The Elephant's Tale

by Lauren St. John

  When Gift moved away to stoke the barbecue, sending sparks flying, Ben said simply, “From tomorrow, it’ll be five days.”

  Martine knew exactly what he meant. There were five days until Christmas Eve, the deadline for saving Sawubona and the date Gwyn Thomas was due to return from London. Five days for them to investigate Reuben James’s business dealings and get to the bottom of the mystery surrounding Angel; five days to unravel Grace’s prophecy; and five days for them to figure out how to travel thousands of miles back to Storm Crossing without money, transport, or passports.

  They turned at the same moment to look at Gift. The San boy had his back to them and was loading pieces of chicken onto the sizzling grill. Martine’s stomach did an uncomfortable flip, as if she were in an elevator that was descending too quickly. They had less than a week to achieve a minor miracle and they were utterly dependent on a stranger—one who owed his home and his job to the man they were investigating.

  18

  Gift’s home was so peaceful and magical that, as she lay in bed the next morning watching the sun outline the hills with gold and drinking the campfire-brewed coffee Ben had brought her, Martine fantasized about one day owning a tented camp overlooking an African valley herself. The dream lasted only until she nearly contracted hypothermia trying to have an outdoor shower using a bucket of icy water. After that, she vowed to stay in her grandmother’s comfortable thatched house at Sawubona, with its hot running water, for the rest of her days.

  That’s not going to happen unless you can outwit Reuben James, piped up a voice in her head, but she refused to listen to it. It was too beautiful a morning to dwell on the disaster looming back in South Africa.

  Breakfast (two fried eggs on toast) out of the way, they went in search of the famous desert elephants, which Martine and Ben were dying to see. Gift had warned them not to get their hopes up. Despite the creatures’ immense size they were frequently difficult to find, because their daily searches for food and water meant they traveled enormous distances.

  “That’s one of the reasons it’s so hard to keep an accurate count of their numbers,” said Gift, braking to allow a herd of springbok to cross the road. “Before my father disappeared he’d become concerned about the way elephants kept vanishing, supposedly without any cause. These were not sick or old elephants. They were from herds he’d followed for years, so there wasn’t any doubt about what was happening. Young, healthy animals would just go missing from the herd. One day he’d see them, the next they’d be gone.”

  Kind of like the elephant whisperer himself, thought Martine. She wound down her window and stared out at the blur of flaxen grasses and twisting red road and far-off violet mountains. The African landscape was so enchanting it was hard to believe that tragedy, in the form of poisonous snakes, plants, scorpions, savage beasts, and even the merciless sun, stalked it.

  “My father alerted the authorities,” Gift went on, his eyes skimming the trees for any sign of elephants, “but nobody took him seriously apart from Reuben James, who increased the poaching patrols. People kept telling Pa that these elephants must have died of starvation or thirst and that the other members of the herd were burying them in an elephants’ graveyard.”

  “The elephants have a cemetery?” Ben said in amazement.

  Gift snorted. “No, that’s just a tourist myth, but they do hold elephant funerals. Sometimes they’ll lift up the body of a companion, a bit like human mourners will reverently carry a coffin, and they bury their dead by covering them with mud or leaves and branches. Anyway, in the end it was decided that global warming was killing the elephants.”

  “Global warming?” Martine was puzzled. “You mean how the earth’s surface is heating up because we’re polluting the planet so much with our cars, airplanes, and factories? What’s that got to do with disappearing elephants?”

  “Scientists and politicians always seem to be arguing about whether or not global warming exists,” Ben said.

  “You can’t take any notice of politicians because they’re just trying to get elected,” Gift told him. “It’s true that some scientists claim it doesn’t exist, but most agree that the warming of the earth’s surface is going to lead to sea level rises, the melting of the polar ice caps, and an increase in disease and extreme weather.”

  “And if there’s an increase in extreme weather, the drought periods in Namibia will be worse than ever and the desert elephants will be pushed to the brink of extinction?” guessed Martine.

  “Exactly. We’re already witnessing that now. Except that my father didn’t feel it was lack of food and water that was causing these elephants to go missing. To him, it seemed too targeted. It was always the prime specimens from every herd that went missing. And yet there was no evidence of poaching.”

  “It’s almost as if you have a Bermuda Triangle here in Damaraland,” remarked Ben.

  “What’s a Bermuda Triangle?” asked Martine.

  “The Bermuda Triangle is this area of the Florida Straits, the Bahamas, and the Caribbean where loads of aircraft and ships have gone missing and have never been seen or heard from again. It’s almost as if they’ve been swallowed by the ocean. Over the years, hundreds of experts on things like weather and paranormal activity have tried to discover what became of them, but a lot of the vanishings are completely unexplained.”

  “I don’t know about that,” said Gift, “but I’m convinced the two things are linked. You know, my father going missing and the disappearing elephants. The funny thing is no elephants have been lost since the day my father vanished.”

  Ben said excitedly: “Gift, back up and check out that tree. I’m sure I saw some fresh elephant sign.”

  Gift carried on driving. As much as he liked Ben and Martine, he continued to view them as tourist kids who knew nothing about the desert. “Leave the tracking to me, city boy,” he said jokingly. “The elephants never come this far south.”

  Martine smiled to herself. In the few months Ben had been studying under Tendai as an apprentice tracker, he’d shown such a talent for reading sign, the tracker’s word for the traces an animal leaves of its passing, that the game warden said he had the potential to become one of the best he’d ever seen.

  Two hours later, her smile had gone and her patience had evaporated. It was clear that Gift was as poor at tracking as he’d joked he was when he met them. They hadn’t seen so much as a tail-hair of an elephant.

  Gift read her expression and scowled. “If you and Ben think you can do better, you find the elephants.”

  Ben said nothing. He sat staring straight ahead while Gift grudgingly drove back to the tree where he’d first spotted the peeled bark and split branches that so often marked the passage of elephants. When they reached it, Ben hopped out and inspected the elephant tracks at close range. Martine pored over them with him. She could never get over the fact that a beast weighing up to seven tons could leave such a light impression on the earth. They seemed to move as lightly as dancers.

  “That way,” Ben said with quiet authority, pointing across a dry riverbed.

  Gift did as he was instructed, although his face said: “Yeah, right.” But his disbelief turned to awe as Ben moved rapidly from sign to sign. By the time they crested a rise to find the desert elephants browsing in the trees before them, Martine could see that Gift had gained a new respect for her friend. Not that he admitted it. He said, “I was planning to check this place next anyway.”

  The bull elephant separated himself from the herd gathered in the shade of a thicket of trees and advanced up the dusty trail, his ears flapping warningly. The females, the matriarchs, gathered their youngsters in close.

  And now it was Gift’s chance to shine, because if there was one thing the San boy did know about, it was elephant behavior. His father had taught him everything he knew.

  “A herd of elephants is like a moving nursery and retirement village for the elderly,” he told them with a laugh as he parked a respectful distance away and turned the
engine off. “It’s a real community with everyone looking out for each other. They know every fellow member by what we call a name, and they can use a sort of elephant sonar to find friends who are as far as six miles away.”

  “Tendai says that their pregnancy lasts two years,” Ben said.

  Martine gazed out of the window at the huge beasts. “That’s got to be mighty uncomfortable, especially when you think how big the elephant baby would be.”

  Gift smiled. “Yes, but elephants get a lot more support than a lot of humans do. An elephant baby is born into a protective circle, with a midwife standing by, and all share in the caring of it, including the feeding.”

  “Dolphins do the same thing,” Martine said excitedly. “A dolphin midwife will even assist the newborn to the surface of the water for its first breath.”

  She looked at Ben. Both were remembering the days they’d spent swimming with dolphins in the islands of Mozambique on another adventure.

  Watching the ponderous progress of an old matriarch, Ben said with a laugh, “If an elephant tried swimming, it would sink to the bottom of the lake.”

  “Actually,” Gift told him, “apart from whales and dolphins, elephants are the best swimmers in the whole mammal kingdom. They’ve been known to swim up to three hundred miles between islands—just for fun.”

  At Sawubona, Martine had always regarded elephants as lumbering, prehistoric-looking creatures that were wondrous but unfathomable. Their activities appeared to be confined to eating trees and splashing around the water hole. Gift showed her that even their tiniest action had significance.

  “See that youngster over there? He’s using that stick as a fly switch. Elephants have complex brains and an incredible ability to reason, and they’re masters at using tools to make tasks easier. They use chewed-up bark to plug holes in riverbeds so that the water doesn’t evaporate and they can return to drink later. They uproot trees and push them onto electric fences. There’ve been stories of them pretending to be chained after they’ve broken their shackles so they can escape from their captors or take revenge against people who’ve been cruel to them.”

  Martine thought again of Angel and wondered who, or what, had traumatized her in the past.

  “Funny,” said Ben, “whenever I see an animal that’s cute and cuddly and small, like a Labrador puppy, or big and gentle, like dolphins or Martine’s giraffe, Jemmy, all I want to do it protect it and make sure nothing ever hurts it. But elephants look like they can take care of themselves. They’re so big and their hides are so thick that it’s never occurred to me they might be able to reason like we do or have similar emotions.”

  “Hunters like to believe that when animals are killed they don’t know what’s happening to them, but elephants feel things every bit as strongly as we feel them,” Gift assured him. “They have all the same emotions: love, hate, rage, pride, happiness, jealousy, and despair. Baby elephants who’ve witnessed their parents being culled wake up screaming with nightmares.”

  Martine, who’d endured many nightmares after her own parents died, regarded the elephants with new eyes. She’d taken those at Sawubona for granted. Although she saw these sensitive, intelligent beasts almost every day, she knew next to nothing about them. Well, that was going to change. She was going to do what she could to make their lives better, and the elephant she was going to start with was Angel.

  They were driving back across the plain, their senses full of the majesty of the elephants, when Gift spotted a Velvetchia plant. It was, he said, the oldest in the world and they absolutely had to see it. Some were known to live for thousands of years.

  Martine, who was conscious of time slipping away from them like salt through a timer, was too distracted to take much interest in the plant, which was quite ugly. The calls of a pair of sandgrouse birds attracted her attention and she wandered over to them. That’s when she noticed the circle of red earth. At its widest point it was probably the length Jemmy would be if he lay down, and it was perfectly round and bare. Not a blade of grass grew on it.

  She touched it gingerly. The ground was firm and the soil was warm and crumbly. When she sifted it through her fingers, nothing happened. There was no blinding flash of light. No life-changing revelation.

  “Gift,” she called. “Do you know anything about this circle?”

  He came over. “Sure I do. That’s a fairy circle.”

  “A fairy circle? You believe in fairies in Namibia?”

  Gift laughed. “I don’t think anyone believes they’re created by actual fairies. Then again, nobody knows where they come from. They appear out of nowhere, a bit like crop circles do in places like Britain and America. Some people think they’re caused by termites or radioactive granite; others say a forest of Euphorbia trees grew here many years ago and poisoned the ground when they died.”

  “What do you believe?” Ben asked.

  “I think they were made by little green aliens,” Gift teased. “They’re extra-terrestrial landing pads!”

  “You keep saying ‘they,’” Martine interrupted. “Is there another circle around here?”

  Gift clutched at his forehead, as if that was the dumbest tourist question he’d heard. Motioning them to follow, he clambered up a rocky hillock. When they reached the top, sweating from the short climb, he waved an arm in the direction of the grassy plain on the other side. Martine peered over the edge and gulped. As far as the eye could see were dozens and dozens of circles.

  The circle will lead you to the elephants, Grace had told her.

  “Which circle?” Martine thought in despair. And which elephants? If Grace was right, only one combination would lead her to the truth.

  19

  The next step in their investigation was Reuben James’s tourist lodge. Gift was friends with one of the guides there and he thought it possible the man might know something about Angel’s past. He was less willing to cooperate when it came to the lodge owner himself. “You’re wasting your time doing detective work on Reuben James,” he told them. “There’s nothing to find. But, hey, it’s your vacation.”

  Martine said nothing on the drive over. She’d not yet recovered from the fairy circle blow. She’d expected to find one special circle that would make everything clear, not hundreds. Once again she was haunted by the notion that she and Ben might be in the wrong place at the wrong time. That by coming to Namibia in the vain hope of stumbling upon some last-ditch way of saving Sawubona and the animals, they might have ruined any chance Gwyn Thomas had of doing just that.

  She shuddered to think what would happen if her grandmother arrived back at the game reserve unexpectedly to learn that not only had her granddaughter and Ben been missing for days, the police had not been called. She’d go berserk. She’d feel obliged to get a message to Ben’s mum and dad on their Mediterranean cruise and all hell would break loose. Grace, who’d promised to take care of Martine and Ben, would be in the biggest trouble of her life. So would Tendai, who was skeptical about Grace’s prophesies and would have been livid to discover that the sangoma had encouraged Martine to go off on some hare-brained adventure “to pluck out the thorn” that was hurting her.

  Then there was the problem of the prophecy itself. Grace’s predictions were often obscure, but this latest one was either deceptively simple or just plain wrong. The circle hadn’t led Martine to the elephants. The elephants had, if anything, led her to the circle.

  On top of all that, she was worried sick about Jemmy and Khan. Sawubona was crawling with Reuben James’s hired workers. What if one took a shine to the white giraffe and rare leopard and decided to steal them?

  Gift’s voice broke into her thoughts. “Welcome to Hoodia Haven.”

  Martine leaned out the window. They were pulling into a circular gravel driveway lined with beds of cacti and purple and scarlet desert flowers, shaped to spell the name of the lodge.

  “That’s a strange name for a hotel,” Ben remarked.

  “I think it’s quite a good one,” Gift s
aid, parking beneath a shepherd’s tree. They all climbed out. “Those plump cacti are hoodia plants. The iKung Bushmen call them ‘xhoba.’ For thousands of years the San have used them as appetite suppressants and thirst quenchers. A piece the size of a cucumber used to keep the old hunters going for a week.”

  “That would be handy right now,” remarked Martine. “It seems at least a century since we ate breakfast.”

  Gift took a knife from his pocket and cut them each a piece of cactus, using a rag to protect his hands from the thorns. “When you’ve eaten that, why don’t you go and wait in the guest lounge? There’s an exhibition of my elephant photos in there. I’ll go and ask my friend about your elephant.”

  Ben waited until he was out of earshot. “What’s our plan?” he asked, screwing up his nose at the bitterness of the cactus leaf, then straightening it again as he realized that it left a refreshing sweet taste on his tongue. “What exactly are we searching for?”

  “We don’t know,” admitted Martine, wiping her hands on a tea-tree wipe Gift had provided. “Some proof that Mr. James is involved in diamond smuggling or mistreats animals or is employing slave labor or something. Proof of corruption. Why don’t we split up and see if we can find anything interesting?”

  “Sounds good. Martine . . .”

  “Yes?”

  “Watch your back.”

  Martine did not have much experience with five-star hotels, but there was no doubt that Hoodia Haven was the last word in luxury. The swimming pool looked as if it had been created from dissolved aquamarines. Over-tanned guests were draped around it in elegant poses, ice tinkling in their drinks. One had binoculars and was watching zebra drink from a distant water hole. Waiters glided around with platters of fruit, shellfish, and salad, or whisked away empty cocktail glasses with umbrellas sticking out of them.

  The hoodia plant had taken the edge off Martine’s hunger, but the food looked so delicious it was hard not to want it. When she passed an unattended bowl of exotic fruit and nuts, she sneaked a handful of salted almonds into her mouth. A waiter noticed and smiled. A few minutes later he came over and kindly presented her with a plate of chopped pineapple.