The third elephant saw the rest of the herd emerge from the forest, not far from where it was standing, and it wasted no time to rejoin it. The now gentle giants of the forest started walking across the savannah, their massive bodies slowly rocking from side to side, like gigantic grey ships bobbing peacefully in a gentle breeze, a far cry from the pandemonium that had reigned only moments ago. A few turned to look back at the waterhole and the acacia tree where their brethren had fallen. Tristan expected them to come closer, to inspect, but they just continued to stare, like they were getting used to the sight. Both men in the tree refrained from taking another shot. It was enough killing for one day.
Jabari was the first one on the ground. He pulled the ceremonial sword from its sheath and cut into the young bull’s neck until he had severed its main artery. Thick spurts of blood erupted from the wound as the giant’s heart pumped its life onto the African plain. Tristan stood behind him and listened to the animal’s laboured breathing.
‘Come here, Nyegere.’ Tristan walked closer. ‘Put down your gun.’ Jabari motioned for him to step right up to the elephant. The African knelt slightly and clasped his hands together, making a foothold for Tristan. As soon as his foot was in, the big man lifted him in one motion, right on top of the young bull, where he lay down. Tristan felt its muscles quiver underneath his body. Even in its paralysed state, the beast made him feel insignificant, like a fly on the back of a buffalo.
‘Put your ear on his chest and listen.’
Tristan did as he was told. The skin was hard and leathery, yet warm and comforting on his cheek where the blood was still oozing from the last gunshot. He could hear the shallow rumbles of the lungs inflating and deflating. They were shutting down as life started to leave the elephant’s body. The animal’s heartbeat was slowing, the slushing sound slowly fading away.
‘Remember this day, Nyegere. Just like in your Bible, the young boy has slain Goliath. How does young David fare now that the deed is done?’
Tristan had shot many animals in his life to feed the crew of the Raven but feeling the magnificent beast’s body shudder underneath his own tugged wilfully at his comfort strings.
Jabari sensed his predicament. ‘You have taken one of mother Africa’s most ancient and precious children. She will ask for something in return, a gift to her many other children. And to receive her blessing, we shall give it to her. The meat will feed her people for weeks, then the lion, the hyena, the jackal and the vulture. Even the smallest of the ants will feast on the remains for weeks to come. Then, when the rains come and wash the bones white like London’s snow and time flatten our footprints, the tallest of grass and the lushest of brush will spring forth from its bones and feed so many others.’ With one ear, Tristan listened to the wise man’s words while he ran his hand across the dying animal’s side, providing what little comfort he could give. ‘’Tis different from killing a man, Nyegere. A man you kill to survive but this animal, it has done nothing to us, so we have to believe that killing such a humble, gentle creature serves a higher purpose and we’re not just killing it for these two white things at the front of its head.’
Jabari ran his sword over the tusks and all along the animal’s side, then as he turned around and walked away, said, ‘Tonight we shall feast on the heart of this animal. My ancestors believe you will gain its powers, both sense and body.’
Tristan slid down and walked over to the large bull where Jabari had repeated the slitting of the throat. The animal’s big eyes followed him. Dark patches had formed around them where tears had leaked out. He turned around and started walking back to the forest to inspect the damage, slightly torn between sadness and exhilaration. For it all to make sense, he had no choice but to believe the African’s story. And so he did.
When he reached their temporary camp, sunbeams had started to penetrate the thick foliage. There was not much left. Tents, pots, shelters, everything had been trampled into the ground, and likewise the pile of brush on the perimeter. Some of the men had started cleaning up, while others were retrieving those items that had been catapulted into bushes and trees. Tristan expected a more subdued atmosphere, but there was genuine excitement in the air as the natives scurried around to resurrect shelters and salvage what they could. Matondo came to meet him.
‘We got one, sir. A big one,’ beamed the man and showed Tristan his bloodied throwing axe as evidence. ‘The kasuyu tasted blood today. I didn’t think we would get any, but Mr Hanlon is an excellent shooter, sir. It took only one bullet from his gun.’ The man’s ebullient mood was contagious. ‘The trackers found the elephant. He fell about three hundred yards that way.’ The man excitedly pointed in the direction where the herd had exited the forest. ‘Mr Hanlon instructed me to send for help from the main camp. They should be here by late afternoon, sir,’ said Matondo proudly. He held up their drum of which only two limp bits of hide, with a few large splinters attached, remained. ‘They will get us a new one too.’
Tristan hid his impatience well. They needed a more coordinated approach. But we’re still learning. He smiled to himself, happy with the success they had had. ‘Send another man with these instructions and be quick about it. We’ll need most of the men from the main camp. They also need to contact the village we’ve passed through on the way here and send word to the chief. There’s enough meat here for all of them.’
‘Enough meat, sir?’
‘Walk to the edge of the forest and look in the direction of the large tree by the waterhole. You will see two more dead elephants. It cost the life of one of our men. Let me know how you and the others want to farewell him because there is little left to bury. That’s all for now.’
The negro watched Tristan suspiciously, not sure if he should believe what the white man had just told him. Previously when they had hunted, one, perhaps two animals had fallen in a day. ‘Yes, sir.’ He yelled to one of the senior men, a porter who had been with him on the British expedition, and told him what he had just heard.
‘O-yo-yo.’ The older man shook his head but listened carefully to his instructions, grabbed his kit and set off on a brisk pace, chasing after the two who had already left for the main camp.
While Matondo went to see for himself if the white man had spoken the truth, Tristan made his way through the camp assessing the devastation as he walked. While he witnessed the men working, his mind reflected on the hunt. He had counted as many of the herd as he could. With at least sixty adults and twelve young, it had to be one of the largest herds in the area. This meant that they needed to follow and hunt them for as long as they could.
He had to speak with Matondo and find out what exactly happened this morning. How did the elephants know where we were? Tristan knew he had yet to learn everything about Africa and its animals, but foolish he was not. Something had made those elephants head straight for their camp. They were lucky there had been no more injuries, and he said a silent prayer. With a herd that size and the scrambled retreat up the trees, it was good fortune that no more lives were lost, or perhaps a higher hand was indeed involved. He did not know enough of these things. Perhaps he should have gone to church more. Perhaps the death that he got to witness was God’s way of telling him to be more careful. Perhaps, it was an omen. Perhaps it meant nothing and the loss of life came with the territory they were finding themselves in and was something he needed to make peace with. Perhaps…perhaps he should reflect on this another day. Perhaps a discussion with the doctor over a beer on the very same topic would shed more light or give him a different perspective. The man was good at that.
Tristan did not doubt that Hanlon and Tayler were still celebrating somewhere while they relived every thrilling part of the hunt, so he let them be and headed back to the waterhole. What had taken him two minutes early this morning, with little light in a mad scramble for safety, now took him the best part of ten minutes to complete. Instead of following the tunnellike main track left in the undergrowth by the three elephants that had given chase, he retrace
d their tracks by looking for signs of broken branches, flattened grass and the odd footprint. Along the way, he searched for and found his fighting stick that had slowed him down through the thick brush, as well as one of his pistols that had slipped from his belt during the mad rush.
Just as the day was breaking across the savannah, he exited the forest. He looked down at his footprints, deep and heavy, and remembered how calm he had been. Even with a fourteen-thousand-pound animal in close pursuit, he knew exactly what he needed to do. For a brief moment, he allowed himself the lonely feeling of pride mixed with a little bit of relief and enjoyed the serenity while he listened to the forest as it welcomed the new day.
Right in front of him, the large acacia tree that had been their beacon of safety was encompassed in the sun’s first rays, while down below, beside the dark carcasses, he saw the two natives conversing.
When he joined them, Matondo could not contain himself. ‘Sir, three elephants in one day.’ He looked up at the heavens and reached out with both hands, speaking his own language.
‘The ancestors have certainly blessed us today, and in return, we have sent them one of our own,’ Jabari corroborated. He saw Tristan look in the direction of the bloodstain at the foot of the tree. ‘’Twas a good death, Nyegere. After all, you didn’t think mother Africa would relinquish her bounty that easily?’
Tristan shook his head dreamily. He had heard that the Bible said that they all came from dust and that one day they would return to dust. For once, it made sense to him or at least the latter part did. He turned back, facing the two men.
‘What happened this morning? What went wrong?’ His direct questions insisted on direct answers.
Matondo spoke first. ‘We made a mistake last night, sir.’ Somehow he had known the white man would have figured it out. ‘When we made camp, we were in such a rush to set up everything before nightfall that we didn’t canvass our surroundings properly. I went for a walk just before you arrived back at camp and found that we had camped right next to an existing footpath that the elephants used to get to the waterhole. The signs were there, sir. Some of the larger trees nearby have bark stripped from their trunks and younger trees have been pushed over. I missed it last night. I am sorry, sir.’
It would have been easy to fabricate a lie, perhaps blame a change in the wind or even the smoke from the fires, but the truth deserved swift punishment and sometimes a reward. Tristan had learned that from the Old Man. During one of their many nights at sea, the captain shared a story with him.
Amidst a severe heatwave in the Far East, the captain found out that someone had been stealing water. All hands on deck were called the next morning during which a man stepped forwards to claim responsibility. The man was swiftly punished with the cat, and while the doctor was busy looking after his wounds, the captain made his way down to the infirmary. He helped the doctor to dress the man’s wounds and commended the man for telling the truth. Sixteen years later the man took a cannonball fragment to the head, still in the service of the Old Man.
Tristan acknowledged Matondo’s honesty and with a stern yet gentle voice, said ‘It will never happen again.’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Now, please head back to camp and bring back some men with axes so that we can remove these tusks.’
‘Yes, sir. Thank you, sir.’
When he was out of earshot, Tristan turned to Jabari.
‘I said at the beginning of our journey that no man’s life is worth ten elephant tusks. I was proven wrong today, for it took only six.’
‘In this place, Tresten, I will gladly accept those terms.’
As much as he struggled to accept it, Tristan could not deny it. The man was right. No prayers were offered that night.
Another rainy day was coming to an end. It was dark and wet outside as dusk fell over the main camp. Tristan sat in his tent. They all kept to themselves most of these days. Over the course of two and a half months, the talk had dried up. A hunting story could only be told and retold so many nights before they all started sounding the same. And those nights were long gone. Life on the Raven was a distant memory no one wished to bring up anymore.
The rain had not let up for three long days – first hard, like a curtain of water rendering the ground trackless, then, as if they were not wet enough already, soft drenching rain. It was a miserable few days during which they just tried to keep themselves dry – the second time in as many weeks.
Tristan was cleaning his musket. Across from him, Matondo sat and watched, following his master’s actions step by step as he cleaned the gun that had been entrusted to him. Through the hazy smoke left by the burnt cedar, Matondo could see that the white man was brooding. He would clean a part, then sit with it in his hands, turning it round and round, watching it gleam in the pale lantern light. The light-hearted banter that was there at the beginning of the expedition had slowly disappeared and had made way for a mood as dark as the grey clouds that had brought the rain.
‘Do not worry, Nyegere. When I was young, I used to complain to my father about the rain. My father always said that without the rain we would not have the green grass to feed our cattle or a river to give us the fish. He would say, “Remember, my son, after the rain comes the rainbow.” Then he would sit me down and tell me the story of the rainbow serpent who had helped God to create this wonderful land, the mountains, the valleys and the rivers.’
Tristan looked across the cramped space to where the African was sitting on a crate. It was a story he had heard many times around the campfire. He imagined how the serpent slithered across the earth, creating all those things and wondered what the bishops of the England church would do if they had heard this. It put a smile on his face and from across the room, he received a beaming reply. Tristan liked the man dearly. He had never seen a fellow so reliable, always so upbeat, no matter the circumstance. Nothing could bring the Bakongo man down. But Matondo was right. Something gloomy was building on his insides. Last week’s rain was a blessing because it had given him the time to think things through, slowly and thoroughly. Luckily, he knew what needed to be done. In the quiet of the morning, he had made the decision, and tonight he would address it.
Two months in the bush felt like six in the civilised world. Time went by differently, not necessarily slowly – just differently. You wished for a day to go by faster so that you could put the killing and the butchering behind you and move on, yet it still kept going at the same pace as it had done for thousands of years. The monotonous cycle was endless, and the ceaseless killing had changed all of them. Days and even nights blended into each other, and he struggled to keep track of weeks and months.
They hunted. They slaughtered. Then they hunted some more. Every animal known to man, and many more, fell in front of their guns. Anything that crossed their path and the sights of their guns became another hide, horn or tusk that was added to the ever-growing stack in the middle of the camp. They had developed a hunger, a constant need to feed the stack and to watch it grow, day after day.
Time not spent hunting was used to refine their techniques for the different animals. Some they horded, some they stalked and others they ambushed, but for the largest, they continued to bring death from above. It was relentless, sometimes mindless and mostly faultless. The stack had quickly become the highest structure in camp, their very own church for which they had become the reapers, the gods of destruction.
What Jabari had said at the waterhole about an animal’s heart had come true in more ways than one. Physically, Tristan was stronger than he had ever been. He even started thinking like his prey and used his newfound knowledge in dreamlike visions to devise schemes and traps to outwit even the slyest of foxes. He used the wind and terrain to good advantage, hording animals into corners made from brush piles. There, obscured bodies smeared with mud and dung would lurk patiently, and, amidst a cacophony of shrill bleats for help, guns, spears and bows would unleash hell upon their prey.
While their days were f
illed with the sweet smell of blood and the dull thuds of blade on meat and bone, their nights were laden with the smell of charred and smoked meat that hung like a thick blanket over the camp. And sometimes, no matter the time of day and depending on the breeze, the now all-familiar whiff of rotten entrails would drift into the camp. But they had become immune to it all, their moral senses blunted, for even in their dreams, they took the shot and cut the throat, these actions now as common to them as a piss in the morning.
A network of people transported slabs of smoked and salted meat across the land. Their main camp had grown to twice its original size as more and more people arrived to work and distribute the meat. And amidst it all was a young white man whose name had become synonymous with this endless supply – Nyegere.
However, a week ago, what had slowly become apparent to Tristan had swiftly and almost unexpectedly come to full fruition. They had killed six adult elephants. There had been so much meat that the natives had been unable to process all of it. Three days later, when Tristan had cast his eyes over the killing fields where predators and birds of prey had gorged themselves on the rotting carcasses, he realised that his time here was done.
Mother Africa could no longer keep up with them, and although he was not superstitious, he wondered if the endless rain was her way of saying that they had overstayed their welcome. Or perhaps it was how she rustled the leaves at night. Like a gentle wind through the sails, she tugged at a part of his heart, reminding him of the life he had left behind.
Tristan had also come to realise that there was not an ounce of enjoyment or adventure left in what he was doing. Their way of life had become a means to an end. Skins, horns and tusks brought money but nothing else. There was no thrill left or any self-worth in anything they did. And then there was the constant tiredness of body and mind. ‘Tired men make mistakes,’ the Old Man used to mumble. This morning he had found himself draped across his mattress, his stomach empty and his left foot still brandishing a partially removed boot. Somehow they had lost all notion of decency and even the most basic of tasks, like feeding and clothing themselves, had fallen by the wayside and had become less important as the relentless duty to feed the pile had taken over their lives.
The Fire Within Page 42