The Child's Elephant

by Rachel Campbell-Johnston

  It was only when they stood up again that they saw for the first time that they had reached a wide plateau: a magical platform poised midway between earth and sky. A huge cave was cut into the wall of the rock behind them. Meya had already entered. Picking Gulu up, they followed the elephant in. It was cool inside; blissfully cool: like plunging your face into a calabash of cold water. And somewhere far at the back they could hear a faint trickling. They blundered into the darkness. Meya was already there, sucking and sucking, as if she could never stop.

  It was only the thinnest of runnels, Bat realized as he stretched his fingertips towards it; but it was fresh and clean, springing straight from some repository hidden deep in the rock. Scooping handful after handful, he and Muka drank desperately. Then they returned for Gulu, pouring cupped palms of water into his blistered gape. They moistened his face and bathed his burning temples. They splashed his hot limbs and cleaned the pus from his foot. And then they returned to drinking themselves.

  Outside, where a waterfall would have plunged downwards in the rainy season, they saw whiskery grasses still growing about the fringes of the rocks. Meya was wrenching them up in swift eager mouthfuls, the first scraps of fresh fodder she had tasted for many days. Hank after hank, she swept it into her mouth. Her gut whined and groaned. Bat pulled out the last of the salt meat that the pygmies had given them, and he and Muka ate too, but Gulu waved it away.

  ‘Take it.’ Muka bent over him, gently encouraging. But Gulu couldn’t see them. The cave was so dark, and yet the light in his head was too bright. He was shivering, but his brain was boiling. ‘Let me rest,’ he sighed and he lay down to sleep on a bed of dried leaves.

  They left him and went out. A bush of marula plums grew nearby. The fruit had all fallen and fermented, but with cries of delight the children gathered it up in damp handfuls, cramming it eagerly between parted lips. Streams of sticky sourness flowed down their chins, running down wrists and forearms, dripping from elbows and splashing onto feet. Meya feasted beside them, her eyes closed in sheer relish, as she mashed at vast mouthfuls of pulp. But when Muka carried some into the cave for Gulu, when she shook him to rouse him, he just lay without lifting his head.

  ‘I can’t eat now,’ he murmured, and his eyes closed again.

  With one hand behind his thin neck, she lifted him, squeezing the acid succulents between parted lips. ‘They will help you sleep better,’ she pleaded. The juices ran down Gulu’s throat and the boy swallowed weakly. Then he lapsed once again into a fit of violent coughs. Muka could feel his skin burning. His whole body was trembling. She wanted to hold him against her; she wanted to promise that it would all be all right; but, the spasm now over, the boy’s eyes were once again closing. Gently she laid his head back down again and Gulu, turning on one side, folded himself inwards, drawing knees up to elbows, and lay without stirring. His fists were clenched tight as a pleader’s before his parted mouth.

  The fermenting plums were making them all feel faintly giddy. Even the elephant was blinking and swaying. They looked dizzily about. Hastily, Bat set to work in the cave, coaxing a fire from the embers that he carried. Kneeling, he blew at the sparks, fanning the flame gently, feeding it fragments of dry tinder until it finally leaped up. Shadows flickered over the walls of rock. A flock of bats scudded outwards into the twilight and, following them, the children sat at the rocky mouth, watching the sun as it slipped below the far horizon, the gathering clouds flaming bright vermilion and gold. The first stars began to appear. Soon the heavens would be studded with millions upon millions, packed sharp and close as a porcupine’s quills.

  Meya’s tusks glinted silver in the moon’s rising light. The children gazed up at her. But neither of them would have dared at that moment to have reached out and touched her. She seemed somehow transformed, somehow magical, they both thought. It was as if she had been invested with some power that lay far beyond them; as if she was part of a lost world that they would never reach. Quietly she stood there, silhouetted against the great darkness, a vast looming presence as ancient as the prehistoric rocks.

  Only when it was dark did they turn back to go into the cave. Gulu was calling. ‘Look! Look!’ he was crying. He was stretching his arms out and pointing. His black eyes were glittering. Bat and Muka peered through a darkness that was hazed with drifting smoke. And it was then that they saw it: a great elephant appearing, a huge shadowy form painted onto the surface of the rock. A tiny calf peeped out from under her belly, and nearby a man with an armful of firewood had been drawn, and a mother carrying the bundle of a baby on her back.

  The children stared transfixed. This was the cave that the pygmies had told them about, the secret haven that only the elephants now knew. This was a place that went back to a time before history, to the days when man and elephant had walked side by side. Bat felt a chill at the back of his neck, as if some hidden presence was blowing upon him softly. But Meya merely lumbered over to lick at a rock. There were minerals here too for the elephants.

  They slept deeply that night. Meya made a bed of mulch at the rear. Sighing and grunting she shifted until finally she settled, leaning her rump against the cave wall, while the children curled up nearby round the warm fire. It must have been somewhere near the middle of the night when they woke. The embers had faded to a rich orange glow and Gulu was calling out, as he so often did in his sleep.

  ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry,’ he cried in the blackness. But this time he was not dreaming; he was sitting up. His thin legs were folded into arms of stretched sinew. The knobbled blades of his shoulders stuck out from his back. ‘I’m sorry, so sorry,’ he called to the night. The tears that, until then, he had always kept locked up in his head now flowed down his face. His sorrow and grief were pouring out in a flood. And, as if the dark world was lying there and waiting and listening, a long rumble of thunder rolled answering back. Great bolts of lightning broke open the skies. They lit up the cave with their eerie blue light, flashing over the carvings until they flickered with a mystical life.

  When the children woke again at dawn, Gulu was sleeping. They could see his pulse flickering, a faint beat in his temple, but he looked calmer, more peaceful. His fear had passed. His face was still hot but his brow was smooth and clear and a smile drifted over his wide face as he woke. He looked like a little child again, Bat thought. When Muka put her arm around him, he did not shrug her off. He let her support him, while she lifted a palm full of water to his lips. ‘This is a lovely home,’ he whispered. ‘I would like to stay here for ever.’ And he looked at the carvings on the rocky walls. ‘Did the wild elephant really carry me?’ he asked in a voice full of wonder.

  It was extraordinary how quickly the clouds appeared, as if conjured out of nowhere. One moment they had been streaking the rim of the horizon; the next, blown by the gusts of sudden fierce wind, they were massing and swelling and racing out across the sky. A little after noon, the wind dropped abruptly. The air thickened. Then the whole world turned black. Bat waited in silence. The quietness was eerie. He could hear nothing but the piping of a plaintive hornbill. Everything seemed frozen, all motion suspended, as if every living creature was holding its breath. Then, suddenly, the silence broke with a great earth-shaking crash. Thunder rolled through the trees, echoing off the escarpment, rumbling back outwards in waves over the plain’s dry expanse. Lightning flashed and hissed. Bat, crouching by the entrance of the cave, could almost taste it, sour as a piece of tarnished metal in his mouth.

  A splat fell on his skin. It was a raindrop: and then another and another and yet another fell; plopping fat to the ground and pitting the dust. A few moments later, Bat heard a loud rattling. And then a sheet of rain swept across the mouth of the cave. It lashed down in ropes as thick as his fingers, crashing and beating upon the undergrowth. Where a minute ago there had been a dried watercourse, a surging torrent now raced, rushing between rocks as it tore its mad pathway, rearing and plunging as it hurled towards the great drop. It fell sheer down the cliff f
ace, flinging out a cloud of spray.

  Bat, Muka and Meya ran out into the storm, laughing and trumpeting in their wild delight. They gazed up, exhilarated, into the skies, their shouts and their squeals ringing out from the rocks. The water clung to their eyelashes and streamed down their cheeks, dribbling from elbows and tails and ear tips. They lay down and rolled in it and stood up covered in mud. Then they flung out their limbs and let it wash them again. At last, at long last, the rains had arrived.

  The storm eventually passed. The downpour grew steadier, the rain slowly thinned. Patches of blue started appearing in the clouds. Sunlight flashed and sparkled. It glinted off stones and dripped from wet trees. Below, the parched plains sucked in the lying flood. Steam rose like a mist as the land gave up its stored heat. A lone rainbird called, its notes falling like water, and the children stood, heads cocked and listening. Their faces were almost broken in two by their smiles. ‘We look like a pair of wet chickens,’ Muka laughed. Bat gave a loud squawk. A glimmering rainbow leaped across the sky. It spanned its great dome, shining as brightly as if it had been painted on.

  Then they heard Gulu calling, and they both ran in. He was lying on his back, staring up at the walls. ‘Am I home?’ he cried out to them. ‘I am home,’ he said. ‘I can hear my stream. I can hear my stream calling me. “Gulu,” it’s saying. “Gulu . . . Gulu,” as it runs down the rocks.’

  Muka knelt over him. She damped his brow with fresh water. She could feel it still burning, but his hand in her own was chill. ‘Mama?’ he muttered. ‘Mama, is that you?’

  ‘Gulu, it’s me, Muka. It’s Muka,’ she cried.

  ‘Mama,’ he answered and he tried to sit up. He was whispering. Both children leaned closer to hear what he said. But his words were like lizards on the walls of a hut. He couldn’t catch them. They kept slipping back into the crevices of his thoughts. He stared at the carvings as if transfixed. Then he turned his head sideways and gazed slowly at Meya. His lips were framing lost syllables. The elephant reached out for him with a slow gentle trunk. She laid it upon him like a father lays his blessing on a son. There was a look of infinite understanding in her eyes. But Gulu’s own eyes were withdrawing. He was vanishing, sinking further and further away into his own world of thoughts. His last breath was fading. Bat slid a hand inside the boy’s shirt. He thought he could still feel the flutter of a heartbeat, but it was only the blood beating in his fingertips. Gulu’s own hands, always clutched into a fist, had slowly uncurled. They lay open amid the leaves. It was as if, at long last, he had finally managed to let something go.

  The rain dripped steadily from the mouth of the cave, falling and landing in a pool of lying water. Droplets leaped out from the surface where they struck. They jumped up and down like soldiers marking time on the spot.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  All that day the children remained high on their hidden plateau. They were mourning the life of the friend they had lost.

  ‘Without him we would never have made it,’ Bat whispered. ‘Without him I don’t think I could have survived the camp.’ Tears streamed down his face as he remembered how they had shared not just a blanket together, but the comfort of each other’s closeness on those long cold army nights. ‘He could have come home with us,’ he sobbed. ‘He could have lived as our brother.’

  ‘He saved us,’ Muka murmured. ‘Without him we would never have found a way out. And he was prepared to give his life for us,’ she whispered as, bathing his body in their tribal ritual of cleansing, she thought back to that moment when he had left them behind in the crawlspace, ready to face the wrath of the Leopard alone rather than give up his two hidden friends.

  Together the two children drank water beside Gulu’s dead body as a sign that, as his clans-people, they shouldered their part in his life. Muka drew the line around his body, which would have to serve as a fence around his grave. Bat cut a stick for the spear which, in their traditional ceremony of forgiveness, would have been solemnly broken as a symbol that all violence had been finally renounced.

  Meya waited quietly until all their rites were over. Only then did she approach, lifting one of Gulu’s fallen hands and then laying it back down softly, brushing the lifeless body with the tip of her trunk. Then, gently, she covered it with a coffin of branches, as elephants often did in their own ceremonies for the dead.

  ‘This place felt like his home,’ Muka murmured. ‘It was here for the first time that I ever saw him find peace. His spirit will be happy to return to this place.’

  All day the three travellers rested and stood guard over Gulu. Sometimes Bat and Muka spoke of their memories, sometimes they sobbed or smiled. More often they just sat in meditative silence, listening to the birds as they chirruped and rustled, the rush of the river as it spouted over the rocks. Clouds of white butterflies fluttered over the bushes. An iguana hoarded its trove of sunlight. Muka watched a small dark snake sliding like an arrow through the undergrowth. Slipping into the water, it glimmered like a living rainbow.

  From the lip of the escarpment, the children could clearly see the course of the river, a silvery vein of new life winding out across the earth. A fresh tinge of green was already covering the ground and amid it they could see the scattered dots of distant grazers. They were all feeding eagerly for the first time in several months.

  Soon they would be down there in that world, the children thought. And the next day, bowing their heads in a last sorrowful farewell to Gulu, they set off. Neither of them could see a way to get down that great cliff. But Meya, in the lead, didn’t pause. Barely waiting to check that the scrabbling children could keep up with her, she forged her steady path back up onto the escarpment’s lip. She seemed in a great hurry now. She strode along, scenting urgently, ears flared and trunk stretched.

  Huge clumps of scrub had slipped away down the cliff in the rain. They left raw fan-shaped smears on the face of the rock. How would they ever get down there? Bat wondered. It looked completely impossible. But Meya was more confident. She pushed on ahead, continuing without pausing for what felt a long while before suddenly plunging down the slopes of a ravine so steep that the children had to clutch at exposed roots to stop themselves from sliding.

  At the bottom the path levelled and grew suddenly easy again. Meya ate hungrily as she walked, snapping at boughs and cramming their bursting foliage into her mouth. The children gazed around them in delight at so much green. The smell of wet leaf mould filled the air, and sometimes they found themselves moving through patches of sticky sweet fragrance. Opening blossoms draped the damp air with their scent. Doves gurgled. It sounded like water pouring from a narrow-necked jar, Muka thought. A troupe of black-and-white monkeys bounded through the trees overhead, their feathery tails flowing in the wind of their flight. Once they saw a leopard slipping low through the trees, a newly caught bird still flapping feebly in its mouth. It gave a muffled grunt of alarm and the children heard the high answering miaow of a kitten hidden somewhere not far off. They hurried on by as fast as they could.

  It was only on the evening of the second day that Meya slackened her urgent pace. She stopped in a wide forest clearing to feed, stuffing in grasses which, releasing their rich juices, sent dribbles of green running down her bristly chin. Swathe after swathe she greedily plucked. And then, suddenly, she stopped. Bat and Muka saw her tense. The whites of her eyes rolled as she lifted her head and, raising her trunk, let its load of stems fall. Her pale tusks gleamed in the low evening light. She uttered a piercing squeal.

  For several minutes the children heard nothing. They waited, hearts pounding, and then came the first sound of movement far off in the trees. They strained their ears: it was a low scuffing noise, almost as if something heavy was being dragged through the brush. Bat recognized it instantly. A dizzy rush of excitement flooded his brain. He closed his eyes for a moment, and when he opened them again a great shadowy form was emerging from the shadows. It loomed up before them. Bat’s blood raced. Clutching at Muka, he drew her s
lowly backwards towards the edge of the clearing. This was the matriarch. This was the leader of Meya’s herd.

  The huge animal paused for a moment. A loud, high-pitched rumble rolled out. It was a sound that produced an instant reaction in Meya. The two elephants were moving rapidly towards one other. When they were only a short way apart, they broke into a run, coming together in a turmoil of flapping ears and shrill screaming; of jubilant trumpeting and loud clicking tusks. And then they lifted their heads together and, twining their trunks, rumbled so deeply that it rolled through the trees like the breaking of a storm. Only then did the rest of the herd emerge, spinning and backing in their wild excitement, trampling the clearing and breaking down bushes, rubbing and leaning upon their lost friend. They slipped their trunks into her grass-stained mouth. Muka, who had never before witnessed this exuberant greeting ceremony, stared round-eyed with amazement. Tears of sheer happiness coursed down Bat’s cheeks.

  Only after several minutes did the elephants settle. The cows slowly calmed and began to feed. They were thin, Bat noticed: very thin. Their skin hung from gaunt bodies in deep leathery folds, and the little calves that now crept curiously out from their mother’s legs were as wrinkled and wobbly as a litter of new-born dogs.

  That night, Bat and Muka moved amid a forest of huge feet, and when the whole family lay down, one by one, on their sides, they too slept. Curled up amid the sound of the elephants’ deep rhythmic breathing, they felt as if some great canopy had been stretched out above them, protecting them from the night with its slow puffing breaths.