30

While initially buoyed by the riverside consignment, the next five days gradually punctured Derek’s spirit. Conditions bordered on the unbearable. The searing heat and increasingly powdery river sand made walking extremely difficult. The only available cloud cover was created by sporadic swarms of flying insects, mostly mosquitoes, hovering at around mouth height. In some places, Derek had to breathe through his handkerchief to guard his throat from Africa’s most prolific murderer. To make matters worse, he was feeling decidedly weak and out of kilter and was beginning to wonder if he had contracted something worthy of concern. His ailments did not appear severe enough to suggest malaria, but his chest was tight and although he wasn’t quite hallucinating, some of his thoughts had become noticeably disjointed and irrational. Perhaps it was the sustained exposure to the heat, he thought. He found that he would coast between moments of ambivalence and periods in which he was gripped by a powerful paranoia, suddenly concerned that there were troops of poachers and ranks of German soldiers hiding among the trees on the riverbank. As if symptomatic of his misfiring mind, his body was also beginning to deteriorate. His ankles and knees ached from the mileage and his feet were bruised and blistered. Small pockets of blood pushed against two of his toenails. Still, the worst of it was the sun. The unyielding devil orb that brought on headaches so compelling that he was forced to walk for periods with his eyes shut. In stark contrast, Shawu was prospering, even revelling, in the conditions. Her limp had all but vanished and the sun was drying up and healing her wounds – the scabs from the lions darkening and crumbling away to nothing. To his considerable relief, her health no longer seemed in jeopardy.

As the late afternoon’s edges were finally blunted, Shawu veered off towards a small alcove against the riverbank. Grateful that the day’s journey was over, Derek dropped his bag and collapsed onto his back. Without looking, he reached over and fumbled for one of the water canisters from his bag. He took three large gulps before glancing up at the riverbank. As loathsome as it was, he knew that he would soon have to find somewhere to hang his hammock, as he was easy pickings for any number of night predators patrolling the river bed. But just not right now. He first needed a few minutes to relax. A chance to catch his breath, to give his pounding feet a break.

He watched as Shawu used her great bullet-pierced ears to fan herself. For the first time since he had known her, she seemed somehow lighter, more at ease with herself and her surroundings. Perhaps it was down to her improving health, he thought. Or, more likely, because she sensed they were closing in on her family and there was finally real cause for hope.

‘We’re not far now. Are we, Shawu?’ he called out.

She turned to look at him. In his mild delirium, he half-expected her to answer.

‘I can’t wait for us to find them,’ he continued, and then laughed. ‘It’s going to be one hell of a reunion.’

Reacting to the elevated pitch in his voice, something lively and propitious skipped across her eyes. Fanning herself more forcibly now, she suddenly shifted her weight onto her right side.

And now? Derek wondered.

Still listing, like a ship in a slow death roll, she raised her left front leg. The vast grey hull of her torso then swayed across and she lifted her right front leg. Then her back legs were brought into play, each lifting in turn. Back left. Back right. Front left. Front right. Repeat.

‘What the hell are you doing, Shawu?’ he shouted. Perhaps he was more ill than he thought. Was this a delusion? How could he tell? Mad people didn’t know they were mad, did they? Widening his stare, he watched as she continued the patterned movement for another minute, before drawing to a halt and leaning against the bank.

Sinking his head back into the sand, Derek closed his eyes and tried to make sense of what he had either just witnessed or had conjured up in his ailing mind. His last exhausted thought, before his weariness consumed him, seemed like lunacy.

He heard and then felt himself laugh, his cackles echoing across the river bed. Either he was considerably worse off than he thought, or Shawu – a member of an ancient elephant tribe – an animal capable of pulverising almost any living thing into oblivion, had just danced a jig for him.

Daybreak.

Derek tried to open his eyes beyond a narrow crack, but couldn’t at first. His eyelids, he was convinced, had been stitched together. As his mind peeled through layers of information, he began to get his bearings. The war was over, thank God for that. He was in Africa. In the bush. Following Shawu. Protecting her. But where the hell was he lying? He again tried to open his eyes and this time managed a slightly more expansive view of the world. His enemy, the sun, had only just breached the horizon and the familiar songs of river birds chorused as one. But why wasn’t he in his hammock? Had one of the ropes failed during the night? Had he fallen and hit his head? Was that why he felt so weary? As he moved his hands up from his sides, he felt the dry river sand drag along his knuckles. And that triggered his memory.

All at once, he was wide awake. He bolted upright and quickly scanned the area around him, realising that he had slept the entire night completely exposed in the river bed. He glanced down at his body, suddenly expecting to find one of his limbs missing, but was relieved to discover his appendages where he had left them. He had been extraordinarily fortunate. Any number of predators could have dragged him away to a violent and gruesome death. Although still vulnerable in the hammock, he always positioned himself as high up between two trees as possible, limiting his risk to only a desperate lion or a hungry leopard, perhaps, willing to scale the tree to get to him. And, even then, he gambled that the movement on the branches would rouse him before the animal could reach him. At which point he could use his rifle to defend himself. He checked the sand around him for tracks and was at once taken aback by what he discovered. There were some definite markings less than ten yards away from him, but they were not the prints of a predator. He felt a knot of emotion coil and expand in his throat. Realising how exposed he was, the great elephant had kept watch over him during the night. And for a few hours at least, the tables had been turned.

Shawu, the dancing elephant, had been his protector.