached out her trunk and twined it gently about him and, drawn slowly inwards, the boy felt himself relaxing as he was pressed into the crinkled underside of her throat. He gave a deep sigh of contentment. It felt so very familiar. He filled up his nostrils with her rich musky smell.
From then on Bat knew that he could no longer hold Meya; that, although he had reared her, she was a truly wild creature. And now it was he who, for the first time, determined that she should finally go. He would refuse her food when she came to the village, turning his back and ignoring her when her trunk crept towards him, searching his pockets for the treats that she hoped he had hidden. He would slip quietly away once she had met up with the herd and, when she looked back to find him, he would already have left. Later, when he returned to check up on her and she came running to meet him, he would pat her only briefly before pushing her off. Meya was confused; she would look at him quizzically, shaking her head and blinking reproachfully before eventually lumbering back to her companions’ side. Then she would turn to face him, her eyes never leaving him as she watched him walk off. Often, Bat faltered. Occasionally, unable to bear it, he would have to turn back. He would run towards her and fling his arms round her. But little by little he learned to harden his heart. ‘The links in the chain must be broken one by one,’ Bitek said. ‘Like a jackal that crosses the water so that nothing can track it, you must break the trail that leads your elephant back to Jambula. If she is to survive, she must learn that men are not to be trusted. She must look for her safety to the herd alone.’
As the seasons passed, Meya began to stay out longer and longer and her visits to the village became increasingly brief. When she was not there, Bat yearned for her. He would think back to the days when he had curled up beside her, the thump of her heart like the beat of a drum in his blood, and then he would stare into the cook-fire, his calabash of food untouched.
Muka would try to distract him, telling him stories of what the cattle had done, of how Kayo had trapped her foot in a bush-hyrax burrow or Kila’s new calf had found a kitten to play with, and she would watch Bat smile as he remembered his own days with the cattle, while the boy’s grandmother, in her turn, kept watch on Muka’s face. She would see from the way the girl lifted her head, clenching her jaw muscles to stop her mouth trembling, that she too was missing the young elephant. Sometimes the tears would film over her eyes. The girl would blink them away before they rolled down her cheeks, but not before Bat’s grandmother had taken notice. ‘I think tomorrow you need not go out with the cattle,’ she would say. ‘I’ll send Bim instead so that you two can go elephant-tracking. It’s always better to journey with a companion,’ she told them. ‘You never know when you might need someone to remove a grass seed from your eye.’ And Muka’s eyes would brighten and a smile would flash over her face.
Muka loved nothing more than those days when she and Bat wandered together, their hearts humming with excitement as they spotted the elephants surging their way through the savannah’s wide spaces, silent as ghosts as they steamrollered along.
It was on one of those days, after one of the now rare occasions when Meya would return to the village, that the two children set off together with the elephant at their side. It was bright, though a few clouds were still chasing across the sky. Bat gazed across the open plains. The grass fled like water in the strong wind and in the distance he could see a herd of wildebeest, their horns and high shoulders poking out from the scrub. There must have been about twenty of them, he thought as he squinted: a sure sign that the dry season would soon begin. As pastures grew sparser, the nomads began to gather. Soon they would begin the migration which carried them across the continent. Soon the damp earth would be nothing but dust.
They had been walking and browsing and ambling all morning, hoping to meet up with the other elephants, but by the time the sun had dropped more than halfway down the heavens, they still had not found a trace of the wild herd. They were on the point of giving up and going back when Meya suddenly paused and lifted her trunk. She had sensed them. The childre
n stood quiet and alert. Bat could sense their presence too. It was a feeling far inside him, a strange visceral stirring: like the sound of a song before it reaches the tongue.
Meya was moving now. They followed her forward, ducking through a thicket of thorn bushes, climbing a low rise and skidding down a slope that led towards a riverbed. But still they saw nothing. And then Bat, who was just ahead of Muka, found himself drawing to a sudden stunned halt. He put a hand on the girl’s arm to restrain her. There, on the far side of the water, was a great baobab. It towered over the scrub like a gaunt sentinel.
The boy recognized it. He didn’t know how; but he had been here before. His thoughts scooted about like a flock of scared chickens. What was alarming him? His flapping mind confused him. And then, like a child in the fowl pen trying to catch a bird for dinner, he got a firm grip on the memory: there he was . . . many years back . . . a little boy of just seven . . . crouching on the far bank . . . just behind that big boulder. Bat blinked and shook his head. He wanted to dislodge the picture, but it was too late. The past was flooding over him. He was huddled amidst it, small and so frightened that even now he could feel himself starting to shake. He was staring giddily up at a dead elephant. The carcass loomed above him, filling his whole horizon. He was watching a gang of poachers . . . they were scrambling up onto the great bloated corpse . . . they were clambering around like beetles . . . the blood whined in his ears like the engine of a chainsaw. The memory flooded his senses. It stickied his breathing and clung to the back of his throat. Muka could feel him trembling as his fingertips gripped her. He was beginning to hurt her; but she did not cry out. She glanced at him, confused. And then she felt his hold loosen as he returned to the present. He stared stricken at Meya as she waded into the shallow river. For a moment his mouth opened as if he wanted to call her; but no sound came out. Instead, stepping forward as determinedly as if he was going finally to confront some hidden fear, he started to follow her. Muka hitched up her wrap and slid into his wake. The waters were already shrinking; they barely reached up to their knees. It wouldn’t be long before this bed had run dry.
Clambering up the far bank, the children slipped between two boulders and then stopped. Muka was gazing, eyes shining, as she spotted the wild herd browsing a short way beyond them; but Bat seemed barely to notice them. His stare was glassy and fixed, as if what lay before him was only a surface reflection and what he was searching for lay in the depths below. This was the very scene of that long ago slaughter. This was the place where Meya’s mother had been shot. Bat had never returned since. He could not even have remembered how to find it. So why had the elephants come there? he wondered. Why were they leading Meya to this terrible spot?
He searched the ground for some clue. Only a few bones remained, bleached and broken and strewn about the dry grasses; and now, even as he watched, the elephants were slowly moving towards them. Their silence was unsettling. The only sound in that lonely gravesite was the sigh of their breath. Softly, they reached out the probing tips of their trunks. He watched one of them pick up a bone, turn it over and examine it, stroke it softly and then gently lay it back down again. He saw the matriarch reversing slowly towards another great rain-smoothed fragment, nudging it delicately with a hind foot. It was a movement Bat recognized. That was how a mother elephant would have woken a sleeping baby from the herd. So why was the matriarch doing it now? Was she trying to rouse the lost memories? Was she awakening the secrets that slept in that bit of bone? Bat watched as the elephants hovered and circled and sighed and came back again and reached out and stroked.
Meya, beside him, waited transfixed. It was some time before she too approached. She reached out with the tip of her trunk for the skull. Grass had long since grown through the empty eye-sockets. The teeth had come loose and lay scattered about. Lowering her head, she sniffed at one gently. With a delicate precision she turned over a detached jawbone. She stroked its long curve with a wandering trunk; then she let her touch stray across the slope of the skull, probing its cracks and its knobbles and cavities, picking a loose stone from the place where an eye had once looked. She tried to dislodge it from the clambering grasses; first with a gentle push and then by a harder shunt. She seemed to be searching for something, Bat thought; for some hidden meaning that these fragments held.
He had often seen her pass the remains of other dead animals, the leathery cases of buffalo picked clean by scavengers, the strewn bones of antelope that wild dogs had brought down, and once even a giraffe that had fallen, legs stretched as if still running, neck slack as the stem of a wilted flower. But she had never paused to investigate. She had simply walked by. So why did she now stand for so long at this gravesite? It could only be, Bat thought, because she understood what had happened. The other elephants had led her there so that she could know the truth. They wanted her to share in their moment of mourning, in their memories of the days when her mother had been part of their herd, of the long years when she had wandered the savannah at their side. They wanted Meya to know how deeply she belonged to them.
Bat felt something huge and mysterious welling up inside him. He was in the presence of a force far beyond that which he could explain. He glanced at Muka, but she didn’t look back. She just stood there, eyes lowered in respect. And Bat remembered the stories of Bitek the fisherman. ‘Elephants have powers far greater than you can understand,’ he had said.
Meya returned home to the village with the children that evening again, but though they walked in her shadow, she felt a long way off. They wandered homewards, lost in the world of their thoughts.
Neither of the children was alert as they should have been at that hour on the empty plain. They didn’t notice the shadows lengthening as the sun sank towards the horizon, nor the fact that the antelope which liked to graze upon the woodland fringes had long ago left for the greater safety of the grasslands beyond. They didn’t see the lioness slinking low-bellied through the undergrowth, stealing towards them, her ears flat to her skull. But Meya did. She jerked up her head; her whole body tense. With a bellow of anger, she broke into a spanking trot.
The children, jolted out of their daydreaming, clutched at each other, confused. They didn’t know what was happening. Their eyes darted about. And then, with a half-stifled scream, Muka pointed. Bat’s heart jumped a beat. The lioness was rising. Any moment now she would be launched in a swift grappling rush. Her claws, sharp as meat-hooks, would be dragging them downwards. There would be nothing they could do. But, even as the boy sprang instinctively before Muka, the elephant bore down on the crouching animal. It twisted and leaped sideways. Slewing around in a cloud of red dust, Meya pursued. Ears flared and trunk lifted, she screamed her mad rage. The lioness slunk away with furious growls. Still Meya did not stop.
She bore down on the big cat like a creature possessed. If she had caught it, she would have crushed it; she would have picked up its body and smashed it with one blow. The lioness, with a last enraged lash of its tail, turned and bolted. It did not stop running until it was long out of sight, but it was even longer before the terrified children could steady their legs enough to continue their homeward walk.
‘Meya drove a lion away,’ Bat told his grandmother, as he swallowed the last bit of sesame paste from his supper and put the calabash back down. He was trying to sound calm as he told her the story, but his hands gripped his knee-bones, and one of his feet jittered nervously against the floor. His grandmother glanced across at Muka. She was crouched in a huddle of angles, her big eyes still glittering with remembered fear. Both children knew that they had been foolhardy; they had been warned again and again of the dangers on the savannah at dusk. They knew they had had a narrow escape. If it had not been for Meya, the lions would, even now, have been snarling and snapping around their dead bodies, cuffing at each other as they fought for the choicest bits.
For a long while Bat’s grandmother remained silent. She examined her hands. She had been pulling groundnuts all day but, with the soil
now drying, the plants were hard to uproot. Her palms were blistered and raw. From time to time she looked up at the children and shook her head. The fire flickered, sending their shadows leaping about the mud walls. They rocked and wavered, wildly exaggerating every gesture. The big white moths fluttered perilously close to the flames.
‘You must be careful,’ she said at last. ‘How many times have I told you that?’ She searched their faces for answers, but neither of them would look up to meet her eye. ‘Well, I want this to be the last time,’ she declared, rising slowly to her feet. ‘Both of you, go to bed now and think about that while I go outside and thank the gods . . . and that elephant . . . that you have been brought home to me.’ She made her way towards the door of the hut, but just before she ducked under the lintel she turned one last time. ‘You must always be watchful,’ she said solemnly, fixing her stare upon each child in turn. ‘It is not just the lions you must fear on the savannah these days.’
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Life in Jambula returned to normal for a while, its rhythms as steady as the rise and fall of a pestle, its routines as settled as the melody of a song; but in this undisturbed soil the rumours were still growing. Gossip was brought home by women from the market, stories were carried across the plains by the herders of goats, and now, even from this side of the town, there came troubling tales. Voices had been heard out on the savannah. A cow had been stolen from a nomad by night. A child had vanished. No one knew how or where. Families were beginning to leave their villages in the evenings, to carry their mats out into the bush to sleep; and a few with relations who lived in the south were talking of packing up and travelling, crossing the plains with their children and possessions. They were planning to stay away until the danger passed.
Soon, even in Jambula, people began to grow nervous. Rumours whipped like wildfire across the savannah. Fears, sharp as burned grass stalks, were left behind in their wake. Villagers would look over their shoulders if they heard footsteps approaching. A rustling in the trees, a shadow flickering over grasses, a cry of an animal in the darkness, could all make them jump. An abandoned bicycle was discovered by one of Marula’s sons a short way from the river. He didn’t go near it but dashed immediately for home. Bitek the fisherman saw strange lights in the bush.
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