All the Land to Hold Us (20 page)

It seemed that she could feel parts inside her, both physically and mentally, opening and closing like the locks and weirs of a dam, or the sluice gates to some innovative if not complex watering system that diverted creek water to parched fields. It seemed that she could feel and hear the sound of water running, as she watched the elephant continue his plunge down that steep slope, running with a steadfastness of purpose that seemed to indicate the destination toward which he hurtled was not one of a mere moment's opportune selection but rather the desire of a cumulative destiny; and that in his haste, the elephant was acutely aware that the last of certain puzzle-pieces were being assembled.

And it seemed almost to Marie, across that distance, that she could perceive joy in the elephant's tumult—though in this, she was completely mistaken.

She could not look away, could not blink; and as she watched, she continued to feel the gates and locks changing and shunting within her, felt the cool water rising.

She was conscious of the day's fierce heat, but the heat was no longer an enemy or an oppressor, and she kept watching the faraway elephant pluming down the dune like a ball rolling crookedly, not sure whether she was dreaming it or not, but not minding.

The waves of her pleasure and astonishment began to fade, however, as there appeared now behind the elephant the straggling, shouting wave of pursuers, the trucks and houndsmen strung out all across the landscape, struggling in that seam between earth and sky.

Then came the jagged, blaring sounds of the chase, the horns and bayings only now drifting across the expanse of sand and reaching her ears; and it was a disturbing sound, reminding her of the descriptions the missionaries of her former church had given of the ceremonies held by rank villagers in the Himalayas, who would surround a fellow villager, dressed as a devil or dragon, pelting him with rocks and banging on pots and pans and blowing on trumpets made from the hides of animals or the wetted bark of trees stretched tight around hoops of bone or iron, in the foolish hopes of driving demons and other evil spirits out of their village.

These villagers were worse than cursed, said the missionaries, for they believed in these pagan rites, and lived for months following each purging in a deluded sense of cleanliness and well-being, even as their souls were rotting.

Again and again the elephant fell, stumbling and sometimes rolling a short distance down the dune like a boulder seeking to both establish and yet resist its angle of repose. And always, if the elephant sought to pause and rest, the hounds would bite and worry his flanks, so that no rest could be had, and the elephant would rise and continue his headlong descent.

Near the bottom of the dune, his glittering eyes caught sight of the truck parked still before him, and he caught sight of and recognized Marie—she could tell this in an instant: some jolt, some awareness, across the distance. It seemed to Marie that his recognition of her spurred in him some effort even more pronounced, for he lowered his head with resolve and came on even stronger, reaching the bottom of the dunes and accelerating, lifting his feet and knees high, and running hard.

It looked like a charge—the ears flapping, and the tusks riding so smooth and level, aiming for the destination, which she assumed to be the river, Horsehead Crossing, but which she understood too might have been mistaken by an uninformed observer to be the truck, and Marie.

And as the elephant continued to close that last distance—so close now that the exhausted hounds still hectoring him no longer sounded like angels, but merely hounds—it began to occur to Marie, belatedly though still in time to consider an escape, that there was some error in the elephant's interpretation of events, and that it was not with comradeship or any feelings of commiseration or understanding that the elephant was hurtling toward her, but that it was powered instead by the ungovernable fuel of the betrayed.

Maybe Marie's perceptions were wrong, she told herself, even as she felt her own heart falling through some rotting planking. The beautiful image of the elephant crossing her lake, and then descending the dune to greet her, was destroyed like a mirror or glass vase broken into a thousand pieces—and now as the elephant drew closer, Marie was certain that it was a feeling of having been betrayed which drove the elephant toward her; though still she could not bring herself to run or hide or take cover, but could only do that which she had done all her life, to watch and wait: and when the elephant was close enough for her to smell it, and to see the pearly strings of slobber trailing from the hounds' jowls, she had another revelation, which was that the elephant was correct, that Marie
had
betrayed him—both in her passive participation in the hunt, as well as in her failure to stop the hunt, or even argue against it—and so overwhelming was this sudden, lucid awareness of her own unworthiness that she felt as if the elephant had already slammed into her.

She was standing in the wedge of shade cast by the truck. She stepped out into the light and sun so that he could see her better, and to better receive the full impact of him.

She thought she saw a wave of softening—the first release of emotion that precedes forgiveness—enter his eyes, a dimming of the enraged lights within, in the last moments before his body shut down, and his front legs tangled together, conspiring to send him down hard, coming to a stop so close in front of her that the impact of his collapse threw a spray of sand against her feet, and a wave of the heated air displaced by his passage washed over her, carrying with it not just the ripe scent of his cooking, but of his fear and anger and misery, too.

He lay there, ribs heaving, unblinking, staring at her without seeing her, while the dogs climbed atop him and began chewing and tearing at the thick hide. Blood began to run down the sides of him, glistening like the streams leaving a mountain's melting snowcap.

Marie waded into the fray, shouting at the dogs and laboring to pull them off—climbing up the elephant's tusk, running up over the top of his head and tugging and jerking on the hounds' collars and on the leashes and chains that still trailed from them—but even with her might and fury she could never keep more than one or two of the dogs from biting at the elephant at any one time, and she called out to the men to hurry down from the dune and help her.

“Ah, they can't hurt it,” called out the houndsman nearest to her, “and it's what they've worked for.” The others seemed to be in agreement, and it occurred to Marie that the men had lost hounds to the elephant and were seeking revenge.

One of the hounds snapped at her ankle as she pulled it down the slope of the elephant. It was a young hound, and it laid open the skin around her calf as if cutting into it with shears. She felt no pain, only the brief tugging, and when her boys saw that she had been hurt, they scrambled on top of the elephant to help her, and to wreak their own vengeance on the hounds, wrestling with the dogs as they would with another person, and winding the leashes around the dogs' necks and strangling them.

Mufti was scaling the bloody elephant too, crying out and slapping at the dogs with his palms, and then the houndsmen were up on the elephant, pulling their dogs off not so much to keep them from inflicting more harm to the elephant as to protect them from the attacks of Mufti and the children; and one of the houndsmen, in prying the oldest boy loose from his best hound, with the dog's eyes rolled back in his head—still the boy would not release his chokehold—was a bit rough with the boy, which spurred Max Omo in a way that witnessing the damage the hounds had inflicted upon his wife had not; and soon enough, Max Omo was into the combat as well, so that atop the mountain of the elephant there was not just hound battling elephant, but man against man, woman against dog, man versus child, foreigner versus native; and through it all, the elephant did not move, only lay there as if oblivious to the scrabblings above, and to the heated red rivers trickling down his back, and stared out at the crossing, not fifty yards away.

The houndsmen finally got the hounds pulled free of their quarry, and reattached to the trucks' bumpers. The dogs were still euphoric; if left unregulated, they would have continued to gnaw at their great treasure until they succumbed to the heat and their own enthusiasms; and even after they were leashed and chained to the bumpers of the trucks again, they continued to lunge and snap at the air itself, biting and howling now at nothing but the distance between them and their quarry: and for the rest of their days, their dreams would be filled with the memories, the odors and tastes and sights, of this one chase; and, greedsome, they might wonder if even more glorious quarry than this existed, when only days earlier they would never have been able to imagine even this immense and splendid wonder.

“What is wrong with you people?” the lead houndsman demanded of both Mufti and Max Omo. “We were only trying to help you find your damn elephant. We've just lost about three thousand dollars' worth of dogs, chasing your damn elephant across hell and back.”

Mufti was silent, chastened, but Max Omo bristled, ready to jump into the fight again. “He's not my damn elephant. I see no good coming from him, and am just as happy to see him die as live”—but at this Mufti broke down in sobs, still jittery from the fighting, and implored them to try to save the animal.

“I'll pay for the dogs, if we can save him,” Mufti said. “In the salvation of your enemy lies your restitution,” he pleaded. “I stand before your mercy. Name your price.”

“I'll help you,” Max Omo said. “If you pay for the gas it took to come out here and back, and if you let my boys ride on that elephant in the circus, next time you come through.”

“Me too,” Marie said. “I'd like to ride on it. The three of us. The four of us, if you want to, Max.”

Max Omo stared at her, then shook his head. “No, it'll just be the three of you.”

“Fine,” Mufti said. “A parade. A celebration for the elephant's saviors. We can all take turns riding on his back.” He nodded to the houndsmen. “All of us. You, your dogs, the children, Mrs. Omo, myself—he can carry all of us.”

They were all silent, then, studying the catatonic mass. There was no sound save for the hounds' plaintive whines and yelps.

“You are the engineer,” Mufti said to Max Omo. “How can we get him into the river?”

But Max Omo was already hunkered on his heels, studying on it: watching the horseflies settling themselves into the crusting red calligraphy that decorated the still-heaving hide.

“Getting him into the river will be the easy part,” Max Omo predicted. “Getting him out, not so easy.”

“I think once he cools down his power will return to him,” Mufti said. “He can leave the river on his own.”

Max Omo turned to survey the limited machinery at hand. It did not seem fair to him that the elephant, in its infirmity, should weigh the same; by Omo's accounting, it seemed that in his reduced state the elephant should be becoming lighter and more tractable by the minute, as his life and will drained away, and it alarmed Max Omo to realize that the opposite was true. It probably took a creature that size a year to die, he supposed, or longer; perhaps several years. Perhaps the elephant did not even know yet that it was dying.

“He's going to have to help us some,” he said. “If we just hook up to him with the chains and ropes and try to pull him to the river, the ropes will cut right through him.” He walked over closer to the elephant and looked into his eye, trying to gauge what resolve might remain, but had no real idea of how to measure such things. “If we wrap the chains around his tusks, will they come out?”

Mufti winced. “They might.” He considered the problem himself. “Maybe around the back and under the shoulders, if we have that much rope and chain.”

The houndsmen looked at one another like card players who, having been beaten badly all night, have come to the point where they need to decide whether to play one more hand or turn around and go home.

They could not turn away. Even though down to four hounds, they could not quit. When would they ever have another chance at an elephant?

They brought buckets of water from the river and doused their fiery hounds before shutting them up inside the back of the circus wagon, leaving the roll-up-curtain door cracked only enough to allow a thin siphon of fresh air. The dogs clawed briefly at the door before finally being overcome by the heat. They lay on their bellies on the hot floor of the truck with only their muzzles pressed through that little seam, sucking in through flared nostrils the sweeter outside air.

The men laid their ropes and chains together and began fastening them into a pulley system, and with shovels began digging a small passageway beneath the elephant, in order that they might wrap the chain around him from below.

Two trucks would pull from the front while the third pushed from behind. They would drag and shove the elephant as close to the river's edge as possible, where he would then have to take but one or two final steps to tumble down the little bluff. They would have to work quickly to unfasten the ropes and chains when this happened, so that his plunge would not take the trucks and drivers with it.

The boys continued excavating beneath the elephant, while the adults positioned the trucks and readied the ropes and chains.

Marie kept going down to the river to haul up bucket after bucket of the silty water, which she poured on the elephant's head, and on his wounds; but it was to little avail, for the water seemed to evaporate off of him in shimmering waves, as when one splashes droplets of water onto a too-hot skillet; and in the process, Marie soon began to overheat, and had to stop and drench herself, not the elephant, with the bucket of warm water.

They each made dozens of trips, and through it all, the elephant gave no response, and finally Marie stopped, with her heart hammering and a crushing headache. She took refuge with the men in the hot shade of the trucks, from where they watched the boys dig.