So the bulls would wander away from the herd, singly or in bachelor groups of three or four. Perhaps they also realized instinctively that the herd was likely to attract the hunters and they would be safer away from it. Sometimes they were only a few miles away, sometimes as far as thirty or forty, but they always seemed to be aware of the herd's location and would return when the cows were in season.
When the bulls were with the herd was the time there was most likely to be that sudden crash of gunfire, the squeal of wounded animals, and the headlong rush of huge panic-stricken bodies through the brush.
When Tukutela was a juvenile, under ten years of age, there had been six huge bulls associated with the herd, animals carrying thick shafts of ivory, but over the years he grew toward maturity, these were gradually whittled down. Each dry season one or more of them fell to the sound of rifle fire, and only the mediocre bulls, or those with worn or damaged ivory, remained.
By this time Tukutela had grown into an unusually large young bull and his tusks were beginning to develop, clean and white and sharp-pointed, already showing promise of what they would one day become. As he grew, so the matriarch, his dam, declined. Slowly the outline of her bones appeared through the folds and hangs of her wrinkled gray hide, so she became a gaunt and skeletal figure. Her sixth and last molar was already chipped and half worn away, she ate with difficulty, and the slow starvation age had begun. She relinquished her place at the head of the herd to a younger, more robust cow, and shambled along behind. On the steep places where the elephant road climbed the mountain passes Tukutela would wait for her at the crest, rumbling to bring her up over the difficult places, and he stood close to her in the night as he had as a calf.
It had been a dry season and the water holes were less than half full. The approaches to the water had been churned by the elephant herds and rhinoceros and buffklo to glutinous black mud, in some places deep as an elephant's belly, and it was here that the old matriarch stuck.
Lunging in an attempt to free herself, she fell over sideways and the mud sucked her down until only part of her head was clear.
She struggled for two days. Tukutela tried to help her, but even his enormous strength was of no avail. The mud held her fast and gave him no footing nor purchase. The old cow's struggles became weaker, her wild screams more feeble, until at last she was stiff and silent except for the hiss of her breathing.
It took two more days, and Tukutela stood beside her all that time. The herd had long since departed, but he remained. She gave no outward sign of passing from life to death other than the cessation of her harsh breathing, but Tukutela knew it instantly, and he lifted his trunk high and bugled out his grief in a cry that startled the wild fowl from the water hole in a cloud of noisy wings.
He went to the edge of the forest and plucked leafy boughs. He took them to the water hole and covered his dam's muddy carcass with them building for her a high green funeral pier. Then he left her and went into the veld.
He did not rejoin the herd for almost two years. By that time he was sexually mature and could no longer resist the scent of estrus the breeze brought down to him.
When he found the herd, it was gathered on the bank of the Kafue River, ten miles upstream from where it makes its confluence with the great Zambezi. Some of the herd members came out to meet him as he approached. They entwined their trunks with his and pushed their foreheads together in greeting, then allowed him to join the main body.
There were two cows in season, and one of them was an animal of similar age to Tukutela. She was prime, fat with good grazing and browsing the rains had raised. Her ivory was thin and very white, as straight and sharp as knitting needles, and her ears had not yet been torn or tattered by thorn and sharp twigs. She spread them now as she recognized Tukutela as her peer, and she came to twine her trunk with his.
They stood with their heads together, rumbling gently at each other, and then disentangled their trunks and began to caress each other lightly with the tips, moving down the length of each other's bodies until they stood head to tail.
The tips of the trunk are as sensitive and dextrous as the fingers of the human hand, and Tukutela reached down between her back legs and groped for her vaginal opening. She began to sway from side to side, rocking her whole body, an expression of extreme pleasure. As he manipulated her, so her estrus discharge flowed down freely, drenching his trunk, the aroma of it filling his head.
His penis emerged from its fleshy sheath, as long as a man is tall and as thick as one of his legs; the tip of it brushed the earth below his belly. Its length was variegated with blotches of pink and black, but the skin was smooth and shining and the head flared like the mouth of a trumpet. Elephants belong to the testiconda group, and his testicles were contained deep in the body cavity, so there was no external evidence of them.
When both of them were fully aroused, Tukutela nudged her gently down the bank and into the river. The green waters closed over them, intensifying their pleasure in each other, supporting their great bodies, buoying them up so they were light and nimble.
They submerged until only their trunks were above the surface, sporting together, bitaking out again like blowing whales, and the water poured off them in sheets, cleansing their gray hides of dust and dirt, darkening them to the color of coal.
Tukutela reared over her and placed his forelegs on each side of her back. In the water, she supported him easily. Her vagina was placed far forward between her back legs, and he needed all of his length to reach it. His penis took on a life of its own, pulsing and jerking and twisting as it flared upward to conform to the angle of her opening. Only the first third of its length was able to bury itself in her. His whole body shuddered and convulsed and both creatures trumpeted together and thrashed the waters to white foam.
He stayed with the herd three days, and then the female's estrus ended and Tukutela became restless. He had inherited his dam's instinct for survival, and he sensed danger with the herd. On the third day, he ghosted away into the gray thorn scrub. He went alone, with no other bull for company.
Each season when he returned to the herd he was stronger, his tusks longer and thicker, the vegetable juices darkening them to the color of alabaster. On occasion there were other bulls competing to service the females, and he had to fight for his right.
At first he was driven off by older, more experienced males, but each season his tusks and his cunning grew, until none of the other herd bulls stood up against him and he had his pick of the cows.
However, he never stayed more than a few days with the herd, and always he departed alone and sought out the places his dam had showed to him, the swamps inaccessible to man, the thickest forests, the tallest beds of elephant grass. It was as though he realized the danger those tusks would bring upon him.
In his thirty-fifth year he was a huge animal, weighing seven tons and standing over twelve feet at the shoulder. His tusks, though not anywhere as heavy as they would one day be, were perfectly symmetrical, long, and pointed.