He froze like that for a long moment, groping at the tainted earth with the tip of his trunk, then he lifted it to his mouth and sprayed the scent into the open pink buds of his olfactory organs. The dread and hated odour struck him like a physical force and he went back another pace, then his trunk lifted straight into the air above him, and he wheeled and like a well-trained pair of coach horses his tall askari wheeled with him, shoulder to shoulder, and flank to flank, they began to run – and Zouga was still a hundred yards behind them.
Jan Cheroot dropped on to one knee into the mud, and flung up his musket. At the same instant, the askari checked slightly and swung left, crossing his leader’s rear. Perhaps it was unintentional, but neither Zouga nor Jan Cheroot believed that. They knew that the younger bull was drawing fire, protecting the other with his own body.
‘You want it? Take it then, you thunder!’ Jan Cheroot shouted angrily, he knew he had lost too much ground by pausing to fire.
Aiming for the younger bull, Jan Cheroot took the hip shot, and the bull staggered to it, flecks of red mud flying from his skin where the ball struck, and he broke his stride, favouring the damaged joint, swinging out of the line of his run, broadside to the hunters, while the great bull ran on alone.
Zouga could have killed the crippled bull with a heart shot, for the animal was down to a dragging, humpbacked trot and the range was less than thirty paces, but Zouga ran straight past him, never checking, hardly glancing at him, knowing he could leave Jan Cheroot to finish that business. He ran after the big bull, but despite his utmost endeavour, losing ground to him steadily.
Ahead of them, the ground dipped into a shallow open saucer, and beyond that it rose to another ridge on which the wild teak trees stood like sentinels in the grey rain. The bull went down into the saucer, still in his initial burst of speed, stretching out so that his padfalls sounded like the steady beat of a bass drum, opening the gap between himself and his hunter – until he reached the bottom of the dip, and then he was almost halted.
His weight broke the surface of the swampy ground, and he sank through almost to his shoulders, and had to lunge for each step, with the glutinous mud sucking and squelching obscenely at each of his frantic movements.
Swiftly Zouga closed the range, and his spirits took wing, his exultation driving back his weakness and fatigue. He felt intoxicated with battle lust. He reached the swampy ground, and leapt from tussock to tussock of coarse swamp grass, while the bull struggled on ahead of him.
Closer and closer still Zouga came up to him, almost point-blank range, less than twenty yards and at last he stopped and balanced on one of the little islands of grass roots.
Just ahead of him the bull had reached the far side of the swamp, and was heaving himself out on to the firm ground at the foot of the slope. The bull’s front legs were higher than his still-bogged hindquarters, the whole slope of his back was exposed to Zouga, the knuckles of his massive spine stood out clearly through the mudpainted skin and the arched staves of his rib cage were like the frames of a Viking longboat. Zouga fancied he could actually see the pounding rhythm of the great heart beating against them.
There could be no mistake this time. In the months since their first encounter, Zouga had become a skilled huntsman, he knew the soft and vital places in the mountainous bulk of an elephant’s body. At this range and from this angle, the heavy ball would shatter the spine between the shoulder blades without losing any of its velocity, and it would go on deep, to the heart, to those thick serpentine arteries that fed the lungs.
He touched the hair trigger, and with a pop like a child’s toy the gun misfired. The great grey beast heaved himself clear of the mud, and went away up the slope, now at last settling into the swinging ground-eating gait which would carry him fifty miles before nightfall.
Behind him Zouga reached the firm ground and flung down the useless weapon, dancing with impatience as he screamed at his bearers to bring up the second gun.
Matthew was fifty paces behind him, slipping and staggering in the swampy ground. Mark, Luke and John were strung out behind him.
‘Come on! Come on!’ screamed Zouga, and snatched the second gun from Matthew, and dashed away up the slope. He had to catch the bull before he reached the crest of the slope, for down the other side he would go like an eagle on the wind.
Zouga ran now with all his heart, with all his will and the very last dregs of his strength, while behind him Matthew stopped, snatched up the misfired weapon from where Zouga had thrown it down, and, acting instinctively in the heat and excitement of the chase, he reloaded it.
He poured another handful of black powder on top of the charge and ball already in the barrel and tamped down a second quarter-pound ball of lead on top of it all. In so doing he changed the gun from a formidable weapon to a lethal bomb that could maim or even kill the man who attempted to fire it. Then Matthew slipped another percussion cap over the nipple and ran on up the slope after Zouga.
The bull was nearing the crest of the ridge, and Zouga was coming up on him, but slowly, the difference in their speed just barely discernible. At last Zouga’s strength was failing, he could keep this pace for minutes more and he knew when he finally stopped he would be on the verge of total physical collapse.
His vision was swimming and wavering, and his feet stumbled and slipped on the wet lichen-covered rocks of the slope, and the rain beat into his face, almost blinding him. Sixty yards ahead of him the bull reached the crest, and there he did something that Zouga had never seen a hunted elephant do before – he turned broadside, flaring his ears, to look at his pursuers.
Perhaps he had been pushed too hard, perhaps he had been hunted too often and the hatred had accumulated like weed below the waterline of an old ship, perhaps this was his last defiance.
For a moment he stood tall, and glistening black with mud and rain, silhouetted against the low grey sky, and Zouga hit him in the shoulder, the gun ringing like a bronze cathedral bell, and the long lick of red flame blooming briefly in the gloom.
Both man and beast reeled to the shot, Zouga driven off-balance by the recoil and the bull taking the hardened lead ball through the ribs and going back on his haunches, the rheumy old eyes clenching tightly to the shock of it.
The bull kept his feet, though he was hard hit, and he opened his eyes and saw the man, that hated, evil-smelling and persistent animal that had persecuted him so relentlessly down the years.
He launched himself back down the slope, like an avalanche of dark grey granite, and his repeated blood squeals rang against the low sky, and Zouga turned and ran from the charging bull, while the earth trembled beneath his feet at the weight and nearness of the stricken beast.
Matthew stood his ground, even in the terrible press of the moment. Zouga loved him for that. He stood to do his duty, to deliver the second gun to his master.
Zouga reached him, just ahead of the charging bull, dropped his smoking weapon, snatched the second gun from Matthew, never suspecting that it had been double-shotted, and as he turned he thumbed the hammer back and swung up the long thick barrel.
The bull was on top of him, blotting out the rain-sodden sky, the long yellow ivories raised like roof-beams over his head, and the trunk already uncoiling to reach down and snatch Zouga up.
Zouga pressed the hair trigger, and this time the gun fired. With a shattering roar the barrel burst, the metal opening like the petals of a flower, and burning powder flew back into Zouga’s face, singeing his beard and blistering the skin of his face. The hammer was blown clean off the barrel and it hit Zouga in the cheek, just under the right eye, cutting a jagged wound clean down to the bone. The shattered weapon flew out of his grasp, and slammed back into his shoulder with such force that he felt the ligaments and tendons tearing. Zouga was hurled into a backward somersault that carried him just beyond the grasp of the bull’s questing trunk.
He fell heavily behind a pile of loose stone chips, and for a moment the elephant checked, going back on its
hind legs to avoid the flashing flame and smoke of the explosion, blinded and unsighted for a moment – and then it saw the gunbearer still standing.
Matthew started to run, poor, loyal, brave Matthew, but the bull had him before he had gone a dozen paces. It took him about the waist with a single coil of its long trunk, and it threw him into the air as though he were light as a child’s rubber ball. Matthew went up forty feet, with his arms and legs windmilling, his scream of terror unheard in the deafening squeals of the elephant. It sounded like the whistle of a steam engine blown by a crazed engineer, and Matthew seemed to rise very slowly into the air, hang for a long moment and then drop just as slowly downwards.
The bull caught him in mid-air and threw him again, this time even higher.
Zouga dragged himself into a sitting position. His right arm hung limply on its torn muscles and tendons, blood streamed from his ripped cheek into his beard and his eardrums were so tortured by the explosion that the elephant’s squeals seemed muted and far off. He looked up groggily and saw Matthew high in the air, beginning to fall, saw him hit the ground, and the elephant begin to kill him.
Zouga dragged himself to his knees, and began to creep over the mound of loose stone towards the empty gun, the gun from which he had fired the first shot and which he had dropped when he snatched the double-shotted gun from Matthew, the gun which now lay five paces from him, five paces which seemed an infinite distance to drag his maimed body.
The elephant placed one foot on Matthew’s chest and his ribs crackled like dry sticks in a fierce fire. It took his head in its trunk and plucked it from Matthew’s shoulders, as easily as a farmer kills a chicken.
The elephant tossed Matthew’s head aside and as it trundled down the slope close to where Zouga sat, he saw that Matthew’s eyelids were blinking rapidly over his bulging eyeballs and that the nerves flickered under the skin of his cheeks.
Tearing his eyes from the gruesome object, Zouga lifted the empty gun into his lap and began to reload it. He had no use or feeling in his right arm, which still hung limply at his side.
Twenty paces away the elephant knelt over Matthew’s decapitated body and drove one of the long yellow ivories through his belly.
Painfully Zouga poured a handful of powder into the gun muzzle, trying not to be distracted from his task.
Matthew hung impaled through the middle from the bloody tusk like a wet shirt on a laundry line, the elephant’s trunk came up and coiled python-like about his battered body.
Zouga dropped a ball from his pouch into the barrel of the gun, and one-handed tamped it home with the ramrod.
The elephant tore an arm from the body, and Matthew slid from the point of the tusk and dropped once more to earth.
Moaning softly with the pain of each movement, Zouga primed the gun and hauled back the hammer against the powerful tension of the spring.
The elephant was kneeling with both front legs on what remained of Matthew, grinding him into a red mush against the rocky earth.
Dragging the gun with him, Zouga crawled back to the mound of rock chips behind which he had fallen. Using only his left hand, he balanced the stock of the big elephant gun over the top of the mound.
The elephant was still squealing in unabated fury as it crushed Matthew’s corpse.
Grovelling flat on his belly, Zouga sighted over the thick barrel, but with only one hand it was almost impossible to hold the clumsy weapon true, and his vision swam and wavered with pain and exhaustion.
For an instant the shaking foresight aligned with the crude vee of the backsight, and he let the shot fly, in flame and a billowing cloud of burnt powder smoke.
The elephant’s squeals stopped abruptly. As the powder smoke was blown aside on the cold breeze, Zouga saw that the bull had hoisted himself wearily upright and was swaying slowly from foot to foot. The massive head dropped under the weight of its blood-smeared tusks and its trunk hung as limply as Zouga’s own damaged right arm.
The elephant was making a strange mournful humming sound deep in his chest, and from the second bullet wound just behind his bony shoulder joint, his heart blood spurted in short regular jets, to the beat of the huge heart, and poured down his body in a honey-thick stream.
The bull turned towards where Zouga lay, and shuffling like an old and very weary man came towards him, the tip of his trunk twitching with his last fading warlike instincts.
Zouga tried to drag himself away, but the bull came on faster than he could crawl, and the trunk reached out, touched Zouga’s ankle, the vast bulk of the elephant filled the sky above Zouga, and he kicked out frantically but the trunk tightened its grip on his ankle with agonizing unbearable strength, and Zouga knew that it would tear his leg out of its socket at the hip.
Then the elephant groaned, a shuddering exhalation of air from the torn lungs, the grip on Zouga’s ankle relaxed and the old bull died on his feet, his legs collapsed under him and he went down.
He fell with a weight and force that made the earth bounce and tremble under Zouga’s prostrate body and with a thud that Jan Cheroot, who was crossing the swamp, heard clearly from a mile away.
Zouga dropped his head against the earth and closed his eyes, and the darkness overwhelmed him.
Jan Cheroot made no attempt to move Zouga from where he lay beside the old bull’s carcass. He built a rough shelter of saplings and wet grass over him and then coaxed smoky flames from a fire at his head, and from another at his feet. This was all he could do to warm him until the porters came up with the blankets at sunset.
Then he helped Zouga into a sitting position and between them they strapped the damaged arm.
‘God Almighty,’ croaked Zouga, as he prepared the needle and thread from his sewing kit, ‘I’d give both the tusks for a dram of good malt whisky.’
Jan Cheroot held the hand mirror, and using one hand only Zouga stitched the flap of his torn cheek back into place, and as he pulled the last knot tight and snipped the thread, he collapsed back into his damp and stinking fur kaross.
‘I will die rather than march again,’ he whispered.
‘That is your choice exactly,’ Jan Cheroot agreed, without looking up from the chunks of elephant liver and heart that he had begun wrapping in yellow fat before stringing them on a green twig. ‘You can march or die here in the mud.’
Outside the hut the porters were wailing and chanting the mourning dirge for Matthew. They had gathered the fragments of his horribly mutilated body and made a package of them, wrapping them in Matthew’s own blanket and binding it up with bark rope.
They would bury him the following morning, but until then they would keep up the haunting cries of mourning.
Jan Cheroot scraped coals from the fire and began to grill the kebab of liver and fat and heart over them, ‘They will be useless until they have buried him, and we must still cut the tusks.’
‘I owe Matthew a night of mourning at least,’ Zouga whispered. ‘He stood the bull down. If he had run with the second gun . . .’ Zouga broke off, and groaned as a fresh stab of pain transfixed his shoulder. Using his good left hand, he scratched under the skin blanket on which he lay, moving the lumps of stone which had caused the discomfort.
‘He was good – stupid, but good,’ Jan Cheroot agreed. ‘A wiser man would have run.’ He turned the kebab slowly over the coals. ‘It will take all day tomorrow to bury him and then cut the tusks from both elephants. But we must march the day after that.’
Jan Cheroot had killed his bull down on the plain, under the outspread branches of a giant acacia. Looking through the low opening of the hut Zouga could see the carcass of his own bull lying on its side not twenty feet away. Already it was swelling with trapped gas and the upper legs thrust out stiffly above the grey balloon of the belly. The tusks were unbelievable. Even as he stared at them Zouga thought they must be a fantasy of his exhaustion and agony. They were as thick as a girl’s waist, and the spread of them must have been twelve feet from tip to tip.
‘How mu
ch will they weigh?’ he asked Jan Cheroot, and the Hottentot looked up and shrugged.
‘I have never seen a bigger elephant,’ he admitted. ‘We will need three men to carry each of them.’
‘Two hundred pounds?’ Zouga asked, the conversation distracted him from the agony in his shoulder.
‘More,’ Jan Cheroot decided. ‘You will never see another like him.’
‘No,’ Zouga agreed. ‘That is true. There will never be another like him.’ Deep regret blended with his pain, making it more intense. Regret for the magnificent beast and sorrow for the brave man who had died with him.
The pain and the sorrow would not let him sleep that night, and in the dawn when they gathered in the rain to bury Matthew, Zouga strapped his damaged arm into a bark sling and had two men help him to his feet, then he walked unaided but slowly and stiffly up the slope to the grave, using a staff to balance himself.
They had wrapped Matthew’s body in his fur blanket and placed his possessions with him, his axe and spear, his food bowl and beer calabash, to serve him on the long journey ahead.
Singing the slow mournful song of the dead, they packed the rock over and around him so that the hyena would not dig him out. When they had finished, Zouga felt drained of strength and emotion. He staggered back to his hut and crawled under the dank blanket. He had only that day to gather his strength for the march that must be resumed in the dawn. He closed his eyes, but could not sleep for the thud of the axes into bone as Jan Cheroot supervised the chopping of the tusks from the casket of the old bull’s skull.
Zouga rolled on to his back, and once again a loose rock chip dug into his aching body. He reached back and pulled it from under the blanket, was about to throw it aside when something caught his attention and he arrested the movement.
The rock was as white and as crystalline as the candied sugar that Zouga had loved so as a boy, a pretty little fragment, but that was not what had stopped his hand.