The Child's Elephant

by Rachel Campbell-Johnston

  Before sleeping, the children always kindled a fire from the smouldering dung that Yambabo had taught them to wrap in a leaf. Blowing on it gently, they ruffled up twists of smoke which burst into flame as dried leaves and scraps of tinder caught. Then they cooked. There was no shortage of meat, and even as the supplies in their little baskets grew lighter and lighter, Gulu cut more from the carcasses of the famine-stricken animals that they found on their path. Then, clearing sharp stones and twigs from the ground, they would dig a shallow hollow with their heels for their hips, scrape up a little heap of sand for a pillow and lie down. It was cold at night. After burning all day, they would begin to shiver. Even when they huddled together, they could never get warm. They would stare up at the sky. The stars were so far away and yet often, amid the vast expanses of the desert, they seemed to the children their closest companions.

  ‘Maybe it might rain tomorrow,’ Muka would look up and say every night. But it never did.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  As each day passed, the little posse grew weaker. The days seemed to grow hotter; the nights starker and more cold. The children’s parched lips were cracked. Their joints ached all the time. Their ribs stuck out like bars on their chests. They had finished all the cassava that the pygmies had given them; eaten the nuts and the mushrooms and berries. They longed for something other than meat. But it was Meya who was starving. She looked like a spectre. All her great bulk of muscle had fallen away. Her shoulder-bones jutted and her hips jagged out through skin that hung draped in slack folds. Desperately she foraged, tusking for grass roots and devouring bitter scrub. Once she found a hidden cache of buried tubers that not only sustained her but helped take the edge off her terrible thirst.

  It was the thirst that tormented them. They felt as if they would choke on their own swollen tongues. By the sixth day of their journey, the riverbed was all but dry. The few pools that remained were no more than damp sludge. Meya swung her trunk, sniffing and snorting for water, smelling its delicious freshness far beneath the hot sand. She sunk in her tusks and began gouging, deeper and deeper. A trickle of liquid seeped into the hole. It took several minutes for even a small calabash to fill. It was thick with silt. But still they drank. And when the children had filled up their goatskins, Meya stayed there, sucking it up mouthful by tiny mouthful with the tip of her trunk. When they finally left, a cheetah slunk swiftly down after them, ears flattened, sleek body hugging low to the ground. Twitching her tail from side to side, she frantically lapped. An impala looked on. Its saffron shiny coat had dulled to a matt brown.

  ‘A man could walk for ever across that desert and never get anywhere.’ The words of Yambabo beat like a drum in the children’s heads. They imagined the pygmies flitting through their shaded forests.

  ‘Should we turn back?’ Muka whispered. ‘Should we turn back now while we still can?’

  Bat shook his head. ‘The lake can’t be far away. It can’t be so far to go now. And once we have rested, once Meya has fed . . .’ His voice trailed away as he clutched at the girl’s fragile hand. Together they glanced at Gulu. They wanted reassurance.

  ‘There’s no way back now; we can only go onwards,’ he whispered.

  Then, two days later, just as Bat had predicted, they saw water. It was Bat who first spotted it, shimmering in the distance; a sheet of glittering light. He tried to cry out, but his dry voice cracked. Instead he just pointed. They stopped in their tracks and stared. There it was, sparkling ahead of them: an oasis of life. Even Gulu, whose hacking cough bent him double, clenched his fists tighter and looked upwards with something like eagerness. ‘Not far now, Meya!’ Bat encouraged as he patted the elephant. For the first time in days they felt hopeful as they pitched their camp. They didn’t even shiver when they heard the far-off roaring of lions: less a sound than the pulse of a rumbling vibration, filling the night air with its low resonance.

  They got up earlier than usual the next morning and set off. There would be time to rest later. They drank more than was normal from their water-skins. ‘Not long now, Meya,’ Bat whispered. But the elephant didn’t seem to share in their optimism. Her lumbering steps left a trail of scuffmarks in the dust to which Gulu, now lagging with his bad foot, contributed his own pattern of strange wandering strokes. It was nothing but hope that hauled him along behind the companions who, eyes fixed ahead of them, quickened their paces. They could all but taste the water’s freshness as it poured down their throats.

  Not so much further, they thought with growing desperation as the sun slowly crawled to its glowering midday heights. They inched their way onwards as it lowered itself down the far side of the sky. The lake shimmered just ahead now. ‘Not so very much further,’ Bat whispered as, tipping his goatskin, he drained it and pushed himself into a last run. Muka watched his frail figure slowly drawing away from her. She quickened her own pace, and for a few moments both of them were floundering, one after the other, the sand scuffing up in bursts of sparkling from their feet, until, almost as suddenly as they had begun running, they both slowed down again to a bewildered stop. They squinted desperately ahead. Surely what they were now seeing could not be right. Befuddled and frantic, they rubbed at their eyes. But a dreadful sense of reality was beginning to take hold. It was not water but a mirage of water that lay spread out ahead of them. The lake had been turned into a dustbowl by drought.

  Blinking, the children picked out the shapes of huddled grazers, of wildebeest, zebra, giraffe and gazelle. Their shadowy outlines wavered in the heat as they stood gazing out over the emptiness as if collectively dazzled. The sun glittered and danced over the expanses of dried silt. The silence was eerie. It was the silence of utter despair. There was not a word in the children’s mouths as, with failing steps, they walked onwards into awful truth.

  Families of baboons, lean and squalid, were strung out along the banks of the empty lake, a mother with her dead baby still clutched to her belly. A skeletal impala took a high twitching step. A buffalo lay down, defeated, and groaned. A long string of mucus was dangling from its snout. It swayed as slowly it shook its cumbersome head. Spots of blood flecked its muzzle and its eyes were half closed. The vultures swarmed everywhere. They perched in the boughs of the twisted acacias, necks arched, wings outstretched, waiting to drop down upon their next feast. A zebra had barely drawn its last breath when they descended and started looting the gore, hissing and jostling and flapping and crawling, before the approach of a big cat sent them beating back up, like black angels, gobbets of flesh dangling from their greedy beaks.

  Only the predators looked sleek in this dreadful place. The lions, so bloated that their stomachs brushed the ground, collapsed, moaning low songs. The dry wind brushed through their manes. Even the cheetahs were torpid, draped supine over branches from which the deserted nests of the weaver birds dangled, swaying and twisting and scattering dried twigs. Below, the hyenas skulked, sated. The children stared, appalled. The reek of death filled their nostrils, so thick they could taste it. It stickied their breathing and clung to the backs of their throats. They gazed at the flies that were scrambling over everything. The whole grisly scene was alive with their hum.

  Water had been there until recently, Gulu noticed; perhaps until only a few days ago. There was a frill of wilted grass around a patch of damp soil. A vicious baboon guarded it, yellow fangs bared, but when Meya raised her trunk it shuffled reluctantly aside, grunting in fury and slapping the ground with its fists. Smashing through the crust, Meya found a soft ooze. She lowered herself to her knees, rocking slowly back and forth, coating her burned skin with a thick paste of mud. Bat could smell the stench of rotting catfish. An antelope crept a step closer, hoping that there might be water. But it was no good.

  Images of the past rose up like mad hallucinations in Bat’s head. He thought of the days when Meya had bathed near the village, descending the banks in a splashing avalanche, setting the geese flurrying in clouds of indignant honking; the flamingo flocks scattering like wisps o
f sunset. The hippos would sigh gratefully as they sank into the papyrus; but now all he could see were the arches of their stripped bones. It was as if he was standing in a world that had been drained.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  Bat felt like a drowning man swept away by the currents. It was strange, he thought, as he plodded wearily on, to feel as if you were drowning when the whole world was dry, when all you could dream about was the coolness of water, when all you could think about was its taste on your tongue. But he no longer felt as if his fate belonged to him. His life lay in the hands of the land that he crossed. The desert could do with them whatever it liked.

  He walked on, because he could think of no reason to stop. Nature had been filed right down to the bone in this place. It was unforgiving as rock. The dead scrub was black. Above it the burning air quivered and shone. The scream of the insects was like the dazzle of the sun. Mirages glittered and bullied. Sometimes he would see familiar shapes among them, the low huts of his village squatting on the skyline, the silhouette of his grandmother coming to meet him; but he never held out his hands to greet her. He knew that it was only the sun’s cruel trick. The air was alive. It flickered like a flame over the face of the earth, shining and waving like a sheet of running water, dancing and mirroring and duping and doubling, conjuring up fantasies and then dissolving them again.

  The children’s pace grew steadily slower and slower. The marks of their footsteps were more and more faltering. Gulu’s bad foot dragged a juddering line in the dust. ‘You have to keep going,’ Bat whispered. He couldn’t speak any louder. His tongue, when he tried, stuck to the roof of his mouth. It felt fat as a puff adder lodged in a dry cranny. ‘If we stop we will die,’ he breathed.

  The landscape started to undulate now: an endless succession of ridges, each rising slightly higher than the last. This might be the final climb, they would think as they laboured; there might be water on the far side. They would inch towards the summit in a growing delirium of anticipation, but from the top they would see yet another barren horizon, the low clouds straggling above it like a broken promise.

  Each time the disappointment was almost too much to bear. ‘Please!’ Bat would whisper inside his head. ‘Please!’ All his hopes had shrunk to this one imploring word. It fell like a raindrop in the dust of his thoughts.

  Lumbering up each long slope, they half slid, half tumbled down the far side. Their breath burned in their throats. Their skin baked and shrivelled. The blood throbbed in their skulls. Soon it became the only sound they could hear. They passed the wreckages of animals that had died on their journeys. A vulture dragged a limp snake along in its talons. It scuffed away the marks of their footprints and buried their scent. It was as though death was eradicating their very traces, Bat thought.

  Meya walked as if she had fallen into a trance. There was nothing about this land that felt familiar to her now. She didn’t know where she was. In the great thunderhead of her brow, there were no memories at all. She just continued southwards, the heat of the falling sun the only sign of her direction. The flies scabbed her raw flesh; but when she paused to spray dust it was all scattered by the wind. The flies rose and dropped back in a thick buzzing clot.

  One day they found a small fetid pool in a rock and they shared it, and towards the end of the next day they came across a baobab. Meya could smell the hot wisps of water and paused, and Muka, standing on Bat’s shoulders, hauled herself up into its branches. A monitor lizard, busy raiding an abandoned bird’s nest, sprang through the air and fell hissing, its yellow belly flashing before it landed, splayfooted, and scuttled furiously off. A drowned bat floated in the slime that scummed over a deep hollow in the trunk, but still the desperate children drank and afterwards, lifting her trunk, Meya drained the reservoir dry. It was only a fraction of what she needed but it was just enough.

  The ground was growing stonier now. It gleamed a poisonous mauve-blue in the low evening light. That night, when the children stopped, it was as if their soles had been sliced with the blade of a knife. They tried to separate the grit from the flesh but they couldn’t. Without the heat to anaesthetize it, the pain was almost unbearable and it kept them from sleep. The following morning Gulu could hardly move. His lame foot wept yellow pus and, despite the chillness of dawn, his face burned to the touch. He put his cold hands to his cheeks to try to warm them, then bent over double, shaken by racking coughs. When he tried to rise, his thin legs folded under him and he collapsed back into the little hollow he had dug. Muka and Bat did their best to lift him. Holding him under the arms, they began dragging him along. But it was no good. They did not have the strength.

  ‘Leave me,’ whispered Gulu. ‘I’m a hindrance now, not a help. I can’t walk. Go on without me. Let Meya lead you.’

  Muka shook her head. ‘You must come,’ she said. ‘We won’t go without you. We’re going to take you with us.’

  ‘You must come,’ Bat echoed. His voice was a creak in his throat. ‘You have to keep going. It can’t be far now.’

  Gulu barely responded. He couldn’t see that future which, for a few bright moments, he had glimpsed. He was slipping back into the shadowy world of his past. Bat could see the despair brooding beyond falling eyelids. However far the boy travelled, however much distance he covered, Bat thought, he would never manage to leave his dark memories behind. They would rise back up within him with the rising of every sun.

  ‘When I was a child, I thought that the dawn was beautiful,’ Gulu murmured, as the first red light of the sun stained the far-off horizon. ‘Now I just think of blood. It’s too late for me now. Just leave me here.’

  The two children stepped back uncertainly. They didn’t know what to do. They searched his eyes for an answer, but no answer came. And then, in what felt like a moment suspended in magic, Meya moved slowly forward. Stretching out her trunk, she lifted the boy’s fragile body as tenderly as a mother, weary after her day in the shamba, lifts her sleeping baby. She placed him onto her back. He slumped over her neck, and then slowly she moved forward: the great African elephant that remains always untameable and the broken human child.

  They were moving into a land of huge multi-spurred termite mounds now. Dried vegetation was beginning to crackle underfoot and in the far distance they could see a single ridge rising. Somewhere over its horizon, they prayed, their home lay.

  Flat clouds drifted above. For days the children had stared at them, willing them to gather, to muster their forces and swell; but with the rising of the sun they had always been routed. In tatters and straggles they had faltered and dispersed. But now, as the children watched them, the clouds rolled and tumbled. They were massing their strength against the sun’s onslaught. That evening Bat heard a Kori bustard calling.

  ‘It means rain,’ he whispered. ‘It means rain, Gulu,’ he repeated, clutching at the boy as he balanced on the elephant above. ‘When herdsmen hear the bustard, they start out for their pastures. The rain isn’t far off.’

  Gulu didn’t respond.

  The next day they followed the tracks of an ostrich. It was almost as though its claw-prints were towing them along. And even though the prints ended in a bloody scuffle, the pads of a lioness blotting out the bird’s splayed marks, the strewn feathers stirred in a wind that for the first time felt soft.

  Ahead of them reared the slope of a sudden steep incline. Bat braced himself for the gruelling ascent. Wearily he climbed, Muka struggling behind him, one dragging foot planted in front of the next. The dusty air scoured their lungs. Meya’s breath came painfully in stertorous grunts. Gulu clung to her neck, but he didn’t look up.

  And then they were at the top, standing on the brink of a vast windswept ledge. The cliffs fell all but sheer to the bottom far below them. But the children gazed over the grasslands that rolled away ahead: a dizzying vastness that reached to the furthermost rim of the world. This was the savannah, Bat thought. His heart thumped as he reached out for Muka. They were standing on the escarpment. These were
the rocks that for so long had formed the horizon of their lives. Somewhere down below them lay the place they called home.

  ‘Look, Gulu! Look!’ he cried, his voice cracked by the tears which his body was too dry to send. The little boy raised his head weakly. He felt his burning face cooled by the draughts from Meya’s great flapping ears. But his dark eyes were glazed and his grasp was so weak that, when the elephant moved, Bat and Muka now had to walk either side of her, holding his dangling legs so that he would not slip.

  For a while they followed the line of the cliff edge. Bat remembered the words of the fisherman Bitek: sometimes the elephants would be away for as long as three years, he had said, travelling secret paths that led over the escarpment. Was Meya searching for one of these ancient ways now? Did she know a track home? He felt something change place somewhere deep inside him. It was the groundswell of despair giving way to a fresh surge of hope.

  Then, suddenly, Meya was branching off, stumbling down a ravine that looked utterly impassable. She eased herself through a gap between two massive boulders. Gulu slid down her neck. He was clutching at her ears. But the elephant was unstoppable. She picked her way purposefully onwards down a dried watercourse, pushing through tangles of dead vegetation, forging a path so obscure that no one, Bat thought, could possibly ever have tried it. He tucked himself close in behind her. There was nothing that he and Muka could do now but trust.

  Inch by skidding inch, Meya continued her descent. Probing at uncertain stones with her trunk, grasping at dried roots and testing loose stones, she transferred her great bulk from one treacherous foothold to the next. The rays of a lowering sun beat against the cliff, frying them like ants on a griddle of hot rock. How much longer could this go on? Bat wondered. How much longer before they slipped?

  Just at that moment, Meya stopped. Reaching behind her, she twined her trunk around Gulu and, lifting him gently, laid him down on the ground. Then she knelt on her hind legs to lower herself over a rocky lip. For a few heart-stopping seconds Bat was sure she would fall. But no . . . she was safe . . . she stood waiting below. Muka scrambled down next, hanging from the ledge by her hands before she let herself drop. Then Bat passed Gulu down into her outstretched arms. It was easy. He weighed little more than a bundle of dry kindling. He groaned as she grasped him and then doubled up in a fit of frame-racking coughs. Bat and Muka bent over, putting their arms round his back to support him. His shoulder-blades felt sharp as wings.