The headman was worried. He had left for a visit to a fellow chieftain and, on the way, been passed by a pack of wild dogs. ‘They cantered right by me,’ he said, ‘looking neither right nor left . . . travelling so fast . . . as if with some fixed purpose . . . and so close I could see the white tufts of their tails.
‘These dogs are an omen,’ he declared. ‘They are carrion eaters. They arrive with a war.’ And he puffed at his pipe, even though its bowl was empty. He had run out of tobacco quite some time ago, but his wife no longer felt safe making the walk into the market. She was frightened of being ambushed upon the path.
A twelve-year-old boy from a village not far off had been snatched. ‘He and his mother were on their way to town to sell eggs,’ said Mama Brenda, who had heard the story first-hand from a friend, ‘when two strangers suddenly leaped out in front of them and trapped them with sticks which they held to their throats. One was a boy but he looked more like a wild animal. He had long matted hair and he smelled sour as a goat. The other was a girl,’ Mama Brenda told her listeners, ‘but she had no gentleness. When the mother looked into her eyes and implored her, she saw that they were completely cold. Her little boy was sobbing. “If you cry any more, we will kill you!” the rebel girl said. And she meant it. So his mother just turned away. She turned her back on her son so that he would not see her, so that he would not shout for her and be killed. And then she just walked away. She had to. She had to leave him to save him. And he has not been seen since.’
‘Who are these rebels? What do they want?’ Bat asked his grandmother that evening.
But the old woman had no answer. ‘Nobody is quite sure,’ was all she could say. ‘Their leader lives wild in the forests and no one can catch him so no one knows why he’s fighting or what he hopes to get. But his army is said to be growing every day. You must be careful, Bat.’ She paused and looked in turn at the two children who squatted by the cook-fire. ‘This is a violent country,’ she said. ‘On the map, it is shaped like the holster of a pistol. That’s what the white people I used to work for would say; and one day, they said, the firing will begin. You must be alert, both of you. You must always be watching . . . and don’t go too far into the forests,’ she warned Bat.
But now that the boy had learned his way into the mountains, he loved them. During the heat of the dry season, there was no greater pleasure than to pad his way cautiously along the elephant trail. The forest felt secret and shadowy. Its rich sappy smells filled his lungs and refreshed him. Its paths, trampled to softness by the passing of hundreds of thick-soled elephant feet, were so easy to walk on. He would watch the colobus monkeys grooming in the high branches, the bush pigs grubbing for roots in the dark crumbly loam. He would listen to the cuckoo as it sang from its hiding place in the bushes. It felt like he was hiding at the heart of the world.
And yet, where once the sound of a buffalo browsing in the thickets would have spelled his greatest danger, now the snort of a forest hog could make him freeze in his tracks; and one day, when an eagle had come crashing through the canopies, talons outstretched for some clasping potto, he had fled so fast that by the time he had stopped running he had looked all around him and not been able to recognize where he was. He started imagining eyes watching him from amid the striped shadow. They belonged to fierce children with glittering eyes and guns.
One afternoon, returning home, he saw a person ahead of him and his chest grew so tight that he could hardly breathe, but it was only the honey-gatherer strolling down the pathway, puffing at his fat roll of smouldering leaves. The smoke calmed the insects as he raided their store-houses. Too dopey to sting him, they just crawled helplessly about. A block of comb in his hands dripped its sweet golden syrup and he broke off a piece and gave it to Bat.
The boy’s nerves calmed a little when the short rains arrived in November and the elephants returned to the savannah to feed. Like the antelope, he felt safer out there in the open. On the plains he could spot danger from much further off. But then came the day when he stumbled across a set of strange footprints. He followed the tread of heavy boots through the dust. He knew that they could not have been left by one of the villagers because the villagers wore only sandals if they were not barefoot. He cast his eyes watchfully over the disturbed ground. A car had passed down the track.
Bat ran back to the village expecting to find strangers, only to find that Lobo had returned unexpectedly that afternoon. It was the first time he had been back for months.
Lobo was sixteen years old now. He had learned to walk with a confident swagger that made him look like a man. But his hands gave him away. They were too big for his body and he could never decide what to do with them. As he sauntered about they were constantly shifting, now beside him, now behind him, now stuffed deep in his pockets, now touching the moustache which he was constantly hoping would thicken. He would sit there stroking it meditatively with the crook of a forefinger; but what he was thinking the villagers could only guess at.
‘He does not fit,’ they whispered, ‘not with himself, nor with the rest of our community.’ They were beginning to distrust him. They did not trust the way he disappeared for months, vanishing like the smoke from the medicine woman’s fire, leaving only his memory, a dark smell on the air. Nor did they like the way, just when they were beginning to believe that he had left for ever, he would arrive back unexpectedly, with no word of warning.
Every time he returned he would boast some shiny new possession: a pair of sunglasses balancing on the bridge of the broad, flat nose that he had broken in a fight; a watch with a strap made from metal that stretched out when he pulled it; a radio that for two days he had carried about everywhere until finally, on the fourth evening, its batteries had run out.
‘Where does he get it all from?’ the villagers wondered. ‘Who does he work for? How does he earn so much?’ The elders would eye him suspiciously. They were no longer persuaded by his shows of politeness.
‘He is like a chameleon plucked from a tin roof,’ said Marula. ‘Flung into the foliage, it can’t change colour fast enough. He has the look of a town boy when he comes to Jambula. He doesn’t belong.’ And she warned her own sons not to mix with him. Muka’s cousin no longer put a wriggle into her walk when she passed him, and where once she would have loitered listening shyly to his stories, letting out half-stifled ‘eeehs’ and ‘aaahs’ of delight, now she hurried on by whenever she saw him. Her mother would have scolded her if she had not.
Even the little boys who had once buzzed like bees about him became more hesitant. ‘Don’t wrestle with him. You only get hurt by the Hog,’ they told one another. ‘Remember the time he broke Okeny’s finger,’ they would remind each other. ‘And the time he bit Komakech.’ Stories that, in the past, had been recounted like the feats of a hero were now harboured as evidence against the boy.
But Lobo seemed unconcerned. Nothing worried him. ‘Could be anyone.’ He shrugged, when he heard about the mysterious tyre tracks that Bat had seen out on the savannah. ‘Or more likely no one.’ He laughed. He dismissed all the rumours of the mysterious child army. He didn’t seem to mind travelling alone down the track. He’d brought a hunk of raw bush-meat for the medicine woman for supper. The smell of roasting flesh drifted through the village that night.
‘Come and eat with us,’ Lobo invited Muka as he stepped onto the pathway in front of her, waylaying her on her evening walk home from the river. ‘Come and eat with us. The meat is good and you can sit by our fire and tell us everything that’s been happening; you can tell us all the stories of your elephant.’ A smile dimpled his cheeks, and for a few moments Muka found herself wavering. Was he trying to show her that he had turned a new leaf? The villagers had set their hearts so firmly against him. But maybe they misjudged him?
She looked at him standing there, his hands dangling awkwardly. If he was rough, it was because roughness was all that he had known. That’s what Bat’s grandmother had told her. So shouldn’t he now be given a fresh cha
nce?
She remembered her own awkwardness when she had first arrived in Jambula, dumped like an unwanted package in the home of her aunt. She remembered the loneliness, stuck like a stone at the bottom of her heart. It had made her spit like a wildcat at anyone who approached her.
‘Come,’ Lobo coaxed. His hands moved to his pockets as if to prove he was harmless. She could see the eagerness brightening his eye. ‘Come. Tell me about your elephant. Is it true about the wild herd?’
Why did he want to know? Muka searched his face but found no answer. She let her eyes drop. Something shiny was dangling from a string round his neck. She remembered the amulet they had found in the grain store. With a hard little shake of her head, she dodged him and ran on.
‘There’s plenty of food,’ she heard Lobo calling behind her. But she was already gone. Bat’s grandmother would be waiting, frying green bananas in the hut. Food was getting scarcer these days, now that people were too frightened to go to market, but when the plantains had turned dark and gooey they would be good all mixed up with cassava flour.
Lobo perched on a log and ate alone that evening, the rich gamey juices dribbling down his chin. He held out scraps to the village boys who peeped from a distance; but even the hungriest just shook his head.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Bat knew that this day was going to be different, from the moment he woke. All night, the wild elephants had been growling and moaning in the grasslands outside the village. It was as if they were unsettled, excited by something. He rose yawning from his mat and went out of the hut.
The sun streamed through the wood-smoke of the newly stirred fires. There they were. He could see them as he squinted against the low morning light: gathered in a group among a cluster of low acacias . . . and there was Meya too, standing alone and a little nearer, hovering fretfully between the furthermost perimeters of the village and the open expanses that belonged to the wild herd. Bat could tell from the way she was moving that something was troubling her. She was shuffling about, shifting anxiously to and fro.
‘I’m going to see what she wants,’ he called out to his grandmother.
‘Wash your face first,’ she cried.
The water from the earthenware pot in the cook-hut was cool. He cupped his hands and splashed. The droplets that clung to the tips of his eyelashes sparkled with rainbows as, grabbing his panga, he dashed off, leaping the bushes that bordered the compound rather than bothering to run round to the gap.
Bat’s grandmother smiled. Clutching her stick with her shiny old hands, she watched the boy go, following the paths that wound between gardens then, reaching the edges, zigzagging away across wide open spaces, growing smaller and smaller until he had all but disappeared.
Meya was nearly seven years old now. She had reached her full size. Tall and strong, she must have stood more than nine feet high at the shoulder. Her long curving tusks swept upwards in a great gleaming arc and her ears, shaped like the continent over which her species roamed, were not ragged but smooth and clean-edged. When she spread them out she looked like a thundercloud in full sail.
The herd began to shamble away slowly as they saw the boy approach. They were used to him by now; they knew he would not harm them and they were happy to let him tag peaceably along; but only Meya would allow him to walk up and touch her, only Meya would twine her trunk around his tall, whipcord frame, let him scratch at the coarse hairs that sprouted from her under-lip and then, lazily blinking, lower her great head so that he could scratch behind her ears also.
The short rains were over, the grass had been grazed right down to the nub, but the herd spent most of the morning quietly browsing on high foliage while Bat sat not too far away and waited and watched. He allowed himself to be lulled into a false sense of peace. Perhaps he had misread the signs; perhaps nothing out of the ordinary was going to happen. The youngsters were playing, barging and squirming like a basket full of puppies, clambering the slopes of their recumbent mothers, only, when they had finally straddled the bony spinal ridge, to slide back down the far side and land in a mess of sprawled limbs. Twice, the youngest of the babies came running in Bat’s direction, getting as close as it dared before skidding to a halt. Then, brought to its haunches like a begging dog, it would trumpet its shrill treble as hard as it could before tearing excitedly back to its group. The game delighted Meya. She got down on her knees and started tusking the ground through sheer excess of pleasure, as if remembering the days when she too had played like that. But when one of the racing babies slipped and got stuck, sprawled on its belly, its four legs splayed out, she was the first of the herd to hasten over to help it, to lever it carefully back up with her tusks, offering it comfort by rubbing its back before prodding it gently away to return to its mother.
Bat stayed with the elephants most of the day. He drowsed as they dusted themselves with great puffs of dirt. The ox-peckers hissed as they snacked on fat warble flies. A vast cloud of starlings gathered over the savannah, wheeling and diving in mysterious unison. A pair of giraffe wandered across the horizon, their heads swaying like flowers that have caught a slight breeze. A lonely old bull buffalo came down to drink. Only when it had finished did it finally notice Bat. Startled, it gave vent to a loud huffing snort. A long drool of slobber swung from its black snout as, with head held aloft, it trotted stiffly away.
By late afternoon, the elephants too were thinking of leaving. It was time to move back to the thicker bush. The matriarch rumbled her low ‘let’s go’ call. The cows stirred sleeping babies with a nudging hind foot. Only Meya seemed uncertain. Swaying from side to side and swinging her foreleg, she looked back and forth between the boy and the herd. She was confused, Bat knew. But why, when of late she had not slept in the village at all?
His musings were broken by the arrival of Muka. She always came out to meet him when her day’s work was done, when Bat’s grandmother, finally heeding her growing impatience, would give the nod of her head which meant that she could at last go. Momentarily distracted, Meya wandered over to greet her. The girl reached out a hand and rubbed at Meya’s rough hide.
The sun was beginning to fall in the sky. The matriarch rumbled again and, lifting her trunk, looked directly at Meya. The other elephants gathered and began to shuffle off. A low growling like thunder reverberated around the group. Meya rumbled back, but still she was hesitant. The children were holding her with their wistful looks. Now they knew in their bones that something out of the ordinary was happening; they could feel it like the prickle of static that precedes a storm.
‘They are leaving,’ Bat whispered. But he could say no more. Even if tears had not been choking his voice, he could not have found words for the feelings that now welled up inside him. His little elephant, his beautiful Meya, the creature who had walked alongside him for half of his life, had finally reached her moment of unbreakable decision. She was making the choice between him and her wild herd.
Bat looked at the matriarch. She looked back, tall and commanding, from the fringes of the troupe that for so many years she had led. How could he compete? How could he promise the safety that this great animal offered? How could he offer the freedom that the wild herd knew? The thought of Meya leaving was like a knife in his heart; but he knew at that moment that they must finally part. It was what, from the very beginning, had been supposed to happen. The tears brimmed in his eyes. But he was sure now, at last, that he loved Meya so much that he was prepared, gladly, to let her finally go.
‘You get along with them, girl,’ he whispered and, stepping out into the open where all the other elephants could see him, he pushed her. ‘Go on, Meya,’ he called out. ‘You can go now!’
The elephant stretched out her trunk and laid it upon his shoulder. Thick wafts of hot breath fell upon the boy’s cheek. He stared into the depths of her soft russet eyes. Slowly they closed. It was as if she was trying to remember this moment, to lock an image of his face inside her mind for ever. He stroked her gently. Then he kissed her and le
t his hand drop.
Muka now moved towards the elephant. The animal encircled her slender waist with her trunk. Muka spoke not a word, but she could not hide the feeling that swelled up from within her, shaking her thin shoulders and trembling her lips. She put out her arms and wrapped them around Meya. A powerful flush of remembering swept like a wind through her head, bearing upon it all the memories of the moments she had spent with this beast. They swirled up together as she leaned forward on tiptoe and planted a slow farewell kiss and then, tensing, as if her fragile body could no longer take so much strain, she pulled away and stepped back.
The matriarch turned to them and uttered another deep growling rumble. For a moment Meya remained motionless, as if she had not heard. Then she blinked and shook her head rapidly. It was as if a rush mat had been beaten. A thick cloud of dust billowed over the children. They crinkled their eyes and began to cough. Wiping their faces, they spat granules from their mouths. The spell had been broken. Muka began to giggle. Bat’s face spread in a grin. Soon the sound of their laughter was ringing out across the savannah. Meya eyed them wryly and waggled her head.
The children were still smiling, though now through the first spilling tears, as they stood hand in hand and watched the elephants leave. The sun was sinking towards the horizon. Its pink light flared out across the vast open spaces, fanning upwards like wildfire into the African sky. An eagle soared to its roost on the furthest horizon. The escarpment turned carmine and then pink and then mauve. Then the shadows began slowly to seep out across the grasslands, swallowing colours and blurring distinctions, expanding and swelling and finally flooding the world.
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