A Time to Die - Smith Wilbur - Страница 50

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When both of them were fully aroused, Tukutela nudged her gently down the bank and into the river. The green waters closed over them, intensifying their pleasure in each other, supporting their great bodies, buoying them up so they were light and nimble.

They submerged until only their trunks were above the surface, sporting together, bitaking out again like blowing whales, and the water poured off them in sheets, cleansing their gray hides of dust and dirt, darkening them to the color of coal.

Tukutela reared over her and placed his forelegs on each side of her back. In the water, she supported him easily. Her vagina was placed far forward between her back legs, and he needed all of his length to reach it. His penis took on a life of its own, pulsing and jerking and twisting as it flared upward to conform to the angle of her opening. Only the first third of its length was able to bury itself in her. His whole body shuddered and convulsed and both creatures trumpeted together and thrashed the waters to white foam.

He stayed with the herd three days, and then the female's estrus ended and Tukutela became restless. He had inherited his dam's instinct for survival, and he sensed danger with the herd. On the third day, he ghosted away into the gray thorn scrub. He went alone, with no other bull for company.

Each season when he returned to the herd he was stronger, his tusks longer and thicker, the vegetable juices darkening them to the color of alabaster. On occasion there were other bulls competing to service the females, and he had to fight for his right.

At first he was driven off by older, more experienced males, but each season his tusks and his cunning grew, until none of the other herd bulls stood up against him and he had his pick of the cows.

However, he never stayed more than a few days with the herd, and always he departed alone and sought out the places his dam had showed to him, the swamps inaccessible to man, the thickest forests, the tallest beds of elephant grass. It was as though he realized the danger those tusks would bring upon him.

In his thirty-fifth year he was a huge animal, weighing seven tons and standing over twelve feet at the shoulder. His tusks, though not anywhere as heavy as they would one day be, were perfectly symmetrical, long, and pointed.

For days after leaving the herd that season he had been unaccountably nervous. He moved restlessly, testing the air often, raising his trunk high and then puffing it into his mouth. Once or twice he detected it, but the acrid scent was faint, just a tiny shadow on his consciousness.

However, he could not keep moving endlessly. His huge frame required over a ton of grass and leaves and fruit and bark each day to sustain it. He had to stop to feed. In the early morning he stood in a dense grove of comb return trees, stripping bark. He used the point of a tusk to prize a gash in the bark, then he gripped the tag end in his trunk and with an upward jerk ripped loose a strip of bark fifteen feet up the hole of the tree. He rolled the bark into a ball and stuffed it into his mouth.

intent on his task, he relaxed his vigilance. An elephant has poor eyesight; he cannot distinguish stationary objects only a few yards distant, although he can instantly detect movement. Furthermore, his eyes are placed well back in the skull, impeding his forward view, and the spread of his ears tends to block his peripheral vision to the rear.

Using the small morning wind to negate the bull's marvelous sense of smell, moving with extreme stealth so his fine hearing was frustrated, the hunters approached him from behind, staying in his blind spot. There were two of them, and they had followed him ever since he had left the herd. Now they crept up very close to him.

The bull turned broadside to the hunters, ready to move on to the next tree, and showed them the long curved gleam of his tusks.

"Take him!" said one man to the other, and the Spanish maker of fine sherries lifted his double-barreled rifle, which was engraved and inlaid with gold, and aimed for Tukutela's brain.

Over his sights, he picked out the dark vertical cleft in the front of the ear and followed it down to its lowest point. That was where the actual opening of the eardrum was situated. Having found it, he moved his aim forward three inches along an imaginary line from the aperture of the ear toward the elephant's eye.

The Spanish sherry maker was on his first African safari. He had shot chamois and mouflon and red deer in the Pyrenees, but a wild African elephant is none of these timid creatures, and the Spaniard's heart was thudding into his ribs, his spectacles were fogged with sweat, and his hands shook. The professional hunter with him had patiently instructed him how and where to place his shot, but now he could not hold his aim on it, and every second his breathing became more labored, his aim more erratic. In desperation he jerked the trigger.

The bullet hit Tukutela a foot above his left eye and fifteen inches from the frontal lobe of the brain, but the honeycombed bony sponge of his skull cushioned the shock. He reeled back on his haunches, flung his trunk straight up above his head, and gave a deep roaring growl in his throat.

The Spanish hunter turned and ran, and Tukutela whirled to face the movement, launching himself off his haunches. The professional hunter was directly under his outstretched trunk, and he flung up his rifle and aimed into Tukutela's head, into the roof of his open mouth between the bases of the long curved tusks.

The firing pin fell on, dud primer with a click, the rifle misfired, and Tukutela swung his trunk down like the executioner's axe, crushing the man against the the earth.

The Spaniard was still running and Tukutela went after him, overhauling him effortlessly. He reached out his trunk and curled it around his waist. The man screamed and Tukutela tossed him thirty feet straight up into the air. He screamed all the way down until he hit the earth and the air was driven from his lungs.

Tukutela seized him by one ankle and swung his body against the trunk of the nearest tree with a force that burst the man's internal organs, spleen, liver, and lungs.

Tukutela raged through the forest with the corpse held in his trunk, beating it against the trees, lifting it high and slamming it down upon the earth until it disintegrated and he was left with only the stump of the leg in his grip. He flung that aside and went back to where he had left the professional hunter.

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