Read Online Stalking Ivory by Suzanne Arruda - Free Book Online Page B

breakfast of leftover bustard on flat bread and a mug of fragrant hot coffee, Jade and Chiumbo, who also acted as Jade’s personal gun bearer, left camp to check on her cameras. To her delight, both of the two set for day photographs had been tripped. She hoped the pictures had been taken yesterday afternoon or early this morning and not overnight, but if the flashlight picture showed promise, she’d set them all up for night shots in the future. That old tusker’s dust-bathing grounds ought to do well for a shot.
    Jade checked the cameras for condensation and saw that the lenses were dry. She decided to reset them both in hopes of another day shot and bring them back into camp on her return trip to avoid undue exposure of the lenses to the mountain mists until she saw her results. After making the rounds, she and Chiumbo headed up the mountain with her fourth camera in hand in the hopes of photographing the old bull again.
    The problem was finding the bull. Jade knew he sometimes trailed the main herd, but it could be anywhere by now. Based on their last route, the cows might be heading up to the big crater lake at the top of the mountain. If that was the case, he’d be in his favorite bath, water lilies clinging to his back.
    Jade scanned the trees for telltale signs of recent elephant passage, looking for broken branches, stripped bark, and polished tree trunks where a large body had rubbed against them. She found some of those indications, but none looked fresh. She pointed up a steep incline and suggested to Chiumbo that they try a shortcut in hopes of catching the herd on the other side of the ridge. He shook his head and led her a few yards to the right into the forest. Then he pointed to a dinner-plate-sized, steaming manure pile.
    Fresh droppings!
    “Good job, Chiumbo. Someone’s been through here recently.”
    The trail they found followed the contour of the land around the southern side of the crater, with sharp ravines appearing on their right as the mountain sheered off. More scat littered the ground ahead of them, giving testimony to the number of elephants that had followed this path. Chiumbo took the lead, cautioning Jade to proceed slowly. A trail this fresh meant the elephants could be very close, and the last thing they wanted was to stumble into them. A week ago the idea of running smack into a herd of elephants without knowing they were there would have seemed ludicrous to Jade, but not anymore. She’d witnessed firsthand how silent these massive beasts could be.
    That day, she’d been waiting in her first blind, built from brush and set on the ground to the side of a dust-bathing area, when several elephants had emerged like ghosts from the forest right in front of her. The old lead cow had stopped short of her blind and waited, swaying gently from side to side, agitated but not dangerously so. The unexpected blind clearly puzzled her, and as much as she wanted to spray her back with the red earth, she had no intention of leading her troop into danger. Caution eventually won out and the entire herd stepped back into the forest’s shadows as silently as they’d appeared.
    The saplings along this current trail had been stripped of their branches, and several larger trees bore fresh scars where a thick bough had been pulled down and snapped off to give access to the tender shoots at the tip. This must have been where the herd fed last night, Jade mused.
    Chiumbo stopped suddenly and pointed ahead. Elephants! Dozens of them! Jade froze. At present there was no breeze, so the herd didn’t have their scent, but breezes shifted and twisted in the forest. They’d do better to move off the trail and up into a tree, where they could watch in relative safety.
    Jade pointed to a heavily buttressed tree and Chiumbo nodded. The elephants couldn’t easily knock it down if they were spotted, and they should be able to see the herd from above. Jade uncoiled a span of rope from her pack and made several loops