Complete Short Stories Of Ernest Hemingway, The

His father and Juma spoke together and Juma had looked at David and laughed.

“Probably four or five times your life, he says,” David’s father told him. “He doesn’t know or care really.”

I care, David thought. I saw him in the moonlight and he was alone but I had Kibo. Kibo has me too. The bull wasn’t doing any harm and now we’ve tracked him to where he came to see his dead friend and now we’re going to kill him. It’s my fault. I betrayed him.

Now Juma had worked out the trail and motioned to his father and they started on.

My father doesn’t need to kill elephants to live, David thought. Juma would not have found him if I had not seen him. He had his chance at him and all he did was wound him and kill his friend. Kibo and I found him and I never should have told them and I should have kept him secret and had him always and let them stay drunk at the beer shamba. Juma was so drunk we could not wake him. I’m going to keep everything a secret always. I’ll never tell them anything again. If they kill him Juma will drink his share of the ivory or just buy himself another goddamn wife. Why didn’t you help the elephant when you could? All you had to do was not go on the second day. No, that wouldn’t have stopped them. Juma would have gone on. You never should have told them. Never, never tell them. Try and remember that. Never tell anyone anything ever. Never tell anyone anything again.

His father waited for him to come up and said very gently, “He rested here. He’s not traveling as he was. We’ll be up on him anytime now.”

“Fuck elephant hunting,” David had said very quietly.

“What’s that?” his father asked.

“Fuck elephant hunting,” David said softly.

“Be careful you don’t fuck it up,” his father had said to him and looked at him flatly.

That’s one thing, David had thought. He’s not stupid. He knows all about it now and he will never trust me again. That’s good. I don’t want him to because I’ll never ever tell him or anybody anything again, never anything again. Never ever never.

In the morning he was on the far slope of the mountain again. The elephant was no longer traveling as he had been but was moving aimlessly now, feeding occasionally and David had known they were getting close to him.

He tried to remember how he had felt. He had no love for the elephant yet. He must remember that. He had only a sorrow that had come from his own tiredness that had brought an understanding of age. Through being too young, he had learned how it must be to be too old.

He was lonesome for Kibo and thinking of how Juma killing the elephant’s friend had turned him against Juma and made the elephant his brother. He knew then how much it meant to him to have seen the elephant in the moonlight and to have followed him and come close to him in the clearing so that he had seen the great tusks. But he did not know that nothing would ever be as good as that again. Now he knew they would kill the elephant and there was nothing he could do about it. He had betrayed the elephant when he had gone back to tell them at the shamba. They would kill me and they would kill Kibo if we had ivory, he had thought, and known it was untrue.

Probably the elephant is going to find where he was born and they’ll kill him there. That’s all they’d need to make it perfect. They’d like to have killed him where they killed his friend. That would be a big joke. That would have pleased them. The goddamned friend killers.

They had moved to the edge of thick cover now and the elephant was close ahead. David could smell him and they could all hear him pulling down branches and the snapping that they made. His father put his hand on David’s shoulder to move him back and have him wait outside and then he took a big pinch of ashes from the pouch in his pocket and tossed it in the air. The ash barely slanted toward them as it fell and his father nodded at Juma and bent down to follow him into the thick cover. David watched their backs and their asses go in and out of sight. He could not hear them move.

David had stood still and listened to the elephant feeding. He could smell him as strongly as he had the night in the moonlight when he had worked up close to him and had seen his wonderful tusks. Then as he stood there it was silent and he could not smell the elephant. Then there had been a high squealing and smashing and a shot by the .303, then the heavy rocking double report of his father’s .450, then the smashing and crashing had gone on going steadily away and he had gone into the heavy growth and found Juma shaken and bleeding from his forehead all down over his face and his father white and angry.

“He went for Juma and knocked him over,” his father had said. “Juma hit him in the head.”

“Where did you hit him?”

“Where I fucking well could,” his father had said. “Get on the blood spoor.”

There was plenty of blood. One stream as high as David’s head that had squirted bright on trunks and leaves and vines and another much lower that was dark and foul with stomach content.