The Child's Elephant Read Online Free

was going to look for my father, she said, and I couldn’t go with her. She just handed me over like a bundle of washing to a neighbour. She asked her to take me to the home of my aunt. And that’s what the woman did. I was handed over . . . again . . . and I’ve been here ever since.’
    She paused for a moment. Bat wondered if she was crying. He stole a quick slantwise look but, although Muka’s lips trembled, her eyes remained quite dry. ‘Auntie thinks that my mother will come back and fetch me,’ she whispered, ‘but I don’t suppose she ever will. I don’t even think she’s alive any more.’
    ‘What about your father?’
    Muka just shrugged. ‘I don’t know. I don’t know him.’
    A long silence hung between them. When Muka eventually turned she saw that it was Bat who was crying. The tears were spilling from the rims of his eyes, hanging in sparkles at the end of his lashes, rolling in big shiny drops down his cheeks. Seeing her looking, he hastily wiped them away.
    ‘I don’t know my father either,’ he said and, stretching out a hand, he reached over for Kila, letting his fingers ripple down the loose folds of her neck.
    ‘Do you know where he is?’
    Bat shook his head. ‘But I know that he’s dead.’ His mind darted back to the scene of yesterday’s slaughter, to the great swollen carcass and the clambering people; to the clouds of black flies and the hacked-apart face. For a moment he thought he was going to retch. ‘Myfather was killed by poachers,’ he said. ‘It was before I was born. He was a ranger, you see. He worked with elephants, and although he had often been warned of the danger, he still went out on the savannah, and it was there that he was shot. My grandmother says he died for the animals that he most loved.’
    Bat gulped, trying to get rid of the lump that was rising in his throat. ‘People told my grandmother she was lucky,’ he said hoarsely. ‘They said that my father had died a warrior’s death; that it was better to be killed out in the bush, to lose your life hunting or fighting, than to die on your mat like a weak old man. But she didn’t think she was lucky at all. “I know luck when I see it,” she told me. “It’s when a swarm of locusts flies over your crop without settling, or a delicious ripe mango drops straight into your lap. It’s not when someone turns up at your home to tell you that you have just lost your only son.” They never brought my father back. They couldn’t find him; so he couldn’t be buried outside his hut like he ought to have been. He had no family beside him to watch over his grave or throw sand on his body or plant a tree where he lay.’
    ‘But didn’t your grandmother do the ceremonies?’ asked Muka. ‘Didn’t she say the prayers that bring the soul back?’
    Bat nodded. ‘She did. She performed all the ceremonies but her prayers were never answered. She never feels his spirit brushing by her in the hut. She never looks up and senses him just standing there watching. And now she says it’s all over. He’ll never return.’
    ‘And your mother? Where’s your mother?’
    ‘She died too. It was only a few days after I was born. Her blood ran dry. That’s what the villagers whisper; but my grandmother told me it was not her blood but her soul that could not drink. She missed her husband, my father, so much. Death is a scar that never heals: that’s what my grandmother thinks.’
    Bat’s face brightened a little. ‘It was my grandmother who brought me up . . . in the city at first. She worked for the white people with sky-coloured eyes.’ He gave a slight smile. ‘It was the white people who gave me my nickname, you know. My mother had called me Nakisisa. It means “born of the shadows”. But the white people just started calling me Bat. Bats are born of the shadows, they said. And somehow the name stuck.’
    ‘Because it suits you,’ Muka said. She had seen him out with his cattle, weaving through the