look at him. is he not still a king?
The oldest bull was tall and gaunt, taller by almost a head than his proteges, but the flesh seemed to have wasted off the ancient frame. His skin hung in baggy folds and creases from the massive framework of bones.
He was thin in the way that some old men are thin; time had eroded him, seeming to leave only skin and stringy sinew and brittle bone. Matthew had been right in his description, the bull moved the way an old man moves, as though each joint protested with rheumatic pangs, and the weight of ivory he had carried for a hundred years was at last too much for him.
The ivory had once been the symbol of his majesty, and it was still perfect, flaring out from the lip and then turning in again so the points almost met. The gracious curves seemed perfectly matched, and the ivory was a lovely, butter yellow, unblemished despite the dominance battles he had fought with them, despite the forest trees that the bull had toppled with them and stripped of their bark or the desert roots he had dug from stony soil with them.
But now, at last, these great tusks were a burden to him, they wearied him and he carried his head low as they ached in his old jaws. It had been many years now since he had used them as fearsome weapons to keep control of the breeding herds. it had been as many years since he had sought the company of the young cows and their noisy squealing calves.
Now the long yellow ivories were a mortal danger to him, as well as a source of discomfort and pain. They made him attractive to man, his only enemy in nature.
Always it seemed that the hunters were camped upon his spoor, and the man-smell was associated with the flash and thudding discharge of muzzle-loading firearms, or the rude stinging intrusion of sharpened steel into his tired old flesh.
There were pieces of beaten iron pot-leg and of round hardened lead ball deep in his body, the shot lying against the bone castle of his skull had become encysted -with gristle and formed lumps as big as ripe apples beneath the skin, while the scars from arrows and stabbing spears, from the fire-hardened wood spikes of the dead-fall-trap had thickened into shiny grey scars and become part of the rough, folded and creased mantle of p his bald grey hide.
Without his two askari he would long ago have fallen to the hunters. It was a strangely intimate relationship that knit the little herd of old bulls, and it had lasted for twenty years or more. Together they had trekked tens of thousands of miles, from the Cashan mountains in the far south, across the burning, waterless wastes of the Kalahari desert, along the dry river beds where they had knelt and with their tusks dug for water in the sand.
They had wallowed together in the shallow lake of Ngami while the wings of the water fowl darkened the sky above them, and they had -stripped the bark from the forests along Linyati and Chobe, and crossed those wide rivers, walking on the bottom with just the tips of their trunks raised above the surface to give them breath.
Over the seasons they had swung in a great circle through the wild land that lay north of the Zambezi, feasting on the fruits of different forests scattered over a thousand miles, timing their arrival as each crop of berries came into full ripening.
They had crossed lakes and rivers, had stayed long in the hot swamps of the Sud where the midday heat, reaching 120, soothed the aches in the old bull's bones. But then the wanderlust had driven them on to complete the circle of their migration, south again over mountain ranges and across the low alluvial plains of the great rivers, following secret trails and ancient passes that their ancestors had forged and which they had first trodden as calves at their mother's flank.
In these last dozen seasons, however, there were men where there had never been men before. There were white-robed Arabs in the north around the lakes, with their long-barrelled jezails. There were big bearded men in the south, dressed in dark rough homespun and hunting from tough shaggy little ponies, while everywhere they met the tiny little bushmen with their wicked poisoned arrows, or the Nguni regiments hunting a thousand strong, driving the game into set positions where the plumed spearmen waited.
With each round of the seasons, the elephant ranges were shrinkin& new terrors and new dangers waited in the ancient ancestral feeding grounds and the old bull was tired and his bones ached and the ivory in his jaws weighed him down. Still he moved on up the slope to the head of the pass with slow determination and dignity, driven on by his instincts, by the need for space about him, by the memory of the taste of the fruits he knew were already ripening in a distant forest on the shores of a far-away lake. We must hurry. ' Jan Cheroot's voice roused Zouga, for he had been mesmerized by the sight of the regal old animal, filled with a strange feeling of dejd-vu, as though he had lived this moment before, as though this meeting was part of his destiny. The old bull filled him with awe, with a sense of timelessness and grandeur, so he was reluctant to return to the reality of the moment. The day dies fast, Jan Cheroot insisted, and Zouga glanced over his shoulder to where the sun was setting like a mortally wounded warrior bleeding upon the clouds. Yes, he acknowledged, and then frowned as he realized that Jan Cheroot was stripping off his puttees and breeches, folding them and stuffing them together with his blanket and food bag into a crevice in the rock face beside him. I run faster like this, he answered Zouga's silent enquiry with a twinkling grin.
Zouga followed his example, leaving his own pack and pulling off the webbing belt from which hung knife and compass, stripping down to good running order, but he stopped short of removing his breeches. Jan Cheroot's skinny naked yellow buttocks were totally devoid of dignity and his dangling penis played hide-and-seek from under his shirt tails. There were some conventions that an officer of the Queen must observe, Zouga decided firmly, and one was to keep his breeches on in public.
He followed Jan Cheroot along the narrow ledge, until they stepped off it on to the forested slope and immediately their forward vision was limited to a dozen yards by the lichen-covered tree trunks. From higher up the slope, however, they could hear the crackle and the ripping sound as the bull with the broken tusk fed on the uprooted tree.
Jan Cheroot worked out swiftly across the slope to avoid the askari, to circle around him and come at the lead bull. Twice he paused to check the wind. It held steadily down the slope into their faces and the colourful leaves above their heads quivered and sighed at its passing.
They had gone a hundred yards when the sounds of the feeding bull ceased abruptly; again Jan Cheroot paused and the little group of hunters froze with him, every man instinctively holding his breath as they listened, but there was only the sound of the wind and the singing whine of a cicada in the branches above. He has moved on to join the others, ' Jan Cheroot whispered at last.
Zouga was also certain that the bull could not yet have suspected their presence. The wind was steady, he could not have scented them. Zouga knew that the eyesight of the elephant was as weak as his hearing and sense of smell were acute, but they had made no sound.
Yet this was a clear demonstration of the benefits that the three old bulls derived from their association. It was always difficult for the hunter to place each of them accurately, especially in thick forest such as this, and the two
