Only the Animals (18 page)

My difficult labour lasted for two days, assisted by my mother and aunts. Finally my daughter was born in her foetal sac, and within half an hour of her birth she stood up, fell over, and was gently nudged up again by my mother. She found her way to my teats and began to suckle. For hours I could not stop rumbling with pleasure and love, soothing her, reassuring her, sharing my wonderful news with our bond group and wider clan throughout the bush. I helped my sister birth her son in the spring days that followed. We laughed together as we watched our babies discover their trunks and try to figure out what to do with them. They would swing them around and back and forth, sucking on them, tripping over them, all the while bewildered as to what these strange things were useful for. At night we stood awake above our sleeping infants, keeping guard beside all the adult women in the herd.

Their new lives cauterised our old longing for a glorious death. My sister and I began to wish for beauty and goodness in life, and tried not to think of death at all. Immune to the old charms, we hardly listened at dusk when the elders told the herd's babies and children stories of long-dead foreign ancestors under the flowering cashew trees. When my baby girl looked up to piece together the outlines of Castor and Pollux in the sky, I felt nothing but quiet elation at having her skin against my own.

*   *   *

One day at the beginning of the second dry summer after their birth, I discovered my daughter and nephew painting mud in diamond patterns on each other's foreheads at the edge of the dwindling Lake Urema, arranging coral tree twigs into headdresses and pretending they were made of velvet brocade and gold thread.

I demanded to know what they were doing. My daughter told me they were pretending to be Castor and Pollux adorned in finery, giving imaginary Parisian children a ride around the zoo in the Jardin des Plantes. They couldn't understand my anger, wh
ich had its origins in fear, and they ran away and hid from me in the acacia grove. My sister said I had reacted badly by trying to stop their play-acting, that it would only encourage them as it had encouraged us at their age.

She took a different approach and told them everything they wanted to know about Paris and the siege, how the Prussians had encircled the city to starve the Parisians into surrender. She told them that the hungry Parisians had eaten their way through tens of thousands of the city's horses, until there was not a single horse to be found. Next they started in on the rats, but even the city's best chefs had not been able to make rat taste good, though they tried hard to entice the wealthy in the expensive dining clubs with cured rat sausage. Once every cat and dog in the city had been eaten, the chefs began to look around for other meat sources for their rich patrons. Rationing was never considered – the rich must eat meat regardless, and the poor were told they should survive on mustard and wine, of which the city had plenty stored.

I gave my sister a warning look.

‘That's enough for today,' she said. ‘Time to nap.'

The next morning, my daughter and her cousin talked a baby zebra into pretending to be a horse, and a bush rat into being a city rat, and they chased them as if they were human and hungry. It was normal for our young to test their powers by asserting play-dominance over other creatures in the bush, shooing them along with wide ears, trying to trumpet. The other women in our herd looked on with amusement. But I asked my sister to stop telling the tales, and she agreed for a while to let me distract our children with soft little stories about how the lion got its mane, and how the Milky Way was created from ashes thrown up into the sky by one of our ancestors, to lead his lost lover home.

*   *   *

It was at this time that strange foreign humans began to occupy the rundown National Park tourist camps in our territory, abandoned since the Portuguese had left. For many years we'd had Gorongosa mostly to ourselves, disturbed only by locals from the villages just outside the park's reinforced fences who sometimes took shortcuts through the park, if they felt brave enough to come face to face with lions or buffalo. Some of our herd recognised the foreign men's collective scent from past travels over the Mozambique border into the enormous Kruger National Park on the South African side, before the electric fences separating us from our relatives were built. We watched from a safe distance as these men set up a shooting range. Soon they were bringing local men to the camp and teaching them to shoot at targets.

The elders decided we should be cautious and move further away, towards the eastern edge of Gorongosa. We moved at night while the men were sleeping. As a child, I had always loved walking along the eastern boundary because of the smell of the orange groves the villagers tended on the other side. The citrus scent was so overwhelming that the elders in our herd would collect near the weakest parts of the enclosure, knowing we youngsters would be unable to resist trying to get to the fruit. Oranges have always been our great weakness. But that night there was no heady citrus scent, only smoke from fires on the other side of the fence.

The next night we moved on again, towards the Muaredzi River. It was hardly flowing. Several monsoon seasons had given us very little rain and we had suffered through the resulting dry summers, but Lake Urema still had just enough water for us not to become anxious. Now we were unsure whether to return to Lake Urema and risk being close to the strange humans, or to stay and hope that by some miracle the Muaredzi's waters might begin to swell. Our matriarch decided we should stay and wait.

After many weeks of waiting, another herd within our bond group arrived, on their way to see if the Mussicadzi River further afield might be flowing more swiftly. We had known for a while that they were coming, having listened closely to the infrasonic sound waves they transmitted. We greeted one another joyously with chirps and barks and constant rumbling, and they spent several nights with us, telling us stories about what they had seen on their journey from the south. They said the foreign humans had many local recruits now, often from the surrounding villages; they burned the homes to the ground and forced the men to fight. Some of them were very young, closer to being children. Other humans had tried to attack the men's compound within Gorongosa from the air. The travelling herd had seen a pilot crash his helicopter and stagger out wearing a fur-lined aviator cap with an emblem on it that looked like the tools humans use to farm. A Russian, one of the elders said.

The other herd promised to return as quickly as they could, and left to follow their matriarch towards the Mussicadzi. When they finally came back to us, they said that river too was almost dried up. They said a different group of men had moved into the Lion House on the old floodplain near the river – a concrete building, open to the elements, that had been occupied by the same pride of lions and their descendants since the Portuguese abandoned their tourist camps. Now the lions had all disappeared or been killed. We worried about them, dying so secretly. Even the floodplain was dry.

The other herd had fewer babies to look after, and our matriarch and theirs decided it would be best for our herd to stay beside the Muaredzi for its meagre water, while they moved on and tried to find another supply. We held a formal farewell ceremony before they left, making a ring with our bodies close together, breathing in the smell of our kin.

*   *   *

All through the summer we watched the Muaredzi die a slow death, gradually reduced to a trickle. The adults drank less and less so that our young could have their fill. There was very little to eat – the savanna
grasses were too dry, and most of the trees and shrubs we like to pull branches and leaves from had lost their sweetness and were dying too. We dug with our tusks for roots and tubers, for their stored moisture. At night we took extra care to keep our little ones surrounded, for the hyenas were becoming bold in their own hunger and thirst.

One hot afternoon, my sister distracted her son and my daughter from our troubles by caving in to their requests for more stories about Castor and Pollux.

‘A zoo,' she said to them, ‘is a very dangerous place for an animal in wartime, for it can mean the difference between life and death for the human inhabitants of a city. But it was not the poor who ate the zoo animals in Paris.'

Our children listened closely. She told them that the rich Parisians had started first on those zoo animals they could in good conscience eat, the ones that were not so far from the herbivores usually adorning their porcelain plates: two zebras, the yaks, five camels, a herd of antelope. Then they ate the flamingos and the single adored kangaroo. Next they shot and ate the lions and tigers. The zookeeper, desperate to save his beloved hippopotamus, said he would only sell it for food if somebody paid eighty thousand francs (the story was he'd been told a tale at his mother's knee about a hippopotamus). Not even the rich could justify such an expense when there were other zoo animals still to be eaten. They ate their way through the wolf pack, drizzled with deer sauce. Then they ate the passenger pigeons that had so faithfully been transporting secret messages from the French command in Tours.

I heard our children arguing afterwards.

‘
I'm
Castor!' my daughter insisted. She was twirling her tail, trying to keep away the flies that kept landing in a black pall across her back.

‘No, you're not,' her cousin said. ‘You're Pollux.' And he stuck his little trunk in the air and paraded a bit, waiting for her to retaliate.

For once I was glad they had escaped to their make-believe Paris, relieved they still had the energy to pretend.

The next day I took over the telling from my sister. I told them that when it came to the monkeys the Parisians paused. They tried for a while to ignore their hunger. Some wrote editorials to be published in the gazettes, which were distributed around France by hot-air balloon (now that the passenger pigeons were all eaten up) to outwit the circling Prussians, declaring that sometimes it might be better to starve than to eat the meat of a creature that reminded them in some uncomfortable way of themselves, though they could not yet put their finger on exactly
what
or
why
that was. They did not credit us elephants with the same exceptional qualities, and so they turned away from the monkeys towards Castor and Pollux, who year after year had patiently borne the weight of the children of Paris on their backs. The chef of a fine-dining establishment on the boulevard Haussmann stepped forward and offered twenty thousand francs for the two elephants. The zookeeper accepted: his family was starving too. He shot Castor and Pollux with steel-tipped bullets in the middle of winter, while they were dressed in their finest headgear.

Our children had always known this was how Castor and Pollux died. But they were slightly older now, more curious about certain details.

‘What do we taste like to humans?' my daughter wanted to know. She was still suckling, but had started to experiment with new tastes by trying bits of various bulbs from my mouth as I chewed, learning from me which were safe to eat.

I told her that the diners had complained that the trunk was too tough and the flank steak too oily, the consommé bland and the elephant-blood pudding bitter. One month after they ate Castor and Pollux, the French surrendered. The Prussians held a demure victory parade, then sent food by train into the city. The sympathetic English sent over boatloads of pork pies and currant jam. The siege was over, the zoo animals gone.

*   *   *

In the night, my daughter woke and nudged my leg with her forehead. She looked up at me with serious eyes. ‘I don't want you to die,' she said.

I stroked her small body with my trunk until her breathing slowed again, not sure what to say. ‘Are you still awake, sweetheart?' I whispered.

‘Yes,' she said.

‘Did Auntie tell you who the elephants Castor and Pollux were named after?'

‘No,' she said, breathless with the pleasure of anticipating another story.

‘There is a human myth from long ago,' I said. ‘From a time when most humans worshipped many gods. They believed a mortal woman, Leda, had given birth to an unusual set of twins. The twins had different fathers, one a mortal named Tyndareus, and one an immortal god, Zeus. These twins were named Castor and Pollux. Castor was mortal, but Pollux was immortal.'

‘Does that mean he couldn't die?'

‘Yes, that he would live forever. Castor was killed in battle, and Pollux was distraught. He begged his father, Zeus, to make his twin immortal just as he was, so that they could be together for eternity. Finally Zeus agreed, and he transformed the twins into two stars in the constellation the humans call Gemini.'

‘Is this the same constellation where we see the souls of the elephants Castor and Pollux?'

‘Yes. We see the sibling elephant ancestors looking at each other in profile, foreheads pressed together, just one eye visible for each. And the humans see the immortal mythical twins, never separated.'

My daughter thought about this for a long time, looking up at the sky. Clouds began to efface the stars, but it would mean nothing. Each night the clouds grew purple and heavy, only to clear at daylight without a drop of rain. The first monsoon downpours were long overdue.

‘Are you the mortal twin?' she said finally. ‘Or is Auntie?'

I smiled. Her logic was sound. ‘When we die, our souls will appear together in the sky,' I said, not quite answering her question. ‘We will always be watching over you.'

That night we heard the sounds of humans fighting one another with their technologies of fire, somewhere within the southern boundaries of the park.

*   *   *

When the Muaredzi had almost dried up, our matriarch decided we should move on again, towards a waterhole whose location was a closely guarded secret held only by the matriarch and the next most senior female within the herd. We travelled mostly at night, sometimes forced to keep going during the heat of the day if we could sense the humans were getting too close. They weren't searching for us – they were distracted by their desire to destroy one another – but we knew that our glowing tusks would be too tempting for men with guns to ignore.