The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway - Ernest Hemingway [291]
The next morning they were following the spoor of the elephant on an old elephant trail that was a hard-packed worn road through the forest. It looked as though elephants had traveled it ever since the lava had cooled from the mountain and the trees had first grown tall and close.
Juma was very confident and they moved fast. Both his father and Juma seemed very sure of themselves and the going on the elephant road was so easy that Juma gave him the .303 to carry as they went on through the broken light of the forest. Then they lost the trail in smoking piles of fresh dung and the flat round prints of a herd of elephants that had come onto the elephant road from the heavy forest on the left of the trail. Juma had taken the .303 from David angrily. It was afternoon before they worked up to the herd and around it, seeing the gray bulks through the trees and the movement of the big ears and the searching trunks coiling and uncoiling, hearing the crash of branches broken, the crash of trees pushed over, the rumbling in the bellies of the elephants and the slap and thud of the dung falling.
They had found the trail of the old bull finally and when it turned off onto a smaller elephant road Juma had looked at David’s father and grinned showing his filed teeth and his father had nodded his head. They looked as though they had a dirty secret, just as they had looked when he had found them that night at the shamba.
It was not very long before they came on the secret. It was off to the right in the forest and the tracks of the old bull led to it. It was a skull as high as David’s chest and white from the sun and the rain. There was a deep depression in the forehead and a ridge ran from between the bare white eye sockets and flared out in empty broken holes where the tusks had been chopped away.
Juma pointed out where the great elephant they were trailing had stood while he looked down at the skull and where his trunk had moved it a little way from the place it had rested on the ground and where the points of his tusks had touched the ground beside it. He showed David the single hole in the big depression in the white bone of the forehead and then the four holes close together in the bone around the earhole. He grinned at David and at his father and took a .303 solid from his pocket and fitted the nose into the hole in the bone of the forehead.
“Here is where Juma wounded the big bull,” his father said. “This was his askari. His friend, really, because he was a big bull too. He charged and Juma knocked him down and finished him in the ear.”
Juma was pointing out the scattered bones and how the big bull had walked among them. Juma and David’s father were both very pleased with what they had found.
“How long do you suppose he and his friend had been together?” David asked his father.
“I haven’t the faintest idea,” his father said. “Ask Juma.”
“You ask him, please.”
His father and Juma spoke together and Juma had looked at David and laughed.
“Probably four or five times your life, he says,” David’s father told him. “He doesn’t know or care really.”
I care, David thought. I saw him in the moonlight and he was alone but I had Kibo. Kibo has me too. The bull wasn’t doing any harm and now we’ve tracked him to where he came to see his dead friend and now we’re going to kill him. It’s my fault. I betrayed him.
Now Juma had worked out the trail and motioned to his father and they started on.
My father doesn’t need to kill elephants to live, David thought. Juma would not have found him if I had not seen him. He had his chance at him and all he did was wound him and kill his friend. Kibo and I found him and I never should have told them and I should have kept him secret and had him always and let them stay drunk at the beer shamba. Juma