to squeal for mercy.
'I'll show you.' She did not slacken her pace as she reached back and unstrapped her Gore-Tex ski jacket from the top of her pack. It was really cold now, the frost crackled underfoot, and her feet were numb, but she kept her station in the line. Quite suddenly she realized that she could see clearly each thick glossy tress of hair down the back of Sean's neck.
'Dawn. I thought it would never come.' As she thought it, Sean stopped at last. She pulled up beside him with the nerves in her legs jumping and trembling with fatigue.
'Sorry, Capo,' Sean spoke softly past her. 'I had to push a little. We had to get well clear of that bunch before light. How are you making out?'
'No problem,' Riccardo muttered, but in the gray dawn light, his face looked pale and drawn. He was suffering as much as she was, and she hoped she didn't look as bad. He went to find a place to sit and lowered himself stiffly.
Sean glanced at Claudia, still standing beside him. Neither of them spoke, but he had a faint, enigmatic smile on his lips.
'Don't ask me how I feel,' she thought. 'I'd rather drink Drana than tell you the truth.'
He inclined his head slightly, whether in condescension or respect, she wasn't sure. 'First day and the third are always the worst,' he said.
'I feel fine,' she said. 'I can go on quite happily.'
'Sure.' He grinned openly. 'But you'd better go and look after Papa rather.'
Sean brought mugs of tea to where she sat beside her father, wrapped in her lightweight down-filled sleeping bag against the dawn chill. Job had brewed it on a tiny smokeless fire that he extinguished immediately once the billy boiled. The tea was strong and sweet and scalding; she had never tasted anything more welcome. With it he handed her a stack of maize cakes and cold cuts of venison. She tried not to wolf them down.
'We'll move on in a few minutes,' he warned her. When he saw the dismay in her eyes, he explained.
'We never sleep next to a cooking fire; it can attract the uglies.' They went on for five miles. In the middle of the morning, on higher ground in a place secure and easily defended, Sean showed her how to scoop a hollow for her hip and use her pack as a pillow.
She fell asleep as though she had been sandbagged.
She could not believe it when he shook her awake only a minute later. 'It's four o'clock.' He handed her a mug and another stack of maize cakes. 'You've slept six hours straight. We are moving out in five minutes.'
Hastily she rolled her sleeping bag, then peered at herself in the metal hand mirror she had surreptitiously retrieved after Sean had thrown it out of her pack.
'Oh God,' she whispered. The camouflage cream had caked and striped with her sweat. 'I look like Al Jolson in drag.' She tidied her hair, dragging her comb through the tangles, and then tied a scarf around it.
With short breaks every two hours, they kept going all that night.
At first Claudia's legs felt as though they were in plaster casts, but soon she walked the stiffness out of them and kept her place in the line without lagging, though the pace Sean set was every bit as hard as the previous night.
In the dawn, they drank tea. Claudia had begun to depend on the brew. She had always been a coffee drinker, but now on the march she found herself fantasizing over her next scalding mug of tea.
'It's the only thing keeping me going,' she confided to her father, only half joking.
Riccardo nodded agreement. 'They say the Limeys conquered their empire on the stuff.'
Sean came across from where he had been in deep discussion with Matatu and Job. 'We are only a few hours' march from the reed beds where we saw Tukutela from the air.' He looked pointedly at Claudia. 'I'd like to try and get there before we sleep, but of course some of us are a little hushed...' He let it hang between them, a dare and an accusation.
'I need a little stroll to settle my breakfast,' she said amiably, but she wished her face was not coated with black cream. She hated ceding even the slightest advantage to him.
As Sean walked away, her father swirled the tea leaves in his mug and flicked them out.
'Don't fall for him, tesoro. He'd be too big a handful even for you.'
She stared at him, outraged and appalled. 'Fall for him? Are you out of your skull, Papa? I can't stand the sight of him.'
'That's what I mean,' he chuckled.
She jumped up and threw her pack onto her back with unnecessary strength, then told her father with disdain, 'I could cope with him and five others like him with my eyes closed and one hand tied behind my back, but I've got better taste than that.'
'Which is fortunate for you,' he murmured just low enough so she was uncertain what he had said.
A little before noon that day, Matatu led them into the papyrus beds that surrounded the green pool they had seen from the air. He led them directly to the great dished spoor printed in the mud, and they gathered round to inspect it.
'See!' Matatu told them. 'This is where Tukutela stood when he heard the indeki coming. Here and there he turned to look up in the sky and challenge us.' Matatu imitated the old bull, holding his head at the same angle, humping his back and cupping his hands at each side of his head. It was such a faithful impression that for a moment he seemed to become the old bull and they all laughed. Claudia forgot her fatigue and applauded.
'Then what did the old bull do?' Sean demanded. Matatu spun and pointed along the run of the spoor.
'He went away with all his speed, he went fast and very far.'
'Well,' Sean said, 'that puts us almost exactly forty-eight hours behind him and we have to sleep now. We'll be fifty-five hours behind him when we march again.'
Tukutela's dam had been the matriarch of a herd of over one hundred beasts. She had come into her last period of estrus in her fifty-second year, and over the days it lasted, she had been mounted and serviced by six of the herd bulls, all young animals, vigorous and at the height of their powers.
It was the ideal formula for the conception of an extraordinary calf, old cow and young bull. Although it was uncertain which seed had taken root in her, the old cow had carried the genes of great elephants, big in body and tusk, natural intelligence, and the urge to dominate. These same genes had made her the leader of her herd, and now she transferred them to the fetus she carried in her womb.
She carried him twenty-two months, and then in the year when the German askaris under General von Lettow-Vorbeck were ravaging eastern Africa, the year 1915, she left the herd. Accompanied only by another old female past calf bearing, her companion of forty years, she went deep into the fastnesses of the swamps that lie on the south bank of the Zambezi River and there, on an islet fringed with ivory-nut palms, surrounded by miles of papyrus beds, and with the white-headed fish eagles chanting overhead, she cleared an area of sandy earth for her couch. When her time came, she spread her back legs and squatted over the open area, squealing in the agony of her labor, her trunk rolled up on her chest.
Her eyes had no tear ducts to drain them, so the tears poured freely down her withered cheeks as though she wept, and the spasms racked her huge, gaunt frame. The other old cow stood close beside her like a midwife, caressing her with her trunk, stroking her back and rumbling with sympathy. She forced out the calf's head and then rested for a minute before the last violent effort expelled the purple-pink fetal sac and the calf fell to the earth, rupturing the umbilical cord. Tukutela began to struggle immediately, still trapped in the glistening mucus-coated membrane, and the old cow, her companion, stood over him and, with the prehensile tip of her trunk, delicately stripped it away.
Then with her trunk his dam gently and lovingly lifted him to his feet and placed him between her front legs, making the deep, purring rumble of elephant contentment. Still wet and smooth and shining pinkly from his birthing, covered in copious gingery hair, almost blind, Tukutela rolled his little trunk back onto his forehead and reached up instinctively to the twin breasts on his mother's chest.
While he tasted the rich creamy milk for the very first time, his dam picked up the fetal sac and afterbirth and stuffed them into her mouth, chewing and swallowing and, at the same time, using her trunk to cover the damp and bloodstained spot on the earth with sand.
The three of them, his mother, her companion, and Tukutela, remained on the island for almost two weeks while the calf mastered the use of his legs and trunk, the pigment of his skin darkened, and his eyes adjusted to the harsh African sunlight. Then, when she considered him strong enough, she took him to find the herd, pushing him ahead of her and lifting him over the steep and difficult places.
The din of a hundred elephants feeding carried to them from afar, the crack and crash of breaking branches and the pig like squeals of the calves at play. Tukutela's dam trumpeted her return, and the herd came rushing up to greet her. Then, discovering the new calf, they crowded around to touch him with their trunks, puffing his scent into their mouths so they would recognize it always thereafter.
Tukutela cowered between his mother's front legs, overwhelmed by the huge bodies that surrounded him, making little baby noises of terror, but his mother draped her trunk over
