Elephant Song

He filmed the mobile cranes lifting the logs on to the trailer beds of the logging vehicles.

He filmed the hordes of naked Uhali slaves working in the red mud to keep the roads open for the massive trucks and trailers to pass over, as they bore away the looted treasures of the forest.

He had hoped that the act of manipulating the camera and viewing the scene through the intervening lens might somehow isolate him from reality, might allow him to remain aloof and objective.  It was a vain hope.  The longer he watched the destruction, the more angry he became until his rage matched that of the woman who sat on the branch beside him.

Kelly did not have to give voice to her outrage.  He could feel it like static electricity in the air around her.  It did not surprise him that he was so in tune with her feelings.  It seemed only right and natural.

They were very close now.  A new bond had been forged between them, to reinforce the attraction and sympathy that they had already conceived for each other.

They stayed in the treetop until nightfall, and then they remained another hour, sitting in darkness as though they could not tear themselves away from the terrible fascination of it.  They listened to the growl of engines in the night and watched the floodlights and the swinging headlights turn the forest and the devastated red plain to daylight.  It never stopped, but went on and on, cutting, digging, roaring, spilling out poison and death.

When at last it began to rain again and the lightning and the thunder crashed overhead, they crept down from the treetop and made their way slowly and sadly back to where Pamba waited in the forest with the porters.

In the morning they started back through the steaming silent forest towards Gondola, stopping only for Daniel to film the polluted, bleeding rivers.  Victor Omeru went down into the muck and stood knee-deep in it and spoke into the camera, giving articulate voice to all their sorrow and rage.

His voice was deep and compelling and filled with concern and compassion for his land and its people.  His silver hair and dark noble features would hold the attention of any audience, and his credentials were impeccable.  His international reputation was such that nobody could seriously doubt that what he described to them was the truth.  If Daniel could show this to the outside world, he knew that he would be able to communicate his own sense of outrage.

They moved on slowly.  The Bambuti porters were still subdued and dismayed.  Although they had not witnessed the mining, Sepoo had described it to them and they had seen the bleeding rivers.  Yet even before they reached the boundary between the heartland and their traditional hunting grounds they were given even greater cause for sorrow.

They cut the tracks of an elephant.  They all recognized the spoor of the beast, and Sepoo, called him by name.  The Old Man with One Ear, he said, and they all agreed.  It was the bull with half his left ear missing.

They laughed for the first time in days as though they had met an old friend in the forest, but the laughter was short-lived as they studied the spoor.

Then they cried out and wrung their hands and whimpered with fear and horror.

Kelly called urgently to Sepoo.  What is it, old friend?  Blood, Sepoo answered her.  Blood and urine from the elephant.  He is wounded; he is dying.  How has this happened?  Kelly cried.  She also knew the elephant like an old friend.  She had come across him often in the forest when he had frequented the area round Gondola.  A man has struck and wounded him.

Somebody is hunting the bull in the sacred heartland.  It is against all law and custom.  Look!  Here ara the tracks of the man's feet lying over the spoor of the bull.  He pointed out the clear imprints of small bare feet in the mud.  The hunter is a Bambuti.  He must be a man of our clan.  It is a terrible sacrilege.  It is an offence against the god of the forest.  The little group of pygmies were shaken and horrified. They clustered together like lost children, holding each other's hands for comfort in these dreadful days when all they believed in was being turned upside down, first the machines in the forest and the bleeding rivers, and now this sacrilege committed by one of their own people.  I know this man, Pamba shrieked.  I recognize the mark of his feet.  This man is Pirri.  They wailed then and covered their faces, for Pirri had made his kill in the sacred places and the shame and the retribution of the forest god must come down upon all of them.

Pirri the hunter moved like a shadow.  He laid his tiny feet down gently upon the great pad marks of the elephant, where the bull's weight had compacted the earth and no twig would snap and no dead leaf would rustle to betray him.

Pirri had been following the elephant for three days.  During all that time Pirri's entire being had been concentrated upon the elephant, so that in some mystic way he had become part of the beast he was hunting.

Where the bull had stopped to feast on the little red berries of the Selepe tree, Pirri read the sip and could taste the tart acidic juice in his own throat.  Where the elephant had drunk at one of the streams, Pirri stood upon the bank as he had done and felt in his imagination the sweet clear water squirt and gurgle into his own belly.  Where the elephant had dropped a pile of yellow fibrous dung on the forest floor, Pirri felt his own bowels contract and his sphincter relax in sympathy.

Pirri had become the elephant, and the elephant had become Pirri.

When he came up with him at last, the bull was asleep on his feet in a matted thicket.  The branches were interwoven and covered with thorns that were hooked and tipped with red; they could flay a man's skin from his limbs.  As softly and slowly as Pirri moved, yet the elephant sensed his presence and came awake.  He spread his ears, one wide and full as a mainsail, the other torn and deformed, and he listened.

However, he heard nothing, for Pirri was a master hunter.

The elephant stretched out his trunk, sucked up the air and blew it softly into his mouth.  The olfactory glands in his top lip opened like pink rosebuds and he tasted the air, but he tasted nothing, for Pirri had come in below the tiny forest breeze and he had smeared himself from the top of his curly head to the pink soles of his feet with the elephant's own dung.  There was no man-smell upon him.

Then the elephant made a sound, a gentle rumbling sound in his belly and a fluttering sound in his throat.  It was the elephant song.  The bull sang in the forest to learn if it was another elephant or a deadly enemy whose presence he sensed.

Pirri crouched at the edge of the thicket and listened to the elephant sing.  Then he cupped his hand over his mouth and his nose and he gulped air into his throat and his belly and he let it out with a soft rumbling and fluttering sound.

Pirri sang the song of the elephant.

The bull sighed in his throat and changed his song, testing the unseen presence.  Faithfully Pirri replied to him, following the cadence and the timbre of the song, and the elephant bull believed him.

The elephant flapped his ears, a gesture of contentment and trust.

He accepted that another elephant had found him and come to join him.

He moved carelessly and the thicket crackled before his bulk.  He came ambling forward to meet Pirri, pushing the thorny branches aside.

Pirri saw the curved shafts of ivory appear high above his head.

They were thicker than his waist and longer than he could reach with his elephant spear.

The elephant spear was a weapon that Pirri had forged himself from the blade of a truck spring -that he had stolen from one of the dukas at the roadside.  He had heated and beaten it until the steel had lost its temper and he was able to work it more easily.  Then Pirri had shaped and sharpened it, and fitted it to a shaft of hard resilient wood and bound the blade in place with rawhide.  When the rawhide dried it was hard and tight as the steel it held.