The Elephant's Tale (10 page)

For much of the year she’d spent in Africa, Martine had been preoccupied with the San Bushmen. Accounts differed as to whether it was a Bushman legend or a Zulu legend or even just an African one that said that the child who rides a white giraffe will have power over all the animals. Regardless, it was the Bushmen, she felt sure, who held the key to her destiny.

Time and time again, their paintings had forecast the challenges she would have to face and overcome.

And yet in all these months it had never entered Martine’s head that she might meet a San Bushman in the flesh. Certainly not one taking photographs with a long-lens camera. She’d always imagined them to be living in some remote region of the Kalahari Desert in Botswana or in the far north of Namibia, too nomadic and wedded to the traditions of their ancestors to be touched by the modern world.

But this boy, who looked to be about fifteen, was not enigmatic or far removed from the modern world. He was right here and quite angry.

“Do you know how long I’ve been lying here, waiting for that shot? I’ve had to put up with cold, with cramps, with ants nibbling my toes, and a scorpion crawling over my leg. At one point a horned adder even came to inspect me. I survive all that, only to have two idiot tourist kids come by and start shrieking at the Oryx as if they’re pet donkeys.”

“Look, I’m really, really sorry,” said Martine. “How was I supposed to know I was interfering with your picture? I was only trying to stop the Oryx from goring each other. Anyway, you were camouflaged behind a blade of grass.”

To her astonishment, the boy let out a shriek of delighted laughter. He clutched at his stomach and laughed some more.

Martine began to get annoyed. “What’s so funny?”

“Camouflaged behind a blade of grass! I wish the elders of our tribe could hear you say that. They think I’m about the most useless hunter and tracker in San history. Which I probably am. Not that I care. All I ever wanted to be was a photographer, so I never bothered to learn any of that stuff. But then after my father . . . well, anyway now I wish I had, but it’s too late.”

“It’s never too late,” Ben assured him. “I’m an apprentice tracker. I could show you some stuff if you like.”

This brought on another fit of laughter. “
You?
What do you track—the Yeti when it makes midnight visits to your school playing fields?”

He looked them up and down and Martine was conscious of what a sight they must be. “You’re quite funny for tourist kids. And quite scruffy. Don’t they have showers at your hotel? Where are all the other people on your tour anyway? I didn’t hear an engine.”

“We have a slight problem,” confided Ben.

“A tiny one,” Martine added supportively.

“Yesterday morning, we flew in on a private plane from the Western Cape in South Africa. We were with some . . . friends. They stopped at an airfield a few miles from here and Martine and I went to climb the dunes. They didn’t realize we weren’t on board and flew away without us.”

The boy raised his eyebrows. “Your ‘friends’ didn’t notice you were missing, even though there were only a handful of you on this plane?”

“That’s right,” Martine said brightly. “They probably got carried away taking pictures of the scenery. Like you!”

“Let me get this straight. You fly all the way from South Africa, stop at an airfield in the middle of the Namib Desert and decide to go off exploring on your own. Despite the dangers, nobody objects. While you’re gone, your ‘friends’ abandon you in one-hundred-degree heat, with no food or water, and continue with their holiday as if nothing has happened?”

“It sounds worse than it is,” said Martine.

“Oh, I think it’s already pretty bad. With friends like that, who needs enemies?”

The boy looked at his watch. “All right, I’ll take you to the police station in Swakopmond. It’s about a six-hour drive from here, but lucky for you it’s on my way. Good thing for you that you ruined my shot, hey?”

“We’d really appreciate a ride, but you don’t need to go to the trouble of taking us to the police station,” Ben put in quickly. “If you drop us in Swakopmond, we’ll be fine. We’ll make a few phone calls and have this sorted out in no time.”

“Really?” said the boy. “I don’t suppose there’s anything you’re not telling me, is there? You’re not runaways or fugitives from the law, are you?”

Martine gave him her sweetest smile. “We’re just ordinary kids having the worst vacation of our life.”

“Right. If you say so.” He took some keys from his pocket. “Let’s go before it gets much hotter. My vehicle is parked behind those trees. Don’t look so worried. I know I look about fifteen because I’m so small, but I’ve just turned eighteen and I do have my driver’s license. I’m Gift, by the way.”

“Gift,” said Martine. “What a beautiful name.”

A shadow passed across the boy’s face. “It was my father’s choice. I don’t feel as if I’ve been much of a gift to him so far. Everything that’s happened to him is entirely my fault. But that’s another story. A long story. What are your names? Ben and Martine? All right, Ben and Martine, let’s hit the road.”

O
nce he’d recovered from the disappointment of missing out on his photo of the fighting Oryx, Gift was very friendly and chatty. Martine found it difficult to hide how in awe she was at being in the presence of a real San tribesman, even though he didn’t fit her picture of a Bushman at all. Especially when he turned up the rap music on the sound system of his four-wheel drive.

It took a while for her to recover from her initial shyness, but after that she couldn’t resist questioning him about the history of his tribe. He seemed surprised at her interest, but was more than willing to answer her. He told her how the San had been in southern Africa longer than any other indigenous people, and that their cave paintings dated back thousands of years.

For centuries they’d been skilled hunter-gatherers, living a nomadic life in harmony with nature. Then came the invaders. In the 1800s, white Afrikaaners moving in from South Africa and migrating Bantu tribes, who regarded the Bushmen as cattle thieves and lowlifes, brought so much pressure and conflict into the lives of the San that they were forced off their traditional lands and into the deserts of Botswana and Namibia. Their fragile, contented community began to crumble.

Many other things, such as the colonization of Namibia by Germany in the late nineteenth century, several wars, and the long struggle for independence, had contributed to destroying their way of life.

“Now we’re scattered to the four winds and there are many social problems in our communities,” Gift told Martine. “That’s one of the reasons I went away to school. My father wanted me to have a better life than he and his father did. Instead that was the start of all the trouble.”

He paused to slow his vehicle. It bucked and skidded as they descended into a rocky gorge. Martine hung out of the window, enjoying the coppery early-morning sunlight on her skin. The scenery had changed from red dunes to vast dry plains and hills ringed with terraces.

The colors of the landscape were extraordinary. Sometimes the soil was so white it glowed beneath the blue sky. Sometimes it was a warm brown and dotted with yellow flowers. Sometimes it was black and striped with mineral shades like purple, blue, and even green. They saw birds’ nests as big as African huts with multiple entrances and yellow birds darting in and out. Gift explained that they were the home of the community weaverbird and could weigh as much a ton. Some were so heavy they brought down trees or branches.

“Why was going to school the start of all the trouble?” Ben asked Gift. “Didn’t you want to go?”

Gift steered the four-wheel drive carefully along the winding, rocky trail. “I very much wanted to go. My dream is to become a famous newspaper photographer. Because of that, I wanted to get the best education I could.

“The problems came when I went to high school in Windhoek. I had lots of cool friends and it made me see my family and old friends differently. When I’d return to our village in the holidays, everything looked so rundown and shabby. People, including my father, seemed ignorant; set in the past. They weren’t part of the modern world at all. I had big fights with my father, Joseph. One night we argued after he told me he was unhappy with my attitude and was going to pull me out of school. I accused him of destroying my dream. I ran off into the desert. He came looking for me.”

He stopped. Martine thought she saw a tear roll down his cheek, but he swerved to avoid a bounding springbok and when she looked again it was gone.

“Oh, forget it,” Gift said roughly. “What’s the point in me telling you this when I’m never going to see you again? And anyway, you’re just two weird kids who’ve probably robbed a bank or something and are on the run.”

“If we were on the run, we’d have chosen somewhere other than a scorching desert wilderness,” Martine told him. “Look, we’ve still got a long way to travel. We might as well make conversation. What happened after you ran away into the desert? Did your father find you?”

Gift’s strong brown hands gripped the wheel. “That’s the terrible part. I came home the next morning, when I was hungry, to learn that my father had gone out searching for me. I felt sure he’d be back in a few hours. So did everyone else. But he never returned.”

There was the briefest of pauses. “Not only did he not come back that day, he never came back at all. That was a year ago.”

Martine stared at him in horror. “You mean, he just vanished without a trace?”

Gift focused on the road. “Without a trace. We sent our best trackers out to search for him and they didn’t find so much as a footprint.”

Martine’s heart ached for him. It was bad enough when you did know what had happened to your parents. It had to be a thousand times worse having no idea.

“What did the police say?” Ben asked.

“They think he was eaten by some wild animal. They don’t suspect foul play. My father was one of the most loved men in our tribe. He was an elephant whisperer.”

“I’ve heard of horse whisperers,” Ben said, “men and women who have a special gift for communicating with wild or traumatized horses. But what is an elephant whisperer? Surely you’d be trampled to death if you tried to whisper in the ear of a wild African elephant?”

Gift reached into his pocket and took out his wallet. He tossed it to Martine. “Show Ben the photo inside.”

Martine slipped the photo out of its sleeve and she and Ben studied it. It showed a San Bushman like the ones she’d seen in books. He was standing between two elephants. The female elephant had her trunk curled around his waist, and he had one hand resting on her trunk and one on the tusk of a massive bull elephant. His face was radiant with happiness.

“Those are wild elephants.”

Martine studied the picture again. “You mean, they’re wild elephants that have been tamed?”

“No, they’re totally wild. They’d gore you or me without blinking.”

“But how is that possible?” Martine returned the photo to its sleeve and handed the wallet back to Gift.

He put it in his pocket. “When my father was four years old, the San camp was raided by desert elephants. There was a drought and they were looking for food. During the raid, he was snatched by one of the elephants. My grandparents assumed he’d been dragged away and killed, but three months later he was found alive and well and living quite happily with a herd of elephants. They rescued him with great difficulty, and were shocked to find he was reluctant to come home.

“Ever since, he has been able to communicate with elephants. Whether they know him or not, they seem to accept him as one of their own. Or, at least, they did before he disappeared. People think I’m out of my mind, but I believe that the elephants would not have allowed anything to happen to him. I’m positive that I will find him one day and he’ll be living with elephants. I miss him so much.”

“If it’s any consolation, I know how you feel,” Martine told him.

“No offense,” Gift answered shortly, “but a kid like you couldn’t possibly understand how I feel.”

The car went quiet after that. They were passing a line of low, golden dunes that looked airbrushed and unreal, like a backdrop in a film set. Soon after that, they reached the little town of Swakopmond. Suddenly the sparkling sea was before them. Palm trees lined the beach.

The Germans had built Swakopmond during their occupation of Namibia, and the town looked a bit like a German film set. The architecture was German and the buildings spotlessly clean and prettily painted. The roads had names like Hendrik Witbool Street and Luderitz Street. Martine also spotted the Bismark Medical Center.

She nudged Ben. Leaning forward, he said, “Thanks for the ride, Gift. You’ve saved our lives. I don’t know what we’d have done if you hadn’t come along. We owe you. But we can manage on our own from now on. If you drop us somewhere around here, we’ll find a phone and call our friends.”

“Sure,” responded Gift, but instead of pulling over he stamped hard on the accelerator. He swerved around another car, made a dangerous turn at the lights, and screeched to a halt in front of the police station.

Ben grabbed at the door handle, but it was locked.

“Sorry about that, but I couldn’t afford to take any chances,” Gift told him. “You seem like nice kids, but it’s obvious you’ve told me a pack of lies about your so-called friends and their plane and their holiday. You’ve got thirty seconds to tell me the truth or I’m turning you in to the police.”

A
couple of lean, mean policemen, their hands resting casually on their gun belts strolled past the four-wheel drive. One of them turned as he passed and cast a suspicious eye over the vehicle and its passengers.

Martine’s blood pressure went through the roof as she imagined her grandmother receiving a phone call in England to say that her granddaughter and Ben were in jail in Swakopmond, charged with stowing away on a private plane and entering Namibia illegally and without passports.