ELEPHANT MOON (13 page)

Elephants weren’t truly grey at all, Grace realised. It was mud and dust that turned them so. Washed clean in the stream Mother’s skin was far darker than her calf’s, almost blue-black for most of her body, but speckled black-on-pink like a trout behind her ears and across her trunk as it tapered into her head. Where her tummy met her legs the skin sagged in multiple folds, deeply corrugated and as comfortable as Grandad’s corduroy trousers. The mother’s eye, one only visible from side on, was tiny, set in the vast frame of her head, not pig-like because of the effect of a series of rings of skin rippling concentrically from it, as if the eye was a stone lobbed into a black pond. Whereas the eye remained locked on her calf, all but motionless, her trunk barely stayed still for a second, grubbing on the ground or raised up to sniff the wind. Entranced, Grace gazed on as Mother watched over her baby playing in the water.

 Oomy was absorbed in his game of blowing bubbles, black eyelashes as beautiful as a girl’s, shading a liquid brown eye. Mother tilted her head every now and then, this way and
that, making sure that there was no threat to her son. A few yards further off upstream, two aunties were drinking the water, but also keeping the baby in full view. The two aunties formed two sides of a loose triangle, with Mother at the base, and the calf, playing in the water, in the middle: what looked a casual arrangement was in fact a fortress of flesh and trunk and bone, virtually impregnable. In the baby’s playfulness and the subtle watchfulness of mother and aunties, Grace found the elephants more like humans than she had ever thought possible.

Stopping his game, Oomy’s eye fixed on Grace. He gave her a wicked wink and showered her with a blast of mucky water.

‘He got you, Miss!’ shouted Molly.

‘Baby,’ said Joseph, pointing at Oomy. ‘Aaah.’

Grace gave him a squeeze. ‘Yes, Joseph, Oomy is Mother’s baby.’ The anti-malaria pills seemed to have done some good, to have slowed down his fever. He didn’t look at all well, but he managed a feeble smile. Looking at Oomy, his eyes sparkling with glee, he repeated: ‘Baby, aaah.’

Po Net used bark he had cut from a tree by the bank to create a kind of soap, and soon Mother’s back was lathered with a scummy blancmange. Fearlessly, he crouched underneath her belly and washed where the ropes attaching the basket had chafed against her. He ordered her to lift each foot, which he checked laboriously for thorns and wear and tear. One stamp from the elephant would crush the oozie stone dead, and the children marvelled at how much man and beast trusted each other. Inspecting Oomy’s feet was more problematic. He made such a fuss, squeaking and squirting Po Net whenever he got near the baby, that Mother had to give him a hefty thwack on his bottom before he settled down and let the oozie do his job.

Before dinner, Sam called a pow-wow of the adults. Recalling Sam’s irritation with the singing of the Lambeth Walk, Grace put on her apologetic face. Her reward was a brief nod, and a grunt, in elephantese.

Addressing the Havildar, Po Net and Grace, he said: ‘I’m still calculating that the main body of the Japs are intent on pressing north after our army. So long as we head due west, we’ll be well out of harm’s way. At least,’ Sam continued, ‘I think they won’t press hard in this direction. But it remains a gamble. And the bad news is that they’ve got elephants, ten of them by the looks of things, and almost certainly my bloody elephants. We had to leave four hundred behind, thanks to the incompetence of some useless types in the British Army. The Japs have obviously found ten.

 ‘No fires – and that means no hot meals, no boiling water, no tea tonight - because Japanese scouts will almost certainly have crossed the river on their elephant. They may confuse our party with a strong force of British soldiers, and that would not be good. Sentry pickets are to be placed on all four corners of the camp and five miles back down our track, less for fear of enemy attack than tigers, pythons and the like.’

Winston, Sam’s spaniel, licked the Havildar’s bare knee. He cursed the dog lavishly in Urdu and the animal yapped back at him and suddenly the two men were quarrelling, until Grace put a finger to her lips and cried: ‘Sssh! You’re setting a terrible example.’

A long, grisly silence, broken by a deep growly burbling. The Havildar was laughing. Everyone joined in, apart from Sam who glared at her. Grace had had enough of being demure and returned his gaze. After a beat, Sam studied his boots, the right-hand corner of his mouth wrinkling slightly.

The children were fed and watered, and the sick – Joseph and three girls with diarrhoea – were put up in the first aid tent. Word had got out that if you had the shakes you
would get quinine and that meant chocolate to kill the taste, so Grace had to spend quite a bit of time suppressing a fake epidemic of malaria.

The fearsomeness of the Havildar helped. The children half-jumped every time he looked at them. At the end of the meal, Grace found she was standing next to him, as he gathered up the empty sardine tins.

‘I hope you don’t think I’m rude, Havdilar, but the children keep on asking: what happened to your hands?’

The Havildar stood up, towering over her, and smoothed his moustache down with the half-finger of his right hand. ‘Dinner was late one night.’ His voice was very deep. He paused. ‘I was hungry.’  Another pause, longer than before. ‘So, I ate my fingers,’ and, yelling at a Chin who had dared to start lighting a fire, he marched off.

The children were to sleep in the elephant baskets or placed two to a hammock, so that every one of them slept off the ground. No one was allowed a kerosene lamp in the open, but the stream, close by, gave off a faint phosphorescence which somehow grew more vivid the blacker the night became.

Sam had a moment to himself, reached into his pocket and produced a hip-flask, draining it deeply, and then he became aware of Grace standing close by.

‘My weakness, I’m afraid. Home-made firewater. My own recipe. Do you want a sip?’

‘Have you any to spare?’

‘Not much, but I’m going to run out in the next few days so one sip won’t make much of a difference. Go on. It will do you good. Sam’s Own Peculiar.’

It was quite the most vile drink she had ever drunk, a slurry of rancid coconut milk, swamp juice and cough mixture with, she was sure, more than a hint of elephant excrement.

‘Eeeyuckthankarrghyou,’ her eyes watering at the strength of it. ‘What’s it made of?’

‘Ah. That would be telling. After the war, I’m going to market it and become a rich man. Another?’

‘No. Good luck with that,’ she said so drily, and with such little sign of enthusiasm, that his right lip crinkled again.

‘When we join the rest of the refugees, what will you do Sam?’

 ‘The best track – correction, the only proper track – is due north. The problem is, it’s bunged up with what’s left of the army and thousands of refugees. Poor company for elephants and besides, the general staff have banned me from trying it, lest my elephants get in the way of their filing cabinets. So we’re going due west, finding our own path. It’s not easy without a proper map.’

‘Gosh, no.’

‘Hit the wrong ridge, and we add an extra week to the journey. And time is a luxury we don’t have.  Our destination is a tea estate the size of Yorkshire so we shouldn’t miss it.’

‘Do you know the people there?’

‘Hell, no. They’re in India, after all. I’m imagining a fine old bungalow, a vast, Victorian bath-tub, full of hot water, plenty of bars of soap with gleaming white towels and an unending line of gin and tonics – fine anti-malarial prophylactics. And in the morning bacon and eggs, white toast, Seville marmalade, nice chinwag with the planter, he’ll be very old, and he’ll have a charming young wife. And a fine bitch for Winston.’

The dog looked up, expectantly, and panted his approval.

‘Sorry, that came out a bit wrong. Not used to company. Not used to female company, excepting elephant cow.’

‘Excepting elephant cow,’ she agreed, laughing. He wasn’t sure but he suspected that because of the whiteness of her teeth in the gloom she was beaming at him.

‘On behalf of the children I would like to say thank you very, very much for rescuing us, Sam.’

‘Thank the elephants.’

‘I’m thanking you.’

‘I’m sorry I was pompous when we first met. How was Rangoon when you left it?’

‘Stinking. Chaos, naked lunatics running around, looters. The Indians afraid of revenge from the Burmese. Thousands running away, walking, dying by the road.’

‘We…’ he hesitated ‘…let our people down. Badly. Both the Burmese and the Indians. Too many whites have just buggered off or flown out of Burma without a bloody care in the world. But the lesson I’ve taken from that is that you must not promise protection if you can’t deliver it. Had I known that you’d spout bloody poetry in the middle of the Chindwin…’

‘You would have abandoned us?’

‘“Tirra-lirra said Sir Lancelot.” Bloody disgrace,’ and he gave his elephant snort.

‘But you didn’t abandon us. The children are loving it. They can’t wait for morning. Yesterday was the worst day of my life but today may have been, somehow, the best. I thought we’d never, ever make it across the river.’

Another snort.

Moonrise. Shafts of silvery light tunnelled through the forest canopy high above and splashed down onto the jungle floor.

A commotion and three Chin guards – the rearguard – came, carrying a fourth man hanging in a sling from a bamboo pole.

The Chin lowered their burden in a puddle of moonlight, resting the man’s bloodied head against a thick liana, his slumped form casting a shadow, eerie and forlorn.  The Chin explained in Burmese that they had found him by the Chindwin.

The faint light illuminated the man, unconscious, blood on his head, dried almost black against his blond hair.

 ‘That’s
him
,’ said Grace. The undergrowth murmured, twitching with a breath of air, the rhythm of the crickets rising and falling. ‘That’s the man who shot the Jemadar. That’s the murderer.’

The last word detonated like an assassin’s shot.

Sam motioned the Chin to carry the wounded man into his tent.

‘Murderer or not, let’s have a look at that head.’ Inside, she glimpsed a wide hammock, a canvas chair and a small table, on it an unlit kerosene lamp. The Chins sat the man, all but comatose, on the chair. Sam closed the tent flap after Grace, lit the kerosene lamp with a match and unlocked a small medical chest. He dabbed the head wound with alcohol spirit, wiping away the dried blood, and wrapped a clean white bandage around it, tying it off neatly.

By the lamplight she noticed something she hadn’t seen before in the gloom: a framed picture of a dark-haired woman in her thirties, laughing at someone else’s joke. In Burmese, Sam asked a Chin to find a hammock for the wounded man, telling him to get one of the sentries to check his breathing every hour and, if there was any change in his condition, to wake Sam up. They carried him away, gently, his head lolling onto the shoulder of the man supporting him.

‘Nasty cut – shrapnel, of some sort, bit of concussion, but the skull isn’t fractured. He’ll live. Pretty bloody amazing for him to swim the Chindwin after that bash to his head. Luck of the devil.’

Stone-faced under the moonlight, Grace said: ‘He’s a killer.’

Sam extinguished the kerosene lamp, leaving his face all but invisible in the gloom of the tent. He made no reply.

She repeated what she had just said.

‘He’s no threat. He can barely breathe.’

‘He shot the Jemadar in cold blood.’

‘I’m not a judge, still less a hanging one.’

The reluctance to take her side riled Grace. ‘I saw him shoot the Jemadar with my own eyes. I was but fifty feet away when it happened.’

 ‘If you really think the army will be over the moon about the idea of prosecuting a British sergeant in the middle of a war, one we appear to be losing extremely badly, by the way, after one Indian officer has been killed, probably by a stray bullet, then you have another think coming.’ Tiredness – no, worse than that, a grimy, exasperated fatigue – edged Sam’s voice as he went: ‘Are there any other witnesses? Oh, not the children. No court-martial will entertain a bunch of half-caste bastards.’

‘The children didn’t see anything. I was the only witness.’

‘Well, I fear they will look at you and dismiss you as just a girl who knows next to nothing about war or soldiery or what stray bullets can do. The very last thing they will want to do is rake up the mud between an Indian officer and a British soldier, what with all this talk of Jiffs and everything. That will be a disaster for them. So, if you insist on calling this chap a murderer, you’d better be right, but it’s going to be the word of a girl against a sergeant, one who has been injured in the line of duty. Nothing’s going to happen to him until, or rather
if
, we all reach India. And if you think that’s going to be easy, then, on that subject, too, you are horribly mistaken.’

‘Mr Metcalf,’ Grace started.

‘It’s either Sam or Colonel Metcalf, actually.’

‘Colonel, then. Murder is murder. That man killed our Jemadar in cold blood because he couldn’t abide waiting five minutes to help a busload of orphan not injured in the line of
duty but in the act of making a very selfish escape from the enemy. He murdered an officer who was trying to maintain discipline and help us. What I think you are saying is that because the perpetrator is a white Englishman and the victim is of a coloured race, an Indian, no one will mind at all. I may be just a girl, in your view, in charge of sixty half-caste bastards, as you put it so disgracefully, but let me tell you this, Colonel, that to suggest he was killed by a stray bullet, sir, is a filthy lie. I saw what happened and I mind very much indeed, and when I am free of your travelling circus and get to civilisation, I shall say so, loud and clear. Good night to you, sir.’

‘Grace, I didn’t mean to…’

But she was gone.

The luck of the devil? Bugger that. Easing himself out of the hammock, he got to his feet puffing and blowing like an old man of ninety. The mist drifted in, a grey fuzz that confused the lines and shapes of everything ten feet beyond him. Groggily, he rolled up his hammock and passed it to one of the oozies who stowed it in a basket on the back of a pack elephant. After a pantomime of slapping down his shorts and shirt for a smoke, the oozie smiled and lobbed him a cheroot. Filthy things, but better than nothing. The Burmese produced a match, he lit his cheroot and inhaled deeply, saluting the oozie for the smoke and leant back against a tree, watching the elephant camp wake up.

Fingering his head wound through the bandage, it felt sore and gooey. Would it heal in the wet heat? Hmm. Still, not dead yet.

The mist winnowed, revealing the big bastard – Rungdot, they called him – emerging from a clump of bamboo, chomping away, riderless. They had chained one foreleg to a hind-leg so he could not wander far, but the oozies watching over him seemed on edge, looking askance, keeping an eye on him, angling their bodies, ready to run. That was stupid. You had to show who was boss. Funny thing was, they were watching him the same way, too.

Slowly, deliberately, he walked towards the monster. The oozies were occupied with a harness, further off, faffing about, but someone coughed and they began to take notice as the blond Englishman with the bandage on his head became dangerously close to Rungdot. Eddie Gregory came to a stop within touching distance of the elephant’s tusks, blowing a cloud of cheroot smoke at the creature’s face. The elephant raised his head and eyed the sergeant murderously. On the far side of the clearing Sam came out of his tent and his attention was immediately gripped by the scene beneath him. Looking on, Sam watched aghast as the sergeant puffed out another smoke cloud directly at Rungdot. The head of the great elephant
dropped a fraction, held, then he swung his tusks away and hobbled off towards the edge of the clearing.

Gregory had stood his ground, had stared down the Man-Killer. The oozies looked at him, more than a little afraid. Sam shook his head, worried.

No luck in it at all.

A coiled fossil.  Muddle-headed by sleep, she studied the coil, like an Ammonite from the Jurassic, at its dead centre a pretty brown eye. Fossils don’t blink. This one did. Like a dripping wet dog getting out of a duck pond, her mind shook itself awake. If it blinked, it couldn’t be a fossil. Not three feet from her hammock, Grace registered the presence of a baby elephant, his trunk tightly rolled up in on itself. Beyond the trunk was a grey convexity, his stomach. She stared intently at Oomy’s trunk as it tentatively clawed at passing drifts of mist. The trunk made a fifth limb, which could pick up a pencil or, when he was older, roll a three-ton teak log uphill. Even now as a baby, one stomp from his clumping great feet could do her real harm and yet this was a species which would hardly ever abuse its great strength. The war, the wretchedness of the refugees dying by the wayside, the blitzing of Mandalay, the murder of the Jem, all of this was grim beyond the saying of it. But the few hours they had spent with the elephants… while not a consolation, since nothing could have made up for all those unnecessary deaths, had nevertheless been a time of wonderment and joy. To wake up, and the very first thing you see is the tucked-up trunk of a baby elephant, and then him blinking…

The day’s march started, a steep climb through thick forest, Sam far ahead at the front, the Havildar next, in charge of the pack elephants, the children, led by Emily and Ruby and then Grace as ‘sheepdogs’, in the centre party, and the Chin guards bringing up the rear. The killer with the bandaged head? No sign of him. High above, they heard the odd grumble of
thunder from the mountains, and every now and then a patter of light showers fell. The heavy rains threatened but didn’t come.

Prickly wet heat crawled under skin. Bodies raw with salt, their clothes glued to them with sweat. Itches demanded to be scratched, but the more you scratched, the worse the itch became. It was depressing, too, not being able to see ahead for more than ten feet, not having a goal on the horizon, but just being locked inside an unchanging bubble– jungle with no end and no beginning, just foot after foot, yard after yard, mile after mile of foliage. Barred from seeing the open sky by the halo of forest canopy, the surroundings suffused by an eerie green light, it felt like being trapped inside an enormous fish tank.

The path – to glorify it with that description seemed absurd – was paved with a slime of dead leaves, rotting branches, puddles of dark liquid, a mulch of fungus. Under the pressure of the lightest footfall, the ground gave way. A first step ended in a squelch, the second a crumbling, the third a sharp snap.  Waxy ferns which had been around in the time of the dinosaurs whacked into their faces. Above, the vegetable sky was pierced, every now and then, by beams of sunshine that managed to tunnel through. Lianas, as thick as ship’s cables, fell diagonally across their path. Grace stopped to draw breath, a tingling in her left foot. Numberless black ants carved a new path across her toes. She swept them off and carried on.

Downwards, they staggered and slipped. A stinking blackwater bog, a clear stream, icy cold, then more bog until their path tilted uphill. Ceaselessly uphill they walked until they hit a ridge and then, down, slipping and sliding, clawing at roots and palms and rotten sticks to break their descent. Up, down, up down, hour after hour of it. Above all, it was a passage through an alien land, of hostile, never-ending, indecipherable noise. Long ago, in the ignorance of her gilded upbringing, Grace had assumed that the jungle would be a quiet place, so quiet that you could perhaps hear a snake slither by or make out individual birdsong. This jungle was as noisy as a train station. Nearby – but invisible – a stream roared and
shouted its way down from the Himalayas, sometimes above them, sometimes below, the thunder of water against old stones creating a deep murmur of sound. Overlaying that, a nonsense wild-track of grunts and buzzes and clicks and bleeps and croaks from the things that creep and crawl. And, from high above in the forest canopy, whoops and squeaks and chirrups and trills and long, piercing screams. Monkeys, insects, bats, frogs, gibbons, lizards, birds. The noise pulled a freight train of anxiety in tow.  That roar just then – a waterfall a hundred yards away, or behind that fern, a tiger? That creaking sound, so soft you could barely hear it? A liana brindled by sunlight, or a black and yellow Burmese krait, its venom a dozen times more deadly than cobra?

‘Miss, listen.’ Molly identified it first.

A shudder of unease passed through the group.

‘Miss, I’m scared.’

‘There’s nothing to be afraid of, Molly,’ said Grace, knowing the opposite was more honest.

The crackle-crackle grew more violent, purposeful. Ahead, Grace made out two grey blurs at the end of the tunnel of green. Mother elephant was ripping out thick clumps of bamboo from the ground with her trunk and popping them into Baby’s mouth. Po Net, down on the ground, fussing  over the leather ties and ropes which held the great cane basket in place, smiled at the arrival of the others, remounted and dug his heels in.

Mother started to march, her great backside rolling and yawing like a ship at sea,  and the school party fell in behind. Instantly, their spirits lifted: it was so much easier walking in the immediate footsteps of elephants than through near-virgin jungle. Mother and baby crushed grass and ferns and palms flat, making footfalls which must have scared off every creepy spider or hungry tiger for miles and miles around. There was something wonderfully comical and yet keenly affecting about the baby following in the footsteps of a three-ton
mass. A great gasp from Mother’s bottom and out popped balls of semi-digested stodge in which Grace could make out blades of grass and shoots of bamboo and, half-buried in the last one, something that had been returned from the netherworld.

‘Michael!’ squeaked Grace, delighted, and Po Net, grinning hugely, turned Mother to one side so they all could see the results of the elephant’s digestion. The old lady’s trunk coiled forward and picked up the school cap and washed it in a deep puddle, to and fro, with the fastidiousness of a washerwoman. Up in their basket, the children, Michael too, were beside themselves with glee. Now soaked but still reeking of elephant dung, Mother swished the cap around in the puddle one last time and scooped it up with her trunk and raised it aloft to Po Net, who stood up on Mother’s neck and turned round and bowed very low, before handing the cap to Michael. The po-faced five year old of a few days ago had become a hardened jungle traveller. Returning Po Net’s bow, royally, he accepted the cap, dripping wet, smelly and speckled with gobbets of pooh, and placed it on his head as if it were a top hat. Everyone cheered, but softly, in case Sam heard.

 They trudged on, rising and falling, the march for those on foot made less grim by the squeals and giggles coming from within the pannier on the elephant’s back. An orchid entranced Grace’s eye – a golden orgy of tubes and stamens and scent – but Mother had chosen that instant to stop dead in her tracks and hoist her trunk to snack on a particularly juicy knot of mossy food. Colliding with the elephant’s bottom, she skidded on a wide leaf as slippery as an icy puddle, lost her footing and fell with a thump to the ground.

‘Oh, Miss, are you all right?’ called out Ruby, marching arm-in-arm with Lucy, a perilously thin ten year old.

‘I’m fine, Ruby, thank you, but I am bit worried about Mother.’ As if she had heard every word, the mother elephant turned her enormous head and treated Grace to a look of
mild irritation and shrugged in a very bored kind of way. Close by, Oomy chirrupped happily. Unlike some human beings, these animals, Grace thought, do not live to kill.

They halted for lunch. Po Net opened the tins with his jungle knife and Grace was sharing out the portions as fairly as she could when Molly started to moan: ‘I’m sick of pilchards and biscuits. It’s so boring.’

‘Molly, come on,’ said Ruby, ‘it’s better than nothing.’

‘No, nothing
is
better than this dog food. You eat it, Rover.’

‘Hush, Molly!’

‘Miss!’ cried Emily.

‘Listen, you two, we’ve got to behave.’

‘He’s eating all the jam, Miss, the baby.’

Oomy tipped over the jam tin in his haste; it was virtually empty.

 ‘Stop it, thief!’ Grace yelled. He eyed her shiftily, head down, sulkily apologetic, and trotted off, docking at the far side of Mother, to peek his head out from underneath her legs, checking to see whether Grace was still angry with him. It was so utterly like the reaction of a naughty boy caught red-handed that she found it impossible to be cross.

‘He’s so cute,’ cried Molly. The little girl watched Oomy’s trunk hesitate over a hedge of grasses, like a fat boy hovering over a buffet before plumping for a clump of what looked like dark green shamrock and wolfing it. Molly stood up, walked to the far end of the hedgerow and tugged up a fresh clump of the favoured grass. She held it out to Oomy at arm’s length; he paused, eyeing the gift warily, before plucking it from her outstretched hand and tucking it into his mouth. He rewarded her with a dry touch, not slobbery at all, of his trunk on her hand and trotted off to hide behind his mother once more.

The lunch-break ended all too quickly and they were back inside the green tunnel again, up and down, monotonous, exhausting.

How long could the children keep this up? Three days? Another week, mused Grace, perhaps, but by that time the elephant men would have gone their own way and the children would have to walk along with the thousands of refugees on the main track. But what if the monsoon came early and they were stuck in the jungle for three weeks, even a month? Already the weaker ones were wilting, and it was only the first full day.

In the afternoon trek she had hoped to get her party to pick up its pace, intent on catching up with Sam to press home her fears about the sergeant. But as the hours passed, more and more of the girls tripped on hidden branches or just gave up the ghost, collapsing onto the ground to nurse minor scratches. The group lagged far behind and any hope of catching up with the front of the party before nightfall faded.

Around four o’clock the path grew crazily steeper, their progress pitifully slow. A sudden crash-crash and the head of the Chin rearguard emerged, followed by a dozen or so of the last group of elephants. Grace tried to maintain the order to march, but it was too late in the day and too many of the girls were done in. Only she, Emily and Ruby were walking alongside the elephants, pretty much the opposite of Sam’s orders, when they arrived at the night’s camp, in a glade of high trees, close by, a ravine carved by a jungle stream. There was plenty of water and fodder for the elephants but neither sign nor sound of the Japanese, nor of the other refugees, nor of Sam, nor of the sergeant.

She had planned to have it out with Sam there and then, but first she had to organise the children’s camp for the night – where to tie their hammocks, then ensure they had been fed. By the time she had finished, night had come, and she could feel exhaustion creep into her bones. Grace resolved to find Sam once she had five minutes’ rest in her hammock. She closed her eyes, only to feel the sun shining into her face, and her hammock rocking to and fro, to and fro.

A demented giant was swinging her awake. Eyes wide open, sleep banished, the stout bamboo tree supporting the foot of her hammock was being gobbled up. In a frenzy of alarm, she dived out of the hammock, scrambling to wrap her blanket around her half-naked body, and put a safe distance from her and the monster eating her bedroom for breakfast.

Greed for the fresh, juiciest young bamboo shoots was the root of the problem. Standing on hind legs and extending his trunk, the elephant, a young powerful tusker, could just reach the shoots of the bamboo high above but one hind leg had been tied to a foreleg, sabotaging his natural agility. Hobbled, he was bound to fail, and just as Grace dived to safety he overbalanced, front legs crashing down the side of the bamboo tree, smashing through branches and shredding Grace’s hammock. The culprit shrugged off his fall, trumpeted irritably and staggered away in search of a less challenging meal.