Sebastian expressed himself well satisfied with the existing arrangements.
'I bet you are! It isn't costing you a thing. But I reckon it's about time you got up off your bum and did something.'
'Like what?'
'Like going and shooting some ivory.'
Three days later, armed and equipped for a '
poaching expedition, Sebastian led a column of gun-boys and bearers down the valley towards the Rovuma river.
Fourteen hours later, in the dusk of evening, he led them back.
'What in the name of all that's holy, are you doing back here?' Flynn demanded.
'I had this premonition.' Sebastian was sheepish.
'What premonition?'
'That I should come back, 'muttered Sebastian.
He left again two days later. This time he actually crossed the Rovuma before the premonition overpowered him once more, and he came back to Rosa and Maria.
'Well,' Flynn sighed with resignation. 'I reckon I'll just have to go along with you and make sure you do it.' He shook his head. 'You've been a big disappointment to me, Bassie.' The biggest disappointment being the fact that he had hoped to have his granddaughter to himself for a few weeks.
'Mohammed' he bellowed. 'Get my gear packed.'
Flynn sent his scouts across the river and when they reported back that the far bank was clear of German patrols, Flynn made the crossing.
This expedition was a far cry from Sebastian's amiable and aimless wandering in German territory. Flynn was a professional. They crossed in the night. They crossed in strictest silence and landed two miles downstream from M'tapa's village. There was no lingering on the beach, but an urgent night march that began immediately and went on in grim silence until an hour before dawn; a march that took them fifteen miles inland from the river, and ended in a grove of elephant thorn, carefully chosen for the kopjes and ravines around it that afforded multiple avenues of escape in each direction.
Sebastian was impressed by the elaborate precautions that Flynn took before going into camp; the jinking and counter-marching, the careful sweeping of their spoor with brushes of dry grass, and the placing of sentries on the kopje above the camp.
During the ten days they waited there, not a single branch was broken from a tree, not a single axe-stroke swung to leave a tell-tale white blaze on the dark bush. The.
tiny night fire fed with dry trash and dead wood was carefully screened, and before dawn was smothered with sand so that not a wisp of smoke was left to mark them in the day.
Voices were never raised above conversational tones, and even the clatter of a bucket brought such a swift and ferocious reprimand from Flynn, that on all of them was a nervous awareness, an expectancy of danger, a tuning of the minds and bodies to action.
On the eighth night the scouts that Flynn had thrown out began drifting back to the camp. They came in with all the stealth and secrecy of night animals and huddled over the fire to tell what they had seen.
Last night three old bulls drank at the water- hole of the sick hyena. They carried teeth so, and so, and so..
showing the arm to measure the length of ivory, '. - - apart from them, ten cows left their feet in the mud, six of them with young calves. Yesterday, at the place where the hill of Inhosana breaks and turns its arms, I saw where another herd had crossed, moving towards the dawn; five young bulls, twenty-three cows and..
The reports were jumbled, unintelligible to Sebastian who did not carry a map of the land in his head. But Flynn, sittin beside the fire listening, fitted the fragments together and built them into an exact picture of how the game was moving. He saw that the big bulls were still separated from the breeding herds that they lingered on the high ground while the cows had started moving back towards the swamps from which the floods had driven them, anxious to take their young away from the dangers that the savannah forests would offer once the dry season set in.
He noted the estimates of thickness and length of tusk.
Immature ivory was hardly worth carrying home, good only for carving into billiard balls and piano keys. The market was glutted with it.
But on the other hand, a prime tusk, over one hundred pounds in weight, seven foot long and twice the thickness of a fat woman's thigh, would fetch fifty shillings a pound avoirdupois.
An animal carrying such a tusk in each side of his face was worth four or five hundred pounds in good, gold sovereigns.
One by one Flynn discarded the possible areas in which he would hunt. This year there were no elephant in the M'bahora hills. There was good reason for this; thirty piles of great sun-bleached bones lay scattered along the ridge, marking the path that Flynn's rifles had followed two years before. The memory of gun-fire was too fresh and the herds shunned that place.
There were no elephant on the Tabora escarpment. A
blight had struck the groves of mapundu trees, and withered the fruit before it could ripen. Dearly the elephant loved mapundu berries and they had gone elsewhere to find them.
They had gone up to the Sonia Heights, to Kilombera, and to the Salito hills.
Salito was an easy day's march from the German boma at Mahenge. Flynn struck it from his mental list.
As each of the scouts finished his report, Flynn asked the question which would influence his final decision.
'What of Plough the Earth?'
And they said, 'We saw nothing. We heard nothing.'
The last scout came in two days after the others. He looked sheepish and more than a little guilty.
'Where the hell have you been?' Flynn demanded, and the gun-boy had his excuse ready.
'Knowing that the great Lord Fini would ask of certain matters, I turned aside in my journey to the village of Yetu, who is my uncle. My uncle is a fundi. No wild thing walks, no lion kills, no elephant breaks a branch from a tree but my uncle knows of it. Thus I went to ask him of these things
'Thy uncle is a famous fundi, he is also a famous breeder of daughters,' Flynn remarked drily. 'He breeds daughters the way the moon breeds stars.'
'Indeed, my uncle Yetu is a man of fame.' Hurriedly the scout went on to turn Flynn aside from this line of discussion. 'My uncle sends his greetings to the Lord Fini and bids me speak thus: 'This season there are many fine elephants on the Sonia Heights. They walk by twos and threes. With my own eyes I have seen twelve which show ivory as long as the shaft of a throwing spear, and I have seen signs of as many more.' My uncle bids me speak further: 'There is one among them of which the Lord Fini knows for he has asked of him many times. This one is a bull among great bulls. One who moves in such majesty that men have named him Plough the Earth.'
'You do not bring a story from the honey-bird to cool my anger against you?' Flynn demanded harshly. 'Did you dream
'of Plough the Earth while you were ploughing the bellies of your uncle's many daughters?' His eagerness was soured by scepticism. Too many times he had followed wild stories in his pursuit of the great bull. He leaned forward across the fire to watch the gun-bearer's eyes as he replied, 'It is true, lord.' Flynn watched him carefully but found no hint of guile in his face. Flynn grunted, rocked back on his hams, and lowered his gaze to the small flames of the camp-fire.
For his first ten years in Africa, Flynn had heard the legend of the elephant whose tusks were of such length that their points touched the ground and left a double furrow along his spoor. He had smiled at this story as he had at the story of the rhinoceros who fifty years before had killed an Arab slaver, and now wore around his horn a massive gold bangle studded with precious stones. They said the bangle had lodged there as he gored the Arab. There were a thousand other romantic tales come out of Africa; from Solomon's treasure to the legend of the elephants' graveyard, and Flynn believed none of them.
Then he saw a myth come alive. One evening, camped near the Zambezi in Portuguese territory, he had taken a bird-gun and walked along the bank hoping for a brace of sand-grouse. Two miles from the camp he had seen a flight of birds coming in to the water, flying fast as racing pigeons, whistling in on backswept wings, and he had ducked into a thick bank of reeds and watched them come.
As they banked steeply overhead, dropping towards the sand-banks of the river, Flynn jumped to his feet and fired left and right, folding the lead bird and the second, so they crumpled in mid-air and tumbled, leaving a pale flurry of feathers to mark their fall.
But Flynn never saw the birds hit the ground. For, while the double blast of the shotgun still echoed along the river, the reed-bed below where he stood swayed and crashed and burst open, then an elephant came Out into the open.
It was a bull elephant that stood fourteen feet high at the shoulder. An elephant so old that his ears were shredded to half their original size. The hide that covered his body hung in folds and deep wrinkles, baggy at the knees and the throat. The tuft of his tail long ago worn bald. The rheumy tears of Lyreat aLye staining his seared and dusty cheeks.
He came out of the reed-bed in a shambling, humpbacked run, and his head was tilted at an awkward,
