‘Tell him it will only be for a few days, Sean. We all know how much that elephant means to Papa. I want to give it to him as my . . .’ she almost said ‘last gift’, but then she changed it, ‘as my special gift to him.’

  ‘I can’t accept it, tesoro.’ Riccardo’s voice was gruff but blurred and he lowered his head to hide his feelings.

  ‘Make him go, Sean,’ Claudia insisted, and gripped his forearm firmly. ‘Tell him I’ll be as safe here with Job to look after me as I would be in the swamp with the two of you.’

  ‘She just may have a point, Capo,’ Sean said. ‘But, hell, it’s not my business. It’s between the two of you.’

  ‘Will you leave us alone, Sean?’ Claudia asked, and then without waiting for a reply, she turned to her father. ‘Come and sit here next to me, Papa.’ She patted the ground beside her. Sean stood up and walked away, leaving them together in the gathering darkness.

  He went to sit beside Job. They sat in the companionable silence of old friends, drinking tea and smoking one of Sean’s last cheroots, passing it back and forth between them.

  An hour passed. It was entirely dark before Riccardo came to where the two of them sat. He stood over them and his voice was rough and drawn with sadness.

  ‘All right, Sean,’ he said. ‘She has convinced me to do as she wants. Will you make the arrangements to go on with the hunt first thing tomorrow morning? And, Job, will you stay here and look after my little girl for me?’

  ‘I’ll look after her for you, sir,’ he agreed. ‘You just go kill that elephant. We’ll be here when you come back.’

  Working in the moonlight they moved out of the burned-out village and built a fly camp a few hundred metres back in the forest.

  They made a lean-to shelter for Claudia and under it placed a mattress of cut grass. Sean left the medical kit and most of their remaining provisions in the shelter with her. He detailed both Job and Dedan to remain with Claudia. Job would keep the light 30/06 rifle with the fibreglass stock, and Dedan had his axe and skinning knife.

  ‘Send Dedan back to keep an eye on the isthmus. Any Frelimo or Renamo patrols will come that way. At the first sign of trouble, get the girl into the swamp and hide out on one of the islands.’ Sean gave Job his final orders, and then sauntered across to where Riccardo was taking leave of his daughter.

  ‘Are you ready, Capo?’

  Riccardo stood up quickly and walked away from Claudia without looking back.

  ‘Don’t get into any more trouble,’ Sean told her.

  ‘You neither.’ She looked up at him. ‘And Sean, take care of Papa for me.’

  He squatted down in front of her and offered her his hand as he would have if she had been a man, and he tried to think of something witty to say, but he could not.

  ‘Okay, then?’ he asked instead.

  ‘Okay, then,’ she agreed, and he stood up and walked down to the edge of the swamp where Matatu and Pumula and Riccardo were waiting for him beside the dugout canoe.

  Matatu took up his position in the bows of the frail craft, Sean and Riccardo were amidships, sitting on their depleted packs and holding their rifles across their laps. Pumula stood in the stern with one of the freshly cut punt poles and propelled the dugout in response to Matatu’s hand signals.

  Within seconds of pushing off from the bank, they were surrounded by a high palisade of papyrus, and their view was restricted to the wall of reeds and the small patch of lemon-yellow dawn sky overhead. As they passed, the sharp pointed leaves of the reeds were dashed into their faces, threatening their eyes, and the webs that the tiny swamp spiders had spun between the stems of the reeds wrapped over their faces, sticky and irritating. The night’s clammy chill hung over the swamp and when they came out suddenly into an open lagoon, there was a heavy mist lying over the surface and a flock of whistling duck alarmed the dawn with the clatter of their wings.

  The dugout was heavily overloaded with the four men aboard. There was only an inch or so of freeboard and if any one of them moved suddenly, water slopped on board and they were forced to use the tea billy to bail almost continually, but Matatu signalled them on.

  The sun rose above the papyrus and immediately the mist twisted into rising tendrils and then was gone. The water lilies opened their cerulean blossoms and turned them to face the sunrise. Twice they saw large crocodiles lying with just their eye-knuckles exposed. They sank below the surface as the dugout slid towards them.

  The swamps were alive with birds. Bitterns and secretive night herons lurked in the reed-beds, little chocolate-brown jacanas danced over the lily pads on their long legs, while goliath herons as tall as a man fished the back waters of the lagoons. Overhead winged formations of pelicans and white egrets, cormorants and darters with serpentine necks, and huge flocks of wild duck of a dozen different species.

  The heat built up swiftly and was reflected from the surface of the water into their faces so that the two white men were soon sweating through their shirts. At places the water was only a few inches deep and they were forced to climb out and drag the dugout through to the next channel or lagoon. Under the matted reeds the mud was black and foul-smelling and reached to their knees.

  In the shallower places the elephant’s pads had left deep circular water-filled craters in the mudbanks. The spoor of the old bull led them deeper and ever deeper into the swamplands, but there was consolation in the swift progress that the dugout made across the lagoons and channels, thrust on by the long punt pole. For a while, Sean spelled Pumula in the stern but soon Pumula could no longer abide his clumsy strokes and took the pole away from him.

  There was only room for one man to stretch out in the bottom of the dugout. Riccardo slept in it that night, while the others sat waist-deep in the mud, leaning against the hull of the canoe and took what rest the clouds of mosquitoes allowed them.

  Early the following morning, when Sean stood up out of the mud, he found that his bare legs were swarming with black leeches. The repulsive worms were attached to his skin, bloated with the blood they had sucked from him. Sean used a little of their precious supply of salt to rid himself of them. To pull them loose would leave a wound into which the leech had injected anti-coagulants and which would continue to bleed profusely and probably become infected. However, a dab of salt on each leech made them twist and contort with agony and fall off leaving only a sealed wound on the skin.

  When he opened his trousers, Sean found that they had crawled up into the cleft between his buttocks and were hanging like black grapes from his genitalia. He shuddered with horror as he worked on them, while safely in the dugout Riccardo watched with interest and made facetious comment:

  ‘Hey, Sean, this must be the first time you’ve ever objected to a bit of head!’

  Sean set the end of the punt pole in the mud and steadied it while Matatu shinned up it like a monkey and peered ahead. When he came down he told Sean, ‘I can see the islands. We are very close. We will be there before noon, and unless Tukutela has heard us, he will be on one of the islands.’

  Sean knew from flights over the area and from study of his large-scale map that the islands formed a chain between the swamplands and the main channel of the Zambezi. They dragged the dugout through the shallows, Sean hauling on the nylon rope tied to the bows, and Pumula and Matatu shoving in the stern. When Riccardo offered to assist, Sean told him, ‘Take a free ride, Capo. I want you nicely rested so that you don’t have any excuses if you mess up your shot at Tukutela.’

  At last Sean saw the fronds of the palm trees rising above the screen of papyrus ahead, and abruptly the water deepened, and he went under to his chin. He dragged himself out and they all clambered back on board. Pumula poled them through to the first island. The vegetation was so dense that it overhung the water, and they had to push their way through to reach the shore.

  The earth was grey and sandy, leached by a million floods, but it was good to have dry land under foot. Sean spread out their wet clothing and equipment to dry while Matatu slipped away to make a circuit of the island. The water had just boiled in the billy when Matatu was back.

  ‘Yes,’ he nodded at Sean. ‘He passed here yesterday early, while we were leaving the village, but he has settled down now. The peace of the river is upon him, and he feeds quietly. He left this island at sunrise this morning.’

  ‘Which way did he go?’ Sean asked, and Matatu pointed.

  ‘There is another larger island close by.’

  ‘Let’s take a look.’

  Sean poured a mug of tea for Riccardo and left him with Pumula, while he and Matatu skirted the northern shore, forcing their way through the dense growth until they reached the base of the tallest tree on the island and climbed into its top branches.

  Sean settled into a high crotch of the tree, snapped off the few leafy twigs that obscured his view and gazed out on a scene of magnificent desolation.

  He was sixty feet above the island and could see to the misty horizon. The Zambezi flowed past the island. Its waters were an opaque glassy green so wide that distance had reduced the great trees that lined the far bank to a dark band that separated green water from the high alps of cumulus cloud that soared anvil-headed into the blue African sky.

  The Zambezi flowed so swiftly that its surface was ruffled by eddies and whirlpools and wayward counter currents. Floating carpets of swamp grass had been torn loose by the current and sailed past, seeming as substantial as the island beneath him. Sean thought about crossing that forbidding river in the frail dugout. It would take more than one trip to get them all across and he abandoned the idea. There was only one way out, and that was back the way they had come.

  He transferred all his attention to the chain of islands which stood like sentinels between the mother river and her spreading swamps. The nearest island in the chain was three hundred metres away; the channel between was clogged with reeds and water hyacinth and lily pads. The blooms of the water lilies were spots of electric blue against the green water and even in the tree-top Sean could catch wafts of their perfume.

  Sean raised his binoculars and meticulously swept the channel and the nearest shore of the island, for even a great elephant could be swallowed up by the sweep and magnitude of this land- and waterscape.

  Suddenly his nerves jumped as he saw movement weighty and ponderous in the reeds and the gleam of wet hide in the sunlight. His excitement was stillborn, followed by the pull of disappointment in his guts, as he recognized the broad misshapen head of a hippopotamus emerging from the swamps.

  In the lens of his binoculars he could see the pink-shot piggy eyes and the bristles in the disproportionately tiny ears. The hippo fluttered them like the wings of a bird, shaking off the droplets that sparkled like diamond chips, forming a halo above its huge head. It plodded through the mud, crossing from one lagoon to another, pausing only to loose an explosive jet of liquid dung that it splattered with a violent stirring motion of its stubby tail. The force of this discharge flattened the reeds behind the obese animal.

  With relief, Sean watched it move on and submerge itself in the further lagoon. The rotten hull of the dugout would have offered no protection from those heavy curved tusks in the gape of huge jaws.

  At last Sean glanced across at Matatu in the fork beside him, and the little Ndorobo shook his head.

  ‘He has moved on, so must we.’

  They scrambled down to the ground and went back to where they had left Riccardo. The voyage in the mokorro and a good night’s sleep had invigorated him. He was on his feet, impatient and eager for the hunt, the way Sean had known him before.

  ‘Anything?’ he demanded.

  ‘No.’ Sean shook his head. ‘But Matatu reckons we are close. Absolute silence from now on.’

  While they loaded the dugout, Sean gulped a mug of the scalding tea and kicked sand over the fire.

  They punted and pushed the canoe across the channel to the next island, and once again Sean climbed into a tree-top while Matatu scurried into the dense undergrowth to pick up the elephant’s spoor again. He was back within fifteen minutes and Sean slid out of the tree to meet him.

  ‘He has moved on,’ Matatu whispered. ‘But the wind is bad.’ He looked grave, and took the ash bag from his loin-cloth and shook out a puff of powdery white ash to demonstrate. ‘See how it turns and changes like the fancy of a Shangane whore.’

  Sean nodded and before they crossed to the next island he stripped off his sleeveless bush shirt. Naked from the waist up he could feel instantly the slightest vagary of the breeze on the sensitive skin of his upper body.

  On the next island they found where Tukutela had left the water to go ashore, and the mud he had smeared on the brush as he passed was still slightly damp. Matatu shivered with excitement like a good dog getting his first whiff of the bird.

  They left the canoe and crept forward, feeling their way through the heavy bush, thankful for the breeze that clattered the palm fronds overhead to cover the small sounds of their footfalls in the dead leaves and dry twigs. They found where the old elephant had shaken down the nuts from one of the palms and stuffed them down his throat without chewing them with his last worn set of molars, but he had moved on again.

  ‘Run?’ Sean whispered, fearful that the bull might have sensed their presence, but Matatu reassured him with a quick shake of his head and pointed to the green twigs that the elephant had stripped of bark and left scattered along his tracks. The raw twigs had not completely dried out, but the spoor led them on a meandering beat across the island and then once more plunged into the channel on the far side. They sent Pumula back to bring the dugout around to where they waited and when he arrived piled Riccardo into it and pushed him across, wading waist-deep beside him, moving stealthily and silently until they reached the next island.

  Here they found a pile of dung, spongy and soft with reeds and hyacinth that the bull had eaten, and beside it the splash mark of his urine as though a garden hose had been played upon the earth. It was still so wet that Sean scooped a handful of the dirt and moulded it into a ball like a child’s mud cake. The pile of dung had a dry crust but when Matatu thrust his foot into it, it was moist as porridge and he exclaimed with delight at the body heat still trapped within.

  ‘Close, very close!’ he whispered excitedly.

  Instinctively Sean reached for the cartridges looped on his belt and he changed them for those in the double-barrelled rifle, careful to mute the click of the rifle’s sidelock as he closed it. Riccardo recognized the gesture, he had seen it so often before and he grinned with excitement and clicked the Rigby’s safety-catch on and off, on and off. They crept forward in single file, but disappointment dragged them down again as the spoor led them across the island, and then on the far side once more entered the papyrus beds.

  They stood facing the wall of reeds, staring at the point where Tukutela had pushed down the stems as he went through. One of the flattened stems quivered and began slowly to rise into its original position. The elephant must have passed only minutes ahead of them. They stood in a frozen group, straining to listen beyond the susurration of the wind in the papyrus.

  Then they heard it, the low rumble like summer thunder heard at a great distance, the sound that an elephant makes in his throat when he is content and at peace. It is a sound that carries much farther than its volume would suggest, but nevertheless Sean knew that the bull was not more than a hundred yards ahead of them and he laid his hand on Riccardo’s arm and drew him gently up alongside him.

  ‘We have to be careful of the wind,’ he began in a whisper, and then they heard the swish and rush of water sucked up in the bull’s trunk and squirted back over his own shoulders to cool himself, and they caught a brief glimpse of the black tip of his trunk as he lifted it high above the tops of the papyrus ahead of them.

  Their excitement was so intense that Sean felt his throat closed and dry, and his whisper was rough.

  ‘Back off!’

  He made a cut-out hand signal which Matatu obeyed instantly, and they backed away, a stealthy pace at a time, Sean leading Riccardo by the arm. As soon as they were into the undergrowth Riccardo demanded in a furious whisper, ‘What the hell, we were so close.’

  ‘Too close,’ Sean told him grimly. ‘Without any chance of a shot in the papyrus. If the wind had swung just a few degrees it would have been over before it began. We have to let him get across to the next island before we can close in.’

  He led Riccardo back faster, and then stopped below the outspread branches of a tall strangler fig.

  ‘Let’s take a look,’ he ordered. They propped their rifles at the base of the trunk, and Sean helped Riccardo to reach the first branch and then followed him as he climbed upwards from branch to branch.

  Near the top of the fig they found a secure stance and Sean steadied Riccardo with a hand on his shoulder, and they stared down into the papyrus beds.

  They saw him immediately. Tukutela’s back rose above the reeds. It was wet and charcoal-black from the spray of his trunk, the spine was curved and prominent beneath the rough wrinkled hide. He was faced away from them, his huge ears flapping lazily, the edges torn and tattered, the thick veins twisted and knotted like a nest of serpents beneath the smoother skin behind their wide spread.

  A row of four egrets rode upon his back, perched along his spine, brilliant white in the sunlight with yellow bills, sitting hunched up but attentive, bright-eyed sentinels who would warn the old bull at the first approach of danger.

  While he was in the water, there was no way that they could come at him and he was well over three hundred yards away, far beyond effective rifle shot. So they watched him from the tree-top as he made his slow majestic way across the channel towards the next island.

  When Tukutela reached the deepest stretch of open water he submerged completely; only his trunk rose above the surface, waving and coiling in the air like the head of a sea-serpent. He emerged on the far side of the channel with water streaming down his darkly mountainous sides.