A Time to Die c-13 Read online

  She quickened her step, closing up behind Sean, and found to her surprise that in some bizarre fashion she was more alive and aware than she had ever been before. For the first time in her life she was on the bottom rung of existence, the level of survival. It was a novel and quite overwhelming sensation. She was glad her father had not decided to turn back. Claudia had long since lost all sense of direction, for Sean led unpredictably. They turned and twisted through the forest, at times moving swiftly and at others creeping forward a stealthy pace at a time and then freezing into absolute stillness at a signal from the flank which she often had not even heard. She noticed that Sean looked up at the night sky every few minutes and guessed he was navigating by the stars, but to her their whorls and blazes and fields were as confused as the lights of a foreign city.

  Then, after a while, she realized they had not turned or paused for a long while and were once again heading in a straight line.

  Obviously they were clear of danger for the moment. With the excitement over, she soon felt the weight of her legs and the weariness in the small of her back. The pack between her shoulders seemed to have quadrupled in weight, and she glanced at her wristwatch. The luminous dial showed her that they had been going for almost five hours since circling around that hidden camp.

  "When will we rest?" she wondered, but made it a point of honor to keep close behind Sean and not to lag by a single pace.

  Almost as though a refrigerator door had opened, the temperature plunged, and when they crossed another open glade, the dew on the long grass soaked the legs of her trousers and her boots squelched. She shivered, in real discomfort for the first time.

  "When will he rest?" She stared at Sean's back, resenting him, willing him to stop. On he went, ever on, and she had the feeling he was deliberately trying to humiliate her, to break her down, to force her to squeal for mercy.

  "I'll show you." She did not slacken her pace as she reached back and unstrapped her Gore-Tex ski jacket from the top of her pack. It was really cold now, the frost crackled underfoot, and her feet were numb, but she kept her station in the line. Quite suddenly she realized that she could see clearly each thick glossy tress of hair down the back of Sean's neck.

  "Dawn. I thought it would never come." As she thought it, Sean stopped at last. She pulled up beside him with the nerves in her legs jumping and trembling with fatigue.

  "Sorry, Capo," Sean spoke softly past her. "I had to push a little. We had to get well clear of that bunch before light. How are you making out?"

  "No problem," Riccardo muttered, but in the gray dawn light, his face looked pale and drawn. He was suffering as much as she was, and she hoped she didn't look as bad. He went to find a place to sit and lowered himself stiffly.

  Sean glanced at Claudia, still standing beside him. Neither of them spoke, but he had a faint, enigmatic smile on his lips.

  "Don't ask me how I feel," she thought. "I'd rather drink Drana than tell you the truth."

  He inclined his head slightly, whether in condescension or respect, she wasn't sure. "First day and the third are always the worst," he said.

  "I feel fine," she said. "I can go on quite happily."

  "Sure." He grinned openly. "But you'd better go and look after Papa rather."

  Sean brought mugs of tea to where she sat beside her father, wrapped in her lightweight down-filled sleeping bag against the dawn chill. Job had brewed it on a tiny smokeless fire that he extinguished immediately once the billy boiled. The tea was strong and sweet and scalding; she had never tasted anything more welcome. With it he handed her a stack of maize cakes and cold cuts of venison. She tried not to wolf them down.

  "We'll move on in a few minutes," he warned her. When he saw the dismay in her eyes, he explained.

  "We never sleep next to a cooking fire; it can attract the uglies." They went on for five miles. In the middle of the morning, on higher ground in a place secure and easily defended, Sean showed her how to scoop a hollow for her hip and use her pack as a pillow.

  She fell asleep as though she had been sandbagged.

  She could not believe it when he shook her awake only a minute later. "It's four o'clock." He handed her a mug and another stack of maize cakes. "You've slept six hours straight. We are moving out in five minutes."

  Hastily she rolled her sleeping bag, then peered at herself in the metal hand mirror she had surreptitiously retrieved after Sean had thrown it out of her pack.

  "Oh God," she whispered. The camouflage cream had caked and striped with her sweat. "I look like Al Jolson in drag." She tidied her hair, dragging her comb through the tangles, and then tied a scarf around it.

  With short breaks every two hours, they kept going all that night.

  At first Claudia's legs felt as though they were in plaster casts, but soon she walked the stiffness out of them and kept her place in the line without lagging, though the pace Sean set was every bit as hard as the previous night.

  In the dawn, they drank tea. Claudia had begun to depend on the brew. She had always been a coffee drinker, but now on the march she found herself fantasizing over her next scalding mug of tea.

  "It's the only thing keeping me going," she confided to her father, only half joking.

  Riccardo nodded agreement. "They say the Limeys conquered their empire on the stuff."

  Sean came across from where he had been in deep discussion with Matatu and Job. "We are only a few hours" march from the reed beds where we saw Tukutela from the air." He looked pointedly at Claudia. "I'd like to try and get there before we sleep, but of course some of us are a little hushed..." He let it hang between them, a dare and an accusation.

  "I need a little stroll to settle my breakfast," she said amiably, but she wished her face was not coated with black cream. She hated ceding even the slightest advantage to him.

  As Sean walked away, her father swirled the tea leaves in his mug and flicked them out.

  "Don't fall for him, tesoro. He'd be too big a handful even for you."

  She stared at him, outraged and appalled. "Fall for him? Are you out of your skull, Papa? I can't stand the sight of him."

  "That's what I mean," he chuckled.

  She jumped up and threw her pack onto her back with unnecessary strength, then told her father with disdain, "I could cope with him and five others like him with my eyes closed and one hand tied behind my back, but I've got better taste than that."

  "Which is fortunate for you," he murmured just low enough so she was uncertain what he had said.

  A little before noon that day, Matatu led them into the papyrus beds that surrounded the green pool they had seen from the air. He led them directly to the great dished spoor printed in the mud, and they gathered round to inspect it.

  "See!" Matatu told them. "This is where Tukutela stood when he heard the indeki coming. Here and there he turned to look up in the sky and challenge us." Matatu imitated the old bull, holding his head at the same angle, humping his back and cupping his hands at each side of his head. It was such a faithful impression that for a moment he seemed to become the old bull and they all laughed. Claudia forgot her fatigue and applauded.

  "Then what did the old bull do?" Sean demanded. Matatu spun and pointed along the run of the spoor.

  "He went away with all his speed, he went fast and very far."

  "Well," Sean said, "that puts us almost exactly forty-eight hours behind him and we have to sleep now. We'll be fifty-five hours behind him when we march again."

  Tukutela's dam had been the matriarch of a herd of over one hundred beasts. She had come into her last period of estrus in her fifty-second year, and over the days it lasted, she had been mounted and serviced by six of the herd bulls, all young animals, vigorous and at the height of their powers.

  It was the ideal formula for the conception of an extraordinary calf, old cow and young bull. Although it was uncertain which seed had taken root in her, the old cow had carried the genes of great elephants, big in body and tusk, natural intelligen
ce, and the urge to dominate. These same genes had made her the leader of her herd, and now she transferred them to the fetus she carried in her womb.

  She carried him twenty-two months, and then in the year when the German askaris under General von Lettow-Vorbeck were ravaging eastern Africa, the year 1915, she left the herd. Accompanied only by another old female past calf bearing, her companion of forty years, she went deep into the fastnesses of the swamps that lie on the south bank of the Zambezi River and there, on an islet fringed with ivory-nut palms, surrounded by miles of papyrus beds, and with the white-headed fish eagles chanting overhead, she cleared an area of sandy earth for her couch. When her time came, she spread her back legs and squatted over the open area, squealing in the agony of her labor, her trunk rolled up on her chest.

  Her eyes had no tear ducts to drain them, so the tears poured freely down her withered cheeks as though she wept, and the spasms racked her huge, gaunt frame. The other old cow stood close beside her like a midwife, caressing her with her trunk, stroking her back and rumbling with sympathy. She forced out the calf's head and then rested for a minute before the last violent effort expelled the purple-pink fetal sac and the calf fell to the earth, rupturing the umbilical cord. Tukutela began to struggle immediately, still trapped in the glistening mucus-coated membrane, and the old cow, her companion, stood over him and, with the prehensile tip of her trunk, delicately stripped it away.

  Then with her trunk his dam gently and lovingly lifted him to his feet and placed him between her front legs, making the deep, purring rumble of elephant contentment. Still wet and smooth and shining pinkly from his birthing, covered in copious gingery hair, almost blind, Tukutela rolled his little trunk back onto his forehead and reached up instinctively to the twin breasts on his mother's chest.

  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 encoun
ter 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.