The Veldt

Blitz by John Seerey-Lester

The campfire crackled warmly and flung its sparks up into the cool vesper sky, where the first and brightest stars were just beginning to wink into being. A sliver of moon had also risen early, outshining all but Venus and the Dog Star. Wendy Dandridge thought it looked like an elephant’s tusk, suspended in the lilac yonder by invisible thread. She gazed up to see the stars salting the sky, distracting herself only to smooth back a loose wisp of brown hair that the cool breeze had knocked into her eyes.

Idly, her mind wandered back to just such a summer eve as this, ten years previous, where she sat on her mother’s lap on a bench in the rose garden, watching with the same naked wonder the slow transit of Halley’s comet across the Dorset sky. Her mother. A sting behind her eyes warned that tears were close at hand and she blinked them back, exorcising the memory from her mind and trying to turn her attention back to Bell.

John Bell was a big-game hunter. He stood just under two meters tall, but presently he reclined comfortably in a folding chair across the little table from Wendy, slouched back and leaning one arm against the sharply polished rifle which he’d stood in the dirt beside him. The gun’s glistening walnut stock was a dark mirror of their campfire, casting back hot yellow flames in fuming orange and a coal-black shadow of their pewter teapot. Bell was telling of the morning’s hunt, with wiry, white-bearded Professor Clark occasionally chiming in to add or confirm a detail.

“This old tusker must have stood four meters at the shoulder,” Bell said dramatically, “A bull, in the full throes of musth. We could plainly see the temporin leaking out of him, drenching both sides of his head right down to the chin. Nasty brute, he was.”

“One moment,” Wendy’s father, seated to her right, asked, “What is this ‘temporin’ you speak of?”

“Elephants have glands behind their eyes,” Professor Clark explained, taking his pipe from his mouth and gesticulating with it in such a way that it seemed a prop to help emphasis his points, “When a male elephant goes into musth, these glands secrete a thick, tar-like substance called temporin. The precise function of these secretions is not yet known, but what certainly is known is that an elephant in musth is by far the most dangerous animal on the planet. He will attack anything that moves. He gores rhinoceroses and giraffes, and throws lions like paperweights. I’ve even heard of elephants in India attacking trains on the Hyderabad Line when in musth.”

“Sounds like a dreadful ordeal to be in musth,” Edith said flippantly, mispronouncing ‘musth’. She was seated to Wendy’s left. Her blonde locks were neatly bobbed under her pith, bouncing slightly as she leaned forward in her chair. The helmet was a gift from a soldier in Cape Town. “Why do they do it?”

“Why, Miss Edith,” Bell replied mischievously, “Going into musth only means a male is ready to mate.”

Wendy felt her cheeks turn to rosebuds at his tone, and though she couldn’t see it in the firelight, she knew her younger sister’s were as well. She shifted her position slightly and glanced over Bell again. Broad shoulders. Sandy blond hair, just a shade lighter than his savanna-tanned skin. His short-sleeved khaki shirt did little to conceal a long, jagged scar on his right arm.

He’d arrived at the medical camp in the early afternoon with Professor Clark, requesting water and directions back to Bulawayo. His skin was slick with sweat, his hair arranged into sudorous blades that hung low over his forehead. His eyes sparkled like polished green agates in the noon sun. Wendy and Edith had stared at him dumbly, like he were some desert hallucination of masculinity. Doctor Dandridge offered to serve the two men dinner after treating his last patient of the day, and invited them to stay the evening, which they’d graciously accepted.

“Anyhow,” Bell said, returning to his story, “This bull quite suddenly reared out of the bush, his hide black and menacing as a summer storm. He was coming straight for us.”

“What did you do?” Edith asked. Forgetting all etiquette, she was now leaning forward with her elbows on the table, cupping her chin in her hands like a little girl.

Wendy was deeply intrigued too, though far too poised to make her interest so plain. She watched Bell with an almost feline curiosity, her eyes eagerly drinking in the tanned muscles of his shoulders, his arms, that pale ghost of some long ago wound raked into the flesh of his right bicep. He was so relaxed as he discussed the details of the hunt, so confident in the recollection. So unlike the stuffy prigs back in London. His every word kicked up butterflies in her stomach.

And his story was so vivid, with so few words! As she listened, her mind’s eye ran wild crafting a vision of the hunt so real it was as though she were there in the bush alongside him. Like he were a bard playing the lyre of her imagination.

There was the elephant, rearing like a nightmare creature from behind an acacia that appeared puny at its side, brandishing cream white tusks long and broad as a dreadnought’s cannons. Ears billowing like a galleon’s mainsails. Red of eye and snorting foam from its tentacle nose. A veritable chimera of beast and machine set to obliterate brave John Bell’erophon, armed only with his toothpick rifle.

The rifle kicked back with an earsplitting crack, and Wendy’s daydream froze. Suspended in the air, a gray puff coming out of the rifle like pipesmoke. Bell stood beside her still as a photograph. Only she was still animate in this hazy dreamworld whose edges blurred into mist. She, and the elephant. His breath startled her. She whipped around to face him in all his terrifying glory as he stamped his pillar-like feet in place. Her throat was too tight to speak else she would have prayed to awaken from what could only be a vivid nightmare.

The elephant roared. Not as some dramatic part of her whimsy. At her. Directly. It stared right at her, into her. Red eyes boring holes in her, only they weren’t red anymore, they had become flakes of amber with black needlepoint centers. The raspy, booming trumpet threatened to shake her skeleton to pieces. As if the elephant were raging against some injustice, some hideous misdeed being done to its memory. That this isn’t how it was. This isn’t how it should be remembered. For there is a sacredness in the act of remembering, her mother had always said so. It was important. To treasure events as they really happened, for good or ill, not to repaint them later in different hues no matter what.

She suddenly felt as if the floor had collapsed from under her. Falling, falling, falling through a dream. The monstrous elephant disappeared in a flash back to its realm of unreality, echoes of its terrible roar ringing in her ears like cymbals. She gasped at the sudden catch and release as she plummeted over… nothing. She was back in her seat with a jolt, a clatter of silverware on the white tablecloth. The babble of conversation ceased for a moment and she found all four of her companions staring at her. Her cheeks reddened.

“Boring you, am I?” Bell said. He smiled as he spoke, but his tone carried an unmistakable undertone of annoyance. Disdain, even. He must have thought she had caught herself about to fall asleep.

“N-Not at all,” she replied, looking down to either side of her, readjusting her position, smoothing her skirt. She laughed nervously. “I think the chair’s leg almost gave, over a pebble or something. My humblest apologies, please continue.”

His scornful look lingered on her a moment longer. She veiled her eyes and looked down at her plate, carefully thinking of nothing at all. Especially not elephants. She thought she could still hear the bull’s trumpet ringing in her ears, bouncing around inside the walls of her skull, even as she tried to reign it in. Distracting herself, lightly drumming her fingers on the table and counting each stroke. Focusing on the primitive semblance of rhythm the act generated. Such fantasies were dangerous, precisely what the doctor had sent her here to be rid of, not to indulge in. She felt her father’s gaze on her and when she met it she felt a newer, deeper shame at the look of grave concern in those old gray orbs. One foot in, that was the warning…

When Bell began speaking again, she tried to focus exclusively on what he was saying. Listening only to his words, with no conjured images to go along with any of them, as if she were fine-tuning her ears. Every time her mind’s eye was roused by some evocative word or phrase she coldly shut herself down as one slams the door in the face of a salesman. Forcing herself to listen to a half-song of lyrics divorced from their instrumental.

“Anyhow, I stood my ground,” Bell continued, “I told the professor to stand tall behind me, so that we would present a united front against the bull.”

“And against every fiber of my being, I followed that order!” Professor Clark laughed.

“You certainly did.” Bell replied, piqued at being interrupted yet again, “And because you did, you and I are still alive tonight. I was betting our lives that this was a bluff charge, and I was right. The bull skidded to a stop just two meters in front of us, and stared at us with a rather puzzled look on his face. I raised my rifle, ever so slowly. Many elephants have become wise to what a rifle is, and I didn’t want to startle the beast. I raised it right about to his forehead-” As he said this, he pantomimed the motion of aiming a rifle, his real one still propped against the chair. His dark green eyes danced back and forth between Edith and Wendy to see how the ladies were enjoying his performance, “- and fired. Point. Blank. Range. The bull stood there tottering for a moment with a red hole in his forehead, as though he didn’t yet realize he was supposed to be dead. Then he fell over with a crash like a falling tree, and that was that.”

Quite against her will, Wendy’s mind again flooded her. She viewed Bell and his pantomining as if through dark glass, and the image of the bull elephant overtook her. He wasn’t as large as in her first vision, nor as evil. Infuriated, but not evil. He was still in the same place, stamping his feet and growling at Bell and the Professor. The acacia beside him. Leaves whimpling in tune with his ears in the slack breeze. The sharp report of the rifle echoed in her skull like so many bats disturbed from their roosts in a cave. A stunned grunt as the bullet struck the bull’s forehead. Strong tang of gunpowder in the air. The elephant looked confused. Sad and confused. His body swayed like the canopy of some ancient oak with its base perilously axed. As though the last calculations in his mind were devoted to deciding which way to fall. Left or right. Right. Into the acacia. A boom so tremendous that it shook her again out of the reverie, this time thankfully without any hypnagogic jolts.

She cursed herself silently. It scared her more than anything. Having the visions was one thing. Her near-total lack of control over them was another entirely. She realized at last that the reason Bell had appeared so dark was only because she was staring into his polished reflection cast back by the walnut stock of his gun. But the elephant had been real. So dreadfully real.

They were all silent for a moment, and the only sound to be heard was the crackle of the fire. In the distance, the acacia skyline’s dendritic branches were stark black etchings on a canvas of twilight. The night was warm, but nevertheless Wendy shivered. Shivered in fear, for she could once again hear the doctor’s warning that she needed to put a leash on such vivid daydreams, that she already had one foot in the asylum and this safari vacation was her last chance. The daydreams were fantasies at best, and outright hallucinations at worst. They weren’t real. They were an illness, a disorder to be vanquished. But. Still. She feared to ask Bell which way the elephant had fallen, to confirm whether there really had been an acacia or not.

Elephants didn’t usually come close to the village. Hadn’t since she’d arrived, at least. But she’d seen vast herds of the animals from afar, backlit by the rising sun on the train ride to Bulawayo. They were mountains that moved, trunks throwing dust over their backs like some primeval ritual. Their trumpets a distant, thunderous paean. Beautiful, but commanding respect. In the same manner a thunderstorm or the ageless beating down of the waves upon shore both inspires and humbles.

“That was very brave of you,” Wendy said finally. Bell looked at her and smiled, and a wave of relief flooded over her for she knew at once that her earlier indiscretion had been forgotten.

“Oh, well,” Bell replied airily, “Bravery doesn’t have very much to do with it. It’s in the instant, right when the elephant lunges out of the bush, that you have to decide whether you are going to live or die. Of course, there’s always a fair bit of chance involved. But at root it’s a matter of willpower, Miss Wendy. My will to live was simply stronger than the elephant’s.”

Wendy leaned back in her chair. Willpower. It was her evident lack of it that had sent her here. She didn’t envy Bell for his, necessarily. She simply couldn’t control her imagination. Her somnambulism. Her grief. She’d mourned her mother long after the crape had been blown from the doorknob by the bleak winds of late autumn. Sitting in the sunroom where she died. The same chair where she’d read to her during the long illness. Staring at the empty, accusing bed. She hadn’t the will to move on. She was bordering on melancholia. Her circadian rhythm had begun to flow backwards- she walked in her sleep and dreamed when awake. Retreating inwardly from the echoing, empty halls of the estate, she drifted further and further into the warm recesses of her memories with each passing day. As if she were some forgotten derelict desperately tending a fire that had long since run out of fuel, trying to keep it alight until the last ember died in eternal dark and cold.

Her transcendental doctor thought the wilds would help, the rawness of the open country scouring her soul of its grief like sucking venom from a wound. He could have sent her to the Lake District, or the Scottish Highlands. Ireland, if it hadn’t been in rebellion. But hers was a severe case. Mere mountains would not do. She needed to visit the true wilderness, as Christ had wandered for forty days in the desert. So she took a steamer to Africa, to join her father and sister for a few months on the veldt, where men were still far from the largest or strongest of beasts and where most of the locals voted with their teeth and claws. Whenever she heard the hyena’s laugh or lion’s distant growl late at night, a spike of fear ran down her spine and under the intoxicating spell of adrenaline she could forget the pain in her heart. There had been improvement- she’d noticed, as had her father. Her noctambulatory wanderings had ceased since arriving in Africa, thank God. But then, when the danger had passed and quiet resumed, it all flooded back to her again.

“What happened to the elephant, after you felled it?” her father asked, “The carcass, I mean.”

“I believe our bearers are still out there dismantling it. They must be mostly done by now; they’re racing the hyenas after all. The meat goes to the villagers, and the professor wants the head mounted.”

“I wonder what his eyes were like,” Wendy breathed. A perfectly random question, wholly unrelated to the discussion. But it wondered her nonetheless.

“How do you mean?” Bell asked.

“You said he seemed puzzled, when you called his bluff. I wonder if it showed in his eyes.”

“An elephant’s eyes are terrible to behold, Miss Wendy,” Bell said gravely, “They’re like hot coals jammed into a tree knot, with the surrounding skin thick and tough as stone, all twisted into craggy rings around that terrible eye. They’re fearsome, those eyes. The eyes of a monster that has but one thought- destruction.”

---

Their teakettle began to whistle at just that moment, and Doctor Dandridge called for one of their porters to serve them. A tall black man loped over to the fire and plucked the teapot from the flames with a dishrag he’d had in his belt. They had no fancily crocheted potholders here in Africa, but tea was non-negotiable.

The black man, a Matabele perhaps, went over to Edith to pour hers first. Wendy wondered if he had been a porter for some safari before to know that bit of etiquette. All the cultures of the continent prioritized men by default. Women were merely an afterthought, if they were thought about at all beyond certain biological impulses. Chivalry was a distinctly European import.

It was a strange time. The black man’s father was more than likely a hunter who had never seen a teapot before, who had lived savagely as his fathers had a thousand generations before him. Perhaps a veteran of Bembezi, or a participant in the slaughter of the Shangani Patrol. Rattling his spear and shield at neighboring tribes when conquest demanded fresh blood. Spending most of his days hunting boar and antelope. Now, this new generation of blacks wore fezzes and vests over their white cotton thobes. They hauled crates full of tools and gadgets they didn’t understand, and were the subjects of a race advanced far beyond their own.

Of course, it wasn’t just Africa that was changing. Europe was undergoing monumental upheavals of its own. The Great War had redrawn the map, and the culture with it. Edith was a perfect example of the international zeitgeist. Her blonde locks bobbed like an American flapper’s. She wore knee-high boots and trousers, a saharienne over her blouse, and that silly pith helmet the soldier in Cape Town had given her. For all intents and purposes, menswear.

Wendy didn’t judge her for it- Edith’s boots were certainly better suited to the rugged terrain of the veldt than her own brown leather oxfords. But beyond this small concession, Wendy stuck to a more traditionally feminine wardrobe. Just a plain white cotton blouse and an ankle-length black skirt. Her hair and eyes were the same shades of deep, chocolate brown, with the former pulled back into a Gibson tuck and crowned by a simple straw sunhat adorned with a black ribbon. If Edith drew men’s eyes for her zest, Wendy drew them for her grace.

When the bearer moved around Edith to pour Wendy’s tea, Wendy noticed him staring at Edith’s hair. It must have been a curiosity to him. There were no blonde Africans, and perhaps Edith was the first he had ever seen. But there was something else in his expression. Something unsettling. His eyes didn’t just linger on Edith’s hair but seemed to drift over her full figure. When he felt Wendy’s gaze and caught her eye, he smirked contentedly at her, and she saw it plain. It was lust.

She inhaled sharply. Quite deliberately, she averted her eyes and stared into the porcelain bottom of her empty teacup. The very idea of this, this kaffir ogling her sister- ogling her- curdled her stomach. His very gaze violated her, made her feel unclean. She could sense his staring eyes as if they were actually touching her, penetrating her, lingering on her rosy cheeks. Her pouting lips. Her pale, slender neck. She crossed her arms over her breasts and found herself wishing she had a saharienne too.

The bearer leaned in close, far too close it seemed, to fill her teacup. He smelled rank and oily, despite the pretense of hygiene his wardrobe lent him. And he took his time filling the little teacup.

She looked desperately over to her father. He was busy filling his pipe, deep in some arcane discussion with Professor Clark about elephant behavior. Neither did Bell seem to notice. The hunter still reclined in his chair, absentmindedly drumming his fingers on the white tablecloth, listening to the two older men’s conversation, adding his own expertise once or twice. Occasionally he looked side to side as if scanning for threats but missed the hidden adversary right in their midst.

She hadn’t the nerve to make a scene over it. Her father would pull her aside and admonish her that it was just her overactive imagination again, that she needed to take a deep breath and realize the bearer was simply doing his job, that she needed to get over these silly fantasies once and for all for she was already perilously close to the asylum. But just as Bell knew the tracking of game, she knew the eyes of men. The bearer was enjoying making her uncomfortable.

After what felt like an eternity, he moved away from Wendy to fill her father’s teacup. When he left her side, the air instantly smelled fresh again, and she discreetly inhaled a deep draught of it. She glanced over at Edith, but her sister was busily stirring her tea and did not seem unduly disturbed. Some tiny, logical part of her brain began to grind into action, questioning her gut, but she shut it down. On this matter at least, she trusted herself entirely.

---

“I’ll be glad when they’re all gone,” Bell said, adding a teaspoon of sugar to his tea once the bearer poured it. “The elephants, I mean. Glad, but also a bit morose. They are good sporting.”

“Indeed,” Professor Clark said, “But I’m afraid there isn’t going to be any room in Africa for the elephant a century from now. Nor the lion, the leopard, or hyena.”

“Why not?” Wendy asked. Her voice cracked as she spoke, and she politely cleared her throat as though it were merely an itch and not her lingering unease at the bearer. He’d left them after finally filling the Professor’s teacup, going back over to sit on a wooden crate of medical supplies with the other porters. She no longer felt his gaze, but the hairs on her neck still stood up for she would swear upon any holy book that he was presently crudely describing her and her sister to the other porters in their native tongue.

“Progress, my dear,” Clark replied matter-of-factly. “Africa is a living fossil, simply put. All of its fauna are holdovers from the Pleistocene.”

“How do you mean?”

“During the last ice age, about eleven thousand years ago, the world was full of enormous animals not unlike those still living in Africa today. In Europe we had the mammoth, America its mastodons, and Africa and south Asia still retain elephants. Wild horses and buffaloes were once abundant on every continent, as zebra and wildebeest still are here. Preying on them the world over were lions and leopards, or animals closely related to these- the American sabretooth, for instance. Africa, and to a lesser extent south Asia, are simply the last remnants of that vanished world of ice.”

“How did they vanish? Or, rather why did they?” Wendy asked.

“To answer that,” Clark answered, “you need look no further than a mirror, my dear- mankind is responsible! We are the reason the mammoth and mastodon are no more. As man spread across the world with his superior weapons and, most importantly, his superior wits, all of the great beasts were felled for food, thus making way for civilization. Without any remaining large animals to hunt, man was forced to build permanent settlements and experiment with agriculture and husbandry; perhaps after a long era of simply gardening berries and herbs in forest glades, or penning wild hogs and rams. However it occurred, mankind and his weapons are certainly the reason there are no more megafauna in most regions.”

“There are still large animals in the world,” Professor Dandridge replied, “Or there were until quite recently. The American bison, for instance.”

“Indeed, some lasted longer than others. When pitted against the primitive American Indians, it can be entirely expected for bison to have lasted longer than their European brethren. We can only speculate as to why the dull bison outlived the mastodon- perhaps the mastodon was even more dimwitted, or perhaps it was the mere size differential that made mastodons easier to track. But eventually the bison also fell, under the advance of white civilization. And now, we continue this process in Africa.”

Wendy had never considered that before. She’d known, intellectually, that Europe once had mammoths and horses and buffalo. She’d seen their earth-kilned bones on display in museums and private collections all over Britain. But she’d never thought about how those extinct beasts were connected to ones that still lived. The idea captured her at once, and again she found herself slipping irresistibly away from the table and into some faerie-world of her own imagining…

She saw an aerial panorama of London, only instead of the bustling capital of the world it was a kind of Serengeti-on-Thames, a broad savanna brimming with thousands of animals. Only the serpentine shapes of the rivers remained to inform of the locale’s future form. She could make out horses and bison grazing in their mottled brown millions, all mixed into one teeming herd. Irish elk foraged in little groups on the periphery, splay-antlered bucks leading on willing harems, their cinnamon hides each and all curiously marked with a swooshing black stripe. The black humps of woolly rhinos were scattered like boulders along the green grass, horns reaching skyward like scraggly pine trunks. The sandy hides of lions stood out against the green as they stealthily approached a lone stag, while a pack of wolves rested contentedly on a knoll beside the ribcage of their own victim. Midst them all, groups of trumpeting mammoths stood out like the Dartmoor tors, unafraid of anything that breathed.

And then it was all gone, the vision ended like the draw of a curtain, and she was still sitting at the tea table in her father’s medical camp in Rhodesia where the elephants and zebra still roamed, and she told herself that the prairie she had seen so clearly was just the dreary London of brick and stone that she’d known all her life, the selfsame London whose soot and smog had so hastened her mother’s death, and she knew too that no mammoth would ever walk the Earth again. The memory of that lost world lingered, sharp and vivid as the echo of a bell, as though it were some sort of primordial anamnesis summoned forth by astral means as yet unknown to her.

She shook her head, alarmed. Mere daydreaming. The kind she meant to be rid of, needed to be rid of. She’d done it all her life, of course- her Irish nurse had diagnosed her as having been ‘teched by the faeries when she was still in a pram- but after her mother’s passing the dreamworlds had become more real than reality. The fantasies so rich in color; phantom scents and sounds lingering in her mind even after returning to the material world. A hyperactive imagination, nothing more. It had to be.

“But… why? Why must they go?” she asked, trying to ground herself back in the conversation but she felt as though she were drowning. Her mind half-frozen in trepidation at the idea of an Africa as scalped of wildlife as Europe, of these rich savannas too being rendered into lost dreams, carved up piecemeal into fields and towns. Consigned forever to the same fate as the mammoth-Thames of her whimsy. Looking around the campsite she could almost see the acacias disappearing, replaced by a vague apparition of quartered streets limned with rows of tidy houses translucent as ghosts.

She blinked hard, squinting, trying to exorcise the ghostly town from her vision, and when she opened her eyes again it had vanished. The leering porter was totally forgotten now. She felt consumed by a far deeper, nameless sort of unease that reached up from the most fathomless depths of her nightmares like a cloud of black smoke, threatening to engulf her very soul.

“It goes back to eugenics,” Professor Clark said plainly. He was using his pipe as a prop again, like a pointer on an invisible chalkboard. “You understand that there are different biological classes of human beings? Within the race, we have gradations of intelligence ranging from the genius to the idiot. And between the races, there is a hierarchy as well, with the Nordic resting comfortably at the top as the most intelligent, and the Bushman at the bottom.”

“Of course,” Wendy replied, “But that’s…”

“It follows, then,” Clark interrupted, “that there are also gradations of environments suitable to the different races of man. The least intelligent races, the Bushmen and Australian Aboriginals, can only flourish in environments with plentiful game animals, for their intellect is only fit for the basal tasks of hunting and gathering. But the more intelligent races, the various types of Europe and the Near East, can build and maintain our complex civilizations only in environments lacking such beasts. Think of how little we would have accomplished as a race if we had to constantly be on guard for lions and leopards, or elephants and giraffes destroying our fields and orchards! Certainly we would never have found the time to conquer the Empire!”

“But that’s only conjecture,” Wendy retorted, “It’s merely theory.”

“Oh, Wendy, don’t be such a mubble-fubble!” Edith exclaimed, “Professor Clark has forgotten more about the natural sciences than either of us will ever learn combined!”

Wendy wanted to reply that Edith plainly only wanted the conversation to cease so that she could go back to listening dreamily to Bell’s tall tales, but she swallowed that objection. “I’m not questioning the Professor’s knowledge at all; I’m simply trying to understand this new theory. I’ve never heard it before.”

“It’s quite alright, Miss Wendy,” Clark said in a congenial, silly girl tone she’d become all too familiar with over the years. “Yes, it is indeed ‘mere theory’, as you described it. But we have some rather strong evidence for it. We’ve witnessed it play out within our lifetimes- observe how the Americans had to clear out the buffalo and wolves in order to settle the interior of their country. They did this across the whole of North America, from the first settlers at Plymouth and Jamestown. Where Philadelphia and Boston now stand, there once were great numbers of moose and elk, bears and wolves. They’re all gone now, replaced by tamer herds of cattle and swine, and fields and orchards. Or, for the consequences of not removing the animals, let us turn to the Subcontinent. There, the civilizations, while large, were of a distinctly lower-grade than those of Europe. Thus, while theoretical, it is reasonable to posit that the expansion of civilization is diametrically at odds with the continued existence of large animals.”

“I still don’t see why they all must go, though,” Wendy protested, still unsure why she felt so passionate about the matter, so desperate. As if she were begging for the lives of the beasts from some callous, indifferent executioner, and knowing her pleas fell upon deaf ears.

“Don’t worry, dear,” Professor Clark laughed dismissively, bemused about why she seemed to care for the brutes at all. “They’ll be here a long while yet. Even the most prolific big-game hunters such as Bell don’t kill any more elephants than natural increase can make up for. Their population is, at present, stable.”

“But you said-”

“Yes, elephants will go extinct, surely. But it will take quite a long time. More a matter of attrition than decisive battle. Once the Cape-to-Cairo is completed, new lines will surely branch out from it. New ranches, new orchards, and hundreds of kilometers of fences. The elephants’ habitat will, over time, become so fragmented that they simply won’t be able to maintain a stable population any longer. When these relics inevitably take to raiding crops, by necessity they will be destroyed. One cannot place the beast’s food requirements on a pedestal above man’s. So it goes with all of Africa’s other large animals. They’re all living on borrowed time, now.”

Wendy opened her mouth to object, but then simply didn’t. Couldn’t articulate her feelings, strong as they were. Her mouth felt stuffed with words too scattered to be reined into coherency. Elephant. Extinction. Progress. Nature. Man. The dread tempest swirled within her, refusing any release by her tongue. Something about the finality of it, she supposed. The terrible, cruel finality of extinction, an end more complete than individual death for at least the species survived any one passing. The unfeeling, matter-of-fact timetable outlined by the Professor also gripped her coldly. The premise of a grueling, drawn-out extinguishing of the land no more soothing than the thought of simply lining up all the wild beasts before a firing squad to get it over with.

“Certainly they need not all vanish,” her father interjected.

Professor Clark turned to her father, and Wendy noticed that he cast a more respectful eye on him. She was merely a girl to be lectured, but the esteemed Doctor Dandridge’s ideas were worthy of consideration.

“Probably most of them must,” Dandridge began, “But a few of Africa’s beasts may in the long-term prove themselves useful to man. For example, the zebra could be intermixed with our horses to breed resistance to the horrible tsetse fly. Ostriches, if domesticated, offer a potentially rich source of meat and eggs. Even the brutish elephants may yet prove their worth. On the Subcontinent, elephants have been put to work carrying heavy logs and pulling trains. They even help to construct buildings. I see no reason why their African cousins could not be similarly engaged.”

Bell loosed a bark of laughter. “I can’t fathom an elephant being so tame. Not to doubt your word, Doctor, make no mistake. It just doesn’t seem possible for such a fierce beast to be brought to heel so thoroughly it will placidly carry logs on command.”

“Like a dog fetching a stick!” Edith giggled.

“Oh, but they do, John, they do!” Dandridge said. “They even carry humans over rugged terrain, at the mere direction of a riding crop. In the heart of tiger country, sometimes this is the only safe way to travel. Your elephants may be fierce, but they are also rather dull. Believe me, in my youth I had the pleasure of riding with a mahout through Bengal. His beast was as well-behaved as any cabhorse. They are quite tame once broken in.”

“Well, you’ll have to make quick work of taming them,” Bell replied, “I’m far from the only big-game hunter on this continent, and I’ve toppled over five-hundred of the brutes. And I’m not through yet!”

“There are plenty of elephants for both of you,” Edith said impishly, “I’ve heard there are more elephants in Africa than there are stars in the sky. You might shoot one a day for a hundred years and not make a dent in their numbers.”

“That reminds me of last year,” Bell said, sliding back comfortably into his chair, “when for three straight weeks I did exactly that- shot one elephant a day…”

He started off on another saga, reminiscing about past hunts long into the evening. From slaughtering one elephant a day, he vaulted into a tangent about hunting a lion, a maneater, in Kenya three years prior.

Wendy sat broodingly. She tucked one foot behind the other and stared at the scrim of steam whorling off her tea, listening with one ear to Bell boasting about his many exploits. Besides elephants, he was also a proud slayer of rhinos, wildebeest, and Cape buffalo. He swore by five-seventy-five Nitro Express. He’d taken oryx in Namibia, and hippos in the Nile. A leopard had maimed him once, dropping on him from an acacia while he squinted downscope at a wildebeest. That was where he’d gotten the long, lightning-bolt scar across his arm. The leopard’s spotted skin was now a rug at his favorite pub in Salisbury. Wendy found that she cared little about it now, though Edith was absolutely addicted to his stories.

Wendy should have been just as raptly attentive. She was young and eligible as well, and Bell was certainly an interesting man. But his boasting rang hollow in her ears. He was brave, no doubt. Masculine, too. He was totally in command of his environment, of the environment at large. He was also arrogant. Egocentric. A killer. An active participant in the “environmental eugenics” Professor Clark had outlined. Clearing the wilderness of its natural residents one at a time, bullet by bullet.

---

Directing her attention back to her companions, she realized two separate conversations were presently taking place. Professor Clark and her father were back to discussing the nuts-and-bolts of Africa’s future, while Bell was telling Edith of one of his trips to the Sudan. The two of them giggling like college lovers on a bench in Hyde Park.

Wendy decided to listen to the older men’s discussion- Edith could have Bell, for all she cared. Her father’s eyes twinkled as he spoke. He craved all things intellectual and had been deprived of them for two years, because ultimately he’d come to the veldt for the same reason as she. To heal. Himself and others. Himself by others. Throwing himself fully into his work to drown the grief under material worries about quinine shipments and schedules to keep and sick children to tend.

“You’ve done exemplary work here, Doctor,” Clark said, stirring the dregs of sugar at the bottom of his teacup, “Truly marvelous.”

“Thank you, Professor.”

“How many inoculations have you given thus far?”

“Difficult to say,” Dandridge replied, rubbing his chin, “Definitely over five thousand. I have proper records, of course, but they still need to be collated.”

“Of course. Still, over five thousand! That’s fine work considering the remote location!”

“Yes, well, it’s in no small part thanks to the rail line,” Dandridge replied, somewhat sheepishly. He never did well with praise. It embarrassed him. “Without regular shipments of lymph and quinine, I’d only be mending broken arms and administering end-of-life care to malaria cases. Those trains are our lifeline, and that is no metaphor.”

“There will be more of them in the coming years, of that I can assure you. One day not too far off, camps like these- exemplary though their work can be- will be wholly obsolete. Bulawayo and Salisbury will soon have hospitals as fine as any in England. That’s the beauty of the Empire, Doctor. We’re beating some civilization into these untamed lands.”

“It’s just a shame it’s cost so much,” Doctor Dandridge replied. “So much terrible fighting. The Matabele, the Boers, the World War, all the tribal conflicts…”

“Bumps in the road, Doctor,” Clark said, “Mere growing pains. War is sometimes an unfortunate necessity to ensure progress. And in our case, it’s worked. We’re making it worth the sacrifices. Even as we speak, not fifty kilometers away workmen are resting after a hard day’s labor on the rail line. Rhodes, rest his soul, was a forward-thinking man. Just think of the untapped mineral wealth under our feet right now- all the iron and gold ores, the vast coalfields we can use to fuel our industry back home. We’re making finished products and selling them back to territories that could never support manufacturing, for mere pennies on the pound!”

“It is a rather common sense system,” Dandridge replied. “I can’t fathom why the Americans ever rebelled against it.”

“It was their loss,” Clark replied. “Free trade is the future of the world; someday their tariff walls will crumble. Why, they might even beg to join the Dominions. Wouldn’t that be something? Then they could once again enjoy the bounties of the Empire. Africa’s resources are completely in our hands now since we won Tanganyika from the Kaiser. We have the whole continent under us. It’s whatever we make of it.”

They continued back and forth like this for a bit. Wendy didn’t much care for the substance of the discussion, but she quietly watched her father. Seeing a part of him that she hadn’t seen in a very long time well back up to the surface, parting his lips into a smile like some tectonic upthrust from his very heart. The long discussions of history and philosophy he’d had with her mother had always been a jovial chessmatch, one in which her mother had capably held her own. More often than not leaving her father chuckling to himself, adoringly stupefied that he had managed to marry someone so perfectly his intellectual equal. It was good to see him indulging in those lofty subjects again. Good to see him smile.

“I would certainly like to see the Africans uplifted from their present barbarism,” Dandridge mused, “It will be difficult, though. You know as well as I that the quality of the race itself is what counts, and Africans are distinctly low-grade.”

“That’s the beauty of civilization though, Doctor,” Clark said, “It self-selects for the most intelligent. Africans with inferior intellects simply will not persist through the threshing process. Just as England’s population of imbeciles wound up as vagrants, who are now themselves mostly gone. Ireland’s, too. It isn’t cruel. The lowest grades simply won’t be able to afford to have children, and their genes will wither away.”

Dandridge sighed heavily. “The two main pincers crushing these people, from what I have gathered, are lack of medicine and a lack of education. I am of course hard at work on this first issue, and missionaries are scattered to the four winds correcting the second. But we need more than quinine and Bibles to raise African civilization to the standards of, well, anything remotely resembling civilization.”

“Schools are going to be built, Doctor, of that you need not worry. I can even foresee the brightest pupils of the Subsaharan eventually receiving a proper education in Britain, like we’ve done with those of the Raj, Egypt, Hong Kong, and all the others in the grand constellation of the Empire. We can take comfort in the knowledge that one day the children of our porters will receive their educations at Oxford instead of on the savanna, reading Smith and Hume instead of learning to track beasts!”

Wendy thought of the bearer who had been so eager to be near her and Edith. She cast a glance behind her. He was still over by the crates of medical supplies, still chatting with the other porters. Laughing with them. About her? How distressed she’d been? She didn’t find the idea of him wandering London very comforting.

He felt her gaze and looked her way, grinning widely at her. His black face almost blending into the night, an apparition of tooth and eye like the half-faded Cheshire Cat. Wendy gulped. A wave of nausea overcame her. She tried to wrench her eyes away from him but found herself unable to. The campfire flared up, white hot flames licking the space between them but the bearer’s grinning teeth and eyes lingered in front of the flames.

Her brain, ever logical, tried to assert that it was a mere trick of the light, an afterimage temporarily burned into her sight. But she heard nary a peep of her own inner monologue for her ears were filled with the thunderous roar of a thousand locomotives. The voices ground on around her, Edith and Bell and the Professor and her father but she herself was no longer with them, was a million miles away. Falling upwards through space and time.

---

A dreary morning. The scent of coaldust overpowering. It took her a moment to realize where she was. London. Home. She was standing in the middle of Trafalgar Square where the buses and cabhorses whirled around Charing Cross like Moslems circling the Kaaba. At the base of Nelson’s Column, costermongers hawked their wares to passing workmen and grisettes while pigeons chortled overhead anxiously awaiting the inevitable bounty of crumbs to salt the pavement. She was facing down the long avenue of Whitehall, a narrow ravine of marble frontages, looking off towards the distant tower of Big Ben. It didn’t occur to her, in the depths of the vision, to wonder how any of this was even remotely possible, for her to be in the Rhodesian bush one moment and central London the next.

In sheer wonder, she turned slowly clockwise to gaze around the square, feeling an odd, electric tingle tizzing in her head as she did so. And as she spun, the city about her wilted. Seamlessly, to her mind. The white marble facades faded to drab, sooty grays as she twirled around. The fashions also changed, imperceptibly at first, but soon most of the pedestrians appeared more slovenly than even the worst-dressed paupers of her own day. The cabhorses disappeared, replaced entirely by noisy, ever-sleeker automobiles, though the red double-deckers remained. Even the constitution of the people was altered.

It seemed as if England had lost some terrible war, for by the time she had half-turned the faces of native Londoners constituted no more than a mere quarter of the population. White skin had become a rarity; the vast majority were varying shades of brown. Hindus and blacks, mostly, though the city had plainly become a polyglot petri dish of all humanity. The faces of ten thousand ethnies all crammed into the square as one teeming mass. Most wore the same ill-fitted wardrobes, though a few still adhered to ethnic wear- Moslem women in hijabs, bearded Jews in hoiches. The faces became cruder, harsher as she spun, ticking past decades in an instant.

When she completed her revolution, London was no more. She needed a moment to reorient herself, for the most recognizable landmarks had been buried under a floral blanket. Whitehall was a long stretch of tall grassland, flanked on either side by enormous hedges that she knew were the ivy-choked sides of marble facades. Far off in the distance, jutting out of the carnation dawn, was the green stump of Big Ben. The stately premises of the National Gallery behind her as ruined and overgrown as any slighted castle. Vines of morning glory hung from every cornice like forgotten bridal veils. The entire square a jungle of nettles and couchgrass. Some rusting ruin ahead that she vaguely recognized as a double-decker, slowly disintegrating under the ivy onslaught. Nature, ever patient, was again wedded to the land once known as England. She stood on a plinth of stone and realized with a start that it was all that remained of Nelson’s Column, long since toppled. The couchgrass would be over her head if she stepped down, so she remained where she was and stared down the weedlot avenue.

Ahead, a herd of stags and the distant progeny of cabhorses grazed placidly on the weeds, their brown hides dotted all over the Square. Dew rose from the grass in sheets of mist, obscuring much of the desolation and making the ruins almost appear like a living city again. A phantom city, for as far as the orchestra of humanity was concerned this place was silent as a mausoleum. The urban hustle and bustle replaced by an endless chorus of birdsong. No snorting buses, no peddlers or urchins harrying pedestrians. The only remotely familiar sound was the echoed bark of some large dog in the distance, soon drowned by the cranking of geese overhead.

Then she saw him. Far off on the other side of the square. Striding through the couchgrass, using a spearshaft as a walking stick. His skin was black as a coalbox, though his features matched no particular ethny she knew of. He looked to be some racial mishmash. A Negro’s kinky hair starbursting out of his head. The fleshy nose of a Hindu. A Mongol’s eyelids, but the eyes themselves were deep blue, blue like Edith’s. He wore no clothing she could make out through the dense grass, though she felt certain he must have worn at least a loincloth. A blackamoor neanderthal. He stopped just as he was about to cross Whitehall like any normal pedestrian from her own day waiting for the light to change. Then he turned her way and, after a moment’s startle at her presence, smiled broadly. The same sinister grin as the bearer’s, staring lustily through her sister’s eyes and pinning Wendy like some hapless butterfly to an entomologist’s setting board as he turned and began to approach her.

She swallowed. Felt lightheaded. The vision of the advancing troglodyte and the ivy and the ruined city all smeared into a watery blur. Once again she felt as though she were falling. No, sinking. Sinking into a bottomless trench. She gulped for air and the next thing she knew she was staring wide-eyed into her empty teacup as if she were trying to read the leaves. Her skin was clammy all over even though the night was still cool. She was terrified. This was worse than any mere daydream. She had never, ever experienced anything like it.

She glanced at her father. Mid-sentence, he was. Still chatting with Professor Clark as though nothing had happened. Loony. Absolutely loony. Her father glanced over, smiling at some witticism the Professor had espoused, and blanched at the sight of her.

“My word, Wendy,” he exclaimed, “You look like you’ve seen a ghost!”

Perhaps I have, she thought, but she had no time to reply for suddenly Bell was on his feet.

He gazed off into the black treeline. Held up his hand to shush them. Conversation ceased in an instant, and all five of the party looked around silently, the only sounds to be heard the drum-steady beating of their hearts.

“What is it?” her father whispered.

“Elephants,” Bell replied curtly. “Wait here.”

He walked away. Slowly. His steps silent and precise. Like a cat. Ball of his foot back to the heel. He entered the tent, and Wendy could hear the low metallic clinking as he readied his gun- picking up a handful of cartridges, sliding back the bolt. Surprised that it wasn’t already loaded.

She didn’t hear the elephants he claimed were so near. Could barely hear anything over her heart as it tried to rattle its way out of her chest. Then, there it was- the cracking of a tree branch, off in the dark. An ice splash of adrenaline raced down her spine. The terror of the vision was instantly washed over and replaced by an entirely new suite of fears.

---

Before Bell returned, the elephants were among them. It happened so quickly Wendy didn’t have time to process it. Titanic gray shapes reared out of the treeline, branches and brambles parting noisily before them. Blending almost perfectly into the night save for the tell-tale ghosts of their scimitar tusks. Each was at least twice her height, standing perhaps three meters tall, but they seemed far more colossal ambling right towards her. Ears billowing like flaps of torn canvas. Thick hides visibly wrinkled and furrowed as though each were a centuries-old antecessor, or some wizened deity of the earth.

There was a clatter to her left. Edith leaping out of her chair. Her teacup and saucer clinking and shattering as she knocked them onto the ground in her rush to escape. Wendy was vaguely aware of herself also rising from her own chair, startling herself at the dull thud when she accidentally toppled it. Her legs felt all wobbly, as if unable to decide if they were supposed to flee or prostrate themselves. Professor Clark and her father each turned at the same moment, languidly, as though the occurrence were nothing more unusual than a train passing by.

They certainly sounded like trains. The elephants, that is. Rumbling and bellowing. Shaking the very ground she stood upon. Shuffling through their camp like a battalion of double-decker buses. And yet, they weren’t destructive. Indeed, the herd seemed to flow politely around their table and tents as a river braids its way around a sandbar.

Wendy looked around. She was alone at the table. Edith and her father cowered on the other side of their tent, their heads just barely poking above the taut canvas side. Father’s gray hair and Edith’s silly pith. She turned and saw the porters fleeing behind her, red fezzes trailing golden tassels like the retreating banners of some defeated army. Professor Clark was nowhere to be seen. His pipe lay abandoned on the ground. Nor was Bell anywhere in sight. She stood alone in a canyon made of the living hides of dozens of elephants, their wrinkly flanks passing her by like so many sedimentary layers. Close enough to touch, but she dared not.

She was absolutely frozen. Wide-eyed, like a doe watching an oncoming car. Midway between terror and awe. Her skin felt electrified. None of the elephants harassed her. They barely even seemed to notice her as they passed, and her apparent insignificance in their eyes kicked up a maelstrom of emotions within her. Fear. Shame. Wonder.

Wendy counted thirty-two elephants total. They came in varying sizes- some were juveniles or young adults, others quite old. One little calf shuttled past her like a rockslide boulder, eagerly reaching its trunk out to touch its mother’s tusk like a child holding its mother’s hand. She turned to watch them go, vast gray hulks lumbering off into the night, disappearing into the cloud of dust they left in their wake.

She gasped at the sound of a deep rumble directly behind her that reverberated right through to her core. A hot gust washed over her, blowing the hat from her head. She twirled around, and found herself face to face with the largest elephant she’d yet seen. Face to trunk, rather, for Wendy barely came halfway to the elephant’s ivories, and she had to look far up that rugose, palm-tree trunk to meet the eyes set deep into its gray war-shield face. They weren’t fierce like Bell had said. They were distant orbs of amber collared in gneiss. Far away, but full of passion. Full of life.

The elephant had stopped right in front of the table and stood before her like a medieval bastion, staring down at her as though expecting something. A curtsy or bend of the knees, perhaps.

It was the matriarch of the herd. Had to be. She was the biggest. The oldest. She looked old. Wendy wasn’t quite sure how, but she did. It was the way she carried herself. That sort of quiet dignity which comes only with the onset of graceful maturity. And Wendy knew why the rest of the herd had bustled through the campsite ahead of her. They were her retinue, proudly trumpeting the arrival of their lady, their leader, their mother and grandmother and great-grandmother all in one, as a flourish of buisines announces the arrival of a monarch.

And Wendy, apparently, was her chosen audience.

She swallowed dryly. Standing rigidly, her arms awkwardly held out at her side, gawking up at the old lady for that was how she perceived the matriarch. Not as a dumb beast, but a fellow lady. The matriarch’s breaths were a warm wind, each exhalation blowing back wisps of Wendy’s hair like a noon breeze over savanna grass. Heavy, as though she were sighing in some perpetual state of melancholia. Like Wendy.

She felt weighed. Measured. From Wendy’s lowly vantage point, the elephant seemed the keeper of some cosmic ledger, an eldritch judge whose downward gaze scrutinized her very essence. A look that penetrated all the veneers of social propriety, the illusions put on for crowds and friends and even her dearest relatives, and simply assessed her. Her character, her essence. She, as she truly was. And Wendy knew, knew in her soul, that the elephant was looking for something. Not something she’d lost. Something she’d yet to find, and if she did not see it she would ramble onward into the bush after her family never to return.

Wendy reached out her hand. Slowly. Cautiously. It was a pale and dainty ambassador, fragile as a seashell against this fortress of flesh. The elephant eyed her with equal parts curiosity and caution, her vast ears whimpling in the breeze like pennant banners. When Wendy’s wan fingertips brushed the matriarch’s trunk, the latter pulled back just a moment, as though affronted that some mere human had dared touch her. Wendy’s heart fluttered. Her nerves screamed at her to turn and flee. But she held her ground. Not like Bell had. This was no challenge- not she to the matriarch, nor the matriarch to she. They were simply meeting, as two ladies do.

Wendy thought the matriarch was speaking to her. Not with words. In some formless song of the world before man. Deep, soft breaths. Wet, honeypool eyes. The low rumbles that came from deep within her throat, her heart. It all spoke of respect. Understanding. Some common ground between all the myriad souls to ever inhabit the world. Wendy stood there touching the matriarch’s callused trunk and shivered. She wanted to cry for the majesty of life and all the ephemeral beauty of this garden Earth.

The rifle cracked once.

A sharp bark to slice through the womblike tranquility of the matriarch’s breathing. To pierce her hide. To take her life.

Then, as if in slow motion, her gray trunk fell away from Wendy’s hand.

“No…” Wendy breathed hoarsely, “No, no…”

The matriarch fell with an earthquake thud. A dust cloud reared up at the impact of her huge body and wafted across the tusk moon in mockery of a low cirrus deck. Her body looked crumpled. Like the wreck of a locomotive or some other heavy machinery.

“Careful. It’s still alive,” Bell said, suddenly at her side. Suddenly all man again. One hand curled protectively around her waist, the other around his rifle.

Wendy wrenched free of him and rushed to the elephant’s side, to where her head lay twisted and askance from her body like a heap of boulders. Her head was on its side, such that only one of her eyes looked skyward. Her pupil catching a glimmer of starlight. Her trunk curled in towards her mouth like a line of hawser. One tusk jutted skyward, beseeching the crescent moon, while the other lay flat on the ground. Wendy put her hands on the elephant’s dry, craggy skin, patting her under the jaw, beneath the eye. Her skin felt like old, rumpled leather. She didn’t struggle. Didn’t try to stand or move. She just breathed, slow and ragged, her great side heaving with each strained inhalation.

“It’s going to be okay,” Wendy whispered. Her voice cracked under the weight of the lie and she wished with all her heart that words could heal, “Don’t be afraid. It’ll be over soon.”

She could hear indistinct voices behind her. Shouting. Bell or Clark or her father or the bearers all blurred together. None of them mattered. None of them were real. For that one moment, Wendy and the elephant were were the only two beings in the whole universe.

Their eyes met, and Wendy remembered always how distinctly unmonstrous the elephant’s gaze was.

How her eye was a wet, shining orb of blazing hazel.

How the mote of a pupil focused on her.

How it held her.

Another gunshot sliced through the deathbed silence. Louder this time. Like an explosion. Wendy jumped at the closeness of it. When she looked down again at the elephant, her eye stared blankly up at the black sky. No longer casting back any starlight. Already congealing in death. Whatever soul had dwelt within was gone.

Her father’s hand came down on her shoulder, gripping her reassuringly. His voice shook in relief and she thought he sounded ready to cry. “Wendy, are you alright?”

“He killed her,” she whispered. Still staring into the elephant’s dead eye. Wishing she could will the matriarch back to life.

“Good thing I did, too,” Bell said loudly. The hairs on her neck stood up at his voice. Grating. Sand in her ears. She could imagine his pose behind her, standing tall, leaning his rifle confidently over his shoulder while looking down at his latest victim. “I reckon you were only a moment away from being trampled.”

That’s a lie, she thought. Wanted to say. But didn’t. She couldn’t wrench her eyes away from the matriarch’s, even though she could no longer feel the elephant’s presence near her. Just a carcass, not a being.

“Why didn’t you run, Wendy?” her father demanded. His voice still quavering. Angry, but more sheer terror. The thought of losing her too. “For God’s sake, why didn’t you run?”

She didn’t answer.

“She couldn’t,” Bell supplied, “Knocked the chair over. The elephant had her cornered between it and the table.”

Her father mumbled something, a prayer perhaps, then just exhaled loudly, trembling. He patted her on the shoulder and started skirting around the elephant’s carcass.

“Where did you even hit it?” he asked.

“Lung shot,” Bell replied happily, “Should see the hole just behind the shoulder. At that range I would’ve preferred a side headshot, but I had to aim high on account of Miss Wendy.”

Dandridge found the hole and leaned against the cooling flesh of the elephant’s foreleg to gaze into a red hole as big as his fist that had shorn the breath from her lungs. Wendy’s own chest felt like she’d been shot too. Or sentenced to be pressed to death. Her breathing heavy, labored once more with grief for this friend she had only just met.

“It fell alright too. Away from Miss Wendy, I mean. At least this time there was no acacia for it to fall into,” Bell said, earning a laugh from the Professor and icing the blood in Wendy’s veins.

“Yes, our poor bearers had to waste at least an hour untangling the brute.”

“This one will have to wait til morning,” Bell said sharply. He was facing back in the direction the rest of the elephant herd had ambled in. They were coming back.

They came not as a fierce army on the move to avenge their fallen leader. They seemed to come as a funeral procession. A ragged line, massive heads bowed so long their tusks nearly dragged on the ground, their ears pulled close round them like weeping veils. Silent as gravestones. Just the slow blowing of air from their trunks as they approached the spot where the matriarch lay, to see why she had stopped following them.

Wendy rose to her feet just as Bell was leveling his rifle on the lead elephant, just starting to take a bead on the animal. She slapped the barrel down with one porcelain hand. Bell whipped his head towards her in a flash of anger, and she met it with damp, pleading puppy-dog eyes. The veins on his neck quivered in rage as he stared her down, but she didn’t relent. When she finally uncurled her dainty fingers off the cold metal of the gun, it stayed lowered. He shook his head in disgust and huffed off in the direction of their medical tent.

The herd formed a rough semicircle around the matriarch, like pagans circling a sacred megalith. The adults the juveniles the calves all. They stood swaying over the body. Unsure, reluctant. None wishing to be the first to eulogize, to kiss the cadaver one last time. The night itself seeming to go into mourning. The evening chorus of birds coming to a graceful coda, with only the low trills of a nightjar and the ghostly whistle of the flufftail continuing in a somber nadir.

The largest of the remaining elephants was near the matriarch’s head. Gingerly, she reached out her trunk to brush against the fallen one’s tusk, raking it slowly over the ivory grooves. As if she were a cartographer trying to memorize every detail of a map. This the map of her mother’s life.

And Wendy’s heart sputtered and wept as the surviving elephants tenderly reached out their trunks to caress the fallen one’s body. They lingered over her tusks, some feeling the inside of her mouth. Raking the tender tips of their trunks over her teeth in some arcane funerary rite.

Wendy watched them, stricken. The largest remaining one- the one Wendy presumed, with no evidence save her intuition, to be the daughter of the fallen matriarch, and her rightful heir- glanced over at Wendy. Their eyes both wide and wet. The elephant stared imploringly, as if beseeching Wendy to join her and her family in their shared grief.

She felt her father’s hand on her shoulder. His skin wrinkled and callused, like the matriarch’s.

“Wendy, we must leave,” he said, his voice soft, respectful, “We’ll spend the night in the medical tent. Ours is too close to them.”

“How long do you think they’ll stay?” Wendy asked. She didn’t look at her father. Was still staring at the elephants, at their new leader who had turned away from her to continue her vigil.

“I don’t know.”

“She was beautiful.”

“Yes, she was.”

“She wasn’t going to harm me.”

“I know.”

Wendy sniffled. Ungracefully, she wiped her nose on the cuff of her sleeve. She looked one last time towards the elephants, then followed her father over to the medical tent on the other side of the camp.

The cots had fresh sheets, as Dandridge instructed his bearers to replace them at the end of every day. Wendy and Edith were set in their own quarters, separated from the men by a curtain.

“Did you see how Bell took out that brute?” Edith giggled. “I can’t believe you didn’t run away from it! It looked just about ready to step all over you!”

Unceremoniously, Wendy stripped and shrugged on her nightgown, and pulled back the taut sheets to climb into bed. She didn’t answer Edith. Her head hit the pillow and she rolled over and stared out the white flaps of the tent towards where she could still indistinctly make out the sailcloth ears of the elephants, their titanic gray bulks only barely lighter than the night around them.

---

She dreamed of her mother. The memory of her startlingly clear, as though she really were walking out of the black velvet night. Coming towards the empty tea-table where they’d spent the evening. Towards the open flap of the tent. Clad as usual in a simple white frock. Her cinnamon hair carried up in tortoiseshell combs. Her huge brown eyes, brown as pools of melted chocolate. Innocent doe’s eyes belying formidable strength and wisdom.

She came all the way to the tent, and Wendy sat up with a start. She knew it was a dream, for her mother had been dead two years this April. A drawn-out battle with consumption. She did her best to conceal the agony from her daughters. Her smile taut as the bacilli congealed her lungs. Politely suppressing the dry cough in the day, only to succumb in the night. The kettle whistled like a midnight train to bring honeyed tea in temporary relief, but there were still always spatters of red and pink on her pillow in the morning. She was a strong lady with a strong will and only the weak are content in their incapacity. She fought on all through the winter and died in spring just as the first maples came into leaf.

But now her mother stood just outside the tent flap, beckoning her out into the African night. Against all reason, Wendy obeyed her calling. If this apparition be the mere siren song of a nightstalking lioness, so be it. She knew it wasn’t, though. Intuition again. Her mother… she knew her mother. This was no dream-entity. She could feel the love emanating from her. And she followed her, right out to the elephant carcass.

The other elephants had gone now, and her mother stood tall atop the matriarch like the body were some sacred dolmen and she a druidess. Holding a votive lily in her hands, its petals startlingly white even against her white frock, the white of her skin. She knelt and gently placed the lily just behind the elephant’s shoulder, on the spot where the rifle bullet had found its fatal mark. Then she stood and faced Wendy. Beckoning her closer. Her mouth was moving, but Wendy couldn’t understand what she was saying.

Wendy clenched her fists and her jaw, trying her resolute best to focus all her being into hearing what her mother was saying.

“… don’t last forever, Wendy… all lives… last forever…”

“Mother? Mother?” She didn’t say it. She wanted to, with all her being. Call out to the ghost, beg her to come back with her to the world of the living. But her mouth was paralyzed.

“All lives must end, Wendy, and worlds don’t last forever. All lives must end, and worlds don’t last forever…”

The tears ran in hot runnels down Wendy’s cheeks. She watched her mother repeat the mantra. With each repetition her mother seemed to become a bit more ethereal. Her body a bit more translucent. Fading from reality, back to the afterlife from whence she came. Until finally the only word Wendy could hear from the ghost’s lips was her own name being repeated, over and over again, like she were the proper end to some ancient ritual.

“Wendy… Wendy… Wendy? Wendy!”

She awoke to her father shaking her, shouting. He was wearing pajamas. The night was cold around her, and casket black save for the feeble flame cast by the candle her father held out in a pewter holder.

She was standing at the base of the matriarch’s feet. She blinked the dream-sand from her eyes and knew what had happened but she didn’t answer her father.

She couldn’t break her gaze from the white lily placed atop the clotted hole in the elephant’s shoulder.

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