For days after leaving the herd that season he had been unaccountably nervous. He moved restlessly, testing the air often, raising his trunk high and then puffing it into his mouth. Once or twice he detected it, but the acrid scent was faint, just a tiny shadow on his consciousness.
However, he could not keep moving endlessly. His huge frame required over a ton of grass and leaves and fruit and bark each day to sustain it. He had to stop to feed. In the early morning he stood in a dense grove of comb return trees, stripping bark. He used the point of a tusk to prize a gash in the bark, then he gripped the tag end in his trunk and with an upward jerk ripped loose a strip of bark fifteen feet up the hole of the tree. He rolled the bark into a ball and stuffed it into his mouth.
intent on his task, he relaxed his vigilance. An elephant has poor eyesight; he cannot distinguish stationary objects only a few yards distant, although he can instantly detect movement. Furthermore, his eyes are placed well back in the skull, impeding his forward view, and the spread of his ears tends to block his peripheral vision to the rear.
Using the small morning wind to negate the bull's marvelous sense of smell, moving with extreme stealth so his fine hearing was frustrated, the hunters approached him from behind, staying in his blind spot. There were two of them, and they had followed him ever since he had left the herd. Now they crept up very close to him.
The bull turned broadside to the hunters, ready to move on to the next tree, and showed them the long curved gleam of his tusks.
"Take him!" said one man to the other, and the Spanish maker of fine sherries lifted his double-barreled rifle, which was engraved and inlaid with gold, and aimed for Tukutela's brain.
Over his sights, he picked out the dark vertical cleft in the front of the ear and followed it down to its lowest point. That was where the actual opening of the eardrum was situated. Having found it, he moved his aim forward three inches along an imaginary line from the aperture of the ear toward the elephant's eye.
The Spanish sherry maker was on his first African safari. He had shot chamois and mouflon and red deer in the Pyrenees, but a wild African elephant is none of these timid creatures, and the Spaniard's heart was thudding into his ribs, his spectacles were fogged with sweat, and his hands shook. The professional hunter with him had patiently instructed him how and where to place his shot, but now he could not hold his aim on it, and every second his breathing became more labored, his aim more erratic. In desperation he jerked the trigger.
The bullet hit Tukutela a foot above his left eye and fifteen inches from the frontal lobe of the brain, but the honeycombed bony sponge of his skull cushioned the shock. He reeled back on his haunches, flung his trunk straight up above his head, and gave a deep roaring growl in his throat.
The Spanish hunter turned and ran, and Tukutela whirled to face the movement, launching himself off his haunches. The professional hunter was directly under his outstretched trunk, and he flung up his rifle and aimed into Tukutela's head, into the roof of his open mouth between the bases of the long curved tusks.
The firing pin fell on, dud primer with a click, the rifle misfired, and Tukutela swung his trunk down like the executioner's axe, crushing the man against the the earth.
The Spaniard was still running and Tukutela went after him, overhauling him effortlessly. He reached out his trunk and curled it around his waist. The man screamed and Tukutela tossed him thirty feet straight up into the air. He screamed all the way down until he hit the earth and the air was driven from his lungs.
Tukutela seized him by one ankle and swung his body against the trunk of the nearest tree with a force that burst the man's internal organs, spleen, liver, and lungs.
Tukutela raged through the forest with the corpse held in his trunk, beating it against the trees, lifting it high and slamming it down upon the earth until it disintegrated and he was left with only the stump of the leg in his grip. He flung that aside and went back to where he had left the professional hunter.
The blow from the trunk had shattered the hunter's collarbone, broken both his arms, and crushed in his ribs, but he was still alive and conscious. He saw Tukutela coming back for him, the long trunk dangling, the huge ears extended, blood from his wound dribbling down to mingle with the blood of the Spaniard that splattered his chest and front legs.
The hunter tried to drag his mangled body away. Tukutela placed one great foot in the center of his back, pinning him down.
Then, with his trunk, he plucked off his limbs, one at a time, legs and arms, tearing them away from the hip and shoulder joints, and throwing them aside. Finally he wrapped his trunk around the hunters head and pulled it away from the shoulders. It rolled like a ball bouncing across the ground as Tukutela hurled it from him.
His rage abated, overtaken by the pain in his head, and Tukutela stood over the bodies he had destroyed, rocking from one foot to the other, rumbling in his throat as first the pain and then the melancholy of death came over him.
Despite the pain in his head and the slow drip of blood into his eye from the wound above it, he began the ritual of death he had learned from his dam so many years previously. He gathered the parts of his victims, the squashed trunks and mutilated limbs, and piled them in a heap. He picked their accouterments out of the grass-rifles, hats, water bottles-and added them to the bloody pile. Then he began to strip the trees of leafy branches and to cover it all with a mound of green.
The bullet wound healed cleanly, but soon there were other scars to add to the little white star it left above his eye. A weighted spear from a deadfall trap opened his thick gray hide from shoulder to knee, and he almost died from the infection that followed. The spread of his ears caught on thorns and hooked twigs, the edges became tattered and eroded. He fought for cows when he joined the breeding herd, and although none of the other bulls could prevail against him, their tusks slashed and cut and marked him.
Then there were other encounters with men.
Despite the dire danger associated with it, that first taste of the sweet juice of the sugar cane so long ago had been addictive.
Tukutela became a compulsive garden raider. Sometimes he would lurk for days in the vicinity of a patch of cultivation, getting up his courage. Then, when there was no moon, in the deepest hours of the night, he would go in, stepping soundlessly as a cat on his big madded feet. Millet, maize, papaya, yams, he loved them all, but sugar cane he could never resist.
At first he allowed himself to be driven off by the flaming torches, the shouting, and the drums, but then he learned to answer the shouts with his own wild screams and to charge at the guardians of the forbidden gardens.
On separate occasions over the next ten years, he killed eight human beings in the course of his raids, pulling their bodies to pieces like a glutton dismembering a chicken carcass. He grew reckless in his greed for the sweet cane. Whereas after previous raids he would travel a hundred miles in a single nonstop march to distance himself from retribution, this season he began to return to the same field on consecutive nights.
The villagers had sent a message to the boma of the colonial district commissioner, begging for assistance. The D.C. had sent one of his ask ari armed with a.404 rifle and the ask ari was waiting for Tukutela. The ask ari was a Policeman and neither a great hunter nor marksman. He hid himself in a pit in the middle of the field, quite happy in his own mind that the elephant would not return to the field that night; for TuIkutela had already made a reputation for himself across his vast range and his habits were known. he was notorious as the garden raider who had killed so many villagers and who never returned to the scene of his crime.