"Smith, Wilbur - Ballantyne 04 - The Leopard Hunts In Darkness" - читать интересную книгу автора (Smith Wilbur)

of the Zambezi into an undefended buffer zone, too dangerous for ivory
hunters or even for the game rangers whose duties included the cull of
surplus elephant populations. The herds had prospered in those years,
but now the persecution had begun again with all the old implacable
ferocity.

With the rage and the terror still upon him, the old bull lifted his
trunk again and sucked the dreaded scent into the sinuses of his bony
skull. Then he turned and moving silently he crossed the rocky ridge,
a mere greyish blur for an instant against the clear blue of the
African sky. Still carrying the scent, he strode down to where his
herd was spread along the back slope.

There were almost three hundred elephant scattered amongst the trees.
Most of the breeding cows had calves with them, some so young that they
looked like fat little piglets, small enough to fit under their
mothers" bellies.

They rolled up their tiny trunks onto their foreheads and craned
upwards to the teats that hung on swollen dugs between the dams' front
legs.

The older calves cavorted about, romping and playing noisy tag, until
in exasperation one of their elders would tear a branch from one of the
trees and, wielding it in his trunk, lay about him, scattering the
importunate youngsters in squealing mock consternation.

The cows and young bulls fed with unhurried deliberation, working a
trunk deep into a dense, fiercely thorned thicket to pluck a handful of
ripe berries then place them well back in the throat like an old man
swallowing aspirin; or using the point of a stained ivory tusk to
loosen the bark of a msasa tree and then strip ten feet of it and stuff
it happily beyond the drooping triangular lower lip; or raising their
entire bulk on their back legs likea begging dog to reach up with
outstretched trunk to the tender leaves at the top of a tall tree, or
using a broad forehead and four tons of weight to shake another tree
until it tossed and whipped and released a shower of ripe pods. Further
down the slope two young bulls had combined their strength to topple a
sixty-footer whose top leaves were beyond even their long reach. As it
fell with a crackle of tearing fibres, the herd bull crossed the ridge
and immediately the happy uproar ceased abruptly, to be replaced by
quiet that was startling in its contrast.

The calves pressed anxiously to their mothers" flanks, and the grown
beasts froze defensively, ears outstretched and only the tips of their
trunks questing.

The bull came down to them with his swinging stride, carrying his thick
yellow ivories high, his alarm evident in the cock of his tattered
ears. He was still carrying the man smell in his head, and when he