The Elephant's Tale (12 page)

Gift grinned at their expressions. “This land has been in our family for generations and my father always talked of building a house here. When I started working at the magazine, I saved every cent I made and put it toward creating this place. Reuben James was kind enough to arrange for some of his hotel workers to help me thatch the domes and put up the tents. There have been many challenges, such as drilling a borehole to get water, but it has been worth it. This is my father’s favorite valley, because it is the gathering place of many desert elephants. When he returns, I want him to have a special place to come home to.”

Gazing around the tents, which were simply but lovingly furnished in African cotton and wood, Martine felt tears spring to her eyes. Gift’s father had gone missing in one of the most treacherous desert environments on the planet, and yet his son had never given up hope they would be reunited. He still talked of his dad in the present tense, as if he might round the corner at any time.

That evening, she sat with Ben and Gift on a high, flat boulder, watching the setting sun sink behind the mountains. As the rocks glowed orange, the clouds became lacy wisps of pink, and the contours of the valley became a carpet of jade-colored velvet, she thought again of the San boy’s courage. It inspired her to keep faith that, against all odds, she’d see Jemmy and her grandmother again.

When Gift moved away to stoke the barbecue, sending sparks flying, Ben said simply, “From tomorrow, it’ll be five days.”

Martine knew exactly what he meant. There were five days until Christmas Eve, the deadline for saving Sawubona and the date Gwyn Thomas was due to return from London. Five days for them to investigate Reuben James’s business dealings and get to the bottom of the mystery surrounding Angel; five days to unravel Grace’s prophecy; and five days for them to figure out how to travel thousands of miles back to Storm Crossing without money, transport, or passports.

They turned at the same moment to look at Gift. The San boy had his back to them and was loading pieces of chicken onto the sizzling grill. Martine’s stomach did an uncomfortable flip, as if she were in an elevator that was descending too quickly. They had less than a week to achieve a minor miracle and they were utterly dependent on a stranger—one who owed his home and his job to the man they were investigating.

G
ift’s home was so peaceful and magical that, as she lay in bed the next morning watching the sun outline the hills with gold and drinking the campfire-brewed coffee Ben had brought her, Martine fantasized about one day owning a tented camp overlooking an African valley herself. The dream lasted only until she nearly contracted hypothermia trying to have an outdoor shower using a bucket of icy water. After that, she vowed to stay in her grandmother’s comfortable thatched house at Sawubona, with its hot running water, for the rest of her days.

That’s not going to happen unless you can outwit Reuben James,
piped up a voice in her head, but she refused to listen to it. It was too beautiful a morning to dwell on the disaster looming back in South Africa.

Breakfast (two fried eggs on toast) out of the way, they went in search of the famous desert elephants, which Martine and Ben were dying to see. Gift had warned them not to get their hopes up. Despite the creatures’ immense size they were frequently difficult to find, because their daily searches for food and water meant they traveled enormous distances.

“That’s one of the reasons it’s so hard to keep an accurate count of their numbers,” said Gift, braking to allow a herd of springbok to cross the road. “Before my father disappeared he’d become concerned about the way elephants kept vanishing, supposedly without any cause. These were not sick or old elephants. They were from herds he’d followed for years, so there wasn’t any doubt about what was happening. Young, healthy animals would just go missing from the herd. One day he’d see them, the next they’d be gone.”

Kind of like the elephant whisperer himself, thought Martine. She wound down her window and stared out at the blur of flaxen grasses and twisting red road and far-off violet mountains. The African landscape was so enchanting it was hard to believe that tragedy, in the form of poisonous snakes, plants, scorpions, savage beasts, and even the merciless sun, stalked it.

“My father alerted the authorities,” Gift went on, his eyes skimming the trees for any sign of elephants, “but nobody took him seriously apart from Reuben James, who increased the poaching patrols. People kept telling Pa that these elephants must have died of starvation or thirst and that the other members of the herd were burying them in an elephants’ graveyard.”

“The elephants have a cemetery?” Ben said in amazement.

Gift snorted. “No, that’s just a tourist myth, but they do hold elephant funerals. Sometimes they’ll lift up the body of a companion, a bit like human mourners will reverently carry a coffin, and they bury their dead by covering them with mud or leaves and branches. Anyway, in the end it was decided that global warming was killing the elephants.”

“Global warming?” Martine was puzzled. “You mean how the earth’s surface is heating up because we’re polluting the planet so much with our cars, airplanes, and factories? What’s that got to do with disappearing elephants?”

“Scientists and politicians always seem to be arguing about whether or not global warming exists,” Ben said.

“You can’t take any notice of politicians because they’re just trying to get elected,” Gift told him. “It’s true that some scientists claim it doesn’t exist, but most agree that the warming of the earth’s surface is going to lead to sea level rises, the melting of the polar ice caps, and an increase in disease and extreme weather.”

“And if there’s an increase in extreme weather, the drought periods in Namibia will be worse than ever and the desert elephants will be pushed to the brink of extinction?” guessed Martine.

“Exactly. We’re already witnessing that now. Except that my father didn’t feel it was lack of food and water that was causing these elephants to go missing. To him, it seemed too targeted. It was always the prime specimens from every herd that went missing. And yet there was no evidence of poaching.”

“It’s almost as if you have a Bermuda Triangle here in Damaraland,” remarked Ben.

“What’s a Bermuda Triangle?” asked Martine.

“The
Bermuda Triangle is this area of the Florida Straits, the Bahamas, and the Caribbean where loads of aircraft and ships have gone missing and have never been seen or heard from again. It’s almost as if they’ve been swallowed by the ocean. Over the years, hundreds of experts on things like weather and paranormal activity have tried to discover what became of them, but a lot of the vanishings are completely unexplained.”

“I don’t know about that,” said Gift, “but I’m convinced the two things are linked. You know, my father going missing and the disappearing elephants. The funny thing is no elephants have been lost since the day my father vanished.”

Ben said excitedly: “Gift, back up and check out that tree. I’m sure I saw some fresh elephant sign.”

Gift carried on driving. As much as he liked Ben and Martine, he continued to view them as tourist kids who knew nothing about the desert. “Leave the tracking to me, city boy,” he said jokingly. “The elephants never come this far south.”

Martine smiled to herself. In the few months Ben had been studying under Tendai as an apprentice tracker, he’d shown such a talent for reading sign, the tracker’s word for the traces an animal leaves of its passing, that the game warden said he had the potential to become one of the best he’d ever seen.

Two hours later, her smile had gone and her patience had evaporated. It was clear that Gift was as poor at tracking as he’d joked he was when he met them. They hadn’t seen so much as a tail-hair of an elephant.

Gift read her expression and scowled. “If you and Ben think you can do better,
you
find the elephants.”

Ben said nothing. He sat staring straight ahead while Gift grudgingly drove back to the tree where he’d first spotted the peeled bark and split branches that so often marked the passage of elephants. When they reached it, Ben hopped out and inspected the elephant tracks at close range. Martine pored over them with him. She could never get over the fact that a beast weighing up to seven tons could leave such a light impression on the earth. They seemed to move as lightly as dancers.

“That way,” Ben said with quiet authority, pointing across a dry riverbed.

Gift did as he was instructed, although his face said: “Yeah, right.” But his disbelief turned to awe as Ben moved rapidly from sign to sign. By the time they crested a rise to find the desert elephants browsing in the trees before them, Martine could see that Gift had gained a new respect for her friend. Not that he admitted it. He said, “I was planning to check this place next anyway.”

The bull elephant separated himself from the herd gathered in the shade of a thicket of trees and advanced up the dusty trail, his ears flapping warningly. The females, the matriarchs, gathered their youngsters in close.

And now it was Gift’s chance to shine, because if there was one thing the San boy did know about, it was elephant behavior. His father had taught him everything he knew.

“A herd of elephants is like a moving nursery and retirement village for the elderly,” he told them with a laugh as he parked a respectful distance away and turned the engine off. “It’s a real community with everyone looking out for each other. They know every fellow member by what we call a name, and they can use a sort of elephant sonar to find friends who are as far as six miles away.”

“Tendai says that their pregnancy lasts two years,” Ben said.

Martine gazed out of the window at the huge beasts. “That’s got to be mighty uncomfortable, especially when you think how big the elephant baby would be.”

Gift smiled. “Yes, but elephants get a lot more support than a lot of humans do. An elephant baby is born into a protective circle, with a midwife standing by, and all share in the caring of it, including the feeding.”

“Dolphins do the same thing,” Martine said excitedly. “A dolphin midwife will even assist the newborn to the surface of the water for its first breath.”

She looked at Ben. Both were remembering the days they’d spent swimming with dolphins in the islands of Mozambique on another adventure.

Watching the ponderous progress of an old matriarch, Ben said with a laugh, “If an elephant tried swimming, it would sink to the bottom of the lake.”

“Actually,” Gift told him, “apart from whales and dolphins, elephants are the best swimmers in the whole mammal kingdom. They’ve been known to swim up to three hundred miles between islands—just for fun.”

At Sawubona, Martine had always regarded elephants as lumbering, prehistoric-looking creatures that were wondrous but unfathomable. Their activities appeared to be confined to eating trees and splashing around the water hole. Gift showed her that even their tiniest action had significance.

“See that youngster over there? He’s using that stick as a fly switch. Elephants have complex brains and an incredible ability to reason, and they’re masters at using tools to make tasks easier. They use chewed-up bark to plug holes in riverbeds so that the water doesn’t evaporate and they can return to drink later. They uproot trees and push them onto electric fences. There’ve been stories of them pretending to be chained after they’ve broken their shackles so they can escape from their captors or take revenge against people who’ve been cruel to them.”

Martine thought again of Angel and wondered who, or what, had traumatized her in the past.

“Funny,” said Ben, “whenever I see an animal that’s cute and cuddly and small, like a Labrador puppy, or big and gentle, like dolphins or Martine’s giraffe, Jemmy, all I want to do it protect it and make sure nothing ever hurts it. But elephants look like they can take care of themselves. They’re so big and their hides are so thick that it’s never occurred to me they might be able to reason like we do or have similar emotions.”

“Hunters like to believe that when animals are killed they don’t know what’s happening to them, but elephants feel things every bit as strongly as we feel them,” Gift assured him. “They have all the same emotions: love, hate, rage, pride, happiness, jealousy, and despair. Baby elephants who’ve witnessed their parents being culled wake up screaming with nightmares.”

Martine, who’d endured many nightmares after her own parents died, regarded the elephants with new eyes. She’d taken those at Sawubona for granted. Although she saw these sensitive, intelligent beasts almost every day, she knew next to nothing about them. Well, that was going to change. She was going to do what she could to make their lives better, and the elephant she was going to start with was Angel.

They were driving back across the plain, their senses full of the majesty of the elephants, when Gift spotted a Velvetchia plant. It was, he said, the oldest in the world and they absolutely had to see it. Some were known to live for thousands of years.