by Peter Rimmer
Harry broke the silence. “There has been a legend in these parts for as long as many black people can remember, an elephant so big they named it the Great Elephant in every language spoken from here to the northern borders of the Belgian Congo. Every white hunter including Uncle Tinus hunted the Great Elephant for the weight of its tusks and the legend that would stay with the man who killed the greatest mammal on earth. Sometimes they saw the huge footpads marked in the dust. Once my Uncle Tinus caught a glimpse when he was descending the escarpment into the Zambezi Valley but by the time he reached the floor of the valley, the Great Elephant had swum the river and headed north at a run. Two years ago a party of Americans on safari found the Great Elephant and one of them put a bullet in its head. The white hunter followed the blood trail all day but never caught up with the elephant. He presumed the animal would die on its own but it didn’t. Reports came in of African villages being ransacked by a huge elephant. People were killed. The government sent the police out to track and kill the rogue elephant. Instead, the elephant killed two black policemen, trampling them to death. Ten weeks ago the administrator came himself to Elephant Walk to plead with my father to hunt down the killer elephant. For the first time in twenty years, my father agreed to go out and kill an animal for other than its meat. My Grandfather Manderville tells the story from the report of the serving major who mounted the expedition for my father. Not even seventy miles north of here the Great Elephant charged the camp. My father stood his ground but the bullet was old and when he pulled the trigger at twenty yards the gun did not fire. The major by then was high up a tree, along with the rest of them in their separate trees. The last he saw, the elephant was heading north. My father was dead two seconds after his gun misfired. I’m going after the bloody elephant and I’m going to kill him. If you want to come you are welcome. But it’s dangerous. That elephant is in great pain, probably with a lead bullet lodged in its head. It does not like people.”
“Not really my bag, Harry,” said Robert St Clair. “You know me. Better stay and look after your family. How old is your sister Madge?”
“Don’t waste your time. She’s been in love with Barend, Uncle Tinus’s son, since they were toddlers.”
“But he’s not here, I understand. Went off no one knows where.”
“Doesn’t matter to Madge. She’ll wait for him.” Slightly irritated, Harry had turned to Jack Merryweather… “Jack, it’s dangerous but you won’t be bored. Hot and bitten to buggery by insects, but not bored. I’m taking two black men from the farm. You’re welcome. I’d like the company. I’ll teach you how to handle an elephant gun as we look for this elephant. You said you’d come to hunt. You can ride, of course? I want to leave at first light before he kills again. The villagers who are scattered sparsely through the bush don’t have elephant guns to protect themselves. We may be gone for weeks.”
The night Sallie Barker spent her first day with Lily White and Albert Pringle, Harry and Jack were camped on the high bank of a small river, the blacks having gathered wood for a fire that would burn all night. An old, hard teak, the tree pushed over long ago by an elephant wanting to eat the green, succulent leaves that grew at the tree top, was burning on the fire, throwing light and shadow into the surrounding msasa trees. Sparks like fireflies were drifting upon the hot air from the fire towards the vast dome of sky, layer upon layer of stars that Jack had never experienced before.
That night, when it was his turn to feed the fire, he stood alone looking up at the stars in awe, with the fire burnt down and glowing red at his feet, and saw the vastness of the universe for the first time. A hyena cackled a laugh from the pitch dark of the woods, sending a cold shiver of primal fear through his body. Quickly he picked up some of the stacked wood and threw the pieces on the fire, sending sparks flying high up into the night. Somewhere further away he heard what he now knew was the roar of a lion. He built up the fire, sending flames twenty feet into the air. There was no wind, the flames tonguing straight up to the heavens. Feeling happier than he had ever been in his life, he crawled back into his sleeping bag as he was, fully clothed, not three feet from the fire. Within seconds he was sound asleep. Around him, in the bitterly cold night air, the rustle of Africa continued. The hyena, frightened of the flames, went off for easier prey. An owl hooted softly from far away.
When Jack woke, the dawn was touching the high leaves of the trees. A black man, kneeling by the burnt-down fire, was putting a pot of coffee on the coals. From everywhere, and slowly, the birds began to sing. Below the opposite riverbank, three impalas were drinking the water, their front feet splayed. Hunched in his sleeping bag, his arms around his knees, Jack watched a baby rhinoceros mock charge an elephant to be hustled away by its mother. The elephant ignored mother and child and went down into the river to wallow in the water, the sound of tumbling water evocative of Africa’s emptiness, great size, the extent of nature. None of them spoke. All of them, black and white, listening to the sounds of Africa, part of it, content.
At eleven-thirty that morning the cable arrived in the Salisbury post office. It was to the point, all three of them having worked on it through the early morning before Albert Pringle had gone out and sent it from the Cape Town post office. It was addressed to Jack Merryweather, Elephant Walk, Poste Restante, Salisbury, Southern Rhodesia.
The clerk in Salisbury wrote the address on a brown envelope. The cable had been translated from Morse code by a second clerk. On a separate piece of white paper, which he put into the brown envelope and sealed, he wrote the message:
‘Raped by cousin. Desperate for protection. My mother unwilling to believe the rape. Please help me. Sallie Barker.’
There were many people roaming the new country, looking for gold, looking for excitement, and none of them had a fixed address, many only coming into Salisbury every six months, some alone, some in pairs. All received their mail ‘Poste Restante’, to be collected at the post office by themselves. A seven-tier box of pigeonholes, each claiming a letter of the alphabet was stuffed with mail awaiting collection.
The second clerk had seen the name Elephant Walk and recognised it and the fact that the farm had its own pigeonhole. For a brief moment, he was unsure whether to stuff the envelope into the separate Elephant Walk box or the Ms box. In his confusion, he pushed the brown envelope deep into the pile of Js (J for Jack), the fullest of the pigeonholes with all the English Johnstones, Johnsons, Johns and James. With his hand deep in the pile, the clerk gave it a final push where the small envelope slipped down the back through a crack and stayed lodged half in the back of the Js and half in the back of the Ns, which was also stuffed full with all the Normans, Nairns, Nuttalls and Nollens.
When travellers called for their mail, the clerks stuck their hand into the box that carried the first letter of the traveller’s surname. They rarely looked deep inside the long box, only feeling for stray envelopes with their hands. They then thumbed through the envelopes looking for the traveller’s name. Then what was left of the pile was pushed back into the pigeonhole. Less than half of the envelopes were ever collected from the Poste Restante. Some of the letters had been thumbed through for years.
In Cape Town, Sallie Barker waited through the days while Jack rode down into the Zambezi Valley, her call for help stuck, not even thumbed through by the clerks at Salisbury post office. For three weeks she did not go out of the house on Strand Street, convinced her mother and Mr Flugelhorne would be searching for her for different reasons, her mother to retain her place in the rich Flugelhorne household, Mr Flugelhorne to use her at his will with impunity. Twice, the thought of white, fat flesh, the smell of his foul wind, the stench of drunken breath, sent her to the bathroom to be sick. She was a prisoner of her own beauty, her own magnetic draw for men, old and young. The prize even she had thought would save them both from poverty had turned against her. Men took from women what they wanted when there was no protection.
By the end of June, when she understood clearly the reason for so
many young girls being in the house, Sallie had given up all hope. People were people. They looked after themselves. The appearance of manners, love and trust was a mockery of the truth. Jack had no wish to have anything to do with her now she was out of his sight. The card had been a gesture, a way of showing himself off in a good light. He probably thought she was chasing him once again, the new plot hatched by her mother. ‘Out of sight, out of mind’ the old true saying. Anyway, why should he care? Why should anyone care?
Four days before the rest of the household were due to entrain for Johannesburg, Lily having gone north the day after Sallie arrived on her doorstep, Sallie turned twenty. She was not pregnant, of that she was certain, having learned it three days before with an overwhelming sense of relief. They had given her gin that first night after the tea when she had told her story. Whether through gin or nature, and except for the scar on her body and mind, she was free of Herr Flugelhorne.
“It’s not like Mr Merryweather,” Albert Pringle said. “He cares about people. Why I worry about dumping him, but a man has to have his own life and opportunity only knocks once.”
“Don’t rationalise, Albert,” said Sallie. “A few weeks ago I would have said you were wrong, loyalty is more important than personal gain. Now I know you are right. All the society, words, the things we should do to be right, even religion, are to keep us in our place, to make us do what others want us to do without being forced, for fear of society ostracising us in this life, or God punishing us in the fire of hell in the next. Men have created a web to ensnare us… You go your own way, Albert. You and Lily are good people. The girls know what they are doing, the alternative is far worse than this reality. Men will use us whatever we do. Maybe a good husband won’t, if there is such a thing. There are many more ways of hurting a woman other than raping her… I have grown up, Albert Pringle. Not in the way I expected, with my own family, my own children… Brutally. A man so rich he could do what he wanted. If you and Lily will have me, I’ll come to Johannesburg. Fact is, I have no alternative. I won’t whore, Albert. I’ll keep the books. Do the buying. Run the house Lily has bought. That much I can find from my education. I worry all the time about my mother, but I wonder if she worried so much about me. Can mothers be selfish? It’s against nature. Maybe I am wrong. Maybe she will listen to me. But mostly in my short life, I have found people don’t hear what they don’t want to hear until it’s too late. Raped again by that fat slob, I will kill myself. Am I right or wrong?”
“Probably both… Lily said you were welcome from the start. What job you do is your decision. The whole thing is rather new for all of us. Including the girls. I just don’t understand Jack Merryweather… You think we should send him another cable?”
“If he doesn’t want to answer the first, what’s the use of a second?… Once I’m out of this town I’ll feel less dirty. And I don’t really want to kill myself. Somewhere out there, there’s a lot of fun to be had in life… When I’m settled in Johannesburg, and far enough away from the Flugelhornes, I’ll write her a letter… Maybe she’ll want to join me.”
“You do understand we are going to be running a brothel?”
“You’re right… And, yes, I do understand. Can you think of another alternative for me? Anywhere else to go?”
“Not at the moment.”
“Ernest Gilchrist would have had me before all this but I don’t want him. Not now. Certainly not now. Young men in London don’t take too well to their wives being raped before they marry them. He’d run a mile worrying what his employer would do to him if it ever came out. And he needs his employer. Oh, no. They don’t want soiled goods themselves.”
“Don’t hate all men.”
“You won’t be raped, Albert, so you’ll never know. And I’m sick of being cooped up in this house. Then it’s settled. The first real job in life for Sallie Barker will be working in a brothel and I suppose like everything else I’ll get used to it… And the girls may need a sympathetic shoulder to cry on every now and again… Can I cry on your shoulder, Albert, when I’m lonely?”
5
June, July and August 1907
There had been a brief electric storm during the night. The sky had rumbled ten miles away, forking streaks of lightning over the dark sky. The bush was tinder-dry and no rain had fallen in the Zambezi Valley since the end of March, ten weeks before.
“The gods are angry,” Harry had said to Tembo.
“One of the ancestors turned over in bed.”
They both spoke in the language of the Shona.
“Bushfire?”
“Maybe. We shall see.”
Then they were asleep again and the night went on.
They saddled up in the pre-dawn after loading the packhorses. As soon as they could see five yards ahead, they rode out of camp without making breakfast. When the sun came up it would be burning hot in the valley, even in June.
Harry smelt the woodsmoke ten minutes later when the night sky was running away from the dawn. The wind was in Harry’s face, coming from the direction of the river. As hard as he and Tembo looked they could not see the glow of a bushfire. They were both puzzled and afraid. When the dawn became day, the soft breeze in their faces could turn into a hot wind that would fan a bushfire towards them faster than the horses could gallop. Bushfire. The worst fear of the hunter, when the grass was as high as the horses’ withers, scorched dry of moisture by the sun.
With the rising sun pushing up bright light from the eastern earth came the full light of a new day that showed them a single, thin spiral of white smoke rising just above the height of the river trees, only to be blown away by the wind. Everyone smiled, including Jack Merryweather. Garth, the youngest of the blacks, who had been brought by his parents to Elephant Walk when he was four years old and christened by Harry’s Uncle Nathaniel, smiled a set of pearly white teeth in a face the colour of coal. Harry turned his horse slightly to head for the fire. There were people, the first strangers he had ever seen in the valley.
Riding carefully round the thorn thickets through the tall, brown elephant grass, they came upon the hundred-foot-high trees that lined the bank of the river. It was three hours after the dawn. Not once had they seen a trace of the Great Elephant.
At the first sign of danger, the doves in the high trees above the camp had stopped calling to each other. A pair of African fish eagles that had patiently perched on the boughs of a dead tree since early morning, flew off. The big river flowed on, the white clouds mirrored in the dark brown water. On the opposite bank, some hundred yards away, a pair of kudu broke from the cover of a thorn bush and headed away from the river, the females’ big, round ears having picked up the sound of danger. A few minutes later they both heard the distinct clink of metal that only came from a ridden horse. Jared Wentworth got up from where he was writing a journal and pulled his hunting rifle out from inside the four-wheeled wagon.
“What is it?” asked his sister.
“People. The doves have stopped calling. I think I heard the clink of a harness.”
“No one lives here.”
“Get in the wagon and lie down.”
“You’re frightened of your own shadow. There are no strangers.”
“We are the strangers in Africa.”
Slipping a bullet into the breech, Jared pulled back the single hammer to the half-cock position and waited where he was, his back to the river, his ears and eyes straining for the danger. His heart, easily excited, pumped in his chest. The horsemen were riding straight at his camp. Moving the gun forward to the sound of danger, Jared slid silently onto his stomach and pulled the hammer back to full cock, the butt comfortably in his shoulder. He waited patiently, mostly hidden by the pile of wood ready for the night’s fire, the barrel of the rifle pushed clear of the wood. The worst predator in the bush was man, that much he knew. He wished he had not sent all his blacks downriver to look for a crossing.
They had been following the river for ten days and had still not found a way.
With the valley empty of man, there were no makoris (dugout canoes made from a single tree trunk), no boats at all. Jared had wondered if anyone had ever lived in the valley permanently. There had been no trace of man, only the myriad feet of animals.
Whoever it was had stopped. Jared could see the outline of horsemen through the dry, leafless thorn thicket that guarded the way to the river trees. A herd of buffalo could hide in a thorn thicket if they stood still.
“Can you see anyone?” asked Jack Merryweather.
“Not a soul. To the left through the trees I think is a wagon… Anyone there?” Harry waited a moment before repeating his question in Shona. The horses were difficult to control having long smelt the water of the river.
Jared carefully let the hammer of his rifle back to safety and stood up from behind his pile of wood.
“Who are you?” he called.
“Hunters. What are you doing here?”
“Looking for a way to cross the river.”
Four men, two white and two black, rode through the trees to the top of the riverbank and looked down on him where they had made camp on the lower slope.
“Don’t you have a guide?” asked Harry, seeing where they were camped.
“Blacks. Four of them, but we can’t talk to each other.”
“They let you camp down a riverbank! You get a hippo cow on the wrong side of its calf and you’ll be dead. Hippo can’t run uphill. Always camp at the top, high as you can.”
“I’ll remember that.”
“Where are they?”
Jared looked puzzled for a moment. “The blacks? Sent them downriver to look for a crossing. Presume that’s what they’re doing… You say the hippopotamus are dangerous?”
