Read The Child's Elephant Online
Authors: Rachel Campbell-Johnston
The Child's Elephant
CONTENTS
‘Throw your heart out in front of you and run to catch it.’ That’s what the boy’s grandmother always said.
When a baby elephant is left orphaned on the African savannah, Bat, a young herdsboy, takes her home and cares for her. But Bat’s grandmother knows that Meya cannot stay with them for ever – the call of the wild will always be sounding in her soul.
And there are rumours born on the wind; frightening stories of kidnapping and suffering and war. Bat and his closest friend, Muka, are catapulted into a new life of unimaginable terror. Now memories of their village world feel so far away. Will the bond between elephant and child remain strong enough to save them?
A thrilling new novel which tells a heartbreakingly life-like tale.
For Katya, and in memory of Bob Foulerton
The sound of the rifle shot rang through the air. For a few moments it seemed as if the whole world had stopped. The cicadas fell silent, a bush rat dived for its burrow, the cattle paused in their chewing and looked upwards with wide empty stares; and Bat, the lone herd-boy who up till then had been dreaming, swishing at bushes with a long whippy branch, let the switch fall and dropped suddenly down on his haunches. His head was quite hidden by the tall, yellow grass.
He felt the slow, rolling shudder through the soles of his feet. It rumbled his bones like the beat of the big tribal drum. Something that mattered had just happened out there on the savannah. He could feel it: something momentous that he didn’t want to know about and yet knew at the same time he would have to find out. But not now, he thought, as he ducked even lower
in the grasses. He let his breath leak through fingers clamped hard to his mouth. A lizard clung spellbound to a stalk right beside him. He gazed into the rapt gold-ringed bead of its eye. It stared back, unblinking, as if it had been stunned.
It seemed like for ever before the last fading echoes were finally quieted, before the waiting cicadas picked up their old song and the lizard, as if some bewitchment had suddenly been broken, darted off with a whisk of its skinny brown tail. In the shade of the thorn trees, the cattle returned to their grazing. They pulled at the grasses with long, curling tongues. But Bat, still as a sandgrouse that keeps low in its cover, hugged his arms round his knees and stayed down where he was.
He listened. Somewhere not so very far away he could hear people talking. The sound drifted like wood-smoke upon a slack wind: murmuring voices . . . then a clatter of laughter . . . the silence that followed it . . . then a sudden angry shout . . . then nothing again . . . then the bark of an order. The air carried the fragments in faint tattered snippets. They sent flurries of nerves stirring across his bare flesh.
Who was it? He could feel his pulse racing. His heart jumped in his throat. Every shift of the breeze could have been someone approaching; every glint of the light could have been a stranger’s glance. Was someone even now stealing up upon him? Unable to bear the uncertainty, he rose to his feet.
Nothing looked very different. The cattle were peaceable; a new calf was suckling; the scrublands that stretched all about him looked quite undisturbed. It was
funny how hiding played tricks with your imagination. He shouldn’t have allowed himself to get so scared, he thought. He was seven after all: far too old to be behaving like some panicky chicken.
Ducking his head low, Bat set off through the grasses. Their tall, feathered fronds brushed as high as his chest. His eyes darted warily as he slipped through the thorn bushes. When the branch of one snagged him he didn’t cry out. He just paused for a moment and watched the blood trickling. It dried almost immediately in the afternoon heat.
After a while, he began to see traces; he started noticing places where the scrub had been squashed. Branches were broken and bushes were flattened. He slowed up his pace as he crested a ridge. The down-slope was stony. He would have to be careful not to trip. Flitting between boulders, half running, half scrambling, he arrived at a river-bed that had all but run dry. A basking snake slipped from a smooth sun-baked stone. Bat skirted the spot and it was then, in a patch of damp sand where the last buried moisture still lingered, that he spotted the footprint which brought him suddenly up short. It was huge! His heart thumped. It was truly gigantic, he thought, as big as the biggest circle that he could have made if stretching out both arms as wide as he was able he had then brought them round and tried to brush fingertips.
Bat swallowed. He’d already come too far . . . far further than he’d first meant to . . . much further than anyone would have told him was safe. He cast a quick backwards glance. He could no longer see his cattle. The
dry riverbed glittered and flashed in the heat. On the far bank was a thicket. Something had crashed straight through it. A bush was splattered with red. Perhaps it was a hibiscus, the boy found himself hoping; but he didn’t need to look a second time to know that it was not: it was blood.
He scuttled for the cover of some rocks ahead. Beyond, he could now see a vast shadowy shape. From where he was crouching, it loomed high as a mountain. It blocked out the horizon. It blocked out, for a moment, all the thoughts in his head. But then, with a jolt, the full truth broke upon him. This mountainous form was a dead elephant.
Hands pressed to the rock face, Bat struggled to steady his breathing. His heart was racing so hard it was outrunning his head. Who? How? Why?
A figure emerged from beyond the great carcass. Bat swallowed the cry that almost burst from his lips. It was a man . . . a bare-chested man . . . with dark skin. . . so dark that it shone almost purple . . . and he was tall, Bat noticed, particularly tall . . . he must have stood as high as a stem of grown maize. And now he was moving. Bat could no longer see him. Was he coming closer? Dropping down even lower, the boy peeped through another gap.
There were two other people, both standing a little further off. A rifle was slung round the back of the nearest; the other was supporting what Bat realised with a shudder could only have been an elephant’s tusk.
Poachers! These were poachers! The boy turned dizzy with fright.
He had to get away! But how? He glanced frantically about. The dark man was squatting. Bat scarcely dared breathe as he watched him. He was fiddling with something on the ground at his feet; but when he glanced up, eyes scanning the horizon, Bat saw for the first time the tribal scars that branded him. They ran straight across his brow: three lines like a frown cut deep into his forehead. Bat flinched from the menace embedded in that face.
Wiping his palms on a pair of dusty green trousers, the man half rose and, putting one booted foot forward, gave a sudden hard tug. A chainsaw snarled into life. For a second it snatched all the silence from the air. Then it sputtered and stopped. There was a moment of stunned hush. The man cursed. His cry rang round the stones of the dried riverbed.
Terrified, Bat tried to squeeze himself in even tighter underneath the boulder. He reached up for a handhold. A loose stone was dislodged. It rolled down the slope with a sudden loud clatter.
‘Stop! What’s that?’
‘What?’
‘That sound.’
‘Nothing.’
‘Yes, it was something. There’s someone there . . . someone watching.’
The speaker grabbed at the rifle slung over his shoulder. The man propping the elephant tusk jumped quickly aside. His load slipped from its shoulder and hit the ground with a thud. A swarm of flies rose in a cloud of black buzzing. They bumped about like the
thoughts that dashed round in Bat’s head.
