A Time to Die - Smith Wilbur - Страница 49

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A mile away, the rest of the herd was waiting in a gro yellow-stemmed fever trees. Many of the younger calves were suckling, and the matriarch pushed the orphan calf toward where one of the older calves, one almost due to be weaned, was showing only perfunctory interest in his mother's dugs. She shoved the orphan between the cow's front legs and instinctively the little animal rolled its trunk onto its forehead and reached up for the teat. The cow made no objection, accepting the role of foster mother with equanimity. The matriarch stood beside the pair, rumbling to them encouragingly, and when she led the herd on, the orphan calf had displaced the older calf between the cow's front legs.

It seemed that from then on the herd's contact with men bearing firearms became more frequent every season, especially when the bulls were with the breeding herd.

The mature bulls kept a loose liaison with the breeding herd.

They found the noisy and boisterous behavior of the young animals annoying and the competition for food demanding. No sooner would one of the bulls shake down a rain of ripe pods from the top branches of a tall thorn tree than a dozen youngsters would rush over to gobble them.

Or he would push over a msasa tree to get at the new leaf, leaning with his forehead against the trunk and snapping the three-foot diameter of hardwood with a report like a cannon shot, and immediately four or five greedy young cows would push themselves in front of him before he could sample the juicy pink leaves.

So the bulls would wander away from the herd, singly or in bachelor groups of three or four. Perhaps they also realized instinctively that the herd was likely to attract the hunters and they would be safer away from it. Sometimes they were only a few miles away, sometimes as far as thirty or forty, but they always seemed to be aware of the herd's location and would return when the cows were in season.

When the bulls were with the herd was the time there was most likely to be that sudden crash of gunfire, the squeal of wounded animals, and the headlong rush of huge panic-stricken bodies through the brush.

When Tukutela was a juvenile, under ten years of age, there had been six huge bulls associated with the herd, animals carrying thick shafts of ivory, but over the years he grew toward maturity, these were gradually whittled down. Each dry season one or more of them fell to the sound of rifle fire, and only the mediocre bulls, or those with worn or damaged ivory, remained.

By this time Tukutela had grown into an unusually large young bull and his tusks were beginning to develop, clean and white and sharp-pointed, already showing promise of what they would one day become. As he grew, so the matriarch, his dam, declined. Slowly the outline of her bones appeared through the folds and hangs of her wrinkled gray hide, so she became a gaunt and skeletal figure. Her sixth and last molar was already chipped and half worn away, she ate with difficulty, and the slow starvation age had begun. She relinquished her place at the head of the herd to a younger, more robust cow, and shambled along behind. On the steep places where the elephant road climbed the mountain passes Tukutela would wait for her at the crest, rumbling to bring her up over the difficult places, and he stood close to her in the night as he had as a calf.

It had been a dry season and the water holes were less than half full. The approaches to the water had been churned by the elephant herds and rhinoceros and buffklo to glutinous black mud, in some places deep as an elephant's belly, and it was here that the old matriarch stuck.

Lunging in an attempt to free herself, she fell over sideways and the mud sucked her down until only part of her head was clear.

She struggled for two days. Tukutela tried to help her, but even his enormous strength was of no avail. The mud held her fast and gave him no footing nor purchase. The old cow's struggles became weaker, her wild screams more feeble, until at last she was stiff and silent except for the hiss of her breathing.

It took two more days, and Tukutela stood beside her all that time. The herd had long since departed, but he remained. She gave no outward sign of passing from life to death other than the cessation of her harsh breathing, but Tukutela knew it instantly, and he lifted his trunk high and bugled out his grief in a cry that startled the wild fowl from the water hole in a cloud of noisy wings.

He went to the edge of the forest and plucked leafy boughs. He took them to the water hole and covered his dam's muddy carcass with them building for her a high green funeral pier. Then he left her and went into the veld.

He did not rejoin the herd for almost two years. By that time he was sexually mature and could no longer resist the scent of estrus the breeze brought down to him.

When he found the herd, it was gathered on the bank of the Kafue River, ten miles upstream from where it makes its confluence with the great Zambezi. Some of the herd members came out to meet him as he approached. They entwined their trunks with his and pushed their foreheads together in greeting, then allowed him to join the main body.

There were two cows in season, and one of them was an animal of similar age to Tukutela. She was prime, fat with good grazing and browsing the rains had raised. Her ivory was thin and very white, as straight and sharp as knitting needles, and her ears had not yet been torn or tattered by thorn and sharp twigs. She spread them now as she recognized Tukutela as her peer, and she came to twine her trunk with his.

They stood with their heads together, rumbling gently at each other, and then disentangled their trunks and began to caress each other lightly with the tips, moving down the length of each other's bodies until they stood head to tail.

The tips of the trunk are as sensitive and dextrous as the fingers of the human hand, and Tukutela reached down between her back legs and groped for her vaginal opening. She began to sway from side to side, rocking her whole body, an expression of extreme pleasure. As he manipulated her, so her estrus discharge flowed down freely, drenching his trunk, the aroma of it filling his head.

His penis emerged from its fleshy sheath, as long as a man is tall and as thick as one of his legs; the tip of it brushed the earth below his belly. Its length was variegated with blotches of pink and black, but the skin was smooth and shining and the head flared like the mouth of a trumpet. Elephants belong to the testiconda group, and his testicles were contained deep in the body cavity, so there was no external evidence of them.

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