For a moment his vision was clear and bright as though every thing he looked at were lit by brilliant floodlights. Then it began to fade and darkness closed in upon him. Just before the darkness engulfed him completely, he saw Sean Courtney's face floating before him and heard his voice fading as though he were sinking away into an abyss.
"Capo, Capo," it echoed in his ears, and Riccardo Monterro made a huge effort and said, "She loves you. Look after my little girl." Then the darkness swallowed him and he saw and heard nothing more, ever again.
Sean's first impulse was to free Riccardo Monterro's body. He tugged at the tusk that had impaled him, but it was so thick he could not get a fair grip on it. Riccardo's blood was oozing from the terrible wound, and it coated Sean's hands so that he left sticky red prints on the ivory as he strained at it.
Then he realized the futility of his efforts and stepped back. The full weight of Tukutela's huge head and body was resting on those tusks. After piercing Riccardo's torso the ivory point had gone on to bury itself deep in the soft sandy earth. It would take half a day's work to free the body.
In death the man and the beast were locked together, and suddenly
Sean realized how appropriate that was. He would leave them like that.
First Matatu and then Pumula appeared from out of the forest and stood beside Sean, staring in awe at the grim spectacle.
"Go!" Sean ordered. "Wait for me at the canoe."
"The ivory?" Pumula asked diffidently.
"Go!" Sean repeated, and at the tone of his voice they crept quietly away.
Riccardo's eyes were wide open. Sean closed them with a gentle stroke of his thumb, then unknotted the cotton scarf from around his neck and bound up his jaw to prevent it sagging into an expression of idiocy. Even in death Riccardo Monterro was still a handsome man. Sean leaned against the elephant's head and studied Riccardo's face.
"it happened at just the right time, Capo. Before the disease turned you into a vegetable, while you still had most of your zest and vigor, and it was a fitting end for a man like you. I'm glad you didn't die between soiled sheets. I only pray I will be as fortunate."
He laid his hand on one of the tusks and stroked it. It had the texture of jade beneath his fingertips. "We'll leave them for you, Capo," he said. "These tusks will be your headstone. God knows, you paid for them in full."
He straightened up and followed Riccardo's tracks back into the forest until he found the Rigby lying in the dead leaves. He brought it back and placed it in the crook of Riccardo's right armA warrior should be buried with his weapons," he murmured.
But there was still something missing. He could not go and leave Riccardo like this. He could not leave him lying exposed to an uncaring sky. He must cover him decently.
Then he remembered the legend of this elephant and how he disposed of the dead. He drew the heavy knife from the sheath on his belt and turned to the nearest green bush. He slashed off a leafy branch and covered Riccardo's face with it.
"Yes," he murmured. "That's right, that's proper."
Working swiftly, he hacked down the branches and covered Riccardo's corpse and the head of the old bull under a mound of green leaves. At last he stood back and picked up the.577. He tucked it under his arm and was ready to leave. "No regrets, Capo," he said. "For you, it was a good life right up to the very end. Go in peace, old friend."
He turned away and went down to where the canoe was moored.
The reeds scraped softly along the hull of the canoe as Pumula poled it along. None of them spoke.
Sean sat amidships, hunched forward with his chin in the cup of one hand. He felt numbed, emptied of all emotion except sadness.
it was like coming back from a raid in the days of the bush war with every man silent and sad.
He looked at his right hand in his lap and saw the little half moons of dark red under his finger mails. "Capo's blood," he thought, and trailed his hand over the side of the canoe, letting the warm Swamp waters wash away the stain.
He let the hunt replay itself through his mind as though it were a silent recording. He saw it all again vividly, from their first sighting of the old bull to the moment he rushed forward to find Riccardo Monterro impaled beneath the huge gray head.
Then for the first time, he heard sound. Riccardo's voice echoed in his head, faint and breathless, fading swiftly.
"She loves you," he had said, and the rest trailed away unintelligibly. "She loves you." The meaningless words of a dying man, the Wanderings of a diseased brain- Riccardo could have been looking back on any one of the hundreds of women who had filled his LIFE.
Sean lifted his hand out of the water. It was clean, the blood washed away.
"She loves you." He could have been trying to tell Sean of one particular woman.
Sean looked up from his wet hand and stared ahead. Her memory had been with him these last few days, always there in the recesses of his conscience Yet coming to the fore at unexpected moments. Often while thinking of the great elephant, he had suddenly smiled at something she had said. This morning, during the final stages of the hunt, he had reached outboard from the canoe and picked the bloom of a water lily. He had held it to his face and smelled the perfume, felt the silky touch of the petals on his lip, and thought of Claudia Monterro.
Now he stared ahead and for the first time admitted to himself how much he looked forward to seeing her again. It seemed she was all that could cancel out his grief for her father. He thought about the sound of her voice and the way she held her head when she was about to challenge him. He smiled at the bright specks of anger he could so readily kindle in her eyes and the way she pursed her lips when she was trying to keep herself from laughing at one of his digs.
He-thought about the way she walked and the way she felt when he had carried her in his arms, and he remembered the texture of her skin, like the petals of a water lily, when he touched her under a pretext of helping or guiding her.
"We are absolutely and completely wrong for each other." He smiled, and the melancholy of a few moments previously loosened its grip. "If Capo was talking about her, he had definitely gone completely round the bend." But his anticipation was honed to a sharper edge.
He looked up at the sky. The sun had set. It would be dark in a short while. Even as he watched, Venus, the evening star, appeared with a miraculous suddenness and twinkled low down in the west. One after another, the fixed stars followed her entrance, popping through the darkening canopy of night in order of their magnitude.
Sean looked up at the stars and he thought of Claudia, wondering why she evoked such contrary feelings in him. He compared her to some of the other women he had known and realized how shallow and fleeting those experiences had been. Even his marriage had been inconsequential, a wild impulse based on simple-minded lust. It had been swiftly consummated, satiated, and terminated, a disastrous mistake he had never repeated. Now he could only vaguely remember what the woman who had been his wife looked like.