ears, to look at his pursuers.
Perhaps he had been pushed too hard, perhaps he had been hunted too often and the hatred had accumulated like weed below the waterline of an old ship, perhaps this was his last defiance.
For a moment he stood tall, and glistening black with mud and rain, silhouetted against the low grey sky, and Zouga hit him in the shoulder, the gun ringing like a bronze cathedral bell, and the long lick of red flame blooming briefly in the gloom.
Both man and beast reeled to the shot, Zouga driven off-balance by the recoil and the bull taking the hardened lead ball through the ribs and going back on his haunches, the rheumy old eyes clenching tightly to the shock of it.
The bull kept his feet, though he was hard hit, and he opened his eyes and saw the man, that hated, evil- smelling and persistent animal that had persecuted him so relentlessly down the years.
He launched himself back down the slope, like an avalanche of dark grey granite, and his repeated blood squeals rang against the low sky, and Zouga turned and ran from the charging bull, while the earth trembled beneath his feet at the weight and nearness of the stricken beast.
Matthew stood his ground, even in the terrible press of the moment. Zouga loved him for that. He stood to do his duty, to deliver the second gun to his master.
Zouga reached him, just ahead of the charging bull, dropped his smoking weapon, snatched the second gun from Matthew, never suspecting that it had been doubleshotted, and as he turned -he thumbed the hammer back and swung up the long thick barrel.
The bull was on top of him, blotting out the rainsodden sky, the long yellow ivories raised like roofbeams over his head, and the trunk already uncoiling to reach down and snatch Zouga up.
Zouga pressed the hair trigger, and this time the gun fired. With a shattering roar the barrel burst, the metal opening like the petals of a flower, and burning powder flew back into Zouga's face, singeing his beard and blistering the skin of his face. The hammer was blown clean off the barrel and it hit Zouga in the cheek, just under the right eye, cutting a jagged wound clean down to the bone. The shattered weapon flew out of his grasp, and slammed back into his shoulder with such force that he felt the ligaments and tendons tearing. Zouga was hurled into a backward somersault that carried him just beyond the grasp of the bull's questing trunk.
He fell heavily behind a pile of loose stone chips, and for a moment the elephant checked, going back on its hind legs to avoid the flashing flame and smoke of the explosion, blinded and unsighted for a moment, and then it saw the gunbearer still standing.
Matthew started to run, poor, loyal, brave Matthew, but the bull had him before he had gone a dozen paces.
It took him about the waist with a single coil of its long trunk, and it threw him into the air as though he were light as a child's rubber ball. Matthew went up forty feet, with his arms and legs windmilling, his scream of terror unheard in the deafening squeals of the elephant. It sounded like the whistle of a steam engine blown by a crazed engineer, and Matthew seemed to rise very slowly into the air, hang for a long moment and then drop just as slowly downwards.
The bull caught him in midair and threw him again, this time even higher.
Zouga dragged himself into a sitting position. His right arm hung limply on its torn muscles and tendons, blood streamed from his ripped cheek into his beard and his eardrums were so tortured by the explosion that the elephant's squeals seemed muted and far off. He looked up groggily and saw Matthew high in the air, beginning to fall, saw him hit the ground, and the elephant begin to kill him.
Zouga dragged himself to his knees, and began to creep over the mound of loose stone towards the empty gun, the gun from which he had fired the first shot and which he had dropped when he snatched the double-shotted gun from Matthew, the gun which now lay five paces from him, five paces which seemed an infinite distance to drag his maimed body.
The elephant placed one foot on Matthew's chest and his ribs crackled like dry sticks in a fierce fire. It took his head in its trunk and plucked it from Matthew's shoulders, as easily as a farmer kills a chicken.
The elephant tossed Matthew's head aside and as it trundled down the slope close to where Zouga sat, he saw that Matthew's eyelids were blinking rapidly over his bulging eyeballs and that the nerves flickered under the skin of his cheeks.
Tearing his eyes from the gruesome object, Zouga lifted the empty gun into his lap and began to reload it.
He had no use or feeling in his right arm, which still hung limply at his side.
Twenty paces away the elephant knelt over Matthew's decapitated body and drove one of the long yellow ivories through his belly.
Painfully Zouga poured a handful of powder into the gun muzzle, trying not to be distracted from his task.
Matthew hung impaled through the middle from the bloody tusk like a wet shirt on a laundry line, the elephant's trunk came up and coiled python-like about his battered body.
Zouga dropped a ball from his pouch into the barrel of the gun, and one-handed tamped it home with the ramrod.
The elephant tore an arm from the body, and Matthew slid from the point of the tusk and dropped once more to earth.
Moaning softly with the pain of each movement, Zouga primed the gun and hauled back the hammer against the powerful tension of the spring.
The elephant was kneeling with both front legs on what remained of Matthew, grinding him into a red mush against the rocky earth.
Dragging the gun with him, Zouga crawled back to the mound of rock chips behind which he had fallen. Using only his left hand, he balanced the stock of the big elephant gun over the top of the mound.
The elephant was still squealing in unabated fury as it crushed Matthew's corpse.
Grovelling flat on his belly, Zouga sighted over the thick barrel, but with only one hand it was almost impossible
