‘I won’t be trampled to death in the nude,’ murmured Jenny. ‘It’s undignified.’
In the pitch-dark and in the terror of the moment Jenny seemed to have no clothes anywhere. She pulled a sheet off her camp-bed and grabbed her safari boots and struggled out of the tent and ran.
There were confused shouts and running men. The enormous, invisible bedlam of the elephants came on at her.
Trees were no defence, nor gullies nor rocks nor foxholes: only silence, invisibility, and distance. The others would be scattering quickly and quietly. The elephants would thunder on.
Jenny remembered the lie of the land, in general but not in detail. There were little thorn-bushes and rocks and holes she had forgotten. She tripped and fell. She got up and stumbled on.
Jenny thought her white sheet might be visible to the elephants. She screwed it up into a ball and ran on, naked except for her boots, through the hot darkness. Her ankle hurt.
She ran not directly away from the herd, but at right-angles to its path.
Jenny fell again, heavily, hurting her breast and thigh on stones.
‘I think that’s enough,’ she murmured crossly.
She huddled against a little outcrop and stared into the black pandemonium of the camp.
A bull trumpeted, an enormous scream of rage. There were metallic crashes and the crunch of broken glass. The elephant trumpeted again and it was clear from the noise that he was destroying a Land-Rover. There were other thuds and crashes and the rending of canvas caught on a tusk.
A tulip of brilliant gold flared briefly. Immediately she heard the crash of the big .475: and again: and both barrels again.
There was a scream, and a great body thudded, and there was the scream of a man.
The heavy rifle flashed and cracked, flashed and cracked. It was very near the herd.
Another man screamed and crunched.
Jenny felt numb with amazement and with fright. These great vengeful animals berserk in the darkness were too big to cope with: appallingly big and heavy, irresistible, too big for a European to imagine, reducing man and his guns and machines to puny helplessness.
The rifle crashed into the crashing herd.
An engine fired and roared. Lights blazed. For a few seconds the headlights of a Land-Rover illuminated a scene out of primeval nightmare. The herd seemed enormous. A bull with big tusks was kneeling, hit. A younger bull was immediately in front of the Land-Rover. The Land-Rover began to reverse, revving violently. Suddenly the elephant was almost on top of it. Its head went down and it flipped the Land-Rover on to its side. It knelt on the Land-Rover and began to crush and trample. The lights shattered. In the blacker blackness the screams of a man cut through the screaming of the elephants and the crashing of huge feet and bodies through the shambles of the camp.
After a long time, an endless time of fright and discomfort, Jenny thought the elephants were quieter. They stopped trumpeting. They were moving on, away from the dry lugga into the empty bush.
How far would they go? Would dawn discover them only fifty yards away, watchful, suspicious, angry? Seeing white and black faces, turning, charging again, crashing, trampling?
Jenny yearned to call to Sandro and to Colly to find out if they were alive. She longed to run to the smashed camp and call their names and join them. She ached to see and touch Dave. But she knew she must not call out or move, but wait quietly on this stony and prickly ground until dawn, and hope that there were no scorpions or soldier-ants or saw-scaled vipers, and pray that the elephants were far away when the light came.
For a long time she was too stunned to think: but as dawn approached a question began to bang at her mind: ‘Why?’
Dawn came behind her, a rapid equatorial pallor which etched to fingers of the acacia trees black against the lightening sky.
There was no camp. All the tents were shredded and flattened. The piles of cases, the food and water and bedding and supplies, were strewn, shattered, over the parched ground. Two Land-Rovers were twisted and trampled wrecks, and two trailers. The big trees round the camp, the grove of tall thorn-trees in which they had pitched the tents, were all uprooted and lying flat. One lay across a tent and one across a bundle of clothes which might be the body of a man. Two elephants lay dead, one on a tent and one by the fragments of a trailer at the edge of the camp-site.
There were no live men to be seen.
The herd of elephants was not far away: not far enough. Their great rumps, bright brick-red from red mud and dust, arched as big as houses in a clump of scrub two hundred yards away.
There’s a bit of cover, thought Jenny.
Jenny had lain all night against the grass and gravel of her outcrop swaddled in the sheet from her bed. Now, keeping low and careful not to wave it, she took it off and folded it and wrapped it round her body like a sarong. It was very white but not much whiter than her body. It was a little protection against thorns and insects. Her long bare legs ended ridiculously in safari boots, flapping and unlaced. She tied the laces and felt more able to take action.
She started with great care towards the carnage which had been a jolly and comfortable camp. Sometimes she could walk, bent double, in the cover of scrub or of folds in the ground. Some of the way she crawled. It was not far. She had not run far in the screaming darkness. Jenny was a little aghast to see how close she had been to the fury of the huge animals. It had seemed a long and painful journey in the dark.
‘Jenny!’
It was a soft call. It was Dave. He was wearing a pair of khaki pants and boots. His top was bare. A pattern of broad, silvery scars ran across his ribs and under his arm. He was tousled and unshaven. His eyes were tired. He was unhurt. He still held the big double-barrelled rifle. He looked at Jenny with such joy and relief that, in the midst of horror, she stumbled with happiness.
‘Are you all right?’ asked Dave.
‘Yes. Are you all right, Dave?’
‘Yes. What a long night.’
‘Where are the others?’
‘The dead ones are about. The lives ones not far. I came by your tent last night but you’d gone.’
‘You shouldn’t have done that.’
They were now in the cover of the dead elephant, the one by the fragments of the trailer.
‘They’re still pretty close,’ murmured Dave. ‘No yelling.’
Dave was now altogether a scarred but formidable man of action. Jenny felt safe with him. She thought if she held his hand she would feel still safer, but it was not the moment.
The bundle of clothes under the big uprooted tree was a man. It was Tobias, the African driver, a happy personality with big teeth and a big smile, who in life had looked a little like Louis Armstrong and in death, trampled and smashed, unspeakable.
‘Oh God,’ said Dave. ‘I’ve known him for a long time. Who else?’ He looked at the herd, still close, too close. ‘Will they never move?’
The others came, cautiously, crawling. Sandro, his chin blue and his eyes amazingly blue, wore a towel round his waist. Colly had pyjama pants and slippers. Solomon the cook had a smashed thigh but he was alive. The tracker Alfred was in the overturned Land-Rover, which he had started, in which he had tried to escape. He was smashed among bent metal and powdered glass, sickeningly mixed up with pieces of car.
A dozen vultures wheeled patiently in the pale sky and soon the hyenas and the wild dogs would come.
Flies in their millions crusted the bodies of Tobias and Alfred, and settled like black seething pancakes on the wounds in the heads of the dead elephants.
‘Where’s Kamau?’
There was no sign of Kamau, who had been on guard.
‘He ran a little farther than the rest of us, I guess,’ said Colly.
‘No,’ said Dave. ‘Kamau is a brave man. When Dick and I met that leopard Kamau was rather a help. He killed it, actually. I don’t know where he is, but I don’t think he ran away.’
‘He gave no alarm,’ said Sandro.
‘No. That’s what puzzles me. He must have heard them coming out of the lugga. Look at the trees they knocked over. I don’t understand it. Where is he?’
Jenny crept about the camp and found some clothes.
Dave said they could do nothing about the bodies, or the dead elephant, or the Land-Rover, or breakfast, until the herd moved farther away.
‘Were they married?’
‘Tobias and Alfred? Yes, both.’
‘Kamau?’
‘Yes.’
‘Where is Kamau?’
‘Where? Why? What do I tell his wife?’
They waited a little away from the camp, away from dead men and animals, in the shade of the trees by the lugga. They were helpless until the herd moved on for shade or food or water. In the camp-site the flies were terrible. It was very hot. The sun climbed to the vertical. There was no wind. The burning sky was laced with wheeling vultures. Glossy starlings, with gaudy plumage and bright yellow eyes, hopped cheerfully among the branches of the uprooted trees. A go-away bird called derisively.
Sandro said: ‘Why did it happen, Dave?’
‘I don’t know. There’s an elephant-track, but no new droppings. And the fires . . .’
‘What happened to the fires?’
‘My God, what did happen to the fires?’
‘I think they were out when the herd hit us,’ said Colly.
‘Yes. Why? Kamau . . .’
Sandro went delicately to the nearer fire, the cooking fire in a shallow pit. He turned over the lumps of charred thorn-wood at the edge of the pit. He crawled back to the huddled group by the lugga and shrugged.
‘It went out.’
‘But,’ said Dave, ‘Kamau knew enough to . . . but he didn’t. No alarm, no wood on the fire – he can’t have been here.’
‘Then where?’
‘For Christ’s sake, where?’
‘We look for Kamau,’ said Sandro.
‘Right, but keep an eye on those red creatures.’
They looked, very cautiously, over an acre of rough bush. They went a hundred yards up and down the soft dry bed of the lugga and peered into the thick and hostile vegetation on its banks. They called Kamau’s name softly. All the time Colly watched the herd and held the double-barrelled -475. They found nothing. There was nothing to find. Kamau was nowhere. If he had left tracks the great grey feet of the herd had obliterated them.
They waited. Flies, sun, wheeling vultures, the beginning of stench. Solomon groaned and sweated. Dave gave him a second injection of morphine from the first-aid box, which was mercifully in the undamaged Land-Rover.
‘Is it undamaged?’ asked Jenny.
‘As soon as those animals get a bit farther away we’ll see.’
‘I don’t mind walking.’
‘I do,’ said Colly. ‘I mind terribly.’
They had enough water, warm from a jerrican strapped to the front of the Land-Rover. They had biscuits and fruit. Every movement had to be made carefully and quietly. All the time they watched the towering red-daubed rumps of the elephants two hundred yards away in the bush.
‘What do we do about Tobias and Alfred?’ asked Colly.
‘We ought to take them back,’ said Dave, ‘for their families.’
‘We can’t.’
‘No, we can’t. The Turkana leave their dead out for the hyena.’
‘We can’t do that,’ said Jenny.
‘No. We’ll bury them here.’
‘But not till those beasts get on.’
‘Not till then.’
At last they began to go on, leisurely, not all at once but in phases. A big bull went slowly away with two young askaris, then a dozen cows with a few calves. It was mid-afternoon before Dave said: ‘Let’s move.’
‘This,’ said Jenny, ‘is the oddest day I’ve ever spent.’
It was almost impossible to extricate Alfred from the mashed and tangled Land-Rover. Dave and Sandro did it. They were masked with flies as they hacked and untwisted and jacked apart the bent steel of steering wheel and door and seats. Colly and Joseph, the second tracker, dug a grave in the soft sand under the bank of the lugga. Sandro and Dave lifted the uprooted tree. Joseph pulled Tobias’s body clear. Flies in a shrieking cloud rose from Tobias’s smashed body and came down again instantly like a supurating blanket.
The heat was tremendous and there was no wind.
They heaped sand on top of the poor broken bodies.
‘What about the elephant?’
‘Leave them. I’ll report them. Let’s go.’
Solomon was half-conscious. He would have been in great pain without the drug. They lifted him into the back of the Land-Rover. They collected a few clothes and stores (still moving softly) but most were irretrievably scattered and ruined. It was a tight fit for the rest of them in the Land-Rover. They crammed in, stickily jammed together. The seats were very hot. Jenny squatted in the back with Solomon. They shut the doors softly.
There were still a few elephants, still not far.
‘They’ll hear the engine.’
‘We’ll be off.’
‘Speriamo.’
Dave trod on the starter. It whirred. The engine was hot, overchoked without choke. The elephants heard. Great heads turned, great ears swung out like sails.
Dave kept one foot on the starter, the other stamping with fury on the accelerator.
‘Come on, come on.’
An elephant turned. It raised its head and straightened its trunk and trumpeted.
Dave said: ‘When I say go get out and scatter. Run like hell, everybody a different way, no two together.’
‘What about Solomon?’ said Jenny from the back.
‘We’ll carry Solomon.’
‘We can’t.’
‘We can’t not.’
Jenny thought it was odd, and rather magnificent, to have a quiet and reasoned conversation when tons of angry elephant were about to charge them.
The starter-motor whirred deafeningly and the elephants were on the move, slowly at first, accelerating, coming at them.
Dave opened his mouth to say: ‘Let’s get out of this,’ when the engine fired. He crunched into gear and they lurched forward over the bumpy ground. The branches of a wait-a-bit thorn scraped down the side of the Land-Rover and lashed in through the window. Colly’s arm was suddenly covered in blood from a thousand deep scratches. Solomon screamed with pain as the Land-Rover bounced.
The elephants followed but the Land-Rover was now in third gear and getting away from them.
‘Daren’t go too fast,’ muttered Dave.
‘No, chum, don’t,’ said Colly. ‘If you leave the differential or something on a tree-stump . . .’
‘What about that squishy mud,’ said Jenny chattily from behind, ‘where we got stuck on the way?’
‘Black cotton,’ said Dave. ‘Yes. That’s a thought. Maybe it’s dried up. Maybe we’ll have shaken them off by then.’
Colly twisted in the seat. He hardly noticed the sharp pain of his lacerated arm. He smiled at Jenny but she was too busy with Solomon to notice. He said: ‘I can’t see them, Dave, but we’re making a lot of dust.’
‘Go steady,’ said Sandro to Dave.
Sandro held the .475 elephant rifle, Colly a little 6-5. The other rifles had been smashed in the night by the pounding feet of the elephants. There were two twelve-bore shotguns, as much use to them as pea-shooters.
They came immediately to a broad lugga with a few inches of water over sand and gravel. Far upstream a dozen camels stood in the shallow water, their reflections as sharp as themselves. A crocodile slipped off a mud-flat and immersed itself lazily except for eyes and nostrils.
‘No trouble here coming. Firm bottom. This is where we crossed.’
Dave changed down into the lower range of gears and they ploughed through the shallow water. The wheels bit and slithered. They skidded sideways, into deeper water. All four wheels spun, digging in.
‘Out quick. Stones, sacks, clothes, anything.’
‘No sign of the elephant.’
‘The noise. They may come. Not the cows, but those young bulls.’
They came. They came at a leisurely, easy-striding trot, very fast. Four of them. They ignored trees, brushing them out of their path like a waiter going through a bead curtain. The Land-Rover had looped to avoid a steep bank: the elephants came straight, their awesome strength lifting them up and over the twenty-foot obstacle.
Sandro stood on the bank with the big rifle. He dropped to one knee. Two rounds were in the twin breeches; he held two others in his knuckles ready to slam into the breech as soon as he had fired.
Dave revved gently and the wheels bit. The Land-Rover ploughed out of the water, skidding and rocking on the shingly river-bed. Sandro ran and jumped and clung to the side of the Land-Rover. It rocked violently as they climbed the steep bank and thrust between bushes. Thorn-branches flayed Sandro’s arms and back and he dropped the rifle. Dave gunned the engine and changed up and soon they were on a better track among acacias and they left the elephant behind.
‘What a short safari,’ said Jenny.
‘I’m sorry,’ said Dave. ‘I’m really very sorry.’
‘Nobody blames you, chum,’ said Colly.
‘Elephants have come right through a camp before. Stepped over everything. You sit tight and they go away. What in God’s name turned them kali?’
‘Aggressive,’ explained Sandro. ‘Angry and maybe frightened.’
‘What happened to the fires? What happened to Kamau?’
Forty miles to the east, a crocodile in the Uaso Nyiro heard a splash. It slid off its sandbank and sliced across the scummy water and nuzzled the body of Kamau. It dragged the body below the surface. It would hold it there until it had decomposed and become palatable to the crocodile. There was nothing to be seen of Kamau or the crocodile or, on the scrubby banks, the people who had brought the body there.
They were already loping east towards the Somali frontier. They were black, wiry men with straight hair and high-bridged noses. They had eaten and drunk nothing for twenty hours, but they chewed khat which kept them awake and strong. In the pouch of the leader Osman Bakari was the money, the very much money, they had been given by the Feringhi, the stranger who was so clever at controlling elephant. They would not drink away the money, because after their savage fashion they were pious Moslems.
They came out of sandy scrub on to lava rock. The sun began to go down. They chewed khat and grunted cheerfully to each other and trotted on.
There was no doctor for Solomon in Wamba. The doctor at Isiolo was away up country. They made it to Meru, late at night, staggering with exhaustion. Solomon was delirious. He raved in Kikuyu and Swahili and fragments of English. None of them could eat. Jenny thought she wanted at least a bottle of whisky but she fell deeply asleep after the first sip of her first glass.
‘Wing?’
‘I think.’
‘How?’
‘I don’t know.’
They licked their wounds. Sandro’s back and arms and Colly’s arm were bathed in stinging antiseptic and taped criss-cross over dressings. Solomon’s thigh had been set; he lay, doped, in a cool bed. Dave was making a preliminary report at the police-post of the deaths of Tobias and Alfred, and the disappearance of Kamau, and the shooting of two elephant outside an area where elephant could be shot. Sandro, Colly, and Jenny sat among jacaranda trees.
‘Those fires,’ said Colly. ‘I forgot to ask you. They just went out? No wood? Kamau didn’t feed them?’
‘They were put out,’ said Sandro. ‘That was clear. I said nothing yesterday to Dave because—’
‘Because we’re going to go through the whole bloody thing again,’ sighed Jenny, ‘and get bitten by trained mambas.’
‘Forse. This Wing. His feather is long and his claw is sharp. He employs a man to kill a man who is shooting a woodpecker at Montebianco. He employs a man to remove our guard and put out our fires and send a herd of kali elephant to kill us.’
‘In other words,’ said Colly, ‘he has money and a set-up.’
‘Yes. That night. Think. Possibly it was all a natural disaster. This theory requires that Kamau went mad, put the fires off, ran away into the bush. It requires that he annoyed the elephants or that we somehow annoyed them with our camp. It is possible.’
‘No, fatty,’ said Jenny. ‘Not even as a theory. Not after Wing’s note. Not after my frog tried to warn us.’
‘No, I don’t believe. Okay, think more. Maybe Kamau worked for Wing.’
‘I don’t think so,’ said Jenny slowly. ‘Of course it could be, and that disappearance stinks a bit . . . anyway, it doesn’t help us. Kamau might be a link to Wing, but where is Kamau?’
‘I think dead.’
‘Yes, I’m afraid so.’
‘He would not disappear into the bush alone, a Kikuyu in Samburu country, a man used to beds and electric lights.’
‘He had friends. There were others.’
‘I think there were others, but I think not his friends. I think people followed us, moving very fast and on foot. It is quite possible. The dust would shout to them where we were. Vehicles do not drive more than maybe fifteen kilometres an hour in that country. I think those people came into our camp and removed Kamau and put out the fires.’
‘Africans, then.’
‘Oh yes.’
‘There we all were. Why didn’t they kill us? Why go such a fancy way about it?’
‘I don’t know. Wing is not consistent.’
‘How,’ said Colly, ‘did they sick those juggernauts on to us?’
‘I think a man by some art deliberately angered the elephant and pointed them towards our beds.’
‘Neatest trick of the week,’ said Jenny. ‘Could that be an African?’
‘I think no. I think an animal psychologist, an expert. It was very clever, and pericoloso for him also.’
‘They keep tabs on all the white men in the N.F.D.,’ said Colly.
‘They try. A man could fly in. He could come in from Ethiopia or the Sudan or Somalia or Uganda, from the north or the east or the west.’
‘Absolutely all we know, then,’ said Jenny, ‘is that Wing exists, and he hires people, and he has a nasty sense of humour. He’s never left a trace of a clue.’
‘No.’
‘So it’s blissful to think there isn’t a thing we can do to set about finding him.’
‘All the same,’ said Colly wearily, ‘from that look on Sandra’s face, we’re gonna start searching.’
‘No need,’ said Sandro. ‘He will look for us. He will find us again.’
‘How nice,’ said Jenny.
‘But this time we will be more clever.’
The plump man with the shiny balding head checked his illegal gas-gun. He had used all the darts with the poison which hurt and maddened but did not injure. He wiped the gun all over carefully with a rag, and put it back in its case in the Toyota truck. He walked over to his aircraft and gave a little money to the silent Turkana who was guarding it. His face was benign. He checked the aircraft meticulously. He climbed aboard. He made further checks. The engine fired at once. He took off and flew east towards Mogadishu.