Elephant Song

by Wilbur Smith

  They tell me that the alternator on one truck is burned out. Spare parts are a terrible problem in this country; there just isn't sufficient foreign exchange to pay for everything we need. Cheng drove down to the man-made water-hole. Less than a mile from Chiwewe headquarters a borehole had been sunk at the head of a small vlei.

  From it a windmill pumped a trickle of water into a muddy pond to attract birds and animals to the proximity of the camp.

  As Cheng parked the Mercedes in the observation area overlooking the pool, a small herd of kudu that had been drinking from it took fright and scattered into the surrounding bush. They were large beige-coloured antelope, striped with pale chalk lines across their backs, with long legs and necks, and huge trumpet-shaped ears. Only the males carried wide corkscrewed horns.

  Cheng was too agitated to use his binoculars, although clouds of birds descended to drink at the water-hole. The fire finches burned like tiny scarlet flames, and the starlings were a shining iridescent green that reflected the sunlight. Cheng was a talented artist not only with ivory carver's knives but also with water colours. One of his favourite subjects had always been wild birds which he depicted in traditional romantic Chinese style.

  Today he could not concentrate on them as they settled at the water.

  Instead he fitted a cigarette into his ivory holder and puffed at it restlessly. This was the spot he had chosen as the rendezvous with the leader of the poachers, and Cheng scanned the encroaching bush anxiously as he fidgeted and smoked.

  Still, the first indication he had that someone was there was the sound of a voice through the open window of the Mercedes beside him.

  Cheng started uncontrollably and turned quickly to the man who stood beside the motor car.

  He had a scar that ran down from the corner of his left eye into the line of his top lip. The lip was puckered upwards on that side giving him an uneven sardonic smile. Chetti Singh had warned Cheng about the scar. It was an infallible point of recognition. Sali? Cheng's voice was breathless. The poacher had startled him. You are Sali ? Yes, the man agreed, smiling with only half his twisted mouth. I am Sali .

  His skin was almost purple black, the scar a livid pink upon it. He was short in stature but with broad shoulders and muscular limbs. He wore a tattered shirt and shorts of faded khaki drill that were crusted and stained with sweat and filth.

  He had obviously travelled hard, for his bare legs were floured with dust to the knee. In the heat he stank of stale sweat, a goary and rancid odour that made Cheng draw away fastidiously. The gesture was not wasted on the poacher and his smile broadened into a genuine grin.

  Where are your men? Cheng demanded, and Sali prodded his thumb towards the dense encircling bush.

  You are armed? he insisted, and Sah's grin became insolent.

  He did not deign to reply to such a famous question. Cheng realised that relief and nervousness had made him garrulous.

  He determined to contain himself, but the next question slipped out before he could prevent it. You know what has to be done? With a fingertip Sali rubbed the glossy streak of scar tissue down his cheek and nodded. You are to leave no witnesses. Cheng saw from his eyes that the poacher had not understood, so he repeated, You must kill them all. When the police come there must be no one for them to talk to.

  Sali inclined his head in agreement. Chetti Singh had explained to him in detail. The orders had been agreeable. Sali had a bitter feud against the Zimbabwe Parks Department.

  Only a year previously Sali's two younger brothers had crossed the Zambezi with a small group of men to hunt rhinoceros.

  They had run into one of the Parks anti-poaching units who were all exguerrilla fighters and armed, like them, with AK 47 assault rifles.

  In the fierce fire-fight that ensued, one of his brothers had been killed and the other shot through the spine and crippled for life.

  Despite his wound they had brought him to trial in Harare and he had been sentenced to seven years imprisonment.

  Thus Sali the poacher felt no great affection for the Parks rangers and it showed in his expression as he agreed. We will leave nobody.

  Except the two rangers, Cheng qua and David. You know them. I know them. Sali had worked with them before.

  They will be at the workshops with the two big trucks.

  Make sure all your men understand that they are not to touch them or damage the trucks in any way. I will tell them. The warden will be in his office. His wife and their three children are at the bungalow on the hill. There are four camp servants and their families in the domestic compound. Make sure it is surrounded before you open fire.

  Nobody must get away. You chatter like a monkey in a wild plum tree, Sali told him scornfully. I know all these things. Chetti Singh has told me. Then go and do as you have been told, Cheng ordered sharply, and Sali leaned in through the Mercedes window forcing the Chinaman to hold his breath and draw away from him.

  Soli rubbed his thumb and forefinger together in the universal sign for money. Cheng reached across and opened the cubbyhole in the Mercedes dashboard. The ten-dollar bills were in bundles of a hundred, each secured by a rubber band. He counted them into Sali's open hand, three bundles of a thousand dollars each. It would work out to approximately five dollars a kilo for the vast store of ivory in the camp warehouse, ivory that would be worth a thousand dollars a kilo in Taipei.

  On the other hand, to Sali the sheaves of green bills represented an enormous fortune. He had never in his entire life held that amount of money in his hand at one time.

  His usual reward for poaching a good elephant, for risking his life against the anti-poaching teams by penetrating deep into forbidden territory, for risking his life again by firing at the great beasts with the light bullets of the AK 47, for cutting out the tusks and carrying their galling weight back over heavy broken ground, his usual reward for all that risk and labour amounted to around thirty dollars an elephant killed, say, a dollar a kilo.

  The treasury bills that Cheng placed in his hands represented the reward he could expect from five years of hard and dangerous labour.

  So, compared to that, what was the killing of a few Parks officials and their families? It entailed very little additional effort and minimal risk.

  For three thousand dollars, it would be a pleasure indeed.

  Both men were mightily pleased with their bargain. I will wait here until I hear the guns, Cheng told him delicately, and Sali smiled so broadly that he showed all his large brilliant white teeth right to the wisdoms in the back of his jaw. You will not have to wait long, he promised, and then as silently as he had appeared, he vanished back into the bush.

  Daniel Armstrong drove at a sedate pace. The road was fairly good by central African standards; it was graded regularly, for few of the visitors to the park drove four-wheel-drive vehicles. Nevertheless, Daniel was in no hurry and did not push it. His Toyota was equipped with a full range of camping equipment. He never stayed at motels or other formal lodgings if he could avoid them. Not only were they few and far between in this country, but in most cases the food and comforts they offered were much below the standard that Daniel could provide in his own temporary camps.

  This evening he would keep going until a little before sunset and then find some inviting stand of forest or pleasant stream at which to pull well off the road and break out the tucker box and Chivas bottle.

  He doubted that they would get as far as Mana Pools, and certainly they would not reach the main metalled highway that ran from the Chirundu bridge on the Zambezi, south to Karoi and Harare.

  Jock was pleasant company. It was one of the reasons that Daniel had hired him. They had worked together on and off over the past five years.

  Jock was a freelance cameraman and Daniel called him up on contract whenever he had a new project signed up and financed. They had covered huge tracts of Africa together, from the forbidding beaches of the Skeleton Coast in Namibia to the drought and famine-ravaged mountains and ambas of Ethiopia and
the depths of the Sahara. Although they had not succeeded in forging a deep or committed friendship, they had spent weeks together in the remote wilderness and there had seldom been any friction between them.

  They chatted amicably as Daniel took the heavily laden truck down the twisting escarpment road. Whenever a bird or animal or unusual tree caught their attention Daniel parked the truck and made notes and observations while Jock filmed.

  Before they had covered twenty miles they came to a section of the road over which a large herd of elephant had fed during the previous night.

  They had pulled down branches and pushed over many of the large mopane trees. Some of these had fallen across the roadway, blocking it entirely. From those trees still standing they had stripped the bark, leaving the trunks naked white and weeping with sap. Naughty beggars, Daniel grinned as be contemplated the destruction. They seem to delight in blocking the roads. Yet it was, clear demonstration, if any were needed, that regular culling of the herds was absolutely necessary. The mopane forest could survive only a limited amount of this destructive feeding.

  They were able to pull off the road and detour around many of the fallen trees, although once or twice they were forced to hitch up a tree-trunk to the Toyota's tow chain and bodily haul it aside before they could pass. Thus it was after four o'clock before they reached the valley bottom and turned eastwards through the mopane forest towards the Maria Pools turn-off, near which they had filmed the elephant cull.

  At this stage both of them were engrossed in a discussion of how best Daniel could edit the huge volume of film that they now had on tape.

  Daniel was experiencing the heightened anticipation he always felt at this stage of a production. It was all in the can. Now he could return to London where, in a hired editing room at Castle Film Studios, he would spend long weeks and months sequestered in a dark room absorbed in the exacting but infinitely rewarding labour of cutting each scene into the next and composing the commentary to support it.

  Even though the forefront of his mind was focused on what Jock was saying, he was fully aware of his surroundings.

  Nevertheless he almost missed it. He drove over it and went on for almost two hundred yards before it fully registered that he had passed something unusual. Perhaps it was a relic of his experiences during the bush war when any extraneous mark on the roadway could give warning of a land mine and violent death buried in the tracks. In those days he would have been much quicker to register and react, but the intervening years had blunted his reflexes.

  He braked the truck and Jock broke off what he was saying and glanced at him quizzically. What is it? Don't know. Daniel swivelled in the seat as he reversed the Landcruiser back down the track. Probably nothing, he murmured, but there was a tiny niggling doubt in the back of his mind.

  He stopped and pulled on the handbrake and climbed down out of the cab. I can't see anything. Jock hung out of the window on the far side. That's just it, Daniel agreed. There is a blank spot here.

  He pointed down the dusty roadway whose surface was dimpled and pocked by the marvelous graffiti of the bush. The tiny v-shaped spurs of francolin and other birds, the serpentine tracks of insects and lizards, the larger hoof-prints of various species Of antelope and hare, mongoose and jackal were woven into an intricate tapestry of sign except at one point in the roadway where the soft surface was smooth and unblemished. Daniel squatted beside it and studied it for a moment. Somebody has swept sign, he said. So what's so bloody extraordinary about that?

  Jock climbed down out of the truck and came to join him. Nothing, perhaps. He stood up. Or everything. Depends on how you look at it.

  Shoot? Jock invited him. Only human beings cover their tracks, and only when they're up to no good. Besides that, there aren't supposed to be people wandering around on foot in the middle of a National Park.

  Daniel skirted the area of soft earth that had been carefully swept with a leafy branch and stepped off the track into the stand of tussocked grass on the verge. Immediately he saw other signs of anti-tracking. The grass clumps had been crus bed and flattened as a party of men on foot had used them as stepping stones. It seemed to be a large party and Daniel felt the hair on his forearms and at the back of his neck prickle and lift.

  Contact! he thought. It was like the old days with the Scouts when they first picked up the sign of a group of guerrilla terrorists. He experienced that same breathless feeling of excitement and the same stone of fear heavy in his bowels.

  it took an effort to thrust those feelings aside. Those dangerous days were long past. Still he followed the sign. Although the chase had taken some elementary precautions, they were perfunctory. A cadre of Zanu in the war days would have been more professional. Within fifty yards of the road Daniel found the first clear print of a shod human foot, and a few yards further on the band had joined a narrow game track and formed in Indian file, abandoning all further attempts at anti-tracking. They had struck out in the direction of the escarpment and Chiwewe base camp with determined stride.

  Daniel was amazed to find how large the band was. He counted the tracks of between sixteen and twenty individuals in the group.

  After following them another two or three hundred yards Daniel stopped and thought about it carefully. Considering the size of the group and the direction from which they had come, the most obvious assumption was that they were a band of Zambian poachers who had crossed the Zambezi River on a raid for ivory and rhino horn. That would also explain the precautions they had taken to cover their tracks.

  What he should do now was to warn Johnny Nzou so that he could get an anti-poaching unit in as fast as possible for a follow-up action.

  Daniel pondered the best way to do this.

  There was a telephone in the ranger's office at Mana Pools only an hour's drive ahead, or Daniel could turn back to Chiwewe headquarters and take the warning in person.

  The decision was made for him as he made out the line of telephone poles in the forest not far ahead. These were cut from native timber and steeped in black creosote to discourage the attack of termites.

  Between the poles the draped copper telephone wires gleamed in the late sunlight, except between two of the poles directly ahead.

  Daniel hurried forward and then stopped abruptly.

  The telephone wires had been cut and dangled from the white ceramic insulators at the top of the nearest pole. Daniel reached out for the end of one wire, and peered at it. There was no question about it. It had been deliberately cut. The shear marks made by the cutting edge of a pair of pliers were evident in the malleable red metal of the cable.

  There were the milling tracks of many men at the base of the pole.

  Why the hell would a poacher want to cut the telephone lines? Daniel wondered aloud, and his sense of unease turned to alarm. This begins to look really ugly. I have to warn Johnny. He has to get on to these gentlemen damned quickly.

  Only one way to warn him now.

  At a run he started back to where he had left the Landcruiser. What the hell is going on? Jock wanted to know as he jumped up into the cab and started the motor. I don't know, but I don't like it, whatever it is, Daniel told him as he reversed off the road and then swung back on to it, headed in the opposite direction.

  Daniel drove fast now, ripping up a long bank of dust behind the Landcruiser, slowing only for the fords through the steep dry water-courses and then accelerating away again. As he drove, it occurred to him that the gang could reach the headquarters camp by cutting across the loop that the road made down the pass of the escarpment. It would be a steep climb up on to the plateau, but on foot they could cut almost thirty miles off the longer route that Daniel was forced to follow. He estimated that the telephone lines had been cut about five or six hours earlier. He arrived at that estimate by a process of fieldcraft deduction which included a study of the erosion of the spoor and the recovery time of trodden-down grass and vegetation.

  He could not think of any reason why a gang of poachers sho
uld want to visit Chiwewe headquarters. On the contrary, he would expect them to give it the widest possible berth.

  However, their tracks were headed resolutely in that direction, and they had cut the telephone wires. Their conduct was brazen and aggressive. If Chiwewe was indeed their destination then they could be there already. He glanced at his wristwatch.

  Yes, they could have climbed the escarpment and, by hard marching, have reached the headquarters camp an hour or so ago.

  But why? There were no tourists. In Kenya and other countries further north the poachers, having depleted the elephant herds, had taken to attacking and robbing foreign tourists.

  Perhaps this gang had taken a tip from their northern counterparts.

  But there are no tourists at Chiwewe. There's nothing of value he broke off as the fallacy of that assumption occurred to him. Shit! he whispered. The ivory. Suddenly dread chilled the sweat on his cheeks.

  Johnny, he whispered. And Mavis and the kids. The Landcruiser was flying down the track now and he slid her into the first hairpin bend that led on to the slope of the escarpment.

  As he. came through the corner at speed a huge white vehicle filled the road directly ahead of him. Even as Daniel hit the brakes and swung the Toyota hard over he realised that it was one of the refrigerator trucks.

  He missed its front wing by a foot as he went up on to the verge and tore into a patch of scrub. He came to rest with the nose of the Toyota almost touching the trunk of a big mopane.

  Jock was thrown up against the dashboard by the deceleration.

  Daniel jumped out of the Toyota and ran back to where the refrigerator truck had managed to pull up, blocking his tailgate.

  He recognized Gomo, the senior ranger, at the wheel and called to him.

  Sorry! My fault. Are you okay?