2014
Here is the story of an Elephant, told by a Bush man to a white professional hunter.

Chapter 1.

It hit me this morning that man should stop asking himself; “WHO AM I?,” but “Where do I stand” at a time where Nations interfere with each others cultures, belief’s, etc.
Where does Man’s heart, mind and soul belong in the multitude of global discontent, where rich and poor lay baits for each other to get what they want, yet never asking themselves whether they actually know what they want.
What I feel is that we humans have had enough time to settle our material part and existential problems, yet instead have become slaves to technology, science fracturing and concreting matter at its densest level.
We have put an end to the inward way that alone opens the door to the understanding of evolutionary life.
We have become slave to discoveries, monumental and highly progressive in its artificiality, yet foreign to natural evolution and an obstacle to human karmic right acting as mediating energies in the unfolding universe. .
I have one goal, Self-responsibility which must always be foremost in my incarnation.

In this case I find that animals act more responsible than most humans I have observed, for instance Elephant behaviour.

HERE IS THE ELEPHANT STORY

“His name was Tukutela, given to him by bushmen and meaning – the angry One,- they almost revered him like a god.
His dam had been the matriarch of a herd of over one hundred beasts. She had come into her last period of oestrus in her fifty-second year, and over the days that it lasted, she had been mounted and serviced by six of the herd bulls, all young animals, vigorous at the height of their powers.
It was the ideal formula for the conception of an extraordinary calf, old cow and young bull. Although it was uncertain which seed had taken root in her, the old cow had carried the genes of great elephants, big in body and tusk, in natural intelligence and the urge to dominate. These same genes had made her the leader of her herd, and now she transformed them to the foetus she carried in her womb.
She carried him twenty two months and then in the year when the German askaris under General von Lettvw-Vorbeck were ravaging eastern Africa, the year 1915, she had left the herd and accompanied only by another old female past calf-bearing, her companion of forty years, she had gone deep into the fastness of the swamps that lie on the south bank of the Zambezi river and there on an islet fringed with ivory nut palms, surrounded by miles of papyrus beds, and with the white headed fish eagles chanting overhead, she had cleared an area of sandy earth for the couch. When her time came, she had spread her back legs and squatted over the open area, squeeling in the agony of her labour, her trunk rolled up on her chest.
Her eyes had no tear ducts to drain them so the tears poured freely down her withered cheeks as though she wept, and the spasms racked her huge gaunt frame.
The other old cow stood close beside her like a midwife, caressing her with her trunk, striking her back and rumbling with sympathy. She had forced out the calf’s head, and then rested for a minute, before the last violent effort expelled the purple-pink fetal sack and the calf had fallen to the earth rupturing the umbilical cord. Tukutela had begun to struggle immediately, still trapped in the glistening mucus-coated membrane and the old cow, her companion, had stood over him and, with the prehensile trip of her trunk, delicately stripped it away.
Then with her trunk his dam had gently and lovingly lifted him to his feet, and placed him between her front legs, making the deep purring rumble of elephant contentment. Still wet and smooth and shining pinkly from his birthing, covered in copious gingery hair, almost blind, Tukutela had rolled his little trunk back onto his forehead and reached up instinctively to the twin breasts on his mother’s chest.
While he tasted for the very first time the rich creamy milk, his dam picked up the fetal sac and afterbirth and stuffed them into her mouth, chewing and swallowing and, at the same time, using her trunk to cover the damp and blood-stained spot upon the earth with sand.
The three of them, his mother , her companion and Tukutela, had remained on the island for almost two weeks while the calf had mastered the use of his legs and trunk, the pigment of his skin had darkened and his eyes adjusted to the harsh African sunlight. Then, when she considered him strong enough, she had taken him to find her herd, pushing him ahead of her and lifting him over the steep and difficult places..
The din of hundred elephants feeding had carried to them from afar, the crack and crash of breaking branches and the pig-like squeals of the calves at play, Tukutela’s dam trumped her return and the herd had come rushing up to greet her. Then, discovering the new calf, they had crowded around to touch him with their trunks, puffing his scent into their mouths, so that they would recognise it always thereafter..
Tutukela cowered between his mother’s front legs, overwhelmed by the huge bodies that surrounded him, making little baby noises of terror., but his mother draped her trunk over him and rumbled to reassure him. Within hours rather than days, he ventured out from her protection to join the other calves, and to begin carving for himself a niche in the hierarchy of the breeding herd.

Chapter 2

The herd was a close-knit group, almost all its members blood relatives, mutually reliant upon each other so that the education and discipline of the young was a concern for all.
The calves were always kept in the centre of the herd, and their antics were strictly supervised by the old barren cows who were their self-appointed nursemaids. Their care and protection was intense but any infringement at the herd law was punished instantly; a tree branch wielded with gusto across the recalcitrance’s back and hind-quarters would ensure terrified squeals and instant obedience.
Tukutela learned his place in every situation; at the centre when the herd was relaxed and feeding; between his mother’s front legs when they were on the march, or in flight from danger. He learned to react instantly to the alarm signal, learned to recognise it even when given by an animal on the further outskirts of the group.
At the signal the instantaneous silence, in contrast to the preceding happy uproar of the herd, was an eerie phenomenon of elephant behaviour.
Tukutela’s development was closely parallel to the ages of a human being; his infancy lasted two years during which time he shed the tiny milk tusks with which he had been born and then entered on his juvenile years when his true tusks emerged beyond his lips. At first these were covered by a cap of smooth enamel, but as soon as he was weaned and began to use his tusks to feed with and in mock combat with his peers, this was worn away and the true ivory beneath exposed.
His tusks would continue to grow in length and girth throughout his entire life even into his extreme old age, but the genes which dictated their extraordinary development came down from his dam along with all her other gifts of strength and bulk and intelligence.
By the age of three, Tukutela had learned the attitudes of threat and submission towards others, and his play was boisterous with much ear-flapping and threatening and barging which further developed his unusually robust frame.
Once his dam weaned him, her care became less intensive and he was allowed more range and freedom, though he still came under her fierce protection at the first threat, and on the march his place was close beside her in the lead, so very early on he learned the herd’s territory.
This was a vast area from the shores of Lake Nyasa in the north to the rain forests of the Chimanimani mountains in the south, west to the deep gorge where the Zambezi river forces itself between narrow rock cliffs with the roar of perpetual thunder and east five hundred miles to where the same mighty river spread out across wide flood plains and swampy littoral before debouching through multiple mouths into the Indian Ocean.

Chapter 3.

He learned the mountain passes and the ancient elephant roads, he learned the groves where succulent fruits grew and the seasons when they ripened. She led him to burned out savannas just as the first tender shoots pushed through the ashes and the salt licks where for thousands of years the elephants had come to prise out lumps of mineral-rich earth with their tusks and eat it with relish of small boys with sticks of candy, over the centuries quarrying deep excavations in the red African earth.
The herd was on the Mavuradonha mountains in the south when the forests put out new leaf and their sap began to flow, they were in the dense rain forests on Mount Mlanje when the rest of the range baked in the long African droughts. Always the old cow led them to water, for the herd was totally dependent upon that precious fluid. They must drink each day or experience terrible hardship, they needed copious quantities to nurture their great bodies, to cleanse their hides and, more simply, for the luxurious pleasure of the wallow. The watering hole was an important gathering place for the herd, a place where their bonds were reaffirmed and where many of the rituals of their social behavior were played out. Even the act of procreation usually took place in the water, and when the cows chose the place for their birthing, it was nearly always near water.
Sometimes there was abundant water, the great green African rivers, the mountains upon which the perpetual drizzling rains fell, and the wide swamp lands where they waded belly deep through papyrus beds to reach the islands. At other times, they had to dig for it in the dry riverbeds, or patiently wait their turn at the seeps to thrust their trunks into the deep eye of the secret well and suck up a bitter brackish mouthful at a time.
Their range was wide, and their contact with human beings infrequent. There was a great war raging in a far-off land and it had sucked most of the white men to its centre. The men that the herd encountered were usually half naked and primitive tribesmen who fled before them. Yet Ttukela learned very early that a special aura of dread surrounds these strange hairless baboon-like beings. At five years of age he could identify their peculiar acrid odour on a light breeze from many miles away, and even the faintest taint of it made him and the entire herd uneasy.

Chapter 4.

Yet Tukutela was eleven years of age before he had his first memorable encounter with human beings. One night while following their time-honoured route along the south bank of the Zambezi, his dam had stopped abruptly at the front of the herd and lifted her trunk at full stretch above her head to scent the air. Tutukela had imitated her and become aware of a tantalizing odour. He had puffed the taste of it into his mouth and his saliva poured down and dribbled from his lower lip. The rest of the herd bunched up behind them and were almost immediately consumed by the same appetite. None of them had ever smelled sugar cane before.
The old matriarch led them up the wind and within a few miles they came out on an area of the riverbank that had been recently cleared and irrigated and planted with cane. The long sword-shaped leaves glistened in the moonlight, and the aroma was rich and sweet and irresistible. The herd rushed into the new fields, pulling up the plants and stuffing them down their throats in a greedy passion.
The destruction was immense, and in the midst of it suddenly the herd was surrounded by lights and the shouts of men’s voices and the beating of drums and metal cans. Panic and pandemonium overtook the herd as they charged out of the field there was a shocking series of loud reports and bright flash of gunfire in the night. It was the first time Tutukela had ever smelled burned cordite smoke. He would remember it always and associate it with the squeals of those elephants who had mortally hit.
The herd ran fast at first and then settled into the long stride that covered the ground at the speed of a cantering horse. By morning, one of the young cows, her first calf under her belly, could no longer keep up with the herd and slumped down on her front knees, bright blood trickling from the bullet wound in her flank.
The matriarch turned back to assist her, calling and encouraging her, but the cow could not rise, and the matriarch moved up beside her. Using tusks and trunks, she lifted the fallen animal to her feet and attempted to lead her away. It was in vain, for the dying animal slumped down and lay with her legs folded up under her, and the smell of her blood upset the herd and they milled about her, swinging their trunks and flapping their ears.
One of the herd bulls, in a desperate effort to revive the fallen cow, mounted her in a stylised attempt at copulation, but a gout of arterial blood spurted from her wound and with a groan she toppled over on her side.
Unlike most animals, the elephant recognises death, especially in one of its own group, and even the immature Tukutela was affected by the strange melancholy that followed the cow’s death. Some members of the herd approached the carcass and touched it with their trunks, almost a gesture of farewell, before they wandered away into the grey thorn scrub.
The matriarch stayed on when the others had left, and Tukutela stayed with her. He watched as his dam began to strip the surrounding trees of their branches and pile them over the carcass of the dead cow. Only when it was completely hidden under a great mound of vegetation, was she satisfied.
The dead cow’s unweaned calf had stayed beside its mother’s corpse and now the matriarch shooed it ahead of her as she followed the herd. Twice the calf tried to double back to where its mother lay, but the matriarch blocked it, turning it with her trunk and pushed it along..
A mile away, the rest of the herd was watching in a grove of yellow stemmed fever trees. Many of the younger calves were suckling, and the matriarch pushed the orphan calf towards where one of the older calves, one almost due to be weaned, was showing only perfunctory interest in his mother’s dugs. She shoved the orphan between the cow’s front legs, and instinctively the little animal rolled its trunk onto its forehead and reached up for the teat. The cow made no objection, accepting the role of foster mother with equanimity. The matriarch stood beside the pair rumbling to them encouragingly, and when she led the herd on, the orphan calf had displaced the older calf between the cow’s front legs.

Chapter 5.

It seemed from then on the herd’s contact with men bearing firearms became every season more frequent, especially when the bulls were with the breeding herd.
The mature bulk kept a loose liaison with the breeding herd. They found the noisy and boisterous behaviour of the young animals annoying and the competitions for food demanding. No sooner would one of the bulls shake down a rain of ripe pods from the top branches of a tall thorn tree but a dozen youngsters would rush over to gobble them, or he would push over a masa tree to get at the new leaf, leaning with his forehead against the trunk, and snapping the three-foot diameter of hard wood with a report like a cannon shot. Immediately four or five greedy young cows would push themselves in front of him before he could sample the juicy pink leaves.
So the bulls would wander away from the herd, singly or in bachelor groups of three or four. Perhaps also they realised instinctively that the herd was likely to attract hunters, and they would be safer away from it. Sometimes they were only a few miles away, sometimes as far as thirty to forty, but they seemed always to be aware of the herd’s location and would return when the cows were in season.
When the bulls were with the herd, was the time that there was most likely to be that sudden crash of gunfire, and the squeal of wounded animals and the headlong rush of huge panic-stricken bodies through the brush.
When Tukutela was juvenile, under ten years of age, there had been six bulls associated with the herd, animals carrying thick shafts of ivory, but over the years that he grew towards maturity these were gradually whittled down. Each dry season one or more of them fell to the sound of rifle-fire, and only the mediocre bulls, or those with worn or damaged ivory, remained.
By this time, Tutkutela had grown into an unusually large young bull, and his tusks were beginning to develop, clean and white and sharp-pointed, already showing promise of what they would one day become. As he grew, so the matriarch, his dam, declined. Slowly the outline of her bones appeared through the folds and hangs of her wrinkled grey hide, so she became a gaunt and skeletal figure. Her sixth and last molar was already chipped and half worn away, she ate with difficulty, and the slow starvation of age had begun. She relinquished her place at the head of the herd to a younger more robust cow, and shambled along behind.
On the steep places where the elephant road climbed the mountain passes Tukutela would wait for her at the crest, rumbling to bring her up over the difficult places, and he stood close to her in the night as he had as a calf.
It had been a dry season and the waterholes were less than half full. The approaches to the water had been churned by the elephant herds and rhinoceros and buffalo to glutinous black mud, in some places deep as an elephant’s belly, and it was there that the old matriarch stuck..
Lunging in an attempt to free herself, she fell over sideways and the mud sucked her down until only part of her head was clear.
She struggled for two days. Tukutela tried to help her, but even his enormous strength was of no avail.. The mud held her fast, and gave him no footing nor purchase. The old cow’s struggle became weaker, her wild screams more feeble, until at last she was still and silent except for the hiss of her breathing .
It took two more days, and Tukutela stood beside her all that time. The herd had long ago departed, but he remained. She gave no outward sign of passing from life to death, other than the cessation of her harsh breathing, but Tukutela knew it instantly and he lifted his trunk high and bugled out his grief in a cry that startled the wild fowl from the waterhole in a cloud of noisy wings.
He went to the edge of the forest and plucked the leafy boughs and he brought them to the waterhole and he covered his dam’s muddy carcass with them, building for her a high green funeral bier. Then he left her and went into the veld.

Chapter 6.

He did not rejoin the herd for almost two years. By that time, he was sexually mature and he could no longer resist the scent of oestrus that the breeze brought down to him.
When he found them, the herd was gathered on the bank of the Kafue river, ten miles upstream from where it makes its confluence with the great Zambezi. Some of the herd members came out to meet him as he approached, and they entwined their trunks with his and pushed their foreheads together in greeting, and then allowed him to join the main body.
There were two cows in season and one of them was an animal of similar age to Tukutela. She was prime, fat with good grazing and browsing that the rains had raised. Her ivory was thin and very white, as straight and sharp as knitting needles, and her ears had not yet been torn or tattered by thorn and sharp twigs. She spread them now as she recognised Tukutela as her peer, and came to twine her trunk with his.
They stood with their heads together rumbling gently at each other, and then disentangled their trunks and began to caress each other lightly with the tips, moving down the length of each other’s bodies until they stood head to tail.
The tips of the trunk are as sensitive and dexterous as the fingers of the human hand and Tukutela reached down between her back legs and groped for her vaginal opening. She began to sway from side to side, rocking her whole body, an expression of extreme pleasure. As he manipulated her, so her oestrus discharge flowed down freely drenching his trunk and the aroma of it filled his head. His penis emerged from the fleshy sheath, as long as a man is tall and as thick as one of his legs, the tip of it brushed the earth below his belly. Its length was variegated with blotches of pink and black but the skin was smooth and shining and the head flared like the mouth of a trumpet. Elephants belong to the testiconda group, and his testicles were contained deep in the body cavity so there was no external evidence of them.
When both of them were fully aroused Tukutela nudged her gently down the bank and into the river. The green waters closed over them, intensifying their pleasure in each other, supporting their great bodies, buoying them up so they were light and nimble.
They submerged until only their trunks were above the surface, sporting together, breaking out again like blowing whales, and the water poured off them in sheets, cleansing their grey hides of dust and dirt, darkening them to the colour of coal.
Tukutela reared over her, and placed his forelegs on each side of her back. In the water she supported him easily. Her vagina was placed far forward between her back legs, and he needed all of his length to reach it.. His penis took on a life of its own, pulsing and jerking and twisting as it flared upwards to conform to the angle of her opening. Only the first third of his length was able to bury itself in her. His whole body shuddered and convulsed and both creatures trumpeted together and thrashed the waters to white foam.
He stayed with the herd three days, and then the female’s oestrus ended and Tukutela became restless. He had inherited his dam’s instinct for survival, and he sensed danger with the herd. On the third day he ghosted away into the grey thorn scrub. He went alone with no other bull for company.
Each season he returned stronger and his tasks longer and thicker, darkening to the colour of alabaster with vegetable juices.
Less and less he found other bulls competing. However he never stayed more than a few days with the herd, and always he departed alone and sought out the vastness which his dam had showed to him, the swamps inaccessible to man, the thickest forests, the tallest beds of elephant grass. It was as though he realised the danger that those tusks would bring upon him.

Chapter 7.

Less and less he found other bulls competing. However he never stayed more than a few days with the herd, and always he departed alone and sought out thee fastness which his dam had showed to him, the swamps inaccessible to man, the thickest forests, the tallest beds of elephant grass. It was as though he realised the danger that those tusks would bring upon him
In his thirty-fifth year, for days after leaving the herd he had been unaccountably nervous. He moved restlessly, testing the air often, raising his trunk high and then pulling it into his mouth. Once or twice he detected it, but the acrid scent was faint, just a tiny shadow on his consciousness.
However he could not keep moving. His huge frame each day required over a ton of grass and leaves and fruit and bark to sustain it. He had to stop to feed.
Intent on this task, he relaxed his vigilance. An elephant has poor eyesight, he cannot distinguish stationary objects only a few yards distant, although he can instantly detect movement. Furthermore his eyes are placed well back in the skull, impeding his forward view and the spread of his earts tends to block his peripheral vision to the rear.
Using the smell morning wind to negate the bull’s marvelous sense of smell, moving with extreme stealth so that his fine hearing was frustrated, a hunter that day approached from behind, staying in the elephant’s blind spot. There were two of them and they had followed him ever since he had left the herd. Now they crept up very close to him..
The bull turned broadside to the hunters, ready to move on to the next feed showing his long tusks.
“Take him,” said the safari-keeper to the Spanish maker of fine sherries who was on his first African safari. He lifted his double -barrelled rifle, which was engraved and inlaid with gold, and he aimed for Tukutela’s brain.
Over his sights he picked out the dark vertical cleft in the front of the ear and followed it down to its lowest point, where tha actual opening of the ear drum was situated. Having found it he moved his aim forward three inches along an imaginary line from the aperture of the ear towards the elephant’s eye. He had shot chamois and mournful red deer in the Pyrenees, but a wild African elephant is none of these timid creatures, and the Spaniard’s heart was thudding into his ribs and his spectacles were fogged with his sweat and his hands shook. The professional safari hunter had had patiently instructed him how and where to place his shot, but now he could not hold his aim upon it, and every second his breathing became more labored, his aim more erratic. In desperation he pulled the trigger.
The bullet hit Tukulela a foot above his left eye and fifteen inches from the fronted lobe of the brain, but the honeycombed bony sponge of his skull cushioned the shock. He reeled back on his haunches and had left the professional hunter flung his trunk straight up above his head and gave a deep roaring growl in his throat..
The Spaniard turned and ran, and Tukutela whirled to face the movement, launching himself off his haunches. The professional hunter was directly under his outstretched trunk, and he flung up his rifle and aimed into Tukutela’s head, into the roof of his mouth between the base of the long curved tusks..
The firing pin fell on a dud primer with a click, the rifle misfired and Tukutela swung his trunk down like the executioner’s axe, crushing the man to the earth.
The Spaniard was still running and Tukutela went after him, overhauling him effortlessly. He reached out his trunk and curled it around his waist. The man screamed and Tukutela tossed him thirty feet straight up into the air. He screamed all the way down until he hit the earth and the air was driven from his lungs. Tukutela seized him by one ankle and strung his body against the trunk of the nearest tree with aa force that burst the man’s internal organs, spleen and liver and lungs.
Tukutela raged through the forest with the corpse held in his trunk, beating it against the trees, lifting it high and slamming it down upon the earth, until it disintegrated and he was left with only the stump of the leg in his grip. He flung that aside and went back to where he had left the professional hunter.
The blow from the trunk had shattered his collar-bone, broken both his arms and crushed in his ribs but the hunter was still alive and conscious. He saw Tukutela coming back to him, the long trunk dangling, the huge ears extended and blood from his wound dribbling down to mingle with the blood of the Spaniard that splattered his chest and front legs.
The hunter tried to drag his mangled body away. Tukutela placed one great foot in the centre of his back, pinning him down, then with his trunk, he plucked off his limbs, one at a time, legs and arms, tearing them away from the joints of hip and shoulder, and throwing them aside. Finally he wrapped his trunk around the man’s head and pulled it away from the shoulder and throwing them aside. Finally he wrapped his trunk around the man’s head and pulled it away from the shoulders. It rolled like a ball bouncing across the ground as Tukutela hurled it from him. His rage abated, overtaken by the pain in his head, and Tukutela stood over the bodies that he had destroyed, rocking from one foot to the other, rumbling in his throat as first the pain and the melancholy of death came over him.

Chapter 8.

Despite the pain in his head and the slow drip of blood into his eye from the wound above it, he began the ritual of death that he had learned from his dam so many years previously. He gathered the parts of his victims, the squashed trunks and mutilated limbs and piled them in a heap,. He picked up their accoutrements out of the grass – rifles , hats, water bottles – and added them to the bloody pile. Then he began to strip the trees of leafy branches and to cover it all with a mound of green.
The bullet wound healed cleanly, but soon there were other scars to add to the little white star that it left above his eye. A spear from a dead-fall trap opened his thick grey hide from shoulder to knee, and he almost died from the infection that followed. The spread of his ears caught on thorn and hooked twigs, the edges became tattered and eroded. He fought for the cows when he joined the breeding herd, and although none of the other bulls could prevail against him, their tusks slashed and cut and marked him. The there were other encounters with men.
Despite the dire danger associated with it, the first taste of the sweet juice of the sugar cane so long ago had been addictive. Tukutela became a compulsive garden raider. Sometimes he would lurk for days in the vicinity of a patch of cultivation, getting up his courage. Then when there was no moon, in the deepest hours of the night, he would go in stepping soundlessly as a cat on his big padded feet. Millet, maize, papaya, yams, he loved them all, but sugar cane he could never resist.
At first, he allowed himself to be driven off by the flaming torches and the shouting and the drums, but then he learned to answer the shouts with his own wild screams and to charge at the guardians of the forbidden gardens.
On separate occasions over the next ten years, he killed eight human beings in the course of his raids, pulling their bodies to pieces like a glutton dismembering a chicken carcass. He grew reckless in his greed for the sweet cane. Whereas after previous raids, he would travel a hundred miles in a single non-stop march to distance himself from retribution, this season he began to return to the same field on consecutive nights.
Over the years Tukutela had made a reputation for himself across his vast range and his habits were known, he became notorious as the garden raider who had killed so many humans and yet never returned to the scene of his crime.
Some wounds inflicted upon him took many weeks to heal. The pain gnawed at his guts and Tukutela’s hatred of man grew upon it.
Though he did not understand the reason for it, his contact with man became ever more frequent. His old range was being whittled down; every season there were more tracks and roads cutting through his sacred places. Motor vehicles, noisy and stinking, buzzed through the silent places of the veld. The great forests were being hacked down and the earth turned to the plough. Lights burned in the night, and human voices carried to him wherever he wandered. Tukutela’s world was shrinking in upon him.
His tusks were growing all this time, longer and thicker, until in his sixtieth year, they were great dark columns.
He killed another man in 1976, a black man who tried to defend his few wretched acres of millet with a throwing spear, but the head of his spear lodged in Tukutela’s neck and formed a chronic source of infection, a constantly suppurating abscess.
Tukutela had long ago ceased to seek out the breeding herd. The scent of oestrus on the wind awakened in him only a sweet fleeting nostalgia, but the driving force of the procreative urge had dulled and he pursued his solitary ways through the shrinking forests.
There were some areas of his old range that remained untouched, he realised that they formed some sort of sanctuary. He did not understand that these were the national parks, where he was protected by law, but he spent more and more of his time in these areas, and over the years learned their precise boundaries, and became reluctant to venture across them into the dangerous world beyond.
Even in these sanctuaries he was wary, driven always by his hatred and fear of them to attack men wherever he found them, or to fly from the first acrid taint of them on the breeze.
His faith in the safety of the sanctuary was tested when the hunters found him even there. He heard the report of a firearm and felt the sting of the missile, not differentiating between the sound of a rifle and a dart gun, but when he tried to locate and destroy his attackers, a strange lethargy overtook him, a terrible weakness in his thick columnar legs and he slumped unconscious to the earth. He awoke to the terrifying stench of men all around him thick and repulsive on the air, even on his own skin where they had touched him. When he lumbered unsteadily to his feet he found a strange serpentine device suspended around his neck and the chronic absess on his neck caused by the spear wound was burning with the fires of antiseptics. He tried to wrench off the radio collar, but it defied even his might and so, in frustration, he devastate the forest around him, smashing down the tall trees and ripping out the bushes.
The men who watched his rage from afar laughed and one of them said. Tukutela the Angry One.

Chapter 9.

It took Tutukela many long seasons before he at last succeeded in ripping that hateful collar from around his neck, and hurling it into the top branches of a tree
Tutukela could not deny his deepest instincts and at certain seasons of the year, he became restless. The wanderlust came upon him, the urge to follow once again the long migratory road that his dam had first taken him over as an infant. He would be drawn to the boundary of the park by this irresistible longing and he would feed along it for days gathering his courage until he could no longer contain himself and he would set out fearfully and nervously, but with high anticipation for the far-off fastness to the east.
Of these, the vast Zambezi swampland was his favourite. He did not recognise it as his birthplace, he only knew that here the waters seemed cooler and sweeter, the grazing more luxuriant and his sense of peace deeper than any other place in his world. This season as he crossed the Chiwewe river and headed east, the urge to return to that place seemed even greater.

He was old now, long past his seventieth year and he was weary. His joints ached so he walked with a stiff exaggerated gait. His hide hard encysted lumps of gristle which he touched occasionally with the tip of his trunk when the pain was bad.
His craggy old head was weighed down by those huge ivory shafts; each day their burden was less supportable. Those tusks alone were a monument to his former glory. For the old bull was going back rapidly now.
There was a sense of melancholy in him, such as he had experienced only seldom in his life, the same feeling that had encompassed him as he waited for his dam to die beside the waterhole. He did not recognise that feeling as the premonition of his own impending death.
It seemed to Tukutela that even the sanctuary park was not safe, there were new dangers in the air, aircraft’s rushing over head , filling the air with their buzzing roar, startling and confusing to the old bull.
In some vague way he associated these machines with the deadly danger of the hunters. It left the same foul stench upon the air as the hunting vehicles which he had encountered so often before, and he knew he could rest no longer in this place the hunters were closing in. He fled directly eastward.
It was a hundred miles and more to where the swamps began, and where hunters seldom followed. He had to go, he could not deny the deep instinct that drove him on.
Nearer the swamp clouds stood upon the firmament in towering ranges the colours of lead and silver, their bottoms cleanly horizontal to the earth, their heads shaped like full-rigged ships,
One mainsail and topsail, royal and sky-sail piled up into the blue heavens. Under the cloud ranges the air was trapped and lay upon the earth so that it felt as heavy as hot syrup. Two hunters trudged along beneath its weight, the professional hunter and a Spanish business man who for many safari’s paid to hunt but especially to kill Tukutela for his magnificent tusks. It was a life-long obsession and this was his last attempt, he suffered from terminal cancer.
At the edge of the Zambezi swamplands, standing on a ridge which was like the back of a sea serpent, swimming across the open flood plains, the open plains gave way to endless expanses of papyrus and reeds, there they caught up with Tukutela.
For humans each mile through the swamps would be the equivalent of five on dry land , while the elephant would be in his element. He loved mud and water. It supported his great bulk and his foot pads were designed by nature to expand as he put his weight upon them, forcing a wide opening, and then they would shrink in diameter as he lifted them, freeing themselves readily from the clinging mud.
Tukutela could gorge on reeds and soft water plants and swamp grass, and the dense bushy islets would afford variety to his diet. The suck of mud and the splash of water would warn him of an approaching enemy and the fitfully turning wind would protect him, bringing the scent of a pursuer down to him from every quarter. In all Tukutela’s wide range, this was the most difficult place to hunt him.

The invigoration of a dying man’s obsession to possess Tukutela’s tusks was stronger than nature’s protection.
One of the flattened stems quivered and began slowly to rise into its original position. The elephant was only minutes ahead of them. They stood frozen, straining to listen beyond the sussuration of the wind in the papyrus.
Then they heard it, the low rumble like summer thunder heard at a great distance, the sound that an elephant makes in his throat when he is content and at peace. It is a sound that carries much farther than its volume would suggest, but the professional hunter knew that the bull was not more than a hundred yards ahead of them and he laid his hand on the Spaniard’s arm and drew him gently up alongside him.
“We have to be careful of the wind, he began in a whisper and then they heard the swish and rush open and of water sucked up in the bull’s trunk and squirted back over his own shoulders to cool himself, and they caught a brief glimpse of the black tip of his trunk as he lifted it high above the tops of the papyrus ahead of them.
They came up short and stood listening. Something was happening that was totally unexpected. They heard the sudden crash and crackle in the undergrowth, and then the wild trumpeting squeal of the enraged elephant who had spotted them and had not fled, but instead attacked.
Very close the old bull stood as still as the hunters, listening with ears spread wide, only his long trunk questing for the smell of them. There had never been an elephant like this, the professional hunter thought, a bull who actively hunted his persecutors.
How many times has man inflicted hurt upon him that he attacks at the first hint of human presence, he wondered.
The Spaniard made no effort to escape the charge, he simply leaned against the trunk of a tree and closed his eyes, the pain of the cancer overwhelming him, but through the pain he heard the old bull elephant squeal and the sound filled him with remorse and bitter despair.
He let the Rifle slip from his hands and fall into the leafy trash at his feet and he reached out his empty hands and staggered blindly to meet the elephant, wanting in some desperate way placate and make recompense to the great beast, calling to it; ‘ We are brothers, we are all that is left from another age. Our destiny is linked, I mean you no harm, we are brothers’. And ahead of him the bush crackled and burst open and Tukutela bore down on him like a collapsing cliff of granite.
The professional hunter heard the terrifying rush of the bull and the voice of the man, it was his duty to try and save his profession.
‘Here, he screamed, here, Tukutela, come, come, turn my way, trying to pull the elephant off the Spaniard and onto himself, but it was of no avail. Tukutela had fixed on his victim and nothing would deter him, he would carry his charge to the death.
The Spaniard’s pained vision cleared for a moment, and he looked through an aperture in his throbbing brain surrounded by shooting white lights and Catherine wheels of spinning fire. He saw Tutukela’s vast grey head burst out of the green forest wall above him, and the long stained tusks came over him like the cross-ties of a roof about to fall.
In that moment, the elephant came to embody all the thousands of animals and birds that he had slaughtered in his lifetime as a hunter for sport. He had a confused notion that the tusks and long trunk poised above him were the symbols of some semi-religious benediction that would absolve him and redeem the blood that he had spilled and all the life he had destroyed. He reached up both hands to them, joyfully and thankfully, and he remembered a phrase from his early religious instruction; ‘Forgive me father, for I have sinned,’ he cried.
The professional hunter stood and threw up his 577 Express rifle. It was the most difficult angle for the brain shot, with the elephant angled away from him, and the bulk of its shoulder covering the spinal column.
The target was no bigger than a ripe apple and there was no indication of where exactly it lay buried in the huge bony casket of the skull. He had to trust his experience and his instinct, which seemed to work without any conscious effort. His trigger finger tightened as the tip of foresight imagined or real covered that glowing spot. The bullet burst through the sponge of bone as though it were air, it cleaved the old bull’s brain, and he felt nothing His passage from full enraged life to death was a fleeting instant and his legs collapsed and folded under him. He dropped on his chest with an impact that jarred the earth and shook loose the dead leaves from the branches above him. A cloud of pale dust swirled his massive carcass and his head dropped forward.
His right tusk drove into the Spaniard’s body entering his belly a hand’s breath below the sternum of his rip cage, and it passed through him at the level of his kidneys and came out through his spine just as the point where it merged with his pelvis.
The shaft of ivory which the Spaniard had coveted and risked both fortune and life to obtain, now pinned him to the Earth, skewered him as cleanly as a whaler’s harpoon.
For a moment his vision was clear and bright as though everything he looked at was lit by brilliant floodlights, and then it began to fade and darkness closed in upon him, death engulfed him.
The professional hunter’s first impulse was to free the Spaniard’s body. He tugged at the tusk which impaled him, but it was so thick that he could not get a fair grip upon it, and the Spaniard’s blood was oozing from the terrible wound. It coated the professional’s hands so that he left sticky red prints upon the ivory as he strained at it.
Then he realised 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 the Spaniard’s torso the ivory point had gone on to bury itself deep in the soft earth.
In death, the man and the beast were locked together, and he suddenly felt how appropriate that was. He would leave them like that.

Epitaph

In my view there is only one path that fulfils the law of karma, it is the dynamic balance of the way between the opposites.
To tread that path and not sway towards one or the other is difficult and just as perilous for me who always swayed to unconditioned help and without discrimination seemed unselfish in the eyes of a world concreted in selfishness.
Never, not even as a child did I want to be part of them, the humans.

For me it is not words or ‘the word’ that counts, but its practical application that gives it sound.
Heroes and saints, ancient and modern whip themselves with the exquisite thorns of martyrdom, this is how human voices affect me, keeping me away from my inward silence which speaks in sound, colour and rich symbols to my inner visions.
I have been reading ancient and modern fantasy-history based on myths and facts according to time scale.
The story never changes, civilized man from the beginning to now is the peril of this Earth and the Solar system, that is so hard struggling to evolve.
Nature stands on the side of Creation towards evolution, Man creates to destroy. I know where I belong and no matter how much pain I feel, whether physically or psycho-mentally, it is as nothing to what the Earth endures at the hands of apathetic mankind.
I do feel that I have stayed true to the child within me, who never really entered this modern civilization with its greed and lust for power and its insane pride of discoveries and scientific progress.
They have misused their latent powers of being part of the creative principle within the universe, which knows no death but natural transformation of the formative and active ‘Life-force.
Nobody seems to realise that the inner and outer levels of the ‘One Life’ means ‘change everlasting.
For every human Individual ,the experience of the changing life-tides are unique, they cannot be mass produced, educated into or collectively awarded medals for victory, because its opposite failure will soon take its effect.
Evil is a human invented ruse for the cracks of seeming innocence and ignorance of each Individual who negates to be responsible for his free will and choice of thought and deed.
Man’s Indolence ,cowardice, greed and fear, have not only corrupted, but destroyed Nature and by so doing have destroyed the kingdoms on Earth including their own but have become the pollution of the after death states of the mind, so please , leave me be, go within and find a way back to your own true Self that you have deserted so long ago.

             From a child that has never been part of your world.