The big bull was about ten feet away – and at that distance elephant are not blind.
Blix stood up and raised his rifle slowly, with an expression of ineffable sadness.
“That’s for me,” I thought. “He knows that even a shot in the brain won’t stop that bull before we’re crushed like mangos.”
In an open place, it might have been possible to dodge to one side, but not here. I stood behind Blix with my hands on his waist according to his instructions. But I knew it wasn’t any good. The body of the elephant was swaying. It was like watching a boulder, in whose path you were trapped, teeter on the edge of a cliff before plunging. The bull’s ears were spread wide now, his trunk was up and extended toward us, and he began the elephant scream of anger which is so terrifying as to hold you silent where you stand, like fingers clamped upon your throat. It is a shrill scream, cold as winter wind.
It occurred to me that this was the instant to shoot.
Blix never moved. He held his rifle very steady and began to chant some of the most striking blasphemy I have ever heard. It was colourful, original, and delivered with finesse, but I felt that this was a badly chosen moment to test it on an elephant – and ungallant beyond belief if it was meant for me.
The elephant advanced, Blix unleashed more oaths (this time in Swedish), and I trembled. There was no rifle shot. A single biscuit tin, I judged, would do for both of us – cremation would be superfluous.
“I may have to shoot him,” Blix announced, and the remark struck me as an understatement of classic magnificence. Bullets would sink into that monstrous hide like pebbles into a pond.
Somehow you never think of an elephant as having a mouth, because you never see it when his trunk is down, so that when the elephant is quite close and his trunk is up, the dark red-and-black slit is by way of being an almost shocking revelation. I was looking into our elephant’s mouth with a kind of idiotic curiosity when he screamed again – and thereby, I am convinced, saved both Blix and me from a fate no more tragic than simple death, but infinitely less tidy.
The scream of that elephant was a strategic blunder, and it did him out of a wonderful bit of fun. It was such an authentic scream of such splendid resonance, that his cronies, still grazing in the bush, accepted it as legitimate warning, and left. We had known they were still there because the bowels of peacefully occupied elephant rumble continually like oncoming thunder – and we had heard thunder.
They left, and it seemed they tore the country from its roots in leaving. Everything went, bush, trees, san-sivera, clods of dirt – and the monster who confronted us. He paused, listened, and swung round with the slow irresistibility of a bank-vault door. And then he was off in a typhoon of crumbled vegetation and crashing trees.
From the book Horned Moons & Savage Santas. Click Here to buy now or visit www.sportingclassicsstore.com for other great books!