Elephant Song - Smith Wilbur - Страница 84

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She sat a little longer and listened to the forest.  It seemed at first to be a silent lonely place.  Only when the ear had learned to hear beyond the quiet did one realise that the forest was always filled with living sound.  The orchestra of the insects played an eternal background music, the hum and reverberation like softly stroked violins, the click and clatter like tiny castanets, the wails and whine and buzz like the wind instruments.

From the high upper galleries the birds called and sang and the monkeys crashed from branch to branch or [owed mournfully to the open sky, while on the leaf-strewn floor the dwarf antelope scuttled and scampered furtively.

Now when Kelly listened more intently still, she thought she heard far away and very faintly the clear whistle from high in the trees that old Sepoo solemnly swore was the crested chameleon announcing that the hives were overflowing and the honey season had begun.

Kelly smiled and stood up.  She knew as a biologist that chameleons could not whistle.  And yet .  . . She smiled again, settled her pack and stepped back on to the dim trail and went on towards Gondola.  More and more frequently there were landmarks and signposts she recognized along the trail, the shape of certain tree-trunks and the juncture of trails, a sandbank at a river crossing and blazes on the tree-trunks which she had cut long ago with her machete.  She was getting closer and closer to home.

At a turning in the trail she came suddenly upon a steaming pile of yellow dung, as high as her knee.  She looked about eagerly for the elephant that had dropped it, but already it had, disappeared like a grey shadow into the trees.  She wondered if it might be the Old Man with One Ear, a heavily tusked bull elephant that was often in the forest around Gondola.

Once the elephant.  herds had roamed the open savannah, along the shores of the lake and in the Lada Enclave to the north of the forest.

However, a century of ruthless persecution, first by the old Arab slavers and their minions armed with muzzle-loading black powder guns and then by the European sportsmen and ivory-hunters with their deadly rifled weapons had decimated the herds and driven the survivors into the fastness of the forest.

It gave Kelly a deep sense of satisfaction to know that, although she seldom saw them, she shared the forest with those great sagacious beasts, and that her home was named after one of them.

At the next stream she paused to bathe and comb her hair and don her Tshirt.  She would be home in a few hours.  She had just tied the thong in her braid and put away her comb when she chilled to a new sound, fierce and menacing.  She came to her feet and seized her digging-stick. The sound came again, the hoarse sawing that roughened her nerves like sandpaper, and she felt her pulse accelerate and her breath come short.

It was unusual to hear a leopard call in daylight.  The spotted cat was a creature of the night, but anything unusual in the forest was to be treated with caution.  The leopard called again, a little closer, almost directly upstream on the bank of the river, and Kelly cocked her head to listen.  There was something odd about this leopard.

A suspicion flitted across her mind, and she waited, crouching, holding the sharpened digging-stick ready.  There was a long silence.

All the forest was listening to the leopard, and then it called again, that terrible ripping sound.  it was on the riverbank above her, not more than fifty feet from where she crouched.

This time, listening to the call, Kelly's suspicion became certainty.

With a blood-curdling scream of her own, she launched herself at the creature's hiding-place brandishing her pointed stick.  There was a sudden commotion amongst the lotus leaves on the bank and a small figure darted out and scampered away.  Kelly took a full round-armed swing with her stick and caught it a resounding crack on bare brown buttocks.

There was an anguished bowl.  You wicked old man!  Kelly yelled, and swung again.  You tried to frighten me.  She missed as the pixie figure leaped over a bush ahead of her and took refuge behind it.  You cruel little devil.

She hounded him out of the bush, and he darted around the side, shrieking with mock terror and laughter.  I'll beat your backside blue as a baboon's, Kelly threatened, her stick swishing, and they went twice round the bush, the small figure dancing and ducking just out of range.

They were both laughing now.  Sepoo, you little monster, I shall never forgive you!  Kelly choked on her laughter.  I am not Sepoo.  I am a leopard.  He staggered with mirth and she nearly caught him.  He made a spurt to keep just out of range and squealed merrily.

In the end she had to give up and lean, exhausted with laughter, on her stick.  Sepoo fell down in the leaves and beat his own belly and hiccuped and rolled over and hugged his knees and laughed until the tears poured down his cheeks and ran into the wrinkles and were channelled back behind his ears.

Kara-Ki.  He belched and hiccuped and laughed some more.  Kara-Ki, the fearless one, is frightened by old Sepoo!  it was a joke that he would tell at every campfire for the next dozen moons.

It took some time for Sepoo to become rational again.  He had to laugh himself out.  Kelly stood by and watched him affectionately, joining in some of his wilder outbursts of hilarity.

Gradually these became less frequent, until at last they could converse normally.

They squatted side by side and talked.  The Bambuti had long ago lost their own language, and had adopted those of the wazungu with whom they came in contact.  They spoke a curious mixture of Swahili and Uhali and Hita with an accent and colourful idiom of their own.

With his bow and arrow Sepoo had shot a colobus monkey that morning.

He had salted the beautiful black and white pelt to trade at the roadside.

Now he built a fire and cooked the flesh for their lunch.

As they chatted and ate, she became aware of a strange mood in her companion.  It was difficult for a pygmy to remain serious for long.

His irrepressible sense of fun and his merry laughter could not be suppressed.  They kept bubbling to the surface, and yet beneath it there was something new that- had not been there when last Kelly had been with him.  She could not define exactly what had changed.  There was an air of preoccupation in Sepoo's mien, a worry, a sadness that dimmed the twinkle of his gaze and in repose made his mouth droop at the corners.

Kelly asked about the other members of the tribe, about Pambal his wife.

She scolds like a monkey from the treetops, and she mutters like the thunder of the skies.  Sepoo grinned with love undimmed after forty years of marriage.  She is a cantankerous old woman, but when I tell her that I will get a pretty young wife she replies that any girl stupid enough to take me, can have me.  And he chortled at the joke and slapped his thigh, leaving monkey grease on the wrinkled skin.  What of the others?  Kelly pressed him, seeking the cause of Sepoo's unhappiness. Was there dissension in the tribe?  How is your brother Pirri?  That was always a possible cause of strife in the tribe.  There was a sibling rivalry between the half-brothers.  Sepoo and Pirri were the master hunters, the oldest male members of the small tribal unit.

They should have been friends as well as brothers, but Pirri was not a typical Bambuti.  His father had been a Hita.

Long ago, further back than any of the tribe could remember, their mother while still a virgin had wandered to the edge of the forest where a Hita hunting-party had caught her.  She had been young and pretty as a pixie and the Hita had held her in their camp for two nights and taken it in turns to have sport with her.  Perhaps they might have killed her carelessly when they tired of her, but before that happened she escaped.

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