elephant's own dung. There was no man-smell upon him.
Then the elephant made a sound, a gentle rumbling sound in his belly and a fluttering sound in his throat. It was the elephant song. The bull sang in the forest to learn if it was another elephant or a deadly enemy whose presence he sensed.
Pirri crouched at the edge of the thicket and listened to the elephant sing. Then he cupped his hand over his mouth and his nose and he gulped air into his throat and his belly and he let it out with a soft rumbling and fluttering sound.
Pirri sang the song of the elephant.
The bull sighed in his throat and changed his song, testing the unseen presence. Faithfully Pirri replied to him, following the cadence and the timbre of the song, and the elephant bull believed him.
The elephant flapped his ears, a gesture of contentment and trust.
He accepted that another elephant had found him and come to join him.
He moved carelessly and the thicket crackled before his bulk. He came ambling forward to meet Pirri, pushing the thorny branches aside.
Pirri saw the curved shafts of ivory appear high above his head.
They were thicker than his waist and longer than he could reach with his elephant spear.
The elephant spear was a weapon that Pirri had forged himself from the blade of a truck spring -that he had stolen from one of the dukas at the roadside. He had heated and beaten it until the steel had lost its temper and he was able to work it more easily. Then Pirri had shaped and sharpened it, and fitted it to a shaft of hard resilient wood and bound the blade in place with rawhide. When the rawhide dried it was hard and tight as the steel it held.
As the elephant's head loomed above him, Pirri sank down and lay like a log or a pile of dead leaves on the forest floor.
The elephant was so close that he could make out clearly every furrow and wrinkle in the thick grey hide. Looking up he could see the discharge from the glands in the elephant's head running like tears down his cheeks, and Pirri gathered himself.
Even with the spear he had made, which was sharp and heavy and almost twice as long as Pirri was tall, he could never drive the point through the hide and meat and the cage of ribs -to pierce the bull's heart or his lungs. The brain in its bony casket was far beyond his reach.
There was only one way that a man of Pirri's size could kill an enormous beast like this with a spear.
Pirri rolled to his feet and bounded up under the elephant's belly.
He stood between the bull's back legs and he braced himself and drove the point of the spear upwards into the angle of his groin.
The elephant squealed as the blade sliced through the baggy skin that hung around his crotch and lanced up into the sac of his bladder. The razor steel split his bladder open and the hot urine sprayed out in a yellow jet. He convulsed with agony, hunching his back, before he began to run.
The elephant ran screaming through the forest, and the foliage crashed and broke before him.
Pirri reatied on his bloody spear and listened to the elephant run out of earshot. He waited until the silence was complete and then he girded up his loincloth and began to follow the dribbled trail of blood and urine that steamed and reeked on the forest floor.
It might take many hours to die, but the elephant was doomed. Pirri, the hunter, had struck a mortal blow and he knew that before tomorrow's sunset the elephant would be dead.
Pirri followed him slowly, but he did not feel the fierce hunter's joy in his heart. There was only a sense of emptiness and the terrible guilt of sacrilege.
He had offended his god, and he knew that now his god must reject and punish him.
Pirri the hunter found the carcass of the elephant bull the next morning. The elephant was kneeling, with his legs folded up neatly beneath him.
His head was supported by the massive curves of ivory that were half buried in the soft earth.
The last rainstorm had washed his hide so that it was black and shiny and his eyes were open.
He appeared so lifelike that Pirri approached him with great caution and at last reached out with a long thin twig to touch the open staring eye fringed with thick lashes. The eyelid did not blink to the touch and Pirri noticed the opaque jelly-like sheen of death over the pupil.
He straightened up and laid aside his spear. The hunt was over.
By custom he should now sing a prayer of thanks to the forest god for such largesse. He actually uttered the first words of the prayer before he broke off guiltily. He knew that he could never sing the hunter's prayer again, and a profound sadness filled his being.
He made a small fire and cut the rich fatty meat out of the elephant's cheek and cooked it on a skewer over the coals. For once this choice morsel was tough and tasteless in his mouth.
He spat it into the fire and sat for a long time beside the carcass before he could rouse himself and shrug off the sense of sorrow that weighed him down.
He drew his machete from its sheath and began to chop one of the thick yellow tusks from its bony canal in the elephant's skull. The steel rang on the skull and the bone chips flew and fell about his feet as he worked.
That was how the men of his clan found him. They were drawn to Pirri by the sound of his machete hacking through bone. They came out of the forest silently, led by Sepoo and Pamba, and they formed a circle around Pirri and the elephant.
He looked up and saw them, and he let the machete fall to his side, and he stood with blood on his hands, not daring to meet their eyes. I will share the reward with you, my brothers, he whispered, but nobody answered him.
