The Elephant's Tale Read Online Free Page B

Land Rover, he pretended he didn’t understand.
    They swept across Sawubona’s grassy green-gold plains, and on past the lake and the high escarpment. As they drew nearer to the mountain that hid the Secret Valley, Martine felt a pang. It was months since she’d been to the white giraffe’s special sanctuary. Inside the valley was a cave known only to Martine and Grace and, of course, the San Bushmen ancestors who’d recorded their lives on its walls in mystical paintings.
    For reasons Martine did not even vaguely understand, they seemed to have predicted parts of her destiny there too. She could never decide whether it was a good thing or a bad thing that she had yet to figure out how to interpret the fortune-telling San paintings in the cave they called the Memory Room until it was too late. Until she’d already fallen overboard into shark-filled water, or been trapped in a cave with a wounded leopard.
    “Only time and experience will give you the eyes to see them,” Grace was fond of saying.
    Once, when Martine had complained that it wasn’t fair—that what was the point of having your destiny written on a cave wall if you couldn’t use it to avoid misfortune befalling you, Grace had told her that that was precisely the point. If a person could see their future, they’d only choose the great times. “Then you would never learn and never experience the important things in this world because oftentimes they’s tha hard things.”
    Most days Martine agreed with her. Many of her most painful experiences had led directly or indirectly to some of the most special times of her life. But even Grace would admit that losing Jemmy and every other animal Martine loved at Sawubona was not one of life’s necessary experiences. Nothing good could possibly come of it.
    Martine stole a glance at the twisted tree that disguised the entrance to the white giraffe’s sanctuary as they went by. One night soon she planned to sneak out to the Memory Room to see if the San Bushmen had had anything to say about Reuben James stealing Sawubona. In less than a month she’d be twelve years old. Surely by now she had enough time and experience to read her own future on the cave walls?
    The jeep slowed. Sampson stepped from the trees.
    “Park over there, please Lurk,” instructed Tendai, indicating a place on the edge of the scarred clearing. The chauffeur responded with a grunt.
    “For your own safety you should remain in the vehicle,” the game warden cautioned him. “We have enough problems with your boss without him suing us because some animal has given you a scratch.”
    Lurk gave no indication of having heard. He opened his door and jumped down. Propping himself against the side of the Land Rover, he lit a cigarette.
    Tendai’s eyes met Martine’s. He shrugged, climbed out of the vehicle with his box of emergency veterinary supplies, and began speaking in Zulu to Sampson, a bony, wizened man who Martine was convinced was at least a hundred years old. He paused to say “Be careful” to Martine and Ben as they walked slowly into the grove of trees.
    “We will,” Martine assured him. Buffalo were among the most deadly of Africa’s Big Five, which also included the lion, leopard, elephant, and rhino. Tourists were sometimes fooled into thinking that, because they looked like handsome dark cows with curly horns, all the fuss about how ferociously they could charge had been exaggerated. Not many of those tourists lived to tell the tale.
    This buffalo, however, was no danger to anyone. He was a young bachelor who’d probably been evicted from the main herd for fighting, but there was no fight left in him now. He was lying on his side, his streaming eyes wild and terrified, wracked with fever. As they watched he gave a great gasp, as if the life was slipping from him.
    Martine’s eyes filled with tears. She couldn’t bear to see any animal suffer.
    “Hurry, Tendai,” she called, but Tendai and Sampson were involved in some