The Elephant's Tale

by Lauren St. John

  “Oh, and don’t worry about the elephants. They’re very valuable dead or alive. I’ll take very good care of them.”

  “You monster,” said Reuben James in a barely audible voice. Lurk and the two guards closed in on him.

  “Right, Nipper,” Callum said, “time to get on with the business of the day. Are you ready with the dynamite?”

  Nipper saluted.

  “In some ways it’s a relief that you’ll be out of the picture, Reuben,” Callum said. “It means a bigger piece of the pie for me. In a few minutes’ time, we’re going to blast the final wall that holds back the spring and then we will control all the water in Damaraland. Next I’ll move on to a project in the red dunes of Sossusvlei and do the same there, and pretty soon I’ll own all the water in Namibia. I’ll be able to charge what I like for it.”

  A shrill whistle cut short his speech. Everyone turned to look at Joseph in surprise. His right arm was raised. He dropped it and the elephants cast off their shackles and charged, many of them trumpeting along the way. It was like some centuries-old army tearing into battle, blowing their bugles.

  Martine grabbed hold of Ben, convinced they were about to be trampled to death, but the first elephant to reach them was Ruby. She encircled them both with her trunk and stood over them protectively.

  Elsewhere in the dome it was pure chaos. There were swinging tusks and yelling men everywhere. Lurk was tossed about like an elephant’s football, and Callum Murphy, Reuben James, and the guards disappeared inside an elephant scrum.

  Joseph hurried over to Martine. “Go now,” he said. “Nobody will stop you.”

  “Come with us,” pleaded Ben.

  Joseph smiled. “I’ll be right behind you. First, I must take care of my elephants. For twelve long months, they have taken care of me.”

  They tore through the door and down the hill to the main gate. Ben typed in the code. “Forty-eight hours,” he said to Martine. “We have forty-eight hours to save Sawubona.”

  The gate clicked open and they stepped dazed into the morning. Ringed around the construction site were a dozen police cars, some with rifles trained out of the windows. Before they could react, the rifles lowered. The door of one of the cars opened and out jumped their friend. He was positively beaming.

  Ben grinned. “We’re in luck. Gift’s brought the cavalry.”

  “About time too,” said Martine. “Hey, Ben, look.”

  A line of elephants was streaming down the hill with Joseph at its head, but something even more incredible had caught Martine’s attention. A lilac-breasted roller bird had settled on the roof of the guardhouse and it was trilling its heart out.

  30

  They flew back to South Africa first class next morning, courtesy of the Namibian government, who had agreed to “turn a blind eye” to their lack of passports.

  “It’s the least we could do,” a government official told Ben and Martine as a delegation bearing treats such as Black Forest gateaux and Nara melons saw them off at the airport in Windhoek. “If these men had been allowed to carry out their fiendish plan, our most precious resource might have been destroyed, bringing ruin and devastation to vast areas of our country.”

  The environment minister had been so overjoyed that twenty rare desert elephants, thought to be dead, had been saved that he’d offered Martine and Ben a free holiday in Namibia with their families as a thank you. They’d asked if they could have Ruby instead. He was bewildered by their request until Joseph explained that Ruby was related to their own desert elephant, Angel, at which point he agreed at once. Unlike Martine and Ben, Ruby was going to be traveling to Sawubona by road, and would be reunited with her twin on Christmas Day.

  For Martine and Ben, landing amid the crowds and buzz of Cape Town airport was a shock to the system after the space and silence of the desert. The first thing they saw was a newsstand. Gift’s striking photographs of Reuben James in handcuffs and Callum and Lurk being lifted into an ambulance on stretchers were prominently displayed on several front pages. The Cape Times also carried his picture of his father, Joseph, leading the elephants to safety.

  Martine bought a couple of papers with her remaining change and tucked them into her bag to read later. She smiled at the thought that Gift was already well on his way to achieving his dream of becoming a news photographer—an achievement made all the more special because he could now share it with his dad. There hadn’t been many dry eyes after their reunion. They’d promised to visit Martine and Ben at Sawubona in the new year. Martine hadn’t been able to find the words to tell them that she and Ben might not be on the game reserve by then. Following Reuben James’s arrest, the future of Sawubona was more uncertain than ever.

  Tendai was waiting in the arrivals hall to greet them. He shook hands formally with Ben and swept Martine off her feet, his booming laughter attracting stares.

  “There’s nothing left of you, little one,” he scolded. “Grace is going to have something to say about that. What have you been eating for the past week?”

  “Oh, Nara melons and hoodia cacti mainly,” said Martine as they walked out to the parking lot. “Plus a few croissants. How is Grace?”

  Tendai rolled his eyes. “That impossible woman! After you and Ben went missing, I wanted to call the police, but she admitted that she’d read the bones and told you to go as far as you needed to in order to pluck out the thorn that was hurting you. I told her she had finally lost her mind. I was so angry I didn’t speak to her for a week. I have had sleepless nights thinking of the many ways your grandmother would punish me for allowing you out of my sight.”

  He opened the jeep door and Martine and Ben climbed in.

  “I’m sorry for worrying you, Tendai,” said Martine, “but you know, Grace was right about everything. The circle did lead us to the elephants.”

  Tendai started the engine. “She always is.”

  “My grandmother?” Martine said, plucking up the courage to ask the question she’d been dreading hearing the answer to. “Has she called from England? Does she know we were missing?”

  “She doesn’t, because after you went my aunt Grace persuaded the wife of one of the guards, a hotel receptionist, to record an answer machine message saying there was a fault on the line.” He held up a palm. “I want you to know that I had no part in this.”

  Martine tried to keep a straight face. “I’m sure you didn’t.”

  “As a result, your poor grandmother has not been able to reach the house at all. Grace picked up the phone for the first time this morning, after we heard you were coming back. Your grandmother was on a pay phone. All she had time to say was that she is flying into Cape Town tomorrow morning, on Christmas Eve, and that she has good news.”

  They saved their story till they got back to Sawubona, and even then it had to wait because, although Martine paused to thank Grace and be smothered in the sangoma’s warm embrace, she could not wait another minute to see Jemmy.

  The white giraffe and Angel were standing by the game park gate, almost as if they’d known she was coming. The elephant retreated shyly when Martine walked up. Her gaze was fixed on the road and Martine wondered if she’d sensed, or heard, that her twin was on her way. Gift had told her elephants could communicate across distances as far as six miles, using low-frequency calls that could be heard, or felt and interpreted by their trunks and sensitive feet, but it was a stretch to believe they communicate between countries.

  Still, they were supremely evolved beings—far smarter than people, in Martine’s opinion—so anything was possible.

  “Ruby will be here in two days’ time,” she said to Angel. “You’ll be together on Christmas Day.” Under her breath she added: “I only hope that I’m here too.”

  The white giraffe put his head down and she threw her arms around his neck and pressed her face to his silken silver muzzle, as she’d longed to do so often during her desert ordeal. “I’m so sorry I left you, Jemmy. If it was up to me I wouldn’t be away from you for a mi
nute, not even to go to school, but you can’t believe the messes grown-ups get themselves into, or the trouble they cause. And Ben and I keep getting caught in the middle.”

  She kissed him. “If it’s any consolation, thinking about you kept me strong. When you told me you loved me, that’s what got me through.”

  She didn’t add: “And that’s what’s going to get us through the next twenty-four hours until we know whether or not we’ve done enough to save Sawubona.”

  Grace and Tendai eventually got to hear the elephants’ tale—for that, Martine and Ben were agreed, was what it was—over coffee and chocolate cake.

  They told the story jointly, with lots of interruptions. Martine started by describing how they’d stowed away on Reuben James’s plane and had been stranded in the desert.

  Tendai was aghast. “What were the two of you thinking? Anything could have happened to you. When your grandmother gets back from England, Martine, she will fire me for sure. No wonder I am a nervous wreck.”

  “Tendai, you have nerves like a girl,” Grace told him rudely. “Now go on, honey. How did ya find the circle?”

  Martine continued, explaining how they’d ended up at Moon Valley and about Gift’s dramatic reappearance. It turned out that the text he’d received about his camera lens had been a hoax. When he reached Hoodia Lodge, Lurk had tricked him into a storage cellar and locked him up for the night as revenge for the gift shop humiliation.

  Rummaging through boxes in an attempt to find a tool that might help him escape, Gift had come across files on the tests carried out on the missing elephants. That’s when he realized that Martine and Ben had been onto something. He’d smashed the lock on the door and rushed to call the police.

  “If it wasn’t for the white giraffe, I don’t know if we’d have found you,” Gift had told them. “It would never have occurred to me that you’d been mad enough or brave enough to walk miles across the desert in the dead of night, sneak into a heavily secured extinct volcano, and start causing havoc.”

  In the kitchen at Sawubona, Tendai spooned condensed milk into his tea. He’d pulled himself together since being told off by his aunt, but his hand still shook. “So the elephant whisperer saved you by getting the elephants to stampede?”

  “Joseph blew the whistle that started it, but the elephants came up with the plan to pretend they were still shackled on their own,” Martine told him. “Tendai, you can’t believe how sensitive and intelligent and incredible they are. Their hearts break when they are separated from their loved ones or trapped in captivity. When Ruby collapsed, I think they decided that they’d had enough. They were so desperate for freedom they were prepared to die rather than be tormented any longer.”

  Ben said, “Well, they definitely got their own back. The paramedic I talked to told me that Callum was going to be in hospital for at least three months and one of the detectives said he was pretty sure the courts would lock the man up and throw away the key. The ambulance guy also told me that Lurk would be spending a lot of time in the hospital before he went to jail as well. Apparently he has a string of previous convictions for burglary, assault, and other crimes.”

  “Do you think it was him who broke into your grandmother’s office?” Tendai asked, shocked.

  “The Namibian police thought it was highly likely,” answered Martine. “He was Reuben James’s chauffeur, but he was paid by Callum to spy on his boss. Their guess is that when Reuben began getting cold feet about the Ark Project, Callum sent Lurk to try to find some documents that would help them steal Sawubona from under him if necessary.”

  “What are your feelings about Reuben James now?” Tendai wanted to know. “Did you change your mind about him after he turned against Callum and stood up for you?”

  It was a question Martine and Ben found difficult to answer. Was Reuben James as corrupt as his business partner? Or was he a well-intentioned man who’d genuinely wanted to save animals and water but had been blackmailed into doing the wrong thing? In return for not going to jail, he’d promised to sell all his Namibian hotels and, after the debts were cleared, donate half the profits to global warming and elephant charities. He was also going to set up a trust fund for Gift, in an attempt to make up for the time the boy had spent without his father.

  “I guess we’ll know if he’s nice or nasty tomorrow when we find out whether he’s still planning to take our home,” said Martine. “Oh, I hope so much that my grandmother’s good news is about the game reserve. Keeping Sawubona and Jemmy and Khan would be the best Christmas present I could ever wish for.”

  After the meal, Ben went out with Tendai to check on the game reserve and Martine helped Grace do the dishes. Standing at the sink, up to her elbows in warm soapy suds, Martine found that the whole Namibian adventure had already taken on a dreamlike quality.

  “You’re very quiet, chile,” said Grace. “Was I right to tell ya to go as far as ya needed to go to find truth?”

  Martine dried her hands and put an arm around the sangoma’s ample waist. “Yes, you did the right thing. I’m proud if Ben and I played some part in freeing the elephants, but . . .”

  “But what?”

  “It’s nothing really.”

  “It ain’t nothin’ if it make you feel blue. It ain’t nothin’ if the thorn is still in your heart.”

  “It’s just . . .”

  “Go on.”

  “Well, it’s just that when you told me that the elephants would lead me to the truth, I thought you meant that I’d find out the truth behind my gift. I suppose I’m a bit sad that I’m no wiser.”

  Grace smiled. “The four leaves led you to the circle, didn’t they? And the circle led you to the elephants, right?”

  “Right.”

  “Where did the elephants lead you?”

  Martine thought about it for a second. “The elephants led me back here. They led me . . . they led me to Sawubona.”

  She took a step back. “What are you saying, Grace? That the truth is here? You know it, don’t you? You know my story.”

  Grace pulled out a chair and sat down. Her face gave nothing away. “I know a little.”

  Through the kitchen window, Martine saw Jemmy. He was still at the gate; still waiting for her. At the sight of the white giraffe, the frustration that had been building in her for months suddenly bubbled up and spilled over. It was driving her crazy that she’d been given a gift and yet she didn’t really know what it was for, or why she’d been given it in the first place. It was almost cruel.

  “Why would the ancestors choose me?” she said emotionally to Grace. “It doesn’t make any sense and in some ways it feels wrong. Although I was born at Sawubona, I grew up in England, so I’m more British than South African. Plus I’m a white girl and dead ordinary. Why didn’t they choose an African child—someone special like Gift, for example?”

  “The ancestors didn’t choose you. You chose yourself.”

  Martine sat down slowly. “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, chile, that the gift is not to do with skin color or place of birth. It ain’t nothin’ to do with ordinary or extraordinary. It’s to do with love.”

  Grace took a sip of tea. “Take your elephant whisperer friend. You tell me he were snatched by an elephant during a raid, and that he was found a couple a months later, living happy as can be with the herd. A million other boys, they woulda been crushed by these same elephants. But Joseph, he had a pure love in his heart for these elephants and they knew he spoke their language.”

  Martine felt tears spring into her eyes. That’s how she’d felt the moment she encountered Jemmy. She’d known then that he was her soul mate and that she’d go to the ends of the earth, as she’d done in the past few weeks, to love him and keep him safe. It was agony not knowing if she and Ben had done enough.

  “Same with you, chile,” Grace went on. “Every generation has its healers—some for people, some for animals. A thousand eleven-year-old children coulda looked out their window one stormy nigh
t, as you did, and seen the white giraffe. Most woulda been excited and a few mighta been bold enough to go into the game reserve, like you, ta take a closer look. But only one of those children would have cared enough, been patient enough, and loved enough to tame the white giraffe.

  “The forefathers, the ancestors, they predicted that a white giraffe would be born on this here piece of land; that it would be orphaned and rescued by an elephant and find sanctuary in the Secret Valley. They saw that only the unconditional love of a chile could heal this creature and that, in turn, the white giraffe would give something back—a power to heal other animals.”

  “But they didn’t know it would be me?” said Martine softly.

  “No, they didn’t know it would be you.” Grace put a hand on her shoulder. “But I did, chile. I did.”

  Martine’s heart was pounding as if she’d run a marathon. Outside, she could hear the peaceful crooning of doves. She wondered if they’d sound so content if Reuben James took over Sawubona, or whether he’d have speakers dotted around the garden again, booming out birdsong.

  She covered Grace’s brown hand with her pale one. “Thank you for telling me what you know about my gift. It helps. I’ve been feeling guilty about it. I’ve been thinking, ‘Why me? I’ve done nothing to deserve this.’ But now that I know it’s about love, I’m not so scared of it. I feel lighter somehow. Maybe there’s something in that saying about how the truth can set you free.”

  “Sure is,” said Grace heartily. “Sure is.”

  “Grace, I’ve faced quite a lot of challenges in the year I’ve been at Sawubona, haven’t I?”

  “Sure have, honey. And you’ve come out of them stronger.”

  Martine smiled. “Does that mean I now have the eyes and the experience to read the meaning behind the paintings in the Memory Room?”

  The sangoma gave her a squeeze. “Why don’t ya go there and find out.”

  “Really? Can I go tonight? Grace, do you think it would it be okay if I showed Ben the Secret Valley? We’ve shared so much together.”