His tusks would continue to grow in length and girth throughout his entire life even into his extreme old age, but the genes which dictated their extraordinary development came down from his dam along with all her other gifts of strength and bulk and intelligence.

  By the age of three, Tukutela had learned the attitudes of threat and submission towards others, and his play was boisterous with much ear-flapping and threatening and barging which further developed his unusually robust frame.

  Once his dam weaned him, her care became less intensive and he was allowed more range and freedom, though he still came under her fierce protection at the first threat, and on the march his place was close beside her in the lead, so very early on he learned the herd’s territory.

  This was a vast area, from the shores of Lake Nyasa in the north to the rain forests of the Chimanimani mountains in the south, west to the deep gorge where the Zambezi river forces itself between narrow rock cliffs with the roar of perpetual thunder and east five hundred miles to where the same mighty river spread out across wide flood plains and swampy littoral before debouching through multiple mouths into the Indian Ocean.

  He learned the mountain passes and the ancient elephant roads, he learned the groves where succulent fruits grew and the seasons when they ripened. She led him to burned-out savannahs just as the first tender green shoots pushed through the ashes and to the salt licks where for thousands of years the elephants had come to prise out lumps of mineral-rich earth with their tusks and eat it with all the relish of small boys with sticks of candy, over the centuries quarrying deep excavations in the red African earth.

  The herd was on the Mavuradonha mountains in the south when the msasa forests put out new leaf and their sap began to flow; they were in the dense rain forests on Mount Mlanje when the rest of the range baked in the long African droughts. Always the old cow led them to water, for the herd was totally dependent upon that precious fluid. They must drink each day or experience terrible hardship, they needed copious quantities to nurture their great bodies, to cleanse their hides and, more simply, for the luxurious pleasure of the wallow. The watering hole was an important gathering place for the herd, a place where their bonds were reaffirmed and where many of the rituals of their social behaviour were played out. Even the act of procreation usually took place in the water, and when the cows chose the place for their birthing, it was nearly always near water.

  Sometimes there was abundant water, the great green African rivers, the mountains upon which the perpetual drizzling rains fell, and the wide swamplands where they waded belly deep through papyrus beds to reach the islands. At other times, they had to dig for it in the dry riverbeds, or patiently wait their turn at the seeps to thrust their trunks into the deep eye of the secret well and suck up a bitter brackish mouthful at a time.

  Their range was wide, and their contact with human beings infrequent. There was a great war raging in a far-off land and it had sucked most of the white men to its centre. The men that the herd encountered were usually half-naked and primitive tribesmen who fled before them. Yet Tukutela learned very early that a special aura of dread surrounded these strange hairless baboon-like beings. At five years of age he could identify their peculiar acrid odour on a light breeze from many miles away, and even the faintest taint of it made him and the entire herd uneasy.

  Yet Tukutela was eleven years of age before he had his first memorable encounter with human beings. One night while following their time-honoured route along the south bank of the Zambezi, his dam had stopped abruptly at the front of the herd and lifted her trunk at full stretch above her head to scent the air. Tukutela had imitated her and become aware of a tantalizing odour. He had puffed the taste of it into his mouth and his saliva poured down and dribbled from his lower lip. The rest of the herd bunched up behind them and were almost immediately consumed by the same appetite. None of them had ever smelled sugar cane before.

  The old matriarch led them upwind and within a few miles they came out on an area of the riverbank that had been recently cleared and irrigated and planted with cane. The long sword-shaped leaves glistened in the moonlight, and the aroma was rich and sweet and irresistible. The herd rushed into the new fields, pulling up the plants and stuffing them down their throats in a greedy passion.

  The destruction was immense, and in the midst of it suddenly the herd was surrounded by lights and the shouts of men’s voices and the beating of drums and metal cans. Panic and pandemonium overtook the herd and as they charged out of the field there was a shocking series of loud reports and the bright flash of gunfire in the night. It was the first time Tukutela had ever smelled burned cordite smoke. He would remember it always and associate it with the squeals of those elephants who had been mortally hit.

  The herd ran hard at first and then settled into the long stride that covered the ground at the speed of a cantering horse. By morning, one of the young cows, her first calf under her belly, could no longer keep up with the herd and slumped down on her front knees, bright blood trickling from the bullet wound in her flank.

  The matriarch turned back to assist her, calling and encouraging her, but the cow could not rise, and the matriarch moved up beside her. Using tusks and trunk, she lifted the fallen animal to her feet and attempted to lead her away. It was in vain, for the dying animal slumped down and lay with her legs folded up under her, and the smell of her blood upset the herd and they milled about her, swinging their trunks and flapping their ears.

  One of the herd bulls, in a desperate effort to revive the fallen cow, mounted her in a stylized attempt at copulation, but a gout of arterial blood spurted from her wound and with a groan she toppled over on her side.

  Unlike most animals, the elephant recognizes death, especially in one of its own group, and even the immature Tukutela was affected by the strange melancholy that followed the cow’s death. Some members of the herd approached the carcass and touched it with their trunks, almost a gesture of farewell, before they wandered away into the grey thorn scrub.

  The matriarch stayed on when the others had left, and Tukutela stayed with her. He watched as his dam began to strip the surrounding trees of their branches and pile them over the carcass of the dead cow. Only when it was completely hidden under a great mound of vegetation, was she satisfied.

  The dead cow’s unweaned calf had stayed beside its mother’s corpse, and now the matriarch shooed it ahead of her as she followed the herd. Twice the calf tried to double back to where its mother lay, but the matriarch blocked it, turning it with her trunk and pushed it along.

  A mile away, the rest of the herd was waiting in a grove of yellow-stemmed fever trees. Many of the younger calves were suckling, and the matriarch pushed the orphan calf towards where one of the older calves, one almost due to be weaned, was showing only perfunctory interest in his mother’s dugs. She shoved the orphan between the cow’s front legs and instinctively the little animal rolled its trunk onto its forehead and reached up for the teat. The cow made no objection, accepting the role of foster mother with equanimity. The matriarch stood beside the pair rumbling to them encouragingly, and when she led the herd on, the orphan calf had displaced the older calf between the cow’s front legs.

  It seemed that from then on the herd’s contact with men bearing firearms became every season more frequent, especially when the bulls were with the breeding herd.

  The mature bulls kept a loose liaison with the breeding herd. They found the noisy and boisterous behaviour of the young animals annoying, and the competition for food demanding. No sooner would one of the bulls shake down a rain of ripe pods from the top branches of a tail thorn tree but a dozen youngsters would rush over to gobble them, or he would push over a msasa tree to get at the new leaf, leaning with his forehead against the trunk, and snapping the three-foot diameter of hard wood with a report like a cannon shot. Immediately four or five greedy young cows would push themselves in front of him before he could sample the juicy pink leaves.

  So the bulls would wander away from the herd, singly or in bachelor groups of three or four. Perhaps also they realized instinctively that the herd was likely to attract the hunters, and they would be safer away from it. Sometimes they were only a few miles away, sometimes as far as thirty or forty, but they seemed always to be aware of the herd’s location and would return when the cows were in season.

  When the bulls were with the herd, was the time that there was most likely to be that sudden crash of gunfire, and the squeal of wounded animals and the headlong rush of huge panic-stricken bodies through the brush.

  When Tukutela was a juvenile, under ten years of age, there had been six huge bulls associated with the herd, animals carrying thick shafts of ivory, but over the years that he grew towards maturity these were gradually whittled down. Each dry season one or more of them fell to the sound of riflefire, and only the mediocre bulls, or those with worn or damaged ivory, remained.

  By this time, Tukutela had grown into an unusually large young bull, and his tusks were beginning to develop, clean and white and sharp-pointed, already showing promise of what they would one day become. As he grew, so the matriarch, his dam, declined. Slowly the outline of her bones appeared through the folds and hangs of her wrinkled grey hide, so she became a gaunt and skeletal figure. Her sixth and last molar was already chipped and half worn away, she ate with difficulty, and the slow starvation of age had begun. She relinquished her place at the head of the herd to a younger more robust cow, and shambled along behind. On the steep places where the elephant road climbed the mountain passes Tukutela would wait for her at the crest, rumbling to bring her up over the difficult places, and he stood close to her in the night as he had as a calf.

  It had been a dry season and the waterholes were less than half full. The approaches to the water had been churned by the elephant herds and rhinoceros and buffalo to glutinous black mud, in some places deep as an elephant’s belly, and it was here that the old matriarch stuck.

  Lunging in an attempt to free herself, she fell over sideways and the mud sucked her down until only part of her head was clear.

  She struggled for two days. Tukutela tried to help her, but even his enormous strength was of no avail. The mud held her fast, and gave him no footing nor purchase. The old cow’s struggles became weaker, her wild screams more feeble, until at last she was still and silent except for the hiss of her breathing.

  It took two more days, and Tukutela stood beside her all that time. The herd had long ago departed, but he remained. She gave no outward sign of passing from life to death, other than the cessation of her harsh breathing, but Tukutela knew it instantly and he lifted his trunk high and bugled out his grief in a cry that startled the wild fowl from the waterhole in a cloud of noisy wings.

  He went to the edge of the forest and plucked the leafy boughs and he brought them to the waterhole and he covered his dam’s muddy carcass with them, building for her a high green funeral bier. Then he left her and went into the veld.

  He did not rejoin the herd for almost two years. By that time, he was sexually mature and he could no longer resist the scent of oestrus that the breeze brought down to him.

  When he found them, the herd was gathered on the bank of the Kafue river, ten miles upstream from where it makes its confluence with the great Zambezi. Some of the herd members came out to meet him as he approached, and they entwined their trunks with his and pushed their foreheads together in greeting, and then allowed him to join the main body.

  There were two cows in season and one of them was an animal of similar age to Tukutela. She was prime, fat with good grazing and browsing that the rains had raised. Her ivory was thin and very white, as straight and sharp as knitting needles, and her ears had not yet been torn or tattered by thorn and sharp twigs. She spread them now as she recognized Tukutela as her peer, and came to twine her trunk with his.

  They stood with their heads together rumbling gently at each other, and then disentangled their trunks and began to caress each other lightly with the tips, moving down the length of each other’s bodies until they stood head to tail.

  The tips of the trunk are as sensitive and dextrous as the fingers of the human hand and Tukutela reached down between her back legs and groped for her vaginal opening. She began to sway from side to side, rocking her whole body, an expression of extreme pleasure. As he manipulated her, so her oestrus discharge flowed down freely drenching his trunk and the aroma of it filled his head. His penis emerged from its fleshy sheath, as long as a man is tall and as thick as one of his legs; the tip of it brushed the earth below his belly. Its length was variegated with blotches of pink and black but the skin was smooth and shining and the head flared like the mouth of a trumpet. Elephants belong to the testiconda group, and his testicles were contained deep in the body cavity so there was no external evidence of them.

  When both of them were fully aroused Tukutela nudged her gently down the bank and into the river. The green waters closed over them, intensifying their pleasure in each other, supporting their great bodies, buoying them up so they were light and nimble.

  They submerged until only their trunks were above the surface, sporting together, breaking out again like blowing whales, and the water poured off them in sheets, cleansing their grey hides of dust and dirt, darkening them to the colour of coal.

  Tukutela reared over her, and placed his forelegs on each side of her back. In the water, she supported him easily. Her vagina was placed far forward between her back legs, and he needed all of his length to reach it. His penis took on a life of its own, pulsing and jerking and twisting as it flared upwards to conform to the angle of her opening. Only the first third of its length was able to bury itself in her. His whole body shuddered and convulsed and both creatures trumpeted together and thrashed the waters to white foam.

  He stayed with the herd three days, and then the female’s oestrus ended and Tukutela became restless. He had inherited his dam’s instinct for survival, and he sensed danger with the herd. On the third day, he ghosted away into the grey thorn scrub. He went alone, with no other bull for company.

  Each season, when he returned to the herd he was stronger, his tusks longer and thicker, darkening to the colour of alabaster with vegetable juices. On occasion there were other bulls competing to service the females, and he had to fight for his right.

  At first, he was driven off by older more experienced males, but each season his tusks and his cunning grew, until none of the other herd bulls stood up against him, and he had his pick of the cows. However, he never stayed more than a few days with the herd, and always he departed alone and sought out fastnesses which his dam had showed to him, the swamps inaccessible to man, the thickest forests, the tallest beds of elephant grass. It was as though he realized the danger that those tusks would bring upon him.

  In his thirty-fifth year, he was a huge animal, weighing seven tons and standing over twelve feet at the shoulder. His tusks, though not anywhere as heavy as they would one day be, were perfectly symmetrical and long and pointed.

  For days after leaving the herd that season he had been unaccountably nervous. He moved restlessly, testing the air often, raising his trunk high and then puffing it into his mouth. Once or twice he detected it, but the acrid scent was faint, just a tiny shadow on his consciousness.

  However, he could not keep moving endlessly. His huge frame each day required over a ton of grass and leaves and fruit and bark to sustain it. He had to stop to feed. In the early morning, he stood in a dense grove of combretum trees, stripping bark. He used the point of a tusk to prise a gash in the bark, then he gripped the tag end in his trunk and with an upward jerk ripped loose a strip of bark fifteen feet up the bole of the tree. He rolled the bark into a ball and stuffed it into his mouth.

  Intent on his task, he relaxed his vigilance. An elephant has poor eyesight, he cannot distinguish stationary objects only a few yards distant, although he can instantly delect movement. Furthermore, his eyes are placed well back in the skull, impeding his forward view and the spread of his ears tends to block his peripheral vision to the rear.

  Using the small morning wind to negate the bull’s marvellous sense of smell, moving with extreme stealth so that his fine hearing was frustrated, the hunters approached him from behind, staying in his blind spot. There were two of them and they had followed him ever since he had left the herd. Now they crept up very close to him.

  The bull turned broadside to the hunters, ready to move on to the next tree and he showed them the long curved gleam of his tusks.

  ‘Take him!’ said one man to the other, and the Spanish maker of fine sherries lifted his double-barrelled rifle which was engraved and inlaid with gold and he aimed for Tukutela’s brain.

  Over his sights, he picked out the dark vertical cleft in the front of the ear and followed it down to its lowest point. That was where the actual opening of the eardrum was situated. Having found it he moved his aim forward three inches along an imaginary line from the aperture of the ear towards the elephant’s eye.

  The Spanish sherry-maker was on his first African safari. He had shot chamois and moufflon and red deer in the Pyrenees, but a wild African elephant is none of these timid creatures, and the Spaniard’s heart was thudding into his ribs and his spectacles were fogged with his sweat and his hands shook. The professional hunter with him had patiently instructed him how and where to place his shot, but now he could not hold his aim upon it, and every second his breathing became more laboured, his aim more erratic. In desperation he jerked the trigger.

  The bullet hit Tukutela a foot above his left eye and fifteen inches from the frontal lobe of the brain, but the honeycombed bony sponge of his skull cushioned the shock. He reeled back on his haunches and flung his trunk straight up above his head and gave a deep roaring growl in his throat.