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.
He thought about Claudia and realized with a small shock that her image was so clear in his mind he could almost count the individual lashes around those big honey-brown eyes and the tiny laugh lines at the corners of her mouth. Suddenly he very much wanted to be with her again, and as he acknowledged that fact he began to worry.
"I must have been crazy to leave her alone," he thought, and as he stared ahead into the dark swamps a multitude of horrid possibilities that might have befallen her began to plague him.
"Job is with her," he tried to console himself. "But I should have stayed to care for her and sent Job with Capo. "Even though he realized that had been impossible, still he fretted.
He felt the canoe check under him as Pumula rested on his pole, hinting at permission to stop for the night.
"I'll take her for a while," Sean said. "We'll keep going until we get back to the village."
While Pumula and Matatu curled up in the bilges, Sean stood in the stern and swayed to the monotonous thrust and reach of the Punt Pole- He steered by the Southern Cross and the pointers of Centaurus, reckoning true south at the intersection of their extended center lines.