第3章 An African Story(3)

Juma was very confident and they moved fast. Both his father and Juma seemed very sure of themselves and the going on the elephant road was so easy that Juma gave him the .303 to carry as they went on through the broken light of the forest. Then they lost the trail in smoking piles of fresh dung and the flat round prints of a herd of elephants that had come onto the elephant road from the heavy forest on the left of the trail. Juma had taken the .303 from David angrily. It was afternoon before they worked up to the herd and around it, seeing the gray bulks through the trees and the movement of the big ears and the searching trunks coiling and uncoiling, hearing the crash of branches broken, the crash of trees pushed over, the rumbling in the bellies of the elephants and the slap and thud of the dung falling.

They had found the trail of the old bull finally and when it turned off onto a smaller elephant road Juma had looked at David's father and grinned showing his filed teeth and his father had nodded his head. They looked as though they had a dirty secret, just as they had looked when he had found them that night at the shamba.

It was not very long before they came on the secret. It was off to the right in the forest and the tracks of the old bull led to it. It was a skull as high as David's chest and white from the sun and the rain. There was a deep depression in the forehead and a ridge ran from between the bare white eye sockets and flared out in empty broken holes where the tusks had been chopped away.

Juma pointed out where the great elephant they were trailing had stood while he looked down at the skull and where his trunk had moved it a little way from the place it had rested on the ground and where the points of his tusks had touched the ground beside it. He showed David the single hole in the big depression in the white bone of the forehead and then the four holes close together in the bone around the earhole. He grinned at David and at his father and took a .303 solid from his pocket and fitted the nose into the hole in the bone of the forehead.

"Here is where Juma wounded the big bull," his father said. "This was his askari. His friend, really, because he was a big bull too. He charged and Juma knocked him down and finished him in the ear."

Juma was pointing out the scattered bones and how the big bull had walked among them. Juma and David's father were both very pleased with what they had found.

"How long do you suppose he and his friend had been together?" David asked his father.

"I haven't the faintest idea," his father said. "Ask Juma."

"You ask him, please."

His father and Juma spoke together and Juma had looked at David and laughed.

"Probably four or five times your life, he says," David's father told him. "He doesn't know or care really."

I care, David thought. I saw him in the moonlight and he was alone but I had Kibo. Kibo has me too. The bull wasn't doing any harm and now we've tracked him to where he came to see his dead friend and now we're going to kill him. It's my fault. I betrayed him.

Now Juma had worked out the trail and motioned to his father and they started on.

My father doesn't need to kill elephants to live, David thought. Juma would not have found him if I had not seen him. He had his chance at him and all he did was wound him and kill his friend. Kibo and I found him and I never should have told them and I should have kept him secret and had him always and let them stay drunk at the beer shamba. Juma was so drunk we could not wake him. I'm going to keep everything a secret always. I'll never tell them anything again. If they kill him Juma will drink his share of the ivory or just buy himself another goddamn wife. Why didn't you help the elephant when you could? All you had to do was not go on the second day. No, that wouldn't have stopped them. Juma would have gone on. You never should have told them. Never, never tell them. Try and remember that. Never tell anyone anything ever. Never tell anyone anything again.

His father waited for him to come up and said very gently, "He rested here. He's not traveling as he was. We'll be up on him anytime now."

"Fuck elephant hunting," David had said very quietly.

"What's that?" his father asked.

"Fuck elephant hunting," David said softly.

"Be careful you don't fuck it up," his father had said to him and looked at him flatly.

That's one thing, David had thought. He's not stupid. He knows all about it now and he will never trust me again. That's good. I don't want him to because I'll never ever tell him or anybody anything again, never anything again. Never ever never.

In the morning he was on the far slope of the mountain again. The elephant was no longer traveling as he had been but was moving aimlessly now, feeding occasionally and David had known they were getting close to him.

He tried to remember how he had felt. He had no love for the elephant yet. He must remember that. He had only a sorrow that had come from his own tiredness that had brought an understanding of age. Through being too young, he had learned how it must be to be too old.

He was lonesome for Kibo and thinking of how Juma killing the elephant's friend had turned him against Juma and made the elephant his brother. He knew then how much it meant to him to have seen the elephant in the moonlight and to have followed him and come close to him in the clearing so that he had seen the great tusks. But he did not know that nothing would ever be as good as that again. Now he knew they would kill the elephant and there was nothing he could do about it. He had betrayed the elephant when he had gone back to tell them at the shamba. They would kill me and they would kill Kibo if we had ivory, he had thought, and known it was untrue.

Probably the elephant is going to find where he was born and they'll kill him there. That's all they'd need to make it perfect. They'd like to have killed him where they killed his friend. That would be a big joke. That would have pleased them. The goddamned friend killers.