Issue link: http://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/433799
S P O R T I N G C L A S S I C S 1 3 0 H e loved the place. It was his home, his sanctuary. High on the side of his mountain, he felt comfortable. He could see to the far blue horizon and the breeze always blew through the shady grove of mopane trees where he slept the day away. In this place he found relief from the heat that plagued him by day and the angry, two-legged creatures that harassed him in the lands below by night. He didn't like to go to the lowlands any more, for he was sure to have a confrontation with them. If it weren't for the hunger that hung flat and leaden in the pit of his stomach, he wouldn't go, but today he was hungry and the fields of mealies called to him. They were the best thing that he'd ever eaten, and they grew plentifully around the huts where the creatures slept away the night. If he was very quiet when he slipped into the fields and kept away from the huts, he could eat his fill and return to his mountain before daylight with the comfort of a full belly. If he wasn't quiet, though, or if others of his kind were in the field and made too much noise, things were not good. Sometimes the creatures would hear him and run from their huts, screaming and throwing rocks. Sometimes they carried fire. And he hated fire. When he was young, the bush had caught fire after a summer rainstorm, and he and his family had raced away to avoid the flames. He lost track of them in the panic and never saw them again. Sometimes, the creatures carried long sticks that roared and spit fire and caused a hurt like nothing he had ever felt. He wasn't very old as elephants go, but he could remember when the flatlands were filled with uninterrupted bush that stretched as far as the big river and beyond. There were no mud huts in those days. No creatures. No fields of mealies. In those days, he roamed the bush at will and not even the lions would dare to challenge him. The two-legged creatures were different. They settled into the bush in singles and groups and made little hives of mud and sticks where they lived and guarded the land around them as if it were theirs, and only they could have the food that grew there. And they caused pain. Once when he went to the fields, a group of them had hidden in ambush and their sticks had made a strange noise like the ripping of a long peal of thunder that pulsed, with pops coming so fast that they sounded almost like a single, drawn-out noise, and he could feel something slap his side with each pop and blood ran down his flank as he ran without stopping to his refuge on the mountain. The wounds were not serious, but they took a long time to heal, and he didn't go to the lowland fields for a while after that. He felt weak and it hurt where he had felt the slaps, and he would rather avoid the creatures altogether if he could. In time, he returned to the lowlands. He needed the nourishment, and the mealies made him stronger. With experience, he found a way to deal with them. They were thin-skinned and fragile, and a single swipe of his trunk would disable one of them. Then he could step on the creature and it would stop moving. But he knew that the best way to deal with them was to avoid them altogether, and if he couldn't, he would rush them, catching them off guard before they could hurt him. He learned to circle a field and try to smell the creatures on the breeze.