A Time to Die - Smith Wilbur - Страница 51

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The blow from the trunk had shattered the hunter's collarbone, broken both his arms, and crushed in his ribs, but he was still alive and conscious. He saw Tukutela coming back for him, the long trunk dangling, the huge ears extended, blood from his wound dribbling down to mingle with the blood of the Spaniard that splattered his chest and front legs.

The hunter tried to drag his mangled body away. Tukutela placed one great foot in the center of his back, pinning him down.

Then, with his trunk, he plucked off his limbs, one at a time, legs and arms, tearing them away from the hip and shoulder joints, and throwing them aside. Finally he wrapped his trunk around the hunters head and pulled it away from the shoulders. It rolled like a ball bouncing across the ground as Tukutela hurled it from him.

His rage abated, overtaken by the pain in his head, and Tukutela stood over the bodies he had destroyed, rocking from one foot to the other, rumbling in his throat as first the pain and then the melancholy of death came over him.

Despite the pain in his head and the slow drip of blood into his eye from the wound above it, he began the ritual of death he had learned from his dam so many years previously. He gathered the parts of his victims, the squashed trunks and mutilated limbs, and piled them in a heap. He picked their accouterments out of the grass-rifles, hats, water bottles-and added them to the bloody pile. Then he began to strip the trees of leafy branches and to cover it all with a mound of green.

The bullet wound healed cleanly, but soon there were other scars to add to the little white star it left above his eye. A weighted spear from a deadfall trap opened his thick gray hide from shoulder to knee, and he almost died from the infection that followed. The spread of his ears caught on thorns and hooked twigs, the edges became tattered and eroded. He fought for cows when he joined the breeding herd, and although none of the other bulls could prevail against him, their tusks slashed and cut and marked him.

Then there were other encounters with men.

Despite the dire danger associated with it, that first taste of the sweet juice of the sugar cane so long ago had been addictive.

Tukutela became a compulsive garden raider. Sometimes he would lurk for days in the vicinity of a patch of cultivation, getting up his courage. Then, when there was no moon, in the deepest hours of the night, he would go in, stepping soundlessly as a cat on his big madded feet. Millet, maize, papaya, yams, he loved them all, but sugar cane he could never resist.

At first he allowed himself to be driven off by the flaming torches, the shouting, and the drums, but then he learned to answer the shouts with his own wild screams and to charge at the guardians of the forbidden gardens.

On separate occasions over the next ten years, he killed eight human beings in the course of his raids, pulling their bodies to pieces like a glutton dismembering a chicken carcass. He grew reckless in his greed for the sweet cane. Whereas after previous raids he would travel a hundred miles in a single nonstop march to distance himself from retribution, this season he began to return to the same field on consecutive nights.

The villagers had sent a message to the boma of the colonial district commissioner, begging for assistance. The D.C. had sent one of his ask ari armed with a.404 rifle and the ask ari was waiting for Tukutela. The ask ari was a Policeman and neither a great hunter nor marksman. He hid himself in a pit in the middle of the field, quite happy in his own mind that the elephant would not return to the field that night; for TuIkutela had already made a reputation for himself across his vast range and his habits were known. he was notorious as the garden raider who had killed so many villagers and who never returned to the scene of his crime.

The ask ari awoke from a deep sleep in the bottom of his pit to find Tukutela blotting out the stars over his head, munching on the standing cane. The ask ari snatched up his.404 and fired a bullet upward into Tukutela's belly. It was not a mortal wound, and Tukutela hunted the ask ari remorselessly, quartering downwind until he picked up the scent and following it to the pit where the man crouched paralyzed with terror. Tukutela put his trunk down into the pit and plucked him out.

The wound took many weeks to heal. The pain pawed at his guts, and Tukutela's hAtred of man grew upon it.

Though Tukutela could not understand the reason for it, his contact with man became ever more frequent. His old range was being whittled down; every season there were more tracks and roads cutting through his secret places. Motor vehicles, noisy and stinking, buzzed through the silent places of the veld. The great forests were being hacked down and the earth turned to the plow. Lights burned in the night, and human voices carried to him wherever he wandered. Tukutela's world was shrinking in upon him.

His tusks were growing all this time, longer and thicker, until in his sixtieth year they were great dark columns.

He killed another man in 1976, a black man who tried to defend his few wretched acres of millet with a throwing spear, but the head of the spear lodged in Tukutela's neck and formed a chronic source of infection, a constantly suppurating abscess.

Tukutela had long ago ceased to seek out the breeding herd. The scent of estrus on the wind awakened in him a sweet fleeting nostalgia, but the driving force of the procreative urge had dulled and he pursued his solitary ways through the shrinking forests.

There were some areas of his old range that remained untouched, and from experience Tukutela came to recognize them and to realize that they formed a sanctuary where he was safe from man's harassment. He did not understand that these were the national parks, where he was protected by law, but he spent more and more of his time in these areas and over the years learned their precise boundaries. In time he became reluctant to venture across them into the dangerous world beyond.

Even in these sanctuaries he was wary, driven always by his hatred and fear of men to attack them wherever he found them, or to fly from the first acrid taint of them on the breeze. His faith in the safety of the sanctuary was tested when the hunters found him even there. He heard the report of a firearm and felt the sting of the missile, not differentiating between the sound of a rifle and a dart gun, but when he tried to locate and destroy his attackers, a strange lethargy overtook him, a terrible weakness in his thick columnar legs, and he slumped unconscious to the earth. He awoke to the terrifying stench of men all around him, thick and repulsive on the air, even on his own skin where they had touched him. When he lumbered unsteadily to his feet, he found a strange serpentine device suspended around his neck and the chronic abscess on his neck caused by the spear wound was burning with the fires of antiseptics. He tried to wrench off the radio collar, but it defied even his might, and so, in frustration, he devastated the forest around him, smashing down the tall trees and ripping out the bushes.

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