Текст книги "A Time to Die"

Автор книги: Wilbur Smith

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Текущая страница: 10 (всего у книги 38 страниц)

While he tasted the rich creamy milk for the very first time, his dam picked up the fetal sac and afterbirth and stuffed them into her mouth, chewing and swallowing and, at the same time, using her trunk to cover the damp and bloodstained spot on the earth with sand.

The three of them, his mother, her companion, and Tukutela, remained on the island for almost two weeks while the calf mastered the use of his legs and trunk, the pigment of his skin darkened, and his eyes adjusted to the harsh African sunlight. Then, when she considered him strong enough, she took him to find the herd, pushing him ahead of her and lifting him over the steep and difficult places.

The din of a hundred elephants feeding carried to them from afar, the crack and crash of breaking branches and the pig like squeals of the calves at play. Tukutela's dam trumpeted her return, and the herd came rushing up to greet her. Then, discovering the new calf, they crowded around to touch him with their trunks, puffing his scent into their mouths so they would recognize it always thereafter.

Tukutela cowered between his mother's front legs, overwhelmed by the huge bodies that surrounded him, making little baby noises of terror, but his mother draped her trunk over him and rumbled to reassure him. Within hours rather than days, he ventured out from her protection to join the other calves and to begin carving for himself a niche in the hierarchy of the breeding herd.

The herd was a close-knit group, almost all its members blood relatives, mutually reliant on each other so that the education and discipline of the young was a concern of all.

The calves were always kept in the center of the herd, and their antics were strictly supervised by the old barren cows who were their self-appointed nursemaids. Their care and protection was intense, but any infringement of the herd law was punished instantly: a tree branch wielded with gusto across the recalcitrant's back and hindquarters would ensure terrified squeals and instant obedience.

Tukutela learned his place in every situation: at the center when the herd was relaxed and feeding; between his mother's front legs when they were on the march or in flight from danger. He learned to react instantly to the alarm signal, learned to recognize it even when it was given by an animal on the further outskirts of the group.

At the signal, the instantaneous silence, in contrast to the preceding happy uproar of the herd, was an eerie phenomenon of elephant behavior.

Tukutela's development was closely parallel to the ages of a human being: His infancy lasted two years, during which time he shed the tiny milk tusks with which he had been born and entered on his juvenile years, when his true tusks emerged beyond his lips.

At first these were covered by a cap of smooth enamel, but as soon as he was weaned and began to use his tusks to feed with and to engage in mock combat with his peers, this was worn away and the true ivory beneath was exposed.

His tusks would continue to grow in length and girth throughout his entire life, even into his extreme old age. But the genes that dictated their extraordinary development came down from his dam along with all her other gifts of strength and bulk and intelligence.

By the age of three, Tukutela had learned the attitudes of threat and submission toward others, and his play was boisterous, with much ear flapping and threatening and barging, which further developed his unusually robust frame.

Once his dam weaned him, her care became less intensive and he was allowed more range and freedom, though he still came under her fierce protection at the first threat. On the march his place was still close beside her in the lead, so very early on he learned the herd's territory.

This was a vast area, from the shores of Lake Nyasa in the north to the rain forests of the Chimanimani Mountains in the south, west to the deep gorge where the Zambezi River forces itself between narrow rock cliffs with the roar of perpetual thunder and east five hundred miles to where the same mighty river spreads out across wide flood plains and swampy littoral before debauching through multiple mouths into the Indian Ocean.

He learned the mountain passes and the ancient elephant roads, he learned the groves where succulent fruits grew and the seasons when they ripened. She led him to burned-out savannahs just as the first tender green shoots pushed through the ashes and to the salt lakes where for thousands of years the elephants had come to. out lumps of mineral-rich earth with their tusks and eat it with all the relish of small boys with sticks of candy. over the centuries quarrying deep excavations in the red African earth.

The herd was on the Mavuradonha Mountains in the south when the msasa forests put out new leaf and their sap began to flow; they were in the dense rain forests on Mount Mlanje when the rest of the range baked in the long African droughts. Always the old cow led them to water, for the herd was totally dependent on that precious fluid. They had to drink each day or experience terrible hardship. They needed copious quantities to nurture their great bodies, to cleanse their hides, and, more simply, for the luxurious pleasure of the wallow. The watering hole was an important gathering place for the herd, a place where their bonds were reaffirmed and where many of their social rituals were played out.

Even the act of procreation usually took place in the water, and when the cows chose the place for their birthing, it was nearly always near water.

Sometimes there was abundant water-the great green African rivers, the mountains on which the perpetual drizzling rains fell, and the wide swamplands where they waded belly deep through papyrus beds to reach the islands. At other times, they had to dig for it in the dry riverbeds or patiently wait their turn at the seeps to thrust their trunks into the deep eye of the secret well and suck up a bitter brackish mouthful at a time. Their range was wide and their contact with human beings infrequent. There was a great war raging in a far-off land, and it had sucked most of the white men to its center. The men the herd encountered were usually half-naked, primitive tribesmen who fled before them. Yet Tukutela learned very early that a special aura of dread surrounded these strange hairless baboon like beings. At five years of age he could identify their peculiar acrid odor on a light breeze from many miles away, and even the faintest taint of it made him and the tire herd uneasy.

Tukutela was eleven years of age before he had his first Yet memorable encounter with human beings. One night following their time-honored route along the south bank of the Zambezi, his dam had stopped abruptly at the front of the herd and lifted her trunk at full stretch above her head to scent the air. Tukutela had imitated her and become aware of a tantalizing odor. He had puffed the taste of it into his mouth, and his saliva poured down and dribbled from his lower lip. The rest of the herd bunched up behind them and were almost immediately consumed by the same, appetite. None of them had ever smelled sugar cane before.

The old matriarch led them upwind and within a few miles they came out on an area of the riverbank that had been recently cleared and irrigated and planted with long sword shaped leaves glistened in the moonlight, and the aroma was rich and sweet and irresistible. The herd rushed into the new fields, Pulling up the Plants and stuffing them down their throats in a greedy passion.

The destruction was immense, and in the midst of it the herd was suddenly surrounded by lights and the shouts of men's voices and the beating of drums and metal cans. Panic and pandemonium overtook the herd, and as they charged out of the sugar field there was a shocking series of loud reports and the bright flash of gunfire "in the night. It was the first time Tukutela had ever smelled burned cordite smoke. He would remember it always and associate it with the squeals of the elephants who had been mortally hit.

The herd ran hard at first and then settled into the long stride that covered the ground at the speed of a cantering horse. By morning, one of the young cows, her first calf under her belly, could no longer keep up with the herd and slumped down on her front knees, bright blood trickling from the bullet wound in her Bank.

The matriarch turned back to assist her, but the cow could not rise and the matriarch moved up beside her.

Using tusks and trunk, she lifted the fallen animal to her feet and attempted to lead her away. It was in vain, for the dying animal slumped down and lay with her legs folded up under her.

The smell of her blood upset the herd and they milled about her, swinging their trunks and flapping their ears.

One of the herd bulls, in a desperate effort to revive the fallen cow, mounted her in a stylized attempt at copulation, but a gout Of arterial blood spurted from her wound and with a groan she toppled over on her side.

Unlike most animals, the elephant recognizes death, especially in one of its own group, and even the immature Tukutela was affected by the strange melancholy that followed the cows death.

Some members Of the herd approached the carcass and touched it with their trunks, almost a gesture of farewell, before they wandered away into the gray thorn scrub.

The matriarch stayed on when the others had left, and Tukutela stayed with her. He watched as his dam began to strip the Surrounding trees of their branches and pile them over the carcass of the dead cow.

Only when it was completely hidden under a mound of vegetation was she satisfied. The dead cow's unweaned calf had stayed beside its mother's corpse, and now the matriarch shooed it ahead of her as she followed the herd. Twice the calf tried to double back to where its mother lay, but the matriarch blocked it, turning it with her trunk and pushing it along.

A mile away, the rest of the herd was waiting in a gro yellow-stemmed fever trees. Many of the younger calves were suckling, and the matriarch pushed the orphan calf toward where one of the older calves, one almost due to be weaned, was showing only perfunctory interest in his mother's dugs. She shoved the orphan between the cow's front legs and instinctively the little animal rolled its trunk onto its forehead and reached up for the teat. The cow made no objection, accepting the role of foster mother with equanimity. The matriarch stood beside the pair, rumbling to them encouragingly, and when she led the herd on, the orphan calf had displaced the older calf between the cow's front legs.

It seemed that from then on the herd's contact with men bearing firearms became more frequent every season, especially when the bulls were with the breeding herd.

The mature bulls kept a loose liaison with the breeding herd.

They found the noisy and boisterous behavior of the young animals annoying and the competition for food demanding. No sooner would one of the bulls shake down a rain of ripe pods from the top branches of a tall thorn tree than a dozen youngsters would rush over to gobble them.

Or he would push over a msasa tree to get at the new leaf, leaning with his forehead against the trunk and snapping the three-foot diameter of hardwood with a report like a cannon shot, and immediately four or five greedy young cows would push themselves in front of him before he could sample the juicy pink leaves.

So the bulls would wander away from the herd, singly or in bachelor groups of three or four. Perhaps they also realized instinctively that the herd was likely to attract the hunters and they would be safer away from it. Sometimes they were only a few miles away, sometimes as far as thirty or forty, but they always seemed to be aware of the herd's location and would return when the cows were in season.

When the bulls were with the herd was the time there was most likely to be that sudden crash of gunfire, the squeal of wounded animals, and the headlong rush of huge panic-stricken bodies through the brush.

When Tukutela was a juvenile, under ten years of age, there had been six huge bulls associated with the herd, animals carrying thick shafts of ivory, but over the years he grew toward maturity, these were gradually whittled down. Each dry season one or more of them fell to the sound of rifle fire, and only the mediocre bulls, or those with worn or damaged ivory, remained.

By this time Tukutela had grown into an unusually large young bull and his tusks were beginning to develop, clean and white and sharp-pointed, already showing promise of what they would one day become. As he grew, so the matriarch, his dam, declined. Slowly the outline of her bones appeared through the folds and hangs of her wrinkled gray hide, so she became a gaunt and skeletal figure. Her sixth and last molar was already chipped and half worn away, she ate with difficulty, and the slow starvation age had begun. She relinquished her place at the head of the herd to a younger, more robust cow, and shambled along behind. On the steep places where the elephant road climbed the mountain passes Tukutela would wait for her at the crest, rumbling to bring her up over the difficult places, and he stood close to her in the night as he had as a calf.

It had been a dry season and the water holes were less than half full. The approaches to the water had been churned by the elephant herds and rhinoceros and buffklo to glutinous black mud, in some places deep as an elephant's belly, and it was here that the old matriarch stuck.

Lunging in an attempt to free herself, she fell over sideways and the mud sucked her down until only part of her head was clear.

She struggled for two days. Tukutela tried to help her, but even his enormous strength was of no avail. The mud held her fast and gave him no footing nor purchase. The old cow's struggles became weaker, her wild screams more feeble, until at last she was stiff and silent except for the hiss of her breathing.

It took two more days, and Tukutela stood beside her all that time. The herd had long since departed, but he remained. She gave no outward sign of passing from life to death other than the cessation of her harsh breathing, but Tukutela knew it instantly, and he lifted his trunk high and bugled out his grief in a cry that startled the wild fowl from the water hole in a cloud of noisy wings.

He went to the edge of the forest and plucked leafy boughs. He took them to the water hole and covered his dam's muddy carcass with them building for her a high green funeral pier. Then he left her and went into the veld.

He did not rejoin the herd for almost two years. By that time he was sexually mature and could no longer resist the scent of estrus the breeze brought down to him.

When he found the herd, it was gathered on the bank of the Kafue River, ten miles upstream from where it makes its confluence with the great Zambezi. Some of the herd members came out to meet him as he approached. They entwined their trunks with his and pushed their foreheads together in greeting, then allowed him to join the main body.

There were two cows in season, and one of them was an animal of similar age to Tukutela. She was prime, fat with good grazing and browsing the rains had raised. Her ivory was thin and very white, as straight and sharp as knitting needles, and her ears had not yet been torn or tattered by thorn and sharp twigs. She spread them now as she recognized Tukutela as her peer, and she came to twine her trunk with his.

They stood with their heads together, rumbling gently at each other, and then disentangled their trunks and began to caress each other lightly with the tips, moving down the length of each other's bodies until they stood head to tail.

The tips of the trunk are as sensitive and dextrous as the fingers of the human hand, and Tukutela reached down between her back legs and groped for her vaginal opening. She began to sway from side to side, rocking her whole body, an expression of extreme pleasure. As he manipulated her, so her estrus discharge flowed down freely, drenching his trunk, the aroma of it filling his head.

His penis emerged from its fleshy sheath, as long as a man is tall and as thick as one of his legs; the tip of it brushed the earth below his belly. Its length was variegated with blotches of pink and black, but the skin was smooth and shining and the head flared like the mouth of a trumpet. Elephants belong to the testiconda group, and his testicles were contained deep in the body cavity, so there was no external evidence of them.

When both of them were fully aroused, Tukutela nudged her gently down the bank and into the river. The green waters closed over them, intensifying their pleasure in each other, supporting their great bodies, buoying them up so they were light and nimble.

They submerged until only their trunks were above the surface, sporting together, bitaking out again like blowing whales, and the water poured off them in sheets, cleansing their gray hides of dust and dirt, darkening them to the color of coal.

Tukutela reared over her and placed his forelegs on each side of her back. In the water, she supported him easily. Her vagina was placed far forward between her back legs, and he needed all of his length to reach it. His penis took on a life of its own, pulsing and jerking and twisting as it flared upward to conform to the angle of her opening. Only the first third of its length was able to bury itself in her. His whole body shuddered and convulsed and both creatures trumpeted together and thrashed the waters to white foam.

He stayed with the herd three days, and then the female's estrus ended and Tukutela became restless. He had inherited his dam's instinct for survival, and he sensed danger with the herd. On the third day, he ghosted away into the gray thorn scrub. He went alone, with no other bull for company.

Each season when he returned to the herd he was stronger, his tusks longer and thicker, the vegetable juices darkening them to the color of alabaster. On occasion there were other bulls competing to service the females, and he had to fight for his right.

At first he was driven off by older, more experienced males, but each season his tusks and his cunning grew, until none of the other herd bulls stood up against him and he had his pick of the cows.

However, he never stayed more than a few days with the herd, and always he departed alone and sought out the places his dam had showed to him, the swamps inaccessible to man, the thickest forests, the tallest beds of elephant grass. It was as though he realized the danger those tusks would bring upon him.

In his thirty-fifth year he was a huge animal, weighing seven tons and standing over twelve feet at the shoulder. His tusks, though not anywhere as heavy as they would one day be, were perfectly symmetrical, long, and pointed.

For days after leaving the herd that season he had been unaccountably nervous. He moved restlessly, testing the air often, raising his trunk high and then puffing it into his mouth. Once or twice he detected it, but the acrid scent was faint, just a tiny shadow on his consciousness.

However, he could not keep moving endlessly. His huge frame required over a ton of grass and leaves and fruit and bark each day to sustain it. He had to stop to feed. In the early morning he stood in a dense grove of comb return trees, stripping bark. He used the point of a tusk to prize a gash in the bark, then he gripped the tag end in his trunk and with an upward jerk ripped loose a strip of bark fifteen feet up the hole of the tree. He rolled the bark into a ball and stuffed it into his mouth.

intent on his task, he relaxed his vigilance. An elephant has poor eyesight; he cannot distinguish stationary objects only a few yards distant, although he can instantly detect movement. Furthermore, his eyes are placed well back in the skull, impeding his forward view, and the spread of his ears tends to block his peripheral vision to the rear.

Using the small morning wind to negate the bull's marvelous sense of smell, moving with extreme stealth so his fine hearing was frustrated, the hunters approached him from behind, staying in his blind spot. There were two of them, and they had followed him ever since he had left the herd. Now they crept up very close to him.

The bull turned broadside to the hunters, ready to move on to the next tree, and showed them the long curved gleam of his tusks.

"Take him!" said one man to the other, and the Spanish maker of fine sherries lifted his double-barreled rifle, which was engraved and inlaid with gold, and aimed for Tukutela's brain.

Over his sights, he picked out the dark vertical cleft in the front of the ear and followed it down to its lowest point. That was where the actual opening of the eardrum was situated. Having found it, he moved his aim forward three inches along an imaginary line from the aperture of the ear toward the elephant's eye.

The Spanish sherry maker was on his first African safari. He had shot chamois and mouflon and red deer in the Pyrenees, but a wild African elephant is none of these timid creatures, and the Spaniard's heart was thudding into his ribs, his spectacles were fogged with sweat, and his hands shook. The professional hunter with him had patiently instructed him how and where to place his shot, but now he could not hold his aim on it, and every second his breathing became more labored, his aim more erratic. In desperation he jerked the trigger.

The bullet hit Tukutela a foot above his left eye and fifteen inches from the frontal lobe of the brain, but the honeycombed bony sponge of his skull cushioned the shock. He reeled back on his haunches, flung his trunk straight up above his head, and gave a deep roaring growl in his throat.

The Spanish hunter turned and ran, and Tukutela whirled to face the movement, launching himself off his haunches. The professional hunter was directly under his outstretched trunk, and he flung up his rifle and aimed into Tukutela's head, into the roof of his open mouth between the bases of the long curved tusks.

The firing pin fell on, dud primer with a click, the rifle misfired, and Tukutela swung his trunk down like the executioner's axe, crushing the man against the the earth.

The Spaniard was still running and Tukutela went after him, overhauling him effortlessly. He reached out his trunk and curled it around his waist. The man screamed and Tukutela tossed him thirty feet straight up into the air. He screamed all the way down until he hit the earth and the air was driven from his lungs.

Tukutela seized him by one ankle and swung his body against the trunk of the nearest tree with a force that burst the man's internal organs, spleen, liver, and lungs.

Tukutela raged through the forest with the corpse held in his trunk, beating it against the trees, lifting it high and slamming it down upon the earth until it disintegrated and he was left with only the stump of the leg in his grip. He flung that aside and went back to where he had left the professional hunter.

The blow from the trunk had shattered the hunter's collarbone, broken both his arms, and crushed in his ribs, but he was still alive and conscious. He saw Tukutela coming back for him, the long trunk dangling, the huge ears extended, blood from his wound dribbling down to mingle with the blood of the Spaniard that splattered his chest and front legs.

The hunter tried to drag his mangled body away. Tukutela placed one great foot in the center of his back, pinning him down.

Then, with his trunk, he plucked off his limbs, one at a time, legs and arms, tearing them away from the hip and shoulder joints, and throwing them aside. Finally he wrapped his trunk around the hunters head and pulled it away from the shoulders. It rolled like a ball bouncing across the ground as Tukutela hurled it from him.

His rage abated, overtaken by the pain in his head, and Tukutela stood over the bodies he had destroyed, rocking from one foot to the other, rumbling in his throat as first the pain and then the melancholy of death came over him.

Despite the pain in his head and the slow drip of blood into his eye from the wound above it, he began the ritual of death he had learned from his dam so many years previously. He gathered the parts of his victims, the squashed trunks and mutilated limbs, and piled them in a heap. He picked their accouterments out of the grass-rifles, hats, water bottles-and added them to the bloody pile. Then he began to strip the trees of leafy branches and to cover it all with a mound of green.

The bullet wound healed cleanly, but soon there were other scars to add to the little white star it left above his eye. A weighted spear from a deadfall trap opened his thick gray hide from shoulder to knee, and he almost died from the infection that followed. The spread of his ears caught on thorns and hooked twigs, the edges became tattered and eroded. He fought for cows when he joined the breeding herd, and although none of the other bulls could prevail against him, their tusks slashed and cut and marked him.

Then there were other encounters with men.

Despite the dire danger associated with it, that first taste of the sweet juice of the sugar cane so long ago had been addictive.

Tukutela became a compulsive garden raider. Sometimes he would lurk for days in the vicinity of a patch of cultivation, getting up his courage. Then, when there was no moon, in the deepest hours of the night, he would go in, stepping soundlessly as a cat on his big madded feet. Millet, maize, papaya, yams, he loved them all, but sugar cane he could never resist.

At first he allowed himself to be driven off by the flaming torches, the shouting, and the drums, but then he learned to answer the shouts with his own wild screams and to charge at the guardians of the forbidden gardens.

On separate occasions over the next ten years, he killed eight human beings in the course of his raids, pulling their bodies to pieces like a glutton dismembering a chicken carcass. He grew reckless in his greed for the sweet cane. Whereas after previous raids he would travel a hundred miles in a single nonstop march to distance himself from retribution, this season he began to return to the same field on consecutive nights.

The villagers had sent a message to the boma of the colonial district commissioner, begging for assistance. The D.C. had sent one of his ask ari armed with a.404 rifle and the ask ari was waiting for Tukutela. The ask ari was a Policeman and neither a great hunter nor marksman. He hid himself in a pit in the middle of the field, quite happy in his own mind that the elephant would not return to the field that night; for TuIkutela had already made a reputation for himself across his vast range and his habits were known. he was notorious as the garden raider who had killed so many villagers and who never returned to the scene of his crime.

The ask ari awoke from a deep sleep in the bottom of his pit to find Tukutela blotting out the stars over his head, munching on the standing cane. The ask ari snatched up his.404 and fired a bullet upward into Tukutela's belly. It was not a mortal wound, and Tukutela hunted the ask ari remorselessly, quartering downwind until he picked up the scent and following it to the pit where the man crouched paralyzed with terror. Tukutela put his trunk down into the pit and plucked him out.

The wound took many weeks to heal. The pain pawed at his guts, and Tukutela's hAtred of man grew upon it.

Though Tukutela could not understand the reason for it, his contact with man became ever more frequent. His old range was being whittled down; every season there were more tracks and roads cutting through his secret places. Motor vehicles, noisy and stinking, buzzed through the silent places of the veld. The great forests were being hacked down and the earth turned to the plow. Lights burned in the night, and human voices carried to him wherever he wandered. Tukutela's world was shrinking in upon him.

His tusks were growing all this time, longer and thicker, until in his sixtieth year they were great dark columns.

He killed another man in 1976, a black man who tried to defend his few wretched acres of millet with a throwing spear, but the head of the spear lodged in Tukutela's neck and formed a chronic source of infection, a constantly suppurating abscess.

Tukutela had long ago ceased to seek out the breeding herd. The scent of estrus on the wind awakened in him a sweet fleeting nostalgia, but the driving force of the procreative urge had dulled and he pursued his solitary ways through the shrinking forests.

There were some areas of his old range that remained untouched, and from experience Tukutela came to recognize them and to realize that they formed a sanctuary where he was safe from man's harassment. He did not understand that these were the national parks, where he was protected by law, but he spent more and more of his time in these areas and over the years learned their precise boundaries. In time he became reluctant to venture across them into the dangerous world beyond.

Even in these sanctuaries he was wary, driven always by his hatred and fear of men to attack them wherever he found them, or to fly from the first acrid taint of them on the breeze. His faith in the safety of the sanctuary was tested when the hunters found him even there. He heard the report of a firearm and felt the sting of the missile, not differentiating between the sound of a rifle and a dart gun, but when he tried to locate and destroy his attackers, a strange lethargy overtook him, a terrible weakness in his thick columnar legs, and he slumped unconscious to the earth. He awoke to the terrifying stench of men all around him, thick and repulsive on the air, even on his own skin where they had touched him. When he lumbered unsteadily to his feet, he found a strange serpentine device suspended around his neck and the chronic abscess on his neck caused by the spear wound was burning with the fires of antiseptics. He tried to wrench off the radio collar, but it defied even his might, and so, in frustration, he devastated the forest around him, smashing down the tall trees and ripping out the bushes.