Wilbur Smith - Assegai

Leon laid the twin barrels of his rifle across the pad print to gauge its size, and whistled softly. His barrels were two feet long, and the diameter of the footprint was only two inches less. Applying the formula that Percy Phillips had propounded to him, he calculated that this bull must stand more than twelve feet high at the shoulder, a giant among a race of giants.

Leon jumped up and ran back across the riverbed. He scrambled up the bank and pushed his way through the undergrowth to where his three companions were huddled over the last scraps of honeycomb. ‘Lusima Mama and her sweet singer have shown us the way,’ he told them. ‘I have found the spoor of a great bull elephant in the riverbed.’ The trackers snatched up their kit and ran after him, but Ishmael scooped the remains of the honeycomb into one of his pots before he hoisted his bundle on to his head and followed.

‘M’bogo, this is veritably the bull that I showed you the first time we travelled together,’ Loikot exclaimed, as soon as he saw the spoor, and danced with excitement. ‘I recognize him. This is a paramount chief of all the elephants.’

Manyoro shook his head. ‘He is so old he must be ready to die. Surely his ivory is broken and worn away.’

‘No! No!’ Loikot denied it vehemently. ‘With my own eyes I have seen his tusks. They are as long as you are, Manyoro, and thicker even than your head!’ He made a circle with his arms.

Manyoro laughed. ‘My poor little Loikot, you have been bitten by blow-flies, and they have filled your head with maggots. I will ask my mother to prepare for you a draught to loosen your bowels and clear these dreams from your eyes.’

Loikot bridled and glared at him. ‘And perhaps it is not the elephant but you who has become old and senile. We should have left you on Lonsonyo Mountain, drinking beer with your decrepit cronies.’

‘While you two exchange compliments the bull is walking away from us,’ Leon intervened. ‘Take the spoor, and let us settle this debate by looking upon his tusks and not merely upon the marks of his feet.’

As soon as they had followed the spoor out of the riverbed and into the open savannah it became obvious that the bull elephant had been thoroughly alarmed by the sound of axe blows and their voices as they had raided the beehive.

‘He is in full flight.’ Manyoro pointed out the length of the bull’s strides. He had settled into the long swinging gait that covers the ground as fast as a man can run. They all knew that he could keep up that pace from dawn to dusk without pausing to rest.

‘He is going east. It seems to me that he is heading for the Nyiri desert, that dry land where there are no men and only he knows where to dig for water,’ Manyoro remarked after the first hour. ‘If he keeps up this pace, by sunrise tomorrow he will be over the top of the escarpment and deep into the desert.’

‘Do not listen to him, M’bogo,’ Loikot advised. ‘It is the habit of old men to be gloomy. They can smell shit in the perfume of the kigelia flower.’

After another hour they stopped for a swig from the water-bottles.

‘The bull has not turned aside from his chosen path,’ Manyoro observed. ‘Not once has he paused to feed or even slowed his pace. Already he is many hours ahead of us.’

‘Not only can this old man smell dung in the kigelia bloom, but he can smell it even in the flower between the thighs of the sweetest young virgin.’ Loikot grinned cheekily at Leon. ‘Pay him no heed, M’bogo. Follow me, and before sunset I will show you such tusks as will amaze your eyes and fill your heart with joy.’

But the spoor ran on straight and unwavering. Another hour, and even Loikot was beginning to wilt. When they stopped for a few minutes to drink and stretch out in the shade they were all quiet and subdued. Even though they had driven themselves hard since leaving the dry riverbed, they knew how far they had dropped behind the bull elephant. Leon screwed the stopper back on the water-bottle and stood up. Without a word the others came to their feet. They went on.

In the middle of the afternoon they stopped to rest again. ‘If my mother was with us she would work such a spell as would turn the bull aside and make him start feeding,’ said Manyoro, ‘but, alas, she is not with us.’

‘Perhaps she is watching over us, for she is a great magician,’ said Loikot brightly. ‘Perhaps she can hear me if I call to her.’ He jumped to his feet and broke into a leaping praise dance, hopping high in the air on his long skinny legs. ‘Hear me, Great Black Cow, hear me call to you.’ Leon laughed and even Manyoro grinned and began to clap in time to the dance.

‘Hear him, Mama! Hear our little baboon!’

‘Hear me, Mother of the Tribe! You have shown us the marks of his feet, now do not let him walk away from us. Slow his great feet. Fill his belly with hunger. Make him stop to feed.’

‘That’s enough magic for one day. Surely the bull cannot escape us now,’ Leon intervened. ‘On your feet, Manyoro. Let us go on.’

The spoor ran on. The bull was moving so fast that when it crossed areas of loose earth it kicked spurts of dust forward with each long stride. When Leon looked up at the sun his heart sank. There was no more than an hour of daylight left, no possibility of coming up with the elephant before darkness cloaked the spoor, forcing them to break off the pursuit until dawn on the morrow. By then he would be fifty miles ahead of them.

He was still gazing up at the sky so he bumped into Manyoro, who had stopped abruptly in his path. Both Masai were poring over the earth. They looked up at Leon and, with hand signals, urged him to remain silent. They were both grinning and their eyes shone. They had been revitalized and no longer showed any trace of fatigue. Manyoro indicated the altered spoor with an eloquent, graceful gesture.

Leon grasped that a little miracle had taken place. The bull had slowed, his pace had shortened, and he had turned aside from his determined flight towards the eastern escarpment of the valley. Manyoro pointed to a grove of ngong nut trees a quarter of a mile to their right. The tops of the trees were round in shape, taller and greener than the lesser trees surrounding them. He leaned over to Leon and placed his lips close to his ear. ‘At this season the trees are in bearing. He has smelled the ripe nuts and cannot resist them. We will find him in the grove.’ He took up a handful of earth and let it sift through his fingers. ‘There is still no wind. We can move straight in towards him.’ He looked back at Ishmael and signalled to him to stay where he was. Ishmael laid his bundle at his feet and lowered himself thankfully to the ground beside it.

With the two Masai still leading, they crept forward, moving from one patch of cover to the next, pausing to scan the forest ahead before going forward again. They reached the nearest ngong tree. The ground beneath it was littered with fallen nuts but the branches above were still thick with bunches of half-ripe ones. The bull had stood under this tree for a long time, picking up the hard nuts with the fingers at the tip of his trunk and stuffing them into his mouth. Then he had moved on. They followed his huge pad marks to the next tree, where he had fed again, then moved on once more. This time he had headed towards a shallow depression, above which only the tops of the nut trees showed. They crept forward until they could look down into it.

At the same instant all three saw the enormous black mass of the bull elephant. He was three hundred paces away, standing in the shade of one of the largest nut trees, angled half away from them. He rocked gently from one forefoot to the other, ears fanning lazily, trunk draped nonchalantly over the curve of the only visible tusk. The other was hidden from view by his massive bulk, but Leon stared at the one he could see, hardly able to believe its length and girth. To him, it seemed the size of a marble column from a Greek temple.