The Ivory Trail by Talbot Mundy (top fiction books of all time TXT) 📗

the stink. It smelt like a place where the egg of original sin had turned rotten. Fred said that was sulphur, with the air of a man who would like it believed that he knew.

At last the enemy must have made a night march, for he passed us, and the following dawn we heard him shooting to our right in front. That morning it was simply impossible to make the boys break camp. They swore that the ghost of Schillingschen had gone in league with the elephants to destroy us, and they preferred to be shot by us rather than murdered by witchcraft.

Beyond doubt they would have bolted and left us had that camp not been an almost perfect one, on rising ground with two great wings of rock almost enclosing it, and a singing brook galloping through the midst. There was only one gap by which elephant or man could enter (unless they should fall from the sky), and they closed that by rolling rocks and dragging up trunks of trees.

After a useless argument, during which we all lost our tempers and they were reduced to the verge of panic, we decided to leave them there in charge of Brown and those porters, except Kazimoto, who had rifles. The armed men promised faithfully to die beside Brown in the only place of exit rather than permit a man to pass out; and the rest all agreed it would be right to shoot them if they attempted to desert; but we left the camp together—Fred, Will, I, and Kazimoto, with Will's personal servant and mine bringing up the rear—wondering whether we should ever see any member or part of the outfit again. It felt like going to a funeral—or rather from it—more than likely Brown's.

Kazimoto and the other two should have been carrying spare rifles; but Brown had refused to remain behind unless we left him all but the one apiece we absolutely needed. We took the boys more from habit than for any use they were likely to be; and my boy and Will's bolted back to the camp almost before we were out of sight of it, Kazimoto begging us to shoot them in the back for cowards.

"Huh!" he grunted. "They are afraid of death. Teach them what death is!"

We heard Brown challenge them as they approached the camp, and hoped he thrashed them soundly. But it turned out he did not. He himself had grown afraid; for the fear of a crowd is contagious, and spreads nearly as readily from black to white as from white to black. He broke open a chop-box and consoled himself with whisky.

Forcing our way through vegetation that crowded around a spur of volcanic rock, it soon became evident that the whole of the huge herd was breakfasting not far in front of us, tearing off limbs of trees, and crashing about as if noise were the only object. We climbed and attempted to look down on them, only to discover that the part of the forest where we were consisted of a narrow belt, with a mile-wide open space beyond it between us and the elephants. The wind was from them toward us, but that did not wholly account for the amount of noise that reached us. It was the fact that the herd was twice as big as we imagined. There were elephants in every direction. We could see and hear branches breaking with reports like cannon-fire.

Kazimoto was as steady as an old soldier, a great grin spreading across his ugly honest face, and his eyes alight with enthusiasm. This was the profession he had followed when he was Courtney's gun-bearer, and he kept close to Fred with a handful of cartridges ready to pass to him, whispering wise counsel.

"Get close to them, bwana! Go close! Go close! Wind coming our way—smell coming our way—noise coming our way—elephant very busy eating—no hurry! No long shooting! Go right up close!"

It was easier said than done. The elephants had spread broadcast through the forest, and there was no longer one well-defined swath to follow, but a very great number of twisting narrow alleys through elastic undergrowth between great unyielding trees. We had to separate, to gain any advantage from our number, so that we emerged into the open more than a hundred yards apart, with Fred at the far left and Will in the center. Fred, with Kazimoto close at his heels, was more than fifty yards in front of either of us.

And crossing that mile of open land was no simple business. It was a mass of rocks and tree-roots, burned over in some swift-running forest fire and not yet reseeded, nor yet rotted down. There were winding ways all across it by the dozen that the elephants, with their greater height and better woodcraft, could follow on the run, but great stumps and rocks higher than a man's head (that from a distance had looked like level land) blocked all vision and made progress mostly guesswork.

However, the latter half-mile was more like level going—I emerged from between two boulders, wondering whether I could ever find my way back again, and envied Fred, who had found a better track and had the lead of me now by several hundred yards. Will was as far behind him as I, but had gone over more to the left, leaving me—feeling remarkably lonely—away in the rear to the right.

Kazimoto followed Fred so closely, stooping low behind him, that the two looked like some strange four-legged beast. They were headed for the forest in front of them at a great pace, increasing their lead from Will, who, like me, was more or less winded. I stooped at a pool to scoop up water and splash my face and neck. When I looked up a moment later I could see none of them.

At that instant, when I could actually smell the great brutes crashing in the forest, unseen within a hundred yards of me, and would have given all I had or hoped for just to have a friend within speaking distance, a shot rang out in the forest ahead, and rattled from tree to tree like the echo of a skirmish. It was not from Fred's gun, or Will's. It was the phantom rifleman at work again. Schillingschen—Schillingschen's ghost—or whoever he was, he could not have timed his fusillade better for our undoing. The first shot was followed by six more in swift succession. And then chaos broke loose.

Toward where I stood, from every angle to my front, the whole herd stampeded. No human being could have guessed their number. The forest awoke with a battle-din of falling trees and crashing undergrowth, split apart by the trumpeting of angry bulls and the screams of cows summoning their young ones. The earth shook under the weight of their tremendous rout. I heard Fred's rifle ring out three times far to my left—then Will's a rifle nearer to me; and at that the herd swung toward its own left, and the whole lot of them came full-pelt, blind, screaming, frantic, straight for me.

There was no turning them now. None but the very farthest on the flank could have turned, given sense enough left to do it. It was a flood of maddened monsters, crazed with fear, pent by their own numbers, forced forward by the crowd behind, that invited me to dam them if I could! As they burst into the open, more shots rang out in the forest to lend their fury wings!

I glanced behind, to right and left, but there was no escape, I had come too far into the open to retreat! There were big rocks to the rear to have scrambled on, but there was no time. There was one big rock in front of me that divided their course about in halves; to pass it they must open up, although they would almost surely close again. I took my stand in line with that, as a man on trial for life takes refuge behind an unestablishable alibi.

They talk glibly about men's whole lives passing in review before them in the instant of a crisis. That may be. That was a crisis, and I saw elephants—elephants! I remembered some of what Courtney had told us—some of the mad yarns Coutlass spun when liquor and the camp-fire made him boastful. All the advice I ever heard; all my previous imaginings of what I should do when such a time came, seemed to be condensed into one concrete demand—shoot, shoot, shoot, and keep on shooting! Yet my finger, bent around the trigger, absolutely would not act!

The oncoming gray wave of brutes split apart at the rock, as it must do, some of them screaming as they crashed into it breast on and were crushed by the crowd behind. In the van of the right-hand wing, brushing the rock with his shoulder, charged an enormous bull with tusks so large that the heavier had weighed down his head to a permanent rakish angle. He caught sight of me—trumpeted like a siren in the Channel fog—and came at me with raised ears and trunk outstretched. I heard shooting to the left, and more shots from the forest, where the very active ghost or madman was keeping up a battle of his own. I felt the fear, that turns a man's very heart to ice, grip hold of me—felt as if nothing mattered—imagined the whole universe a sea of charging elephants—accepted the inevitable—and suddenly received my manhood back again! My forefinger acted! I fired point-blank down the throat of the charging bull. And it seemed to have no more effect on him than a pea-shooter has on a railroad train!

I had left Schillingschen's heavy-bored elephant gun behind with Brown, considering it too cumbersome, and was using a Mauser with flat-nosed bullets. I fired four shots as fast as I could pump them from the magazine straight down the monster's hot red throat; and he continued to come on as if I had not touched him, hard-pressed on either flank by bulls nearly as big as he.

Perhaps the reason why my past history did not flash review was that my time was not yet come! I continued to see elephant—nothing but elephant!—little bloodshot eyes aflame with frenzy—great tusks upthrown—a trunk upraised to brain me—huge flat feet that raged to tread me down and knead me into purple mud! I kept the last shot with a coolness I believe was really numbness—then felt his hot breath like a blast on my face, and let him have it, straight down the throat again!

He screamed—stopped—quivered right over me—toppled from the knees—and fell like a landslide, pushed forward as he tumbled by the weight behind, and held from rolling sidewise by the living tide on either flank. I tried to spring back, but his falling trunk struck me to earth. On either side of me a huge tusk drove into the ground, and I lay still between them, as safe as if in bed, while the herd crashed past to right and left for so many minutes that it seemed all the universe was elephants—bulls, cows and calves all trumpeting in mad desire to get away—away—anywhere at all so be it was not where they then were.

Blood poured on me from the dead brute's throat—warm, slippery, sticky stuff; but I lay still. I did not move when the crashing had all gone by, but lay looking up at the monster that had willed his worst and, seeking to slay, had saved me. Those are the moments when young men summon all their calf-philosophy. I wondered what the difference was between that brute and me, that I should be justified in slaying; that I should be congratulated; that I should have been pitied, had the touch-and-go reversed itself and he killed me. I knew there was a difference that had nothing to do with shape, or weight, or size, but I could not give it a name or lay my finger on it.

My reverie, or reaction, or whatever it was, was broken by Fred's voice, flustered and out of breath, coming nearer at a great pace.

"I tell you the poor chap's dead as a door-nail! He's under that great bull, I tell you! He's simply been charged and flattened out! What a dog