Johnny lit a cigarette. Daniel had never been able to talk him out of the habit. They sat in companionable silence as they had so often before and watched the dawn come on more swiftly now, until that religious moment when the sun thrust its burning rim above the dark mass of the forest. The light changed and all their world was bright and glazed as a precious ceramic creation fresh from the firing oven.
The trackers came into camp ten minutes ago. They have found a herd, Johnny broke the silence, and the mood.
Daniel stirred and glanced at him. How many? he asked. About fifty.
That was a good number. They would not be able to process more, for flesh and hide putrefy swiftly in the heat of the valley, and a lower number would not justify all this use of men and-expensive equipment.
Are you sure you want to film this? Johnny asked.
Daniel nodded. I have considered it carefully. To attempt to conceal it would be dishonest. People eat meat and wear leather, but they don't want to see inside the abattoir, Johnny pointed out.
This is a complex and emotional subject we are examining.
People have a right to know. in anyone else I would suspect journalistic sensationalism, Johnny murmured, and Daniel frowned. You are probably the only person I would allow to say that because you know better. Yes, Danny, I know better, Johnny agreed.
You hate this as much as I do, and yet you first taught me the necessity of it.
Let's go to work, Daniel suggested gruffly, and they stood up and walked back in silence to where the trucks were parked.
The camp was astir, and coffee was brewing on the open fire.
The rangers were rolling their blankets and sleeping-bags and checking their rifles.
There were four of them, two black lads and two white, all of them in their twenties. They wore the plain khaki uniform of the Parks Department with green shoulder flashes, and though they handled their weapons with the casual competence of veterans they kept up a cheerful high-spirited banter. Black and white treated each other as comrades, although they were just old enough to have fought in the bush war and had probably been on opposing sides. It always amazed Daniel that so little bitterness remained.
Jock, the cameraman, was already filming. It often seemed to Daniel that the Sony camera was a natural excrescence of his body, like a hunchback.
I'm going to ask you some dumb questions for the camera, and I might needle you a little, Daniel warned Johnny. We both know the answers to the questions, but we have to fake it, okay? Go ahead. Johnny looked good on film. Daniel had studied the rushes the previous night. One of the joys of working with modern video equipment was the instant replay of footage. Johnny resembled the younger Cassius Clay before he became Mohammed Ali.
However, he was leaner in the face and his bone structure finer and more photogenic. His expression was mobile and expressive and the tones of his skin were not so dark as to make too severe a contrast and render photography difficult.
They huddled over the smoky campfire and Jock brought the camera in close to them. We are camped here on the banks of the Zambezi River with the sun just rising, and not far out there in the bush your trackers have come across a herd of fifty elephant, Warden, Daniel told Johnny, and he nodded. You have explained to me that the Chiwewe Park cannot support such numbers of these huge animals, and that this year alone at least a thousand of them must be removed from the Park, not only for the good of the ecology, but for the very survival of the remaining elephant herds. How do you intend removing them? We will have to cull them, Johnny said curtly. Cull them? Daniel asked. That means kill, doesn't it? Yes. My rangers and I will shoot them. All of them, Warden? You are going to kill fifty elephant today? We will cull the entire herd. What about the young calves and the pregnant cows? Won't you spare a single animal? They all have to go, Johnny insisted. But why, Warden? Couldn't you catch them, dart and drug them, and send them elsewhere? The costs of transporting an animal the size of an elephant are staggering. A big bull weighs six tons, an average cow around four.
Look at this terrain down here in the valley. Johnny gestured towards the mountainous heights of the escarpment and the broken rocky kopjes; and wild forest. We would require special trucks and we would have to build roads to get them in and out. Even if that were possible, where would we take them? I have told you that we have a surplus of almost twenty thousand elephant in Zimbabwe. Where would we take these elephant? There simply isn't space for them. So, Warden, unlike the other countries to the north such as Kenya and Zambia who have allowed their elephant herds to be almost wiped out by poaching and unwise conservation policy, you are in a Catch 22 situation. Your management of your herds of elephant has been too good. Now you have to destroy and waste these marvelous animals. No, Doctor Armstrong, we won't waste them. We will recover a great deal of value from their carcasses, ivory and hides and meat which will be sold. The proceeds will be ploughed back into conservation, to prevent poaching and to protect our National Parks. The death of these animals will not be a complete abomination.
But why do you have to kill the mothers and the babies?
Daniel insisted. You are cheating, Doctor, Johnny warned him. You are using the emotive, slanted language of the animal rights groups, mothers and babies". Let's rather call them cows and calves, and admit that a cow eats as much and takes up as much space as a bull, and that calves grow very swiftly into adults. So you feel Daniel started, but despite his earlier warning, Johnny was becoming angry. Hold on, he snapped.
There's more to it than that. We have to take out the entire herd.
It is absolutely essential that we leave no survivors. The elephant herd is a complex family group. Nearly all its members are blood relatives, and there is a highly developed social structure within the herd. The elephant is an intelligent animal, probably the most intelligent after the primates, certainly more intelligent than a cat or dog, or even a dolphin. They know, I mean, they really understand.
. . he broke off, and cleared his throat. His feelings had overcome him, and Daniel had never liked nor admired him more than he did at that moment. The terrible truth is, Johnny's voice was husky as he went on, that if we allowed any of them to escape the cull, they would communicate their terror and panic to the other herds in the Park.
There would be a swift breakdown in the elephant-social behaviour.
Isn't that a little far-fetched, Warden? Daniel asked softly. No. It has happened before.
After the war there were ten thousand surplus elephant in the Wankie National Park. At that time, we knew very little about the techniques or effects of massive culling operations. We soon learned. Those first clumsy efforts of ours almost destroyed the entire social structure of the herds. By shooting the older animals, we wiped out their reservoir of experience and transferable wisdom. We disrupted their migratory patterns, the hierarchy and discipline within the herds, even their breeding habits. Almost as though they understood that the holocaust was upon them, the bulls began to cover the barely mature young cows before they were ready.
Like the human female, the elephant cow is ripe for breeding at fifteen or sixteen years of age at the very earliest. Under the terrible stress of the culling the bulls in Wankie went to the cows when they were only ten or eleven years of age, still in puberty, and the calves born of these unions were stunted little runts. Johnny shook his head. No, we have to take out the whole herd at one stroke.
Almost with relief, he looked up at the sky.
They both picked up the distant insect drone of an aircraft engine beyond the towering cumulus clouds. Here comes the spotter plane, he said quietly, and reached for the microphone of the radio. Good morning, Sierra Mike. We have you visual due south of our position approximately four miles. I will give you yellow smoke. Johnny nodded at one of his rangers, who pulled the tab on a smoke marker.
Sulphur-yellow smoke drifted in a heavy cloud across the treetops.
Roger, Parks. I have your smoke. Give me an indication on the target, please.
-" Johnny frowned at the word target and laid emphasis on the alternative word as he replied. At sunset yesterday evening the herd was moving north towards the river five miles southeast of this position. There are fifty-plus animals. Thank you, Parks. I will call again when we locate them. They watched the aircraft bank away eastwards. It was an ancient single-engined Cessna that had probably served on fireforce duties as a K-Car, or killer car, during the bush war.
Fifteen minutes later the radio crackled to life again. Hello, Parks.
I have your herd. Fifty-plus and eight miles from your present position. The herd was spread out down both banks of a dry river-course that was gouged through a low line of flinty hills. The forest was greener and more luxuriant here in the drainage where the deep roots had found subterranean water. The acacia trees were in heavy pod. The pods looked like long brown biscuits, clustered at the tips of the branches sixty feet above ground level.
Two cows moved in on one of the heavily laden trees. They were the herd matriarchs, both of them over seventy years of age, gaunt old dowagers with tattered ears and rheumy eyes.
The bond between them was over half a century strong. They were half-sisters, successive calves of the same mother. The elder had been weaned at the birth of her sibling and had helped to nursemaid her as tenderly as would a human elder sister. They had shared a long life, and had drawn from it a wealth of experience and wisdom to add to the deep ancestral instinct with which they had both been endowed at birth.
They had seen each other through drought and famine and sickness.
They had shared the joy of good rains and abundant food. They knew all the secret hideaways in the mountains and the water-holes in the desert places. They knew where the hunters lurked, and the boundaries of the sanctuaries within which they and the herd were secure. They had played midwife to each other, leaving the herd together when the time was come upon one of them, and by their presence had fortified each other in the tearing agony of birth. They had stripped the foetal sac from each other's newborn calves, and helped discipline them, instruct them and rear them to maturity.
Their own breeding days were long past, but the herd and its safety were still their duty and their main concern. Their pleasure and their responsibility were the younger cows and the new calves that carried their own blood-lines.
Perhaps it was fanciful to endow brute animals with such human emotions as love and respect, or to believe that they understand blood relationships or the continuity of their line, but no one who had seen the old cows quieten the boisterous youngsters with raised ears and a sharp angry squeal, or watched the herd follow their lead with unquestioning obedience, could doubt their authority. No one who had seen them caress the younger calves with a gentle trunk or lift them over the steep and difficult places on the elephant roads could question their concern. When danger threatened they would push the young ones behind them and rush forward to the defence with ears spread wide and trunks rolled ready to fling out and strike down an enemy.
The great bulls with towering frames and massive girth might overshadow them in size, but not in cunning and ferocity.
The bulls tusks were longer and thicker, sometimes weighing well over one hundred pounds. The two old cows had spindly misshapen ivory, worn and cracked and discoloured with age, and the bones showed through the scarred grey skin, but they were constant in their duty to the herd.
The bulls kept only a loose association with the breeding herd. As they grew older they often preferred to break away and form smaller bachelor groups of two or three males, visiting the cows only when the heady scent of oestrus drew them in. However, the old cows stayed with the herd.
They formed the solid foundation on which the social structure of the herd was based. The tight-knit community of breeding cows and their calves relied heavily upon their wisdom and experience for its everyday needs and survival.
Now the two sisters moved in perfect accord to the giant acacia laden with seed pods, and each took up her position on either side of the trunk. They laid their foreheads against the rough bark. The trunk was over four feet in diameter, unyielding as a column of marble. A hundred feet above the ground the high branches formed an intricate tracery and the pods and green leaves a cathedral dome against the sky.
The two old cows began to rock back and forth in unison with the tree-trunk between their foreheads. At first the acacia was rigid, resisting even their great strength. The cows worked on doggedly, pushing and heaving, first one then the other throwing her weight in opposite directions, and a tiny shudder ran up the tree and, high above them, the top branches trembled as though a breeze had passed.
Still they worked rhythmically and the trunk began to move.
A single ripe pod came loose from its twig and fell a hundred feet to crack against the skull of one of the cows. She closed her watery old eyes tightly but never broke the rhythm of her heaves. Between them the tree-trunk swayed and shuddered, ponderously at first and then more briskly. Another pod and then another plopped down as heavily as the first drops of a thunderstorm.
The young animals of the herd realised what they were up to, they flapped their ears with excitement and hurried forward. The acacia pods, rich in protein, were a favourite delicacy. They crowded gleefully around the two cows, snatching up the scattering of pods as they fell and stuffing them far down their throats with their trunks.
By now the great tree was whipping back and forth, its branches waving wildly and its foliage thrashing. The pods and loose twigs showered down thick as hail, rattling and bouncing from the backs of the elephants crowded beneath.
The two cows, still braced like a pair of book ends, kept doggedly at it until the shower of falling pods began to dry up.
Only when the last one was shaken from the branches did they step back from the tree-trunk. Their backs were sprinkled with dead leaves and twigs, bits of dry bark and velvety pods, and they stood ankle-deep in the fallen debris. They reached down and delicately picked out the golden pods with the dextrous fleshy tips of their trunks and curled them up into their gaping mouths, their triangular bottom lips drooping open.
The ooze from their facial glands wetting their cheeks like tears of pleasure, they began to feed.
The herd was pressed closely around them at the feast that they had laid.
As their long serpentine trunks swung and curled, and the pods were shovelled into their throats, there was a soft sound that seemed to reverberate through each of their great grey frames. It was a gentle rumbling in many different keys, and the sound was interspersed with tiny creaking gurgling squeaks barely audible to the human ear. it was a strangely contented chorus, in which even the youngest beasts joined.
It was a sound that seemed to express joy of life and to confirm the deep bond that linked all the members of the herd.