leaned against the trunk and closed his eyes. The pain in his head had come upon him as suddenly as the blow of an ax and it blinded him, filling his vision with bursting stars of light. But through the pain he heard the old bull elephant squeal, and the sound filled him with remorse and bitter despair.
He let the Rigby slip from his hands and fall into the leafy trash at his feet. He reached out his empty hands and staggered blindly to meet the elephant, wanting in some desperate way to placate and make recompense to the great beast, calling to it. 'I mean you no harm, we are brothers.' Ahead of him the bush crackled and burst open and Tukutela bore down on him like a collapsing cliff of granite.
Sean raced back to where he had left Riccardo, ducking under branches and bounding over obstacles in his path, hearing the terrifying rush of the bull and the voice of the man just ahead of him.
'Here!' he screamed. 'Here, Tukutela! Come! Come this way!'
it was an effort to pull the elephant off Riccardo and onto himself, but he knew it would be to no avail. Tukutela had fixed on his victim, and nothing would deter him. He would carry his charge through to the death.
The center of Riccardo's vision cleared, and he looked through an aperture in his head that was surrounded by shooting white lights and Catherine wheels of spinning fire. He saw Tukutela's vast gray head burst out of the green forest wall above him and the long, stained tusks came over him like the cross ties of a roof about to fall.
In that moment, the elephant came to embody all the thousands of animals and birds that Riccardo had slaughtered in his lifetime as a hunter. He had a confused notion that the tusks and long trunk poised above him were the symbols of some semi-religious benediction that would absolve him and redeem all the blood he destroyed, had and spilled and all the life he had He reached both hands up to them, joyfully thankfully, and he remembered a phrase from his early religious instruction.
'Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned,' he cried.
Sean saw the bull's head rear out of the thicket ahead of him. It was facing almost directly away from him, the ears cocked and rolled along the top edge. He heard Riccardo's voice though he could not understand the words, and he realized that he must be almost directly beneath the bull's out thrust tusks and reaching trunk.
in a single step Sean plunged from his headlong run to a dead stop and threw up the.577 Express rifle. It was the most difficult angle for the brain shot, with the elephant angled away from him and the bulk of its shoulder covering the spinal column.
The target was no bigger than a ripe apple, and there was no casket of indication of where exacttly in the huge bony skull it lay buried. He had to trust his experience and his instinct. For a moment it seemed as he looked over the open sights of the rifle that he could see into the skull, where the brain seemed to glow like a firefly in the bony depths.
Without conscious effort his trigger finger tightened as the pip of the foresight covered that glowing spot. The bullet bored through the sponge of bone as though it were air. It cleaved the old bull's brain, and he felt nothing. His passage from full enra to death was a fleeting instant as his legs collapsed and folded under him. He dropped on his chest with an impact that jarred the earth and shook loose the dead leaves from the branches above him. A cloud of pale dust swirled around his massive carcass, and his head dropped forward.
His right tusk drove into Riccardo Monterro's body, entering his belly a hand's breadth below the sternum of his rib cage, passing through him at the level of his kidneys, and coming out through his spine just at the point where it merged with his pelvis.
The shaft of ivory Riccardo had coveted and risked both fortune and life to obtain now pinned him to the earth, skewered him as cleanly as a whaler's harpoon. He looked down at the tusk in surprise. There was no pain, no sensation in his lower body, which was twisted up under the bull's coiled trunk, no pain even in his head.
For a moment his vision was clear and bright as though every thing he looked at were lit by brilliant floodlights. Then it began to fade and darkness closed in upon him. Just before the darkness engulfed him completely, he saw Sean Courtney's face floating before him and heard his voice fading as though he were sinking away into an abyss.
'Capo, Capo,' it echoed in his ears, and Riccardo Monterro made a huge effort and said, 'She loves you. Look after my little girl.' Then the darkness swallowed him and he saw and heard nothing more, ever again.
Sean's first impulse was to free Riccardo Monterro's body. He tugged at the tusk that had impaled him, but it was so thick he could not get a fair grip on it. Riccardo's blood was oozing from the terrible wound, and it coated Sean's hands so that he left sticky red prints on the ivory as he strained at it.
Then he realized the futility of his efforts and stepped back. The full weight of Tukutela's huge head and body was resting on those tusks. After piercing Riccardo's torso the ivory point had gone on to bury itself deep in the soft sandy earth. It would take half a day's work to free the body.
In death the man and the beast were locked together, and suddenly
Sean realized how appropriate that was. He would leave them like that.
First Matatu and then Pumula appeared from out of the forest and stood beside Sean, staring in awe at the grim spectacle.
'Go!' Sean ordered. 'Wait for me at the canoe.'
'The ivory?' Pumula asked diffidently.
'Go!' Sean repeated, and at the tone of his voice they crept quietly away.
Riccardo's eyes were wide open. Sean closed them with a gentle stroke of his thumb, then unknotted the cotton scarf from around his neck and bound up his jaw to prevent it sagging into an expression of idiocy. Even in death Riccardo Monterro was still a handsome man. Sean leaned against the elephant's head and studied Riccardo's face.
'it happened at just the right time, Capo. Before the disease turned you into a vegetable, while you still had most of your zest and vigor, and it was a fitting end for a man like you. I'm glad you didn't die between soiled sheets. I only pray I will be as fortunate.'
He laid his hand on one of the tusks and stroked it. It had the texture of jade beneath his fingertips. 'We'll leave them for you, Capo,' he said. 'These tusks will be your headstone. God knows, you paid for them in full.'
He straightened up and followed Riccardo's tracks back into the forest until he found the Rigby lying in the dead leaves. He brought it back and placed it in the crook of Riccardo's right armA warrior should be buried with his weapons,' he murmured.
But there was still something missing. He could not go and leave Riccardo like this. He could not leave him lying exposed to an uncaring sky. He must cover him decently.
Then he remembered the legend of this elephant and how he disposed of the dead. He drew the heavy knife from the sheath on his belt and turned to the nearest green bush. He slashed off a leafy branch and covered Riccardo's face with it.
'Yes,' he murmured. 'That's right, that's proper.'
Working swiftly, he hacked down the branches and covered Riccardo's corpse and the head of the old bull under a mound of green leaves. At last he stood back and picked up the.577. He tucked it under his arm and was ready to leave. 'No regrets, Capo,' he said. 'For you, it was a good life right up to the very end. Go in peace, old friend.'
He turned away and went down to where the canoe was moored.
The reeds scraped softly along the hull of the canoe as Pumula poled it along. None of them spoke.
Sean sat amidships, hunched forward with his chin in the cup of one hand. He felt numbed, emptied of all emotion except sadness.
it was like coming back from a raid in the days of the bush war with every man silent and sad.
He looked at his right hand in his lap and saw the little half moons of dark red under his finger mails. 'Capo's blood,' he thought, and trailed his hand over the side of the canoe, letting the warm Swamp waters wash away the stain.
He let the hunt replay itself through his mind as though it were a silent recording. He saw it all again vividly, from their first sighting of the old bull to the moment he rushed forward to find Riccardo Monterro impaled beneath the huge gray head.
Then for the first time, he heard sound. Riccardo's voice echoed in his head, faint and breathless, fading swiftly.
'She loves you,' he had said, and the rest trailed away unintelligibly. 'She loves you.' The meaningless words of a dying man, the Wanderings of a diseased brain- Riccardo could have been looking back on any one of the hundreds of women who had filled his LIFE.
Sean lifted his hand out of the water. It was clean, the blood washed away.
'She loves you.' He could have been trying to tell Sean of one particular woman.
Sean looked up from his wet hand and stared ahead. Her memory had been with him these last few days, always there in the recesses of his conscience Yet coming to the fore at unexpected moments. Often while thinking of the great elephant, he had suddenly smiled at something she had said. This morning, during the final stages of the hunt, he had reached outboard from the canoe and picked the bloom of a water lily. He had held it to his face and smelled the perfume, felt the silky touch of the petals on his lip, and thought of Claudia Monterro.
