A Time to Die c-13 Read online

  He was closing swiftly, like an avalanche of gray rock. Tukutela rolled through the forest, splitting and bending the smaller trees that stood in his way, seeking out the evil amid smell of humanity, following it down so that once again he could wreak on them the accumulated hatred of his long lifetime.

  Suddenly Matatu darted out of the bush just a few paces ahead of Sean. He would stand to meet any odds with Sean beside him, and now instead of running across the wind as Pumula had done, his instinct had led him directly back to his master's side.

  As he saw him, Sean changed direction in midstride, signaling urgently for Matatu to follow him. He ran a hundred swift paces out to one side, across the wind, trying to deny their scent to Tukutela.

  He stopped and crouched with Matatu beside him. His tactic had been successful. Pumula also must have got out of Tukutela's wind. For the moment Tukutela had lost their scent. The forest was absolutely still, the silence so intense that Sean could hear his Pulse beating in his own head.

  He sensed that the old bull was very close to them, standing as still as they were, listening with ears spread wide, only that long trunk questing for the smell of them. There had never been an elephant like this, he thought, a bull who actively hunted his persecutors. How many times has he been hunted, Sean wondered, how many times has man inflicted hurt upon him that he attacks so fiercely at the first hint of human presence?

  Then there was a sound in the forest, one that Sean had not expected, a human voice raised loudly, and it took him a moment to realize that it was Riccardo Monterro. "Tukutela, the Angry One, now I know why they named you. Tukutela, we are brothers!" he was calling to the elephant. "We are all that is left from another age. Our destiny is linked. I cannot kill you!"

  The bull heard him and squealed again, a sound so loud and high-pitched it was like an auger driven into their eardrums.

  Tukutela charged the sound of the human voice like a gray tank He crashed through the undergrowth, going straight for it, and within fifty yards the scent of man, loathsome and infuriating, filled his head once again and he followed it to its source.

  Riccardo Monterro had made no effort to climb the teak tree where Sean had left him, but had simply leaned against the trunk and closed his eyes. The pain in his head had come upon him as suddenly as the blow of an ax and it blinded him, filling his vision with bursting stars of light. But through the pain he heard the old bull elephant squeal, and the sound filled him with remorse and bitter despair.

  He let the Rigby slip from his hands and fall into the leafy trash at his feet. He reached out his empty hands and staggered blindly to meet the elephant, wanting in some desperate way to placate and make recompense to the great beast, calling to it. "I mean you no harm, we are brothers." Ahead of him the bush crackled and burst open and Tukutela bore down on him like a collapsing cliff of granite.

  Sean raced back to where he had left Riccardo, ducking under branches and bounding over obstacles in his path, hearing the terrifying rush of the bull and the voice of the man just ahead of him.

  "Here!" he screamed. "Here, Tukutela! Come! Come this way!"

  it was an effort to pull the elephant off Riccardo and onto himself, but he knew it would be to no avail. Tukutela had fixed on his victim, and nothing would deter him. He would carry his charge through to the death.

  The center of Riccardo's vision cleared, and he looked through an aperture in his head that was surrounded by shooting white lights and Catherine wheels of spinning fire. He saw Tukutela's vast gray head burst out of the green forest wall above him and the long, stained tusks came over him like the cross ties of a roof about to fall.

  In that moment, the elephant came to embody all the thousands of animals and birds that Riccardo had slaughtered in his lifetime as a hunter. He had a confused notion that the tusks and long trunk poised above him were the symbols of some semi-religious benediction that would absolve him and redeem all the blood he destroyed, had and spilled and all the life he had He reached both hands up to them, joyfully thankfully, and he remembered a phrase from his early religious instruction.

  "Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned," he cried.

  Sean saw the bull's head rear out of the thicket ahead of him. It was facing almost directly away from him, the ears cocked and rolled along the top edge. He heard Riccardo's voice though he could not understand the words, and he realized that he must be almost directly beneath the bull's out thrust tusks and reaching trunk.

  in a single step Sean plunged from his headlong run to a dead stop and threw up the.577 Express rifle. It was the most difficult angle for the brain shot, with the elephant angled away from him and the bulk of its shoulder covering the spinal column.

  The target was no bigger than a ripe apple, and there was no casket of indication of where exacttly in the huge bony skull it lay buried. He had to trust his experience and his instinct. For a moment it seemed as he looked over the open sights of the rifle that he could see into the skull, where the brain seemed to glow like a firefly in the bony depths.

  Without conscious effort his trigger finger tightened as the pip of the foresight covered that glowing spot. The bullet bored through the sponge of bone as though it were air. It cleaved the old bull's brain, and he felt nothing. His passage from full enra to death was a fleeting instant as his legs collapsed and folded under him. He dropped on his chest with an impact that jarred the earth and shook loose the dead leaves from the branches above him. A cloud of pale dust swirled around his massive carcass, and his head dropped forward.

  His right tusk drove into Riccardo Monterro's body, entering his belly a hand's breadth below the sternum of his rib cage, passing through him at the level of his kidneys, and coming out through his spine just at the point where it merged with his pelvis.

  The shaft of ivory Riccardo had coveted and risked both fortune and life to obtain now pinned him to the earth, skewered him as cleanly as a whaler's harpoon. He looked down at the tusk in surprise. There was no pain, no sensation in his lower body, which was twisted up under the bull's coiled trunk, no pain even in his head.

  For a moment his vision was clear and bright as though every thing he looked at were lit by brilliant floodlights. Then it began to fade and darkness closed in upon him. Just before the darkness engulfed him completely, he saw Sean Courtney's face floating before him and heard his voice fading as though he were sinking away into an abyss.

  "Capo, Capo," it echoed in his ears, and Riccardo Monterro made a huge effort and said, "She loves you. Look after my little girl." Then the darkness swallowed him and he saw and heard nothing more, ever again.

  Sean's first impulse was to free Riccardo Monterro's body. He tugged at the tusk that had impaled him, but it was so thick he could not get a fair grip on it. Riccardo's blood was oozing from the terrible wound, and it coated Sean's hands so that he left sticky red prints on the ivory as he strained at it.

  Then he realized the futility of his efforts and stepped back. The full weight of Tukutela's huge head and body was resting on those tusks. After piercing Riccardo's torso the ivory point had gone on to bury itself deep in the soft sandy earth. It would take half a day's work to free the body.

  In death the man and the beast were locked together, and suddenly

  Sean realized how appropriate that was. He would leave them like that.

  First Matatu and then Pumula appeared from out of the forest and stood beside Sean, staring in awe at the grim spectacle.

  "Go!" Sean ordered. "Wait for me at the canoe."

  "The ivory?" Pumula asked diffidently.

  "Go!" Sean repeated, and at the tone of his voice they crept quietly away.

  Riccardo's eyes were wide open. Sean closed them with a gentle stroke of his thumb, then unknotted the cotton scarf from around his neck and bound up his jaw to prevent it sagging into an expression of idiocy. Even in death Riccardo Monterro was still a handsome man. Sean leaned against the elephant's head and studied Riccardo's face.

  "it happen
ed at just the right time, Capo. Before the disease turned you into a vegetable, while you still had most of your zest and vigor, and it was a fitting end for a man like you. I'm glad you didn't die between soiled sheets. I only pray I will be as fortunate."

  He laid his hand on one of the tusks and stroked it. It had the texture of jade beneath his fingertips. "We'll leave them for you, Capo," he said. "These tusks will be your headstone. God knows, you paid for them in full."

  He straightened up and followed Riccardo's tracks back into the forest until he found the Rigby lying in the dead leaves. He brought it back and placed it in the crook of Riccardo's right armA warrior should be buried with his weapons," he murmured.

  But there was still something missing. He could not go and leave Riccardo like this. He could not leave him lying exposed to an uncaring sky. He must cover him decently.

  Then he remembered the legend of this elephant and how he disposed of the dead. He drew the heavy knife from the sheath on his belt and turned to the nearest green bush. He slashed off a leafy branch and covered Riccardo's face with it.

  "Yes," he murmured. "That's right, that's proper."

  Working swiftly, he hacked down the branches and covered Riccardo's corpse and the head of the old bull under a mound of green leaves. At last he stood back and picked up the.577. He tucked it under his arm and was ready to leave. "No regrets, Capo," he said. "For you, it was a good life right up to the very end. Go in peace, old friend."

  He turned away and went down to where the canoe was moored.

  The reeds scraped softly along the hull of the canoe as Pumula poled it along. None of them spoke.

  Sean sat amidships, hunched forward with his chin in the cup of one hand. He felt numbed, emptied of all emotion except sadness.

  it was like coming back from a raid in the days of the bush war with every man silent and sad.

  He looked at his right hand in his lap and saw the little half moons of dark red under his finger mails. "Capo's blood," he thought, and trailed his hand over the side of the canoe, letting the warm Swamp waters wash away the stain.

  He let the hunt replay itself through his mind as though it were a silent recording. He saw it all again vividly, from their first sighting of the old bull to the moment he rushed forward to find Riccardo Monterro impaled beneath the huge gray head.

  Then for the first time, he heard sound. Riccardo's voice echoed in his head, faint and breathless, fading swiftly.

  "She loves you," he had said, and the rest trailed away unintelligibly. "She loves you." The meaningless words of a dying man, the Wanderings of a diseased brain- Riccardo could have been looking back on any one of the hundreds of women who had filled his LIFE.

  Sean lifted his hand out of the water. It was clean, the blood washed away.

  "She loves you." He could have been trying to tell Sean of one particular woman.

  Sean looked up from his wet hand and stared ahead. Her memory had been with him these last few days, always there in the recesses of his conscience Yet coming to the fore at unexpected moments. Often while thinking of the great elephant, he had suddenly smiled at something she had said. This morning, during the final stages of the hunt, he had reached outboard from the canoe and picked the bloom of a water lily. He had held it to his face and smelled the perfume, felt the silky touch of the petals on his lip, and thought of Claudia Monterro.

  Now he stared ahead and for the first time admitted to himself how much he looked forward to seeing her again. It seemed she was all that could cancel out his grief for her father. He thought about the sound of her voice and the way she held her head when she was about to challenge him. He smiled at the bright specks of anger he could so readily kindle in her eyes and the way she pursed her lips when she was trying to keep herself from laughing at one of his digs.

  He-thought about the way she walked and the way she felt when he had carried her in his arms, and he remembered the texture of her skin, like the petals of a water lily, when he touched her under a pretext of helping or guiding her.

  "We are absolutely and completely wrong for each other." He smiled, and the melancholy of a few moments previously loosened its grip. "If Capo was talking about her, he had definitely gone completely round the bend." But his anticipation was honed to a sharper edge.

  He looked up at the sky. The sun had set. It would be dark in a short while. Even as he watched, Venus, the evening star, appeared with a miraculous suddenness and twinkled low down in the west. One after another, the fixed stars followed her entrance, popping through the darkening canopy of night in order of their magnitude.

  Sean looked up at the stars and he thought of Claudia, wondering why she evoked such contrary feelings in him. He compared her to some of the other women he had known and realized how shallow and fleeting those experiences had been. Even his marriage had been inconsequential, a wild impulse based on simple-minded lust. It had been swiftly consummated, satiated, and terminated, a disastrous mistake he had never repeated. Now he could only vaguely remember what the woman who had been his wife looked like.

  He thought about Claudia and realized with a small shock that her image was so clear in his mind he could almost count the individual lashes around those big honey-brown eyes and the tiny laugh lines at the corners of her mouth. Suddenly he very much wanted to be with her again, and as he acknowledged that fact he began to worry.

  "I must have been crazy to leave her alone," he thought, and as he stared ahead into the dark swamps a multitude of horrid possibilities that might have befallen her began to plague him.

  "Job is with her," he tried to console himself. "But I should have stayed to care for her and sent Job with Capo. "Even though he realized that had been impossible, still he fretted.

  He felt the canoe check under him as Pumula rested on his pole, hinting at permission to stop for the night.

  "I'll take her for a while," Sean said. "We'll keep going until we get back to the village."

  While Pumula and Matatu curled up in the bilges, Sean stood in the stern and swayed to the monotonous thrust and reach of the Punt Pole- He steered by the Southern Cross and the pointers of Centaurus, reckoning true south at the intersection of their extended center lines.

  The Papyrus stems hissed softly against the hull in strict rhythm to his thrusts. Soon the work became so repetitive and automatic he could let his mind wander, and all those wanderings seemed to return in the end to Claudia Monterro.

  He thought about her bereavement, how although she had been expecting it, it would still devastate her. He composed the words he would use to tell her and then to comfort her. She knew of his own feelings for her father and the companionship that they had shared in the hunting veld. She knew of their mutual regard for each other.

  "I am the right person to help her through the first sorrow, I knew him so well. I will help her to remember all that was good about him." He should have dreaded bearing the sad tidings, but instead he found himself looking forward to taking the role of her comforter and protector. "Perhaps we will be able to drop the postures of antagonism that we have both forced upon ourselves. Instead of accentuating our differences, perhaps we'll be able to explore what we have in common." He found himself lengthening and quickening his Stroke with the punt pole, and he had to force himself to slow down.

  "You won't last the night at that pace," he thought, but his eagerness to be with her kept him going long after fatigue demanded a halt.

  Hour after hour he kept it up. Finally Pumula woke of his own accord and came to spell him, but Sean slept fitfully and was back in the stern as the coming of day turned the eastern sky to murky ruby, then to pale lemon and the waterfowl flighted overhead, their wings whistling softly as they stabbed at the dawn.

  Two hours later Sean sent Matatu up the punt pole. He had not reached the top before he pointed gleefully ahead. However, it was early afternoon before the bow of the canoe knifed through the last dense stand of papyrus and ran ashore on the sand below the burnt village.