Man Eater

by Justin D'Ath

  Olki grabbed my arm. ‘Follow me,’ he whispered, leading me into the trees.

  We took a wide detour through the shadowy forest and rejoined the trail about twenty metres past the elephant. I wished we’d gone further. She was much too close for comfort. I knew how fast she could run.

  ‘It’s the same one that nearly killed me this afternoon,’ I gasped, setting off down the trail as fast as I dared in the rapidly failing light.

  Olki’s eyesight was three times as good as mine and he had no trouble keeping up. ‘Do not worry,’ he said. ‘She not leave baby.’

  ‘I didn’t see a baby.’

  ‘Under big tree beside mother. One leg tied with wire.’

  I came puffing to a standstill. ‘What?’

  Olki stopped, too. ‘Baby tembo caught in hunter trap. Mother stay with it.’

  I peered back up the trail. All I could see with my one blurry eye was the huge black blob of the mother. ‘Why do they catch baby elephants?’

  ‘Not want babies,’ whispered Olki. ‘Bad luck for baby to step in wire. Hunters catch big tembo for tusk.’

  Suddenly I understood. Ivory hunters. A chill ran up and down my spine. ‘We have to go back and save them.’

  ‘No, Sam, cannot save,’ said Olki, lowering his voice. ‘Leopard coming.’

  He was right. We had to save ourselves. But it made me sick to think of the mother elephant staying with her snared calf until the poachers came and killed her in cold blood. They would probably kill the baby, too.

  Olki drew in his breath. ‘Listen. Hear bus.’

  I paused for a moment. Yes! I could hear it, too – the distant rumble of a vehicle.

  Without waiting for a message from my brain, my legs started running, carrying me down the trail towards the road. At least, I trusted that was where we were going. It was fully dark now. All I could see was the pale flapping shape of Olki’s cloak just ahead of me. I locked on that and ran.

  And ran and ran and ran.

  When Olki suddenly slowed down, I wasn’t ready for it. I kept running – straight into his back. Both of us sprawled to the ground.

  ‘Sorry,’ I gasped, rolling off him. ‘Are you okay?’

  Olki raised his head and screwed up his eyes. His face was damp with sweat and there were patches of red dust like clown’s make-up on his nose, chin and cheeks. I felt confused. not about the patches of dust, but because I could see him. There was light on his face, a bright light – bright enough to make him squint. I turned my head and was nearly blinded.

  A pair of headlights came bumping up the trail towards us.

  I jumped to my feet and rushed towards the lights, waving my hands in the air and yelling: ‘Stop, stop, stop!’

  The vehicle halted in the middle of the trail and its engine slowed to an idle. I couldn’t see a thing, just the two blinding circles of light. A door creaked open.

  ‘Well, well, well,’ said a voice that started a hundred warning bells jangling inside my head. ‘We meet again.’

  21

  FIRING SQUAD

  My eyesight might not have been good, but there was nothing wrong with my brain. It was the white ivory hunter I’d met that afternoon on the Marusha road. He and his two partners-in-crime must have been the ones responsible for setting the snare that had captured the baby elephant. now they were coming back to check if they’d caught anything.

  I had to stop them.

  Clutching my bandaged head, I let out a loud groan and collapsed in the middle of the trail.

  ‘Hey, Aussie,’ the white poacher called, ‘can you hear me?’

  Did it look like I could hear him? I pretended to be unconscious.

  A second door creaked open and I heard the two Africans getting out. The three men had a conversation in Swahili. I expected Olki to join in – or at least to come and see if I was okay – but he didn’t. It seemed strange that the poachers were ignoring him. footsteps came rustling towards me. A heavy boot prodded my shoulder.

  ‘Hey, Aussie.’

  I lay still. Everything depended on them thinking I was unconscious. The poacher prodded me again, harder this time. It hurt. I gritted my teeth and ordered myself not to move. The elephants’ lives depended on it. Possibly even my life depended on it. These were dangerous men.

  There was another conversation in Swahili. The white man sounded angry. I think he wanted to drag me to the side of the trail and leave me there. But the two Africans were arguing with him. The word chui was repeated several times. Leopard. A shiver ran through me. The man eater could be anywhere in the surrounding forest. Watching us. Watching me. Waiting for the Land Rover to drive away, and then…

  I made a decision. If the poachers decided to leave me, I would stop pretending to be unconscious and beg them to take me with them.

  Luckily that wasn’t necessary. Muttering in the grumpy tone of someone who’d lost an argument, the white man went stomping off towards the Land Rover. The two Africans picked me up. One held me under the armpits, the other had my legs. I tried to stay limp. They carried me round to the back of the Land Rover and set me on the ground just below the puttering exhaust pipe. The fumes were suffocating, but I didn’t dare turn my head away. Holding my breath, I heard the two Africans unclipping a series of press studs, then they picked me up and heaved me into the Land Rover’s canvas-covered rear section. I landed on a lumpy tarpaulin and lay motionless while they clipped the canvas closed behind me.

  Only when the doors slammed and the Land Rover jolted into motion did I dare open my eye. It was pitch black; I might as well have left it closed. But my trick had worked – I’d fooled the poachers into thinking I was unconscious.

  Now what? I wondered, as we bounced up the bumpy trail. I realised that the poachers were probably still going to check their snare. I hadn’t saved the elephants at all, I’d just delayed their deaths by two or three minutes.

  And what had happened to Olki?

  Pop, pop, pop!

  The noise came from right next to my head. It was the press studs coming undone. I shuffled quickly away. The canvas parted and a wedge of starry sky appeared. Silhouetted against the Milky Way was a small, crouched figure.

  ‘Olki?’ I whispered.

  He was balanced on the Land Rover’s spare wheel, swaying back and forth like a yachtsman in heavy seas as the four-wheel drive lurched and bounced.

  ‘You okay, Sam?’ he asked.

  ‘I’m fine. I was just pretending to be sick to fool the hunters.’

  Olki’s teeth flashed in the starlight. ‘Good trick,’ he said. ‘They do not see me in dark. I hide in trees, then jump on truck.’

  I helped him climb in. The heavy canvas flapped closed behind him and once more it was pitch dark. Olki crouched next to me, his warm breath tickling my bare shoulder. The Land Rover lurched and swayed. Whatever was under the tarpaulin – it felt like firewood – rolled back and forth beneath us, making it very uncomfortable to lie on. I crawled blindly forward, feeling with my hands for somewhere more stable, and nearly collided with a big iron tool box. I wriggled on top of it, wedging my back into the corner where the canvas side of the truck met the rear of the driver’s cab. It was weird to think that the three poachers were just through that connecting wall, with only the canvas and a couple of millimetres of sheet metal separating us.

  Olki came scrambling in my direction. I couldn’t see anything but I heard the wood shifting and clunking underneath him. Just as he reached me, the Land Rover jolted to an abrupt stop, throwing him against me. His weight pressed my face into the connecting wall. My bandaged eye saw stars. But my other eye, the one squashed against the canvas, saw something else: a strip of pale yellow light.

  I’d been wrong about what separated me and Olki from the poachers. It wasn’t canvas and sheet metal, it was canvas and glass. There was a window at the rear of the driver’s cab, hidden behind a flap in the canvas.

  Using one finger, I carefully moved the flap to the side. now Olki and I could see i
nto the cab. The two Africans were getting out one door and the white man was getting out the other. He dragged his big elephant gun behind him. I lifted the flap a bit higher, until we had a view out through the windscreen. I saw immediately why we’d stopped.

  Forty metres up the trail, illuminated by a powerful spotlight mounted somewhere on top of the Land Rover, stood the mother and baby elephant. I could see a wire noose wrapped around one of the calf’s back legs. The other end was secured to the trunk of a huge mahogany tree growing at the edge of the trail. Both elephants stood silently staring at us. Their eyes had a wet glisten in the light, like tears.

  They looked just like two condemned prisoners facing a firing squad.

  22

  THE CUNNING SNAKE

  ‘I’m going to stop them,’ I said, crawling back across the lumpy tarpaulin towards the opening at the rear of the Land Rover.

  ‘They have gun,’ whispered Olki.

  I didn’t care. I’d just realised what was under the tarpaulin – not firewood, elephant tusks. When I vaulted out of the back of the Land Rover, I felt angry enough to take on all three poachers at once. With my bare hands.

  Even though I learn karate – and technically my hands are weapons – it would have been suicide. One half-blind boy versus three grown men, one of whom was packing a .460 Weatherby Magnum. Go figure.

  ‘Look what I find,’ whispered Olki, passing me a tomahawk from the Land Rover’s pitch-black interior. Then he clambered out over the spare wheel carrying a small collapsible shovel, which he proceeded to twirl above his head in a very dangerous manner. ‘We bang hunter on head.’

  The tomahawk was heavy. A single blow would split someone’s skull. The thought made my stomach churn. And brought me back to my senses.

  ‘Get back in the truck, Olki,’ I whispered, ‘and hold on tight.’

  I’d remembered something my karate teacher used to tell us before competitions. The cunning snake beats the angry tiger.

  I would be the cunning snake.

  Heart beating like a tom-tom, I peered around the side of the Land Rover. The driver’s door hung wide open, and one of the Africans stood just on the other side of it, leaning against the front mudguard. Hooked over his shoulder was a short-barrelled automatic rifle. It looked like an Ak-47. I should have realised the poachers would have more than one firearm. The odds were really stacked against me. But I was the cunning snake. Surprise was on my side. They thought I was lying unconscious in the back of the Land Rover.

  I crept towards the unsuspecting poacher, keeping low so the door was between us. The tomahawk felt sweaty in my hand. They’d left the engine running – probably to power the spotlight – so the man with the Ak-47 didn’t hear me when I slid into the driver’s seat barely a metre from where he was standing. keeping my head down, I checked out the gear lever, the pedals and the handbrake. Everything was much the same as my brother Nathan’s Toyota, which I’d driven heaps of times.

  I lay the tomahawk on the seat beside me and inched my head up until I could see over the steering wheel. The second African stood on the other side of the Land Rover, just in front of the passenger door. It was open, too. Ideally, I’d have liked to shut both doors and lock them, but that would have given the game away. Anyway, there wasn’t time. The white man had walked twenty metres up the trail to get a clear shot at the mother elephant, which had moved partially out of sight behind the mahogany tree.

  I saw him raise the elephant gun to his shoulder and take aim.

  Get a move on, Sam. Left foot on the clutch, right foot on the accelerator, slowly release the handbrake and…

  GO GO GO!

  With a clunk of gears and a mighty roar, the Land Rover leapt forward. Both doors slammed closed under the acceleration, but not before the one on my side smacked into the poacher with the Ak-47, sending him flying. The other man dived in the opposite direction. I didn’t see whether or not he got clear because I was looking straight ahead. The white man had spun around as soon as I hit the accelerator. He must have seen what had happened to his two friends. Eyes screwed up against the combined glare of the spotlight and the two headlights hurtling towards him out of the darkness, he pointed the elephant gun straight at me. There wasn’t time to duck.

  BOOM!

  The windscreen exploded in a white spray of glass. It fell all over me like hailstones. But apart from a cut lip and a few small nicks to my bare chest and shoulders, I was unhurt. The bullet missed me by a couple of centimetres. I felt it whoosh past my left ear and crash through the window behind me. I hoped Olki was all right but there wasn’t time to check. The poacher stood in the middle of the trail directly in my path, sliding another bullet into the breech of his rifle.

  I hunched low in the driver’s seat and stepped on the gas.

  As the blinding lights rushed towards him, the expression on the poacher’s face went through a range of emotions – first anger, then uncertainty, and finally blind panic. He turned and ran.

  I chased him. I had no choice. He’d shoot me if I gave him half a chance. My foot was flat to the floor. Even in first gear, the roaring Land Rover was rapidly closing the distance. Ten metres, seven metres, five. If he was smart, the poacher would have swerved into the forest where the Land Rover couldn’t follow, but he ran straight up the middle of trail like a frightened rabbit, looking back over his shoulder as I came charging after him.

  He should have been looking the other way.

  ‘Look out!’ I yelled through the gaping hole where the Land Rover’s windscreen used to be, and slammed on the brakes.

  My warning came too late. The poacher ran slap-bang into the baby elephant.

  Its mother was standing right over it.

  Before the startled ivory hunter knew what was happening, the mother elephant coiled her trunk around him and lifted him high in the air. He screamed and kicked his legs. His face was a mask of terror in the spotlight’s beam as the elephant shook him like a rag doll. The rifle slipped from his hand and fell. It landed on the Land Rover’s bonnet with a loud clunk. The elephant shook him a couple more times, then flung his limp body into the bushes on the other side the trail.

  I couldn’t see the poacher from the Land Rover, but I knew he must be badly hurt. And he’d be dead in a matter of seconds if I didn’t do something. The elephant was moving towards the bushes, no doubt to finish him off. Spinning the steering wheel to its full right-hand lock, I accelerated directly across the elephant’s path and slammed on the brakes, creating a road block. now she couldn’t get to her victim. Trumpeting in fury, she attacked the Land Rover instead.

  WHAM!

  Four tonnes of elephant hit the passenger door head-on. The side of the vehicle rose off the ground. I held onto the steering wheel and gritted my teeth. The elephant’s big, wrinkly-edged eye looked in at me through the open window. I was sure she was going to tip us over. But she just rocked the Land Rover up and down a few times, then dropped it back onto its wheels with a mighty thump that sent the rifle skidding across the bonnet in front of me.

  The elephant and I must have both noticed the rifle at the same moment. And both of us had the same idea. I climbed half out of my seat and made a grab for it. But as my hand closed around the rifle’s barrel, the elephant’s big leathery trunk encircled the wooden stock and wrenched the weapon from my grasp.

  I don’t know how intelligent elephants are, but she obviously knew what rifles did. They killed elephants. Swinging it in a big arc, she whacked the hateful thing against a tree. The stock shattered in a spaghetti of flying wood splinters and the barrel bent into a u-shape. But the elephant still wasn’t satisfied. She gathered the shattered weapon in her trunk and slammed it onto the ground. Then she knelt down and began grinding it into the dust with her head and her tusks and her trunk, all the time bellowing and trumpeting in rage.

  I sat watching her for a few moments, feeling a mixture of awe (at her power), relief (that she hadn’t killed me) and fear (that she still might). Then
I snapped out of it. The elephant was around the other side of the Land Rover, totally distracted by her demolition job of the rifle. This was my chance to rescue the poacher and get out of there. I quietly opened the driver’s door and slid out. The poacher lay in the bushes beside the trail, groaning and clutching his side. I took two steps towards him, tripped and fell headlong to the ground.

  I was back on my feet in a moment. But not before I saw what had tripped me. A wire ran along the ground parallel to the edge of the trail. One end was tied around the trunk of a big shadowy tree, the other end disappeared behind the Land Rover. It was too dark to see what was back there, but I could hear a snuffling noise, interspersed with small squeals. I realised that when I’d driven the Land Rover between the mother elephant and the poacher, I’d separated her from her calf as well.

  The baby elephant’s pitiful squeals reminded me why I’d come to Africa. Stepping over the wire, I reached into the Land Rover for the tomahawk. Then I raced over to the tree and chopped the wire. Or tried to. The tomahawk was blunt – it bent the wire but didn’t cut it. I hit it again, harder this time. Thwack! It still didn’t break. Thwack! Thwack! Thwack! I was getting desperate now. Instead of cutting the wire, the tomahawk was burying it deeper and deeper into the soft bark of the mahogany tree. Thwack! Thwack!

  Something touched me on the back. It was warm and wet and soft. I froze, the tomahawk poised for another chop, and peered over my shoulder.

  Shishkebab!

  The calf was right behind me, gently exploring me with its trunk. But that wasn’t what caused me to draw in my breath. Behind the calf, looming over both of us like a mountain, stood its mother.

  23

  MZUNGU!

  None of us moved. I darted my eyes sideways, gauging whether or not I could make it back to the Land Rover. It was impossible. The mother elephant had me cold. She was standing right over me. I knew how fast she could move. All she had to do was reach out her trunk.