to hold the clumsy weapon true, and his vision swam and wavered with pain and exhaustion.
For an instant the shaking foresight aligned with the crude vee of the backsight, and he let the shot fly, in flame and a billowing cloud of burnt powder smoke.
The elephant's squeals stopped abruptly. As the powder smoke was blown aside on the cold breeze, Zouga saw that the bull had hoisted himself wearily upright and was swaying slowly from foot to foot. The massive head dropped under the weight of its blood-smeared tusks and its trunk hung as limply as Zouga's own damaged right arm.
The elephant was making a strange mournful humming sound deep in his chest, and from the second bullet wound just behind his bony shoulder joint, his heart blood spurted in short regular jets, to the beat of the huge heart, and poured down his body in a honey-thick stream.
The bull turned towards where Zouga lay, and shuffling like an old and very weary man came towards him, the tip of his trunk twitching with his last fading warlike instincts.
Zouga tried to drag himself away, but the bull came on faster than he could crawl, and the trunk reached out, touched Zouga's ankle, the vast bulk of the elephant filled the sky above Zouga, and he kicked out frantically but the trunk tightened its grip on his ankle with agonizing unbearable strength, and Zouga knew that it would tear his leg out of its socket at the hip.
Then the elephant groaned, a shuddering exhalation of air from the torn lungs, the grip on Zouga's ankle relaxed and the old bull died on his feet, his legs collapsed under him and he went down.
He fell with a weight and force that made the earth bounce and tremble under Zouga's prostrate body and with a thud that Jan Cheroot, who was crossing the swamp, heard clearly from a mile away.
Zouga. dropped his head against the earth and closed his eyes, and the darkness overwhelmed him.
Jan Cheroot made no attempt to move Zouga from where he lay beside the old bull's carcass. He built a rough shelter of saplings and wet grass over him and then coaxed smoky flames from a fire at his head, and from another at his feet. This was all he could do to warm him until the porters came up with the blankets at sunset.
Then he helped Zouga into a sitting position and between them they strapped the damaged arm. God Almighty, croaked Zouga, as he prepared the needle and thread from his sewing kit, 'I'd give both the tusks for a dram of good malt whisky.'
Jan Cheroot held the hand mirror, and using one hand only Zouga stitched the flap of his torn cheek back into place, and as he pulled the last knot tight and snipped the thread, he collapsed back into his damp and stinking fur kaross.
I will die rather than march again, he whispered. That is your choice exactly, Jan Cheroot agreed, without looking up from the chunks of elephant liver and heart that he had begun wrapping in yellow fat before stringing them on a green twig. 'You can march or die here in the mud.'
Outside the hut the porters were wailing and chanting the mourning dirge for Matthew. They had gathered the fragments of his horribly mutilated body and made a package of them, wrapping them in Matthew's own blanket and binding it up with bark rope.
They would bury him the following mornin& but until then they would keep up the haunting cries of mourning.
Jan Cheroot scraped coals from the fire and began. to grill the kebab of liver and fat and heart over them, 'They will be useless until they have buried him, and we must still cut the tusks. 'Give Matthew a night of mourning at least, Zouga whispered. 'He stood the bull down. If he had run with the second gun. . . ' Zouga broke off, and groaned as a fresh stab of pain transfixed his shoulder. Using his good left hand, he scratched under the skin blanket on which he lay, moving the lumps of stone which had caused the discomfort.
He was good, stupid, but good, Jan Cheroot agreed. A wiser man would have run. ' He turned the kebab slowly over the coals. 'It will take all day tomorrow to bury him and then cut the tusks from both elephants.
But we must march the day after that.'
Jan Cheroot had killed his bull down on the plain, under the outspread branches of a giant acacia. Looking through the low opening of the hut Zouga could see the carcass of his own bull lying on its side not twenty feet away. Already it was swelling with trapped gas and the upper legs thrust out stiffly above the grey balloon of the belly. The tusks were unbelievable. Even as he stared at them Zouga thought they must be a fantasy of his exhaustion and agony. They were as thick as a girl's waist, and the spread of them must have been twelve feet from tip to tip. How much will they weigh? ' he asked Jan Cheroot, and the Hottentot looked up and shrugged. I have never seen a bigger elephant, ' he admitted. 'We will need three men to carry each of them. 'Two hundred pounds? ' Zouga asked, the conversation distracted him from the agony in his shoulder. More, Jan Cheroot decided. 'You will never see another like him. 'No, Zouga agreed. 'That is true. There will never be another like him. ' Deep regret blended with his pain, making it more intense. Regret for the magnificent beast and sorrow for the brave man who had died with him.
The pain and the sorrow would not let him sleep that night, and in the dawn when they gathered in the rain to bury Matthew, Zouga strapped his damaged arm into a bark sling and had two men help him to his feet, then he walked unaided but slowly and stiffly up the slope to the grave, using a staff to balance himself.
They had wrapped Matthew's body in his fur blanket and placed his possessions with him, his axe and spear, his food bowl and beer calabash, to serve him on the long journey ahead.
Singing the slow mournful song of the dead, they packed the rock over and around him so that the hyena would not dig him out. When they had finished, Zouga felt drained of strength and emotion. He staggered back to his hut and crawled under the dank blanket. He had only that day to gather his strength for the march that must be resumed in the dawn. He closed his eyes, but could not sleep for the thud of the axes into bone as Jan Cheroot supervised the chopping of the tusks from the casket of the old bull's skull.
Zouga rolled on to his back, and once again a loose rock chip dug into his aching body. He reached back and pulled it from under the blanket, was about to throw it aside when something caught his attention and he arrested the movement.
The rock was as white and as crystalline as the candied sugar that Zouga had loved so as a boy, a pretty little fragment, but that was not what had stopped his hand.
Even in the subdued light of the hut, the thin irregular seam of metal that wavered uncertainly between quartz crystals flicked a pin-prick of bright gold into his eyes.
