Elephant Song

by Wilbur Smith

  In the few short years since then, the forest had been hacked back as the land-hungry peasantry nibbled at its edges. They had toppled the great trees that had taken hundreds of years to grow and burned them where they fell for charcoal and fertiliser. The forest retreated before this onslaught. It was now almost five miles from the ferry to the edge of the tree-line.

  In between sprawling shambas with fields of plantains and manioc.

  The worked-out ground was being abandoned to weeds and secondary growth. The fragile forest soils could bear only two or three years of cultivation before they were exhausted and the peasant farmers moved on to clear more forest.

  Even when it reached the retreating forest edge, the road was no longer a tunnel through the trees, roofed over with a high canopy of vegetation as it once had been. The verges of the road had been cut back half a mile on each side. The peasants had used the road as an access to the interior of the forest.

  They had built their villages alongside the road and hacked out their gardens and plantations from the living forest that bordered it.

  This was the terribly destructive slash and burncultivation method by which they felled the trees and burned them where they fell. Those true giants of the forest, whose girth defied the puny axes, they destroyed by building a slow fire around the base of the trunk. They kept it burning week after week until it ate through the hardwood core and toppled two hundred feet of massive trunk.

  The road itself was like a deadly blade, a spear into the guts of the forest, steeped in the poison of civilisation. Kelly hated the road.

  It was a channel of infection and corruption into the virginal womb of the forest.

  Looking out of her peephole she saw that the road was wider now than she remembered it. The deep rutted tracks were churned by the wheels of logging and mining trucks and the other heavy traffic that had begun using it since President Omeru had been overthrown and the forest concession given to the powerful foreign syndicate to develop.

  She knew from her studies and the meticulous records that she kept that already the road had altered the local rainfall patterns. The mile-wide cutline was unprotected by the umbrella of the forest canopy.

  The tropical sun struck down on this open swathe and heated the unshielded earth, causing a vast updraught of air above the road. This dispersed the rain clouds that daily gathered over the green forest.

  Nowadays little rain fell along the roadway, although it still teemed down at the rate of three hundred inches a year upon the pristine forests only a few miles away.

  The roadside was dry and dusty and hot. The mango trees witted in the noonday heat and the people living beside the road built themselves barazas, thatched roofs supported by poles without walls, to shield them from the cloudless sky above the roadway. Without the forest canopy the whole Ubomo basin would soon become a little Sahara.

  To Kelly the road was the Sodom and Gomorrah of the forest. it was temptation to her Bambuti friends. The truckdrivers had money and they wanted meat and honey and women. The Bambuti were skilled hunters who could provide both meat and honey, and their young girls, tiny and graceful, laughing and big-breasted, were peculiarly attractive to the tall bantu men.

  The roadway seduced the Bambuti and lured them out of the fastness of the deep forest. It was destroying their traditional way of life. It encouraged the pygmies to over-hunt their forest preserves. Where once they had hunted only to feed themselves and their tribe, now they hunted to sell the meat at the roadside dukas, the little trading stores set up at each new village. , .

  Game was each day scarcer in the forest and soon, Kelly knew, the Bambuti would be tempted to hunt in the heartland, that special remote centre of the forest where by tradition and religious restraint no Bambuti had ever hunted before.

  At the roadside the Bambuti discovered palm wine and bottled beer and spirits. Like most stone-age people, from the Australian Aboriginals to the Inuit Eskimos of the Arctic, they had little resistance to alcohol. A drunken pygmy was a pitiful sight.

  In the deep forest, there was no tribal tradition that restrained the Bambuti girls from sexual intercourse before marriage.

  They were allowed all the experimentation and indulgence they wanted with the boys of the tribe, except only that intercourse must not be with a full embrace. The unmarried couple must hold each other's elbows only, not clasp each other chest to chest. To them the sexual act was a natural and pleasant expression of affection, and they were by nature friendly and full of fun. They were easy game for the sophisticated truckdrivers from the towns. Eager to please, they sold their favours for a trinket or a bottle of beer or a few shillings, and from the lopsided bargain they were left with syphilis or gonorrhoea or, most deadly of all, AIDS.

  In her hatred of the road, Kelly wished there was some way to halt this intrusion, this accelerating process of degradation and destruction, but she knew that there was none. BOSS and the syndicate were behemoths on the march. The forest, its soil, its trees, its animals, birds and its people were all too fragile.

  All she could hope for was to help retard the process and in the end to save some precious fragment from the melting-pot of progress and development, and exploitation.

  Abruptly the truck swung off the road and in a cloud of red talcum dust drew up at the rear of one of the roadside dukes.

  Peering from her peephole, Kelly saw that it was a typical roadside store with mud walls and roof, thatched with ilala palm fronds. There was a logging truck parked in front of it and the driver and his mate were haggling with the store-keeper for the purchase of sweet yams and strips of dried game meat blackened with smoke.

  Patrick Omeru and his brother began to unload some of the baskets of dried fish to sell to the store-keeper and as they worked he spoke without looking at Kelly's hiding-place. Are you all right, Kelly, I'm fine, Patrick. I'm ready to move, she called back softly. Wait, Doctor. I must make certain that it is safe. The army patrols the road regularly. I'll speak to the store-keeper; he knows when the soldiers will come. Patrick went on unloading the fish.

  in front of the duka the truck-driver completed his transaction and carried his purchases to the logging truck, He climbed on board and started up with a roar and cloud of diesel smoke, then pulled out into the rutted roadway towing two huge trailers behind the truck. The trailers were laden with forty-foot lengths of African mahogany logs, each five feet in diameter, the whole cargo comprising hundreds of tons of valuable hardwood.

  As soon as the truck had gone, Patrick called to the Uhali store-keeper and they spoke together quietly. The store-keeper shook his head and pointed back along the road. Patrick hurried back to the side of the fish truck. Quickly, Kelly. The patrol will be coming any minute now, but we should hear the army vehicle long before it arrives.

  The store-keeper says that the soldiers never go into the forest.

  They are afraid of the forest spirits. He pulled away the fish baskets that covered the entrance to Kelly's hiding-place, and she scrambled out and jumped down to the sun-baked earth. She felt stiff and cramped, and she stretched her body to its full extent, lifting her hands over her head and twisting from the waist to get the kinks out of her spine.

  You must go quickly, Kelly, Patrick urged her. The patrol!

  I wish I had someone to go with you, to protect you. Kelly laughed and shook her head. Once I'm in the forest, I will be safe. She felt gay and happy at the prospect, but Patrick looked worried. The forest is an evil place. You are also afraid of the diinni, aren't you, Patrick? she teased him as she shrugged her pack on to her shoulders.

  She knew that, like most Uhali or Hita, Patrick had never entered the deep forest. They were all terrified of the forest spirits. Whenever possible the Barnbuti were at pains to describe these malignant spirits and to invent horror stories of their own dreadful encounters with them. It was one of the Bambuti devices for keeping the big black men out of their secret preserves. Of course not, Kelly. Patrick denied the charge a little too hotly
. I am an educated man; I do not believe in djinni or evil spirits.

  But even as he spoke his eyes strayed towards the impenetrable wall of high trees that stood just beyond the halfmile wide strip of gardens and plantations. He shuddered and changed the subject. You will get a message to me in the usual way? he asked anxiously. We must know how he is. Don't worry. She smiled at him and took his hand. Thank you, Patrick. Thank you for everything. It is we who should thank you, Kelly. May Allah give you peace. Salaam aleikum, she replied. To you peace also, Patrick. And she turned and slipped away under the wide green fronds of the banana trees. Within a dozen paces she was hidden from the road.

  As she went through the gardens she picked the fruits from the trees, filling the pockets of her backpack with ripe mangoes and plantains.

  It was a Bambuti trick. The village gardens and the villages themselves were considered fair hunting grounds.

  The pygmies borrowed anything that was left untended, but stealing was not as much fun as gulling the villagers into parting with food and valuables by elaborate confidence tricks.

  Kelly smiled as she recalled the glee with which old Sepoo related his successful scams to the rest of the tribe whenever he returned from the villages to the hunting camps in the deep forest.

  Now she helped herself to the garden produce with as little conscience as old Sepoo would have evinced. In London she would have been appalled by the notion of shoplifting in Selfridges, but as she approached the edge of the forest she was already beginning to think like a Barnbuti again.

  It was the way of survival.

  At the end of the, last garden there was a fence of thorn branches to keep out the forest creatures that raided the crops at night, and at intervals along this fence, set on poles were grubby spirit flags and juju charms to discourage the forest demons and diinni from approaching the villages. The Bambuti always howled with mirth when they passed this evidence of the villagers superstition. It was proof of the success of their own subtle propaganda.

  Kelly found a narrow gap in the fence, just big enough to accommodate the pygmy who had made it and she slipped through.

  The forest lay ahead of her. She lifted up her eyes and watched a flock of grey parrots flying shrieking along the treetops a hundred feet above her.

  The entrance to the forest was thick and entangled. Where the sunlight had penetrated to the ground it had raised a thicket of secondary growth. There was a pygmy track through this undergrowth, but even Kelly was forced to stoop to enter it.

  The average Bambuti was at least a foot shorter than she was, and with their machetes they cut the undergrowth just above their own head-height. When fresh, the raw shoots were easy to spot, but once they dried, they were sharp as daggers and on the level of Kelly's face and eyes. She moved with dainty care.

  She did not realise it herself, but in the forest she had learned by example to carry herself with the same agile grace as a pygmy.

  It was one of the Bambuti's derisive taunts that somebody walked like a wazungu in the forest. Wazungu was the derogatory term for any outsider, any foreigner. Even old Sepoo admitted that Kelly walked like one of the real people and not like a white wazungu.

  The peripheral screen of dense undergrowth was several hundred feet wide.

  it ended abruptly and Kelly stepped out on to the true forest floor.

  It was like entering a submarine cavern, a dim and secret place. The sunlight was reflected down through successive layers of leaves, so that the entire forest world was washed with green, and the air was warm and moist and redolent of leaf mould and fungus, a relief from the heat and dust and merciless sunlight of the outside world. Kelly filled her lungs with the smell and looked around her, blinking as her eyes adjusted to this strange and lovely light. There was no dense undergrowth here, the great tree-trunks reached up to the high green roof and shaded away into the green depths, ahead, reminding her of the hall of pillars in the mighty temple of Karnak on the banks of the Nile.

  Under her feet the dead leaves were thick and luxuriant as a precious oriental carpet. They gave a spring to her step and rustled under her feet to give warning to the forest creatures of her approach. it was unwise to come unannounced upon one of the wicked red buffalo or to step upon one of the deadly adders that lay curled upon the forest floor.

  Kelly moved swiftly, lightly, with the susurration of dead Leaves under her feet, stopping once to cut herself a diggingstick and to sharpen the point with her clasp-knife as she went on.

  She sang as she went, one of the praise songs to the forest that Sepoo's wife, Parnba, had taught her. It was a Bambuti hymn, for the forest itself is their god. They worship it as both Mother and Father.

  They do not believe a jot in the hobgoblins and evil spirits whose existence they so solemnly endorse and whose depredations they recount with so much glee to the black villagers. For the Bambuti the forest is a living entity, a deity which can give up or withhold its bounty, which can give favours or wreak retribution on those who flout its laws and do it injury. Over the years she had lived under the forest roof Kelly had come more than halfway to accepting the Bambuti philosophy, and now she sang to the forest as she travelled swiftly across its floor.

  In the middle of the afternoon it began to rain, one of those solid downpours that were a daily occurrence. The heavy drops falling thick and heavy as stones upon the upper galleries of the forest roared like a distant river in spare. Had it fallen on bare earth with such force, it would have ripped away the topsoil and raked deep scars, washed out plains and scoured the hillsides, flooding the rivers and wreaking untold harm.

  In the forest the top galleries of the trees broke the force of the storm, cushioning the gouts of water, gathering them up and redirecting them down the trunks of the great trees, scattering them benevolently across the thick carpet of dead leaves and mould, so that the earth was able to absorb and restrain the rain's malevolent power. The rivers and streams, instead of becoming muddied by the torn earth and choked by uprooted trees, still ran sweet and crystal clear.

  As the rain sifted down softly upon her, Kelly slipped off her cotton shirt and placed it in one of the waterproof pockets of her pack. The straps would cut into her bare shoulders so she rigged the headband around her forehead and kept her arms clear as the pygmy women do. She went on, not bothering to take shelter from the blood-warm rain.

  Now she was bare-chested, wearing only a brief pair of cotton shorts and her canvas running shoes. Minimal dress was the natural forest way. The Bambuti wore only a loincloth of beaten bark.

  When the first Belgian missionaries had discovered the Bambuti, they had been outraged by their nakedness and sent to Brussels for dresses and jackets and calico breeches, all in children's sizes, which they forced them to wear. In the humidity of the forest these clothes were always damp and unhealthy and the pygmies for the first time had suffered from pneumonia and other respiratory complaints.

  After the constraints of city life, it felt good to be half-naked and free. Kelly delighted in the rain upon her body. Her skin was clear and creamy white, almost luminous in the soft green light and her small taut breasts joggled elastically to her stride.

  She moved swiftly, foraging as she went, hardly pausing as she gathered up a scattering of mushrooms with glossy domed heads and brilliant orange gills. These were the most delicious of the thirty-odd edible varieties.

  On the other hand there were fifty or more inedible varieties, a few of which were virulently toxic, dealing certain death within hours of a single mouthful.

  The rain ceased but the trees still dripped.

  Once she stopped and traced a slim vine down the trunk of a mahogany tree. She dug its pure white roots out of the rainsoaked leaf mould with a few strokes of her digging-stick. The roots were sweet as sugar cane and crunched scrumptiously as she chewed them. They were nutritious and filled her with energy.

  The green shadows crowded closer as the day died away and the light faded. She looked for a place to camp
. She did not want to be bothered with having to build a waterproof hut for herself, the hollow at the base of one of the giant tree-trunks would do admirably as a hearth for a single night. -Her feet still rustled through the dead leaves, even though they were now dampened. Suddenly there was an explosive sound, a rush of air under pressure like a burst motor-car tyre, only ten feet or so ahead of her. It was one of the most terrifying sounds in the forest, worse than the bellow of an angry buffalo or the roaring grunt of one of the huge black boars. Kelly leaped involuntarily backwards, from a steady run she rose two feet in the air and landed as far as that back in her own tracks.

  Her hand was shaking as she flicked the headband off her forehead and dropped the backpack to the leafy floor. In the same movement she dipped into one of the pockets and brought out her slingshot.

  Because of her slingshot the Bambuti had given her the nameBaby Archer.

  Though they mocked her merrily, they were really impressed by her skill with the weapon. Even old Sepoo had never been able to master it, though Kelly had tutored him repeatedly. In the end he had abandoned the effort with a haughty declaration that the bow and arrow were the only real weapons for a hunter, and that this silly little thing was only suitable for children and babies. So she had become Baby Archer, KaraKi.

  With one quick motion she slipped the brace over her wrist and drew the heavy surgical elastic bands to her right ear. The missile was a steel ball-bearing.

  On the forest floor ahead of her something moved. It looked like a pile of dead leaves or an Afghan rug patterned in the colours. of the forest, golds and ochres and soft mauves, striped and starred with diamonds and arrowheads of black that tricked the eye. Kelly knew that what seemed to be an amorphous mass was in reality a serpentine body, coiled upon itself, each coil as thick as her calf, but laced and camouflaged with cunning and seductive colour. The gaboon adder is, except for the mamba, Africa's most venomous snake.