The Cowboy and his Elephant Read Online Free Page B

wrapped in soft blankets lay under seats. On their hemp belts the men carried scabbards made of elephant tails, which held sharpening steels. Around their necks they tied kerchiefs to cover their mouths and noses against the stench of death.
    DeVries bounced along through the dust at the end of the convoy in his Ford pickup, which he had customized with wooden sides and an awning over the truck bed. His kidneys ached, and his back throbbed from the jolting ride over the open terrain of the research area. Alone with his thoughts, he reflected on what his oldest son, Johannes Jacobus deVries, would have been like now. Buck missed him dearly; he and Rita had called the boy Zoon. Big for his age, he had worn an adult shoe when he was only twelve. Zoon loved to hunt springboks and fish for tilapia and tigerfish. One day shortly after his twelfth birthday, while he was out angling alone on the brush-cluttered banks of the Zambezi River, Zoon was attacked by a large crocodile that suddenly rose out of the murky waters and killed him. Some twenty years later, age and time had cooled Buck’s rage over this terrible death as they sustained the grief over his loss.
    Now the sight of a light airplane flying over the convoydistracted him from his thoughts. The evening before, the airplane had crossed the area to locate the elephant herds; it had returned to assist in the cull.
    A few miles on, the convoy pulled to the side of the road in a defile near a stand of
moupane
trees. Sometimes called the Dark Continent, Africa was more the Silent Continent, and this morning it was no different. The men disembarked from the trucks without a sound, their boots and shoes sinking into the sandy Kalahari soil.
    Suddenly the noise of the airplane engine broke the stillness, and two-way radios crackled with static. The pilot revved the engine and banked over the treetops in tight circles. He had sighted the elephant herd and was “pushing” them toward the hunters, who were just then loading their guns.
    The elephants of Amy’s family—adult cows, adolescents, and Amy—screamed, trumpeted, and bellowed at the horrible sound of the airplane. They ran behind their matriarch, trying to get away, until they came upon the men who faced them with guns aimed. The elephants stopped. The airplane seemed to be everywhere at once—above, behind them and at their sides. In front of them stood the men. There was nowhere to turn. Then the shooting started, the guns exploding in unison. The first elephant killed by gunfire, the matriarch of Amy’s family, slumped on her front knees, then fell over dead on her side. Amid the racket of the airplane and the exploding guns, Amy’s mother and several other older females in the family rushed to where the matriarch lay dead.They touched and pushed her, trying to help her get up. Her death was inconceivable to them, and their pitiful attempt to save her, refusing to leave her, spelled their quick doom.
    Now without her they did not know what to do or where to go. They had no leader. Out of fear they screamed, bellowed, and defecated. They trumpeted to locate the young elephants that were scattering in panic. The older females formed their bodies into a tight phalanx in front of the matriarch. The guns fired nearly point-blank, and the elephants’ powerful legs went out from under them as if the earth had swallowed them up. They fell on top of one another. One shooter climbed onto a dead elephant and shot from that vantage point. Men were shouting. Amy stayed near her mother; then her mother was shot. Amy tried to burrow her head under her mother’s chin.
    “That one! That one!” a voice cried. “Do
not
shoot that one!”
    Hands pulled Amy away from her mother’s body, though she tried to run away. The gunfire was ending. She struggled out of their grasp. Men with ropes chased her and jumped on her back and straddled her. She was exhausted, terrified, and confused. Men’s hands forced her ears over her eyes. A