“I wish you’d looked in the glass.”
“I couldn’t.”
“Just look at me. That’s how you are and I did it and there’s nothing you can do now. That’s how you look.”
“We couldn’t really have done that,” David said. “I couldn’t look the way you do.”
‘Well, we did,” Catherine said. “And you do. So you better start to like it.” xx
“We can’t have done that, Devil.”
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“Yes we did. You knew it too. You just wouldn’t look. And we re damned now. I was and now you are. Look at me and see how much you like it.”
David looked at her eyes that he loved and at her dark face and the incredibly flat ivory color of her hair and at how happy she looked and he began to realize what a completely stupid thing he had permitted.
Chapter Twenty-two
HE DID NOT THINK that he could go on with the story that morning and for a long time he could not. But he knew that he must and finally he had started and they were following the spoor of the elephant on an old elephant trail that was a hard packed worn road through the forest. It looked as though elephants had travelled it ever since the lava had cooled from the mountain and the trees had first grown tall and close. Juma was very confident and they moved fast. Both his father and Juma seemed very sure of themselves and the going on the elephant road was so easy that Juma gave him the .303 to carry as they went on through the broken light of the forest. Then they lost the trail in smoking piles of fresh dung and the flat round prints of a herd of elephants that had come onto the elephant road from the heavy forest on the left of the trail. Juma had taken the .303 from David angrily. It was afternoon before they had worked up to the herd and around it seeing the gray bulks through the trees and the movement of the big ears and the searching trunks coiling and uncoiling, the crash of branches broken, the crash
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of trees pushed over and the rumbling in the bellies of the elephants and the slap and thud of the dung falling.
They had found the trail of the old bull finally and when it turned off onto a smaller elephant road Juma had looked at David’s father and grinned showing his filed teeth and his father had nodded his head. They looked as though they had a dirty secret, just as they had looked when he had found them that night at the shamba.
It was not very long before they came on the secret. It was off to the right in the forest and the tracks of the old bull led to it. It was a skull as high as David’s chest and white from the sun and the rains. There was a deep depression in the forehead and ridges ran from between the bare white eye sockets and flared out in empty broken holes where the tusks had been chopped away. Juma pointed out where the great elephant they were trailing had stood while he looked down at the skull and where his trunk had moved it a little way from the place it had rested on the ground and where the points of his tusks had touched the ground beside it. He showed David the single hole in the big depression in the white bone of forehead and then the four holes close together in the bone around the ear hole. He grinned at David and at his father and took a .303 solid from his pocket and fitted the nose into the hole in the bone of the forehead.
“Here is where Juma wounded the big bull,” his father said. “This was his asizari. His friend, really, because he was a big bull too. He charged and Juma knocked him down and finished him in the ear.”
Juma was pointing out the scattered bones and how the big bull had walked around among them. Juma and David’s father were both very pleased with what they had found.