His father had known how he had felt about the elephant and that night and in the next few days he had tried if not to convert him to bring him back to the boy he had been before he had come to the knowledge that he hated elephant hunting. David had put no statement of his father’s intention, which had never been stated, in the story but had only used the happenings, the disgusts, the events and feelings of the butchering, and the work of chopping out the tusks and of the rough surgery on Juma disguised by mockery and railery to keep the pain in contempt and reduce its stature since there were no drugs. The added responsibility David was given and the trust that was offered him and not accepted he had put in the story without pointing their significance. He had tried to make the elephant alive beneath the tree anchored in his final anguish and drowning in the blood that had flowed so many times before but always staunched and now was rising in him so he could not breathe, the great heart pumping it to drown him as he watched the man who came
to finish him. David had been so proud the elephant had scented Juma and charged him instantly. He would have killed Juma if his father had not fired into him so that he had thrown Juma into the trees with his trunk and charged on with the death in him, feeling it as only another wound until the blood welled up and he could not breathe against it. That evening as David had sat by the fire he had looked at Juma with his stitched up face and his broken ribs that he tried to breathe without and wondered if the elephant had recognized him when he had tried to kill him. He hoped he had. The elephant was his hero now as his father had been for a long time and he had thought, I did not believe he could do it when he was so old and tired. He would have killed Juma too. But he didn’t look at me as though he wanted to kill me. He only looked sad the same way I felt. He visited his old friend on the day he died.
It was a very young boy’s story, he knew, when he had finished it. He read it over and saw the gaps he must fill in to make it so that whoever read it would feel it was truly happening as it was read and he marked the gaps in the margin.
He remembered how the elephant lost all dignity as soon as his eye had ceased to be alive and how when his father and he had returned with the packs the elephant had already started to swell even in the cool evening. There was no more true elephant, only the gray wrinkled swelling dead body and the huge great mottled brown and yellow tusks that they had killed him for. The tusks were stained with the dried blood and he scraped some of it off with his thumbnail like a dried piece of sealing wax and put it in the pocket of his shirt. That was all he took from the elephant except the beginning of the knowledge of loneliness.
After the butchery his father tried to talk to him that night by the fire.
“He was a murderer you know, Davey,” he had said. “Juma says nobody knows how many people he has killed.”
“They were all trying to kill him weren’t they?”
200 201
. .
“Naturally,” his father had said, “with that pair of tusks.”
“How could he be a murderer then?”
“Just as you like,” his father had said. “I’m sorry you got so mixed up about him.”
“I wish he’d killed Juma,” David had said.
“I think that’s carrying it a little far,” his father said. “Juma’s your friend you know.”
“Not anymore.
“No need to tell him so.”
“He knows it,” David had said.
“I think you misjudge him,” his father said and they had left it there.
Then when they were finally back safely with the tusks after all the things that had happened and the tusks were propped against the wall of the stick and mud house leaning there with their points touching, the tusks so tall and thick that no one could believe them even when they touched them and no one, not even his father, could reach to the top of the bend where they curved in for the points to meet, there when Juma and his father and he were heroes and Kibo was a hero’s dog, and the men who had carried the tusks were heroes, already slightly drunk heroes and to be drunker, his father had said, “Do you want to make peace Davey?”