Magic In The African Bush - Betty Sleep

Magic In The African Bush by Betty Sleep

Book excerpt

Chapter One – Nyeleti

If only Nyeleti had known what kind of day it was going to be, he wouldn’t have been so eager to welcome it. But as the long, delicate fingers of dawn reached over the Drakensburg Mountains and poked at his eyelids, he remembered—it was today! This was the day his best friend was coming home.

As usual, Nyeleti was the last member of his adopted herd to wake up and start foraging, some from the open plan stables and some that had stayed in the bush. The other elephants were already searching out the freshest grasses and new leaves. If he didn’t hurry, they would eat all the newly ripened marula fruit that had fallen. He was not yet tall enough to pillage the branches that were high up, dangling the glowing yellow fruit just out of his reach. Not like his mother had been.

He rolled onto his knees then lunged to his feet, shaking his head as he went. His memory was sometimes confused and there were times he still panicked when he thought of her. It was a long time ago, and he was very small. He did not remember his herd, or where they were from. Only that he was alone in the bush with his mother, who walked more slowly each day, and then lay down and was still. Nyeleti cried for days. Not with the tears of a human, but with the distressed calls of a baby elephant who was hungry and alone. He was lucky, though. For when he was the weakest, people came and talked softly to him and offered a bottle of milk he didn’t know what to do with. Then he woke up in a whole new world that would become his home.

Farmers from a village not far away had heard his cries and seen him standing by his mother. They contacted an elephant rescue organization who took him back to their orphan nursery, where he was fed, nurtured, and watched over. There was nothing they loved more than a new baby elephant!

Nyeleti became one of their ‘herd’. First, he was a baby elephant and got all the love and attention that babies need when they are scared and hungry. There were caretakers who slept with him, took him for walks, and as he grew, helped him to make friends with other orphans, big and small. Time flew by, and as he learned all about being an elephant, he also learned there was a world outside the nursery where the elephant project existed. He had graduated to an interim unit in the park, where he would learn even more, and eventually live on his own. It was also here, that he met his best friend, Kevin. And today, Kevin would be home!

His tummy growled. Some of those marula fruits would be very good right now. Nyeleti wondered briefly if he could find his way back to the nursery. He was sure that in the distance, he could hear the scrum that took place when the first bottles of milk were brought out in the morning for the older orphans. It was delicious! Perhaps he could nip in and take one of the bottles in the wheelbarrow that wasn’t quite empty. Remembering how he used to do this, made him smile. When he stole a bottle, one of the men would scowl and yell “Go home!” His name was Abraham, but he had to yell so often at the thieving baby elephants, that the other keepers called him GoHome instead. He was really very nice though, because he would always let them have the bottle if they were good and didn’t shove the others.

Now, his favourite keeper was an older man named Joseph, from a nearby village. He was very wise and patient, which he needed to be sometimes when Nyeleti was in a frisky mood. They walked through the park together, and as they went, he would tell stories about his tribe and how his people had lived in Africa for thousands of years. Nyeleti wasn’t sure how much a thousand was, but it sounded like a lot. He would walk along with his stick, which wasn’t very long and never, ever used to hit anything or anyone, but used to lift plants and branches or to point at things and describe them for Nyeleti. Just the other day, he had snapped a branch off a shrub and held it out, saying “This smells like a potato. Po-tay-to,” he repeated, as if Nyeleti would say it in turn. He couldn’t of course, but he could snatch it with his trunk and stuff it in his mouth. If this was a potato, it tasted pretty good.

It was Joseph who told him what his name meant in Xitsonga—it was “star”. When he had been lost and afraid in the dark, there had been a meeting of two planets in the sky that made them glow as one star. This was very, very special said Joseph. “And so are you!” he added, throwing back his head and laughing till the leaves overhead shook. Nyeleti wondered if he would ever have teeth that big or that white.

He felt better when he thought about all the people who loved him, and all the animal friends he had made in the bush of the park. But if he didn’t hurry and find something to eat, he would not be there to meet Kevin when he arrived. Today was the day.

Chapter Two – Kevin

Graduating to the integration unit had been very exciting for Nyeleti. Of course, he knew most of the elephants already, because they often came to the nursery and talked to the babies over the fence that kept them safe while they were still small. Once he was bigger though, he could walk through the bush with them and investigate all the new smells, and great places to scratch his bum on a tree. The waterholes were a wonderful gathering place where he saw many of the other animals that lived in the park. It was also where he first met Kevin.

Kevin’s father was the manager of the unit, and his mother worked there, too. She would give visitors tours of the facility and tell them about their work in raising the elephants in their care. They were from a place called Scotland, which apparently was a long way from Africa. This made them… different, from local people. First of all, they had red hair. And secondly, they talked funny. Nyeleti understood English. In fact, he understood any language that was spoken to him. It was just that when Kevin’s father spoke, there were funny, rolling sounds to the words. And when he was mad, like when the delivery truck from the city broke down again, well that was something that made the keepers vanish from sight. But not so far, they couldn’t listen then go off to their work, grinning.

Kevin had lived his whole life in Africa. His hair had been really red when Nyeleti first saw him standing by the water’s edge. But now they were both growing up, and it was more brownish red, and he realized that things like that didn’t matter, because being different wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. So, he didn’t run off when one day, the tree he was standing underneath by the pan said, “Did you ever wonder why frogs don’t sing in the daytime?”

It wasn’t the tree, of course. It was Kevin, sitting on one of the branches and chewing on a stem of grass. As a matter of fact, Nyeleti had wondered about the frogs. He even asked a big bullfrog that very question once, but all he got was a loud “Ribbit!” and the frog disappeared into the water. He would have told Kevin that, but sadly, while all the animals of the park could communicate with each other, humans couldn’t understand them. But when Kevin said, “I’ll bet they wouldn’t tell you if you asked them,” Nyeleti snorted water the wrong way up his trunk and blew it up into the tree.