holding Flynn's rifle across his chest. Flynn did not reply. He peered through the binoculars, swinging them slowly in an arc as he searched.
"He must he deep among the trees, I cannot see him from here." And he loosened his leg grip from the crotch and clambered down to where
Mohammed waited. He took his rifle and checked the load.
"Leave him, Fini," Mohammed urged softly. "There is no profit in it. We cannot carry the teeth away."
"Stay here," said Flynn.
Fini, the Allemand will hear you. They are close very close."
"I will not shoot, "said Flynn. "I must see him again that is all. I
will not shoot." Mohammed took the gin bottle from the haversack and handed it to him. Flynn drank.
"Stay here,", he repeated, his voice husky from the burn of the raw spirit.
"Be careful, Fini. He is an old one of evil temper be careful." Mohammed watched Flynn start out across the clearing. He walked with the slow deliberation of a man who goes in good time to a meeting that has long been prearranged. He reached the grove of fever trees and walked on into them without checking.
Plough the Earth was sleeping on his feet. His little eyes closed tightly in their wrinkled Pouches. Tears had oozed in a long dark stain down his cheeks, and a fine haze of midges hovered about them.
Tattered as battle-riven banners on a windless day, his ears lay back against his shoulders. His tusks were crutches that propped up the gnarled old head, and his trunk hung down between them, grey and stack and heavy.
Flynn saw him, and picked his way towards him between the trunks of the fever trees. The setting had an unreal quality, for the light effect of the low sun through the branches was golden beams reflected in shimmering misty green from the leaves of the fever trees. The grove was resonant with the whine of cicada beetles.
Flynn circled out until he was head on to the sleeping elephant,
and then he moved in again. Twenty paces from him Flynn stopped. He stood with his feet set apart, the rifle held ready across one hip, and his head thrown back as he looked up at the unbelievable bulk of the old bull.
Up to this moment Flynn still believed that he would not shoot.
He had come only to look at him once more, but it was as futile as an alcoholic who promised himself just one taste. He felt the madness begin at the base of his spine, hot and hard it poured into his body,
filling him as though he were a container. The level rose to his throat and he tried to check it there, but the rifle was coming up. He felt the butt in his shoulder. Then he heard with surprise a voice, a voice that rang clearly through the grove and instantly stilled the whine of the cicadas. It was his own voice, crying out in defiance of his conscious resolve.
"Come on, then," he shouted. And the old elephant burst from massive quiescence into full charge. It came down on him like a dynamited cliff of black rock. He saw it over the open rear sight of his rifle, saw it beyond the minute pip of the foresight that rode unwaveringly in the centre of the old bull's bulging brow between the eyes, where the crease of skin at the base of its trunk was a deep lateral line.
The shot was thunderous, shattering into a thousand echoes against the holes of the fever trees. The elephant died in the fullness of his run. Legs buckled, and he came toppling forward, carried by his own momentum, a loose avalanche of flesh and bone and long ivory.
Flynn turned aside like a matador from the run of the bull, three quick dancing steps and then one of the tusks hit him. It took him across the hip with a force that hurled him twenty feet, the rifle spinning from his hands so that as he fell and rolled in the soft bed of loose trash and leaf Mould, his lower body twisted away from his trunk at an impossible angle. His brittle old bones had broken like china; the ball of the femur snapping off in its socket, his pelvis fracturing clear through.
Lying face down, Flynn was mildly surprised that there was no pain. He could feel the jagged edges of bone rasping together deep in his flesh at his slightest movement, but there was no pain.
Slowly, pulling himself forward on his elbows so that his legs slithered uselessly after him, he crawled towards the carcass of the old bull.
He reached it, and with one hand stroked the yellowed shaft of ivory that had crippled him.
"Now," he whispered, fondling the smoothly polished tusk the way a man might touch his firstborn son. "Now, at last you are mine." And then the pain started, and he closed his eyes and cowered down, huddled beneath the hillock of dead and cooling flesh that had been Plough the
Earth. The pain buzzed in his ears like cicada beetles, but through it he heard Mohammed's voice.
Fini. It was not wise." He opened his eyes and saw Mohammed's monkey face puckered with concern.
"Call Rosa," he croaked. "Call Little Long Hair. Tell her to come." Then he closed his eyes again, and rode the pain. The tempo of the. pain changed constantly first it was drums, torn-toms that throbbed and beat within him. Then it was the sea, long undulating swells of agony. Then again it was night, cold black night that chilled him so he shivered and moaned and the night gave way to the sun. A great fiery ball of pain that burned and shot out lances of blinding light that burst against his clenched eyelids. Then the drums began again.
Time was of no significance. He rode the pain for a minute and a million years, then through the beat of the drums of agony he heard movement near him. The shuffle of feet through the dead leaves, the murmur of voices that were not part of his consuming anguish.
"Rosa," Flynn whispered, "you have come!" He rolled his head and forced his eyelids open.
Herman Fleischer stood over him. He was grinning. His face flushed as a rose petal, fresh sweat clinging in his pale eyebrows,
breathing quickly and heavily with exertion as though he had been running, but he was grinning.
"So!" he wheezed. "So!" The shock of his presence was muted for
Flynn by the haze of pain in which he lay. There were smears of dust dulling the gloss of Fleischer's jackboots, and dark patches of sweat had soaked through the thick grey corduroy tunic at the armpits. He held a Luger pistol in his right hand and with his left hand he pushed the slouch hat to the back of his head.
"Herr Flynn!" he said and chuckled. It was the fat infectious chuckle of a healthy baby.
Mildly Flynn wondered how Fleischer had found him so quickly in the broken terrain and thick bush. The shot would have alerted him,
but what had led him directly to the grove of fever trees?
Then he heard a rustling fluting rush in the air above him, and he looked upwards. Through the lacework of branches he saw the vultures spiralling against the aching blue of the sky. They turned and dipped on spread black wings, cocking their heads sideways in flight to look down with bright beady eyes on the elephant carcass.
"Ja! The birds. We followed the birds."
"Jackals always follow the birds, whispered Flynn, and Fleischer laughed. He threw back his head and laughed with genuine delight.