All the Land to Hold Us (19 page)

But watching the heat swallow them—it looked as if they were stepping through a white curtain—Marie felt only a jaded heartlessness. She was aware of something seeping out of her as one might feel faintly the blood trickling from one's nostrils. It seemed to her that whatever was draining out of her was leaving her in the fashion of water and seeping down into the earth, vanishing through the dried, platey crevices of sunbaked mud cracks.

But of true sensation, she felt nothing, only the last of an ancient vitality draining out of her, and traveling back down into the dust.

 

Max Omo and Mufti and the others found the elephant pretty quickly. Though there was no discernible breeze, the dogs had caught his scent. Max Omo, in the truck on the left, and Mufti, in the truck on the right, saw the hounds catch the scent at the same time, saw them lunge in a single wave, jerking the frazzled houndsmen along with them—the houndsmen yanking back on the chains and leashes, sending up showers of flashing sand around their ankles like the spray of sunlit water.

One of the handlers stumbled and went down on a folded ankle, but did not let go of the leash, which was wrapped around his wrist. He continued to hold the leash with both hands as his dog, a big bluetick, dragged him on his belly across the hot sand and down a dune.

Both Max Omo and Mufti accelerated their trucks, Omo's engine laboring, whining at the abuse, and Omo winced, imagining that he could feel the friction of each straining stroke upon the delicate, lubricated valves—and at the top of the next ridge, with their engines beginning to smoke, they saw the elephant.

He was lying on his side at the top of a high dune, as if the effort of reaching only that one single crest, rather than the cumulative effects of the journey, was what had felled him; and even from that distance, they could smell him burning, cooking in the sun.

It was an odor exactly like that of a roast baking in the oven, a huge ham not of mutton or pork, but delicious beef, and even in the truck, Max Omo could smell it, and it filled him with an immediate pleasure, took him back to childhood, when his mother would fix a huge lunch for their family on Sunday after church, the wheel of the century having only just clicked forward a few years, 1904, 1905, and the bones and muscles and blood of the dreaded Comanches not even entirely rotted away to worm-food in their countless unmarked graves and nongraves, the repositories of the chewing beetles that remade history daily.

The odor spurred him on. He did not plan to eat the elephant, but he accelerated the truck toward the odor with anticipation or inexplicable and surprising happiness: as if some part of him far within believed, however illogically, that he was going to meet up with his mother again, and the rest of his family, and his childhood.

Mufti likewise was stimulated by the odor, though he had never eaten beef, not even during his sojourns in Texas, and never would; and he had certainly never eaten elephant, nor could he conceive of such a thing. And Mufti did not associate the pleasant smell with the hastening decomposition of his aged companion, but instead perceived it to be merely some favorable background aroma—a barbecue at some nearby ranch: as if just beyond the last visible dune lay some mythic sylvan glade, where a happy, loving family worshiped their God not weekly but daily, and then came home midday to fix, in celebration of their life of prayer and hard labor, an incredible feast, dining midafternoon at a great oaken table with shimmering leaf-dappled light reflecting from the pond just outside the dining room window and a breeze stirring the curtains and tablecloth, bathing the diners with the odors of the kitchen, and the meal, and the green lawn and great farm beyond.

A pitcher of clear water would be standing in the center of the table, and a bowl of sunlit fruit, and the table would be filled with a family of all ages, the young through the very aged.

The man who was being dragged on his belly by his hound was finally able to regain his footing at the bottom of a dune, as the bluetick slowed slightly; but now another hound snapped free of his tether, and broke from the pack with such speed and enthusiasm that it appeared he had been chosen by them to take the lead; that they had marshaled the collective sum of their frenzied desire and assigned it to that one hound.

At the top of the final rise, the elephant received the hound as gracefully as if he had been lying in wait there all of his life: as if that one place was where the elephant, recumbent, best fit the curve of the earth in order to welcome, and return, the hound's charge.

As his millennial ancestors had done innumerable times with tigers, leopards, and lions, the elephant lifted his weakened trunk almost tentatively, even leisurely, raising it just in time to blunt the dog's headlong attack, and with seemingly no more effort than a man reaching into a refrigerator for a beer, the elephant caught the dog in midflight with his trunk, made a quick twisting motion—there was a sudden silence from that one hound, though the angelic shouting of the hounds below continued—and then with a whiplike gesture, and still recumbent, the elephant hurled the hound back down to the bottom of the dune, so that the advancing houndsmen had to stop and duck to avoid being struck by the flying object.

This was enough to give both men and beasts pause in their charge, and the hounds circled and milled around their lifeless comrade. Max Omo and Mufti parked their trucks on adjacent dunes—to an observer looking down upon them from far away, the arrangements and positionings would have seemed like those of chess pieces in some tiny game—and they got out of their hissing, ticking vehicles and walked down into the trough, where the houndsmen and hounds stood gathered over the campaign's first casualty.

On the ridge above, the baking elephant fixed them with a direct stare, with both reddened eyes seeming to drill straight through all those gathered below. His ears flapped, his enormous tusks were long against the sky, and now his eyes seemed to be searching the hearts of each of them; and to all the men, it appeared that the eyes rested longest and saddest upon Mufti, and that the expression in the elephant's eyes spoke of nothing but betrayal.

The elephant laid his head back down onto the broiling sand almost gently.

“I cannot tell if the musth has left him yet or not,” said Mufti, quietly. There was no other sound around them save for the quicksilver panting of the dogs.

The men conferred, and decided that the elephant could not get up, or did not want to, and that he would be safe to approach, as long as none of them got within reach of his trunk.

The hounds still roared and strained against their leashes; but the houndsmen approached more cautiously now, wrapping the chains and leashes in bights around their waists, and moving slowly up the final dune like mountain climbers, belayed by the dogs: and as the staggered battalion of them neared the fallen elephant, his head did not even lift, nor did anything else move save for the slow, occasional flapping of one ear, seeming mysteriously communicative.

With the side of the elephant's huge-tusked and bouldered head pressed into the burning sand, it appeared to them all, as they approached, that the elephant was listening to some instructions coming from far below, and faintly heard: though the instructions might be more audible now to the elephant than they had ever been before, so that perhaps he was not even aware of the chorus of the hounds.

He paid them no mind, thus seemed at peace with them, even as the men and hounds drew nearer still, moving more fully toward the scent of the roasting.

They gained the ridge, sweating, and stood spaced about, still unsure of whether the animal might yet be transformed back into health and strength in some godlike metamorphosis of rage—the image of the flying dog indelible within them now—and they convened among themselves by calling out to one another in hushed voices, as if not wishing to disrupt the communion the elephant was having with the ground below.

“I do not know if he will be able to mind me or not,” Mufti said. “I do not know if he will want to mind me. He looks and acts as if the musth is still upon him, but I do not think he can get up. Maybe if I crack the whip he will remember all the times before when he has obeyed, and will rise one more time.”

The houndsmen shook their heads and muttered among themselves, disgruntled at the suggestion that the crack of a whip could accomplish the same effect as their dogs, and wanted to turn the hounds loose upon the elephant, with the hounds having worked so hard and led them so far. It was not good for the dogs' courage to draw so close to such a combatant, and then not finish the job.

The elephant still belonged to Mufti, however, and Mufti to the elephant, and so the houndsmen's dissent was tempered; and, as well, none of them was anxious to see another dog lost to the elephant's final throes: lost, and seeming somehow wasted in that manner, being vanquished by the elephant when the elephant itself would not be living long enough to even acknowledge its small victory.

Mufti advanced upon the elephant, whip trailing in the sand like some dead snake he was bringing to the elephant as a gift.

The elephant's eye glowed brighter for a moment as it caught sight of the whip, and a ripple of muscle tone quivered through the animal, a galvanic tension that none of the men would have thought possible from a creature so near to death; and the dogs sensed and smelled the life still within him, and set about their baying again.

And though the elephant had not yet lifted his head from the ground, it seemed that he was no longer listening to anything below but was attuned and attentive once more to the world around him, desert though it was.

Max Omo took a step backwards, glad in that moment that he had not yielded to his sons' pleadings that they go off into the desert by themselves after the elephant, in the hopes of subduing and domesticating it and training it to turn its labors and power to their good.

Mufti advanced.

When he was but ten feet away from the anguished animal—was it fear or anger or tenderness, or even joy, with which the elephant beheld the sight of the whip? Even Mufti could not be sure—Mufti stopped, and swirled the whip, readying it to crack upon the dry heated air that was rising in shimmers from the elephant's cooking body.

There was a part of Mufti that was lamenting the impending loss of his old friend—he had known and lived with the elephant now longer than any human—but there was a part of him too that was calculating the consequences of what might possibly be the end of his career, represented in the smoldering gross tonnage of the sand-bound creature that was fast becoming deadweight.

Mufti raised the whip as if to crack it—magically, the elephant raised his head, seeming now as alert as does a dog who has been waiting by the door for its master's return—and when he leaned forward, snapping the whip into the hot sky like a fly-fisherman casting into some still pool, the elephant rolled over with a great stirring of sand and leaned forward also, struggling to kneel upon its front legs, but still unable to rise.

Not blaming the elephant, but frustrated, Mufti cracked the whip harder and louder. The dogs were nearly uncontrollable, roaring, and this time the elephant managed to get its hind feet beneath it, and sought to stand, but lost its balance—it appeared to the men that the muscles and bones within the great sack of its hide no longer had any order, and merely shifted, spilled sideways, obeying no desire or willpower but merely flowing according to the laws of gravity—and the flagging animal tumbled over on its side, falling as if crumpled by a shot: and once again the dogs danced and howled and sang.

The elephant lay still, trunk outstretched and eyes catatonic, tusks no longer menacing but instead as harmless as twin beams of river-polished driftwood. But Mufti was encouraged by this show of valor, and knowing the animal as he did, and believing that for all its great bulk and strength, the animal's heart and will was stronger than even its body, he began popping the whip again and again.

And as he was cracking the whip, and as the elephant was lifting its huge head and struggling once more to rise, Mufti shouted to the handlers, telling them to turn their dogs loose, and they did so gladly.

The dogs darted in as both individuals and a team, their desires weaving and unweaving, seeking out and finding and snapping at the weak spots and seams of softness that the elephant could not protect; and in that deviling manner, chewing and howling, they helped to urge him, against the logic of his body, to his feet, where he did not spend or waste time standing his ground but instead broke into a swaying run, down the dune and in the direction of the river. He stumbled and fell often, piling headlong into the dunes with great fountains of sand but rising again, the hounds behind him now, euphoric. Max Omo and Mufti jumped back into their trucks and followed him up and over the dunes.

The houndsmen ran along behind, also stumbling and shouting and blowing on their huntsmen's horns; and to the sky above, and the curve of the earth, it would have seemed little different from the times when in this same country hunters with lances had pursued and harried the woolly mammoths and mastodons, over ten thousand years ago: as if all the time that had passed had been as if but a nap on a summer afternoon.

On a path to the river, blinded with fatigue, but somehow knowing where the river was, the elephant managed to pick up one more dog and hurl it, whiplike, a sufficient distance across the hard sand so that it would run no more, and he paused to stomp on two other dogs, leaving only four pursuing it; but it was not the hounds the elephant was fleeing now, nor even the men and their trucks behind him—Mufti firing his pistol into the air—but rather the desert itself, and this errant turn his life had taken.

For a moment, for several moments, there was nothing else in the world, just that one elephant galloping at full effort down that one steep slope of sand.

 

It was a sight so wondrous, one that perhaps no other human had ever seen, that Marie wondered in that breathless moment if the image of it did not unlock within her certain feelings and ideas, mysterious combinations that in some way freed her from earlier and older guidelines of being human.