With the exception of the leopards, who worked alone, few animals sought their food or their safety by themselves. Even the lions united for the hunt, and man, the destroyer, reaching the confines of the unexplored lands where wild beasts dwelt, travelled with a company. More than once Maami saw man in the dim distance, with tents, baggage bearers, and the impedimenta associated with the pursuit of big game, but more often than not these destroyers never saw the giraffes at all.
But disaster cannot be avoided for all time, and it was written that Maami’s mother should be the first of the company to pay tribute to man the implacable. One night, as the herd came from feeding among some young tree tops, she fell into one of the cunningly contrived pits that a company of native hunters had set in the path—a trap intended for even bigger game, but readily discovered by the solitary elephant for whom it had been set. He had scented it a hundred yards away, and made a new path into the forest that sheltered him, conquering the pangs of thirst that had drawn him from his lair. The giraffes having little scent and paying small attention to the ground beneath their feet, were not so fortunate; the mother beast fell, and the herd, yielding to brute instinct, turned in its tracks, and ambled away all night to a distant place of safety.
Maami understood his loss very vaguely, if at all. With the advancing years mother and son had forgotten the ties that bound them to one another in the far-off days of motherly affection and childish need; and, when morning broke, bringing lingering surcease to the poor creature’s pain, terror and life, there was none of the herd within sight of the scene of the misfortune. It was one of the chances that giraffes must take, this deep pit covered lightly with grasses spread about a slender support of boughs; and the shapeless carcase that the hunters cast aside when they had stripped off the hide served to give the carrion a hearty meal. Within twenty-four hours the white bones alone remained to tell of the graceful and harmless creature that had haunted wood and plain so long.
Years have passed since Maami’s mother met her fate in the hunters’ pit, and, of the giraffe herd that still haunts the plains, seeking the high woods only in a season of drought, few of the older ones remain. Maami himself is very near to the leadership; he is second to an old bull some three years his senior. The leader of the early days lives solitary now, if he lives at all. When his eyes grew dim and his limbs began to lose their elasticity, he was compelled to pass his duties and responsibilities to another and to go his way alone.
To be sure he was no match for young lions or for huntsmen, but there was no appeal from forest law, which recognises the herd’s need for sound and sure guidance, and since he had left the ranks others had followed, all to lead solitary lives, happy indeed and fortunate if inevitable death did not come to them in cruel fashion. Calves new born when Maami joined the herd are now responsible adults, and the herd moves with more care than of old time; for, although the lions tend to decrease, the white hunters have penetrated into the district; and even the black ivory and hide hunters organised by the big trading companies are armed with weapons of precision, and have learned to use them with a measure of accuracy hitherto unknown. In districts known to Maami as great homes of game in the years when he first joined the herd, you may travel for miles seeing nothing but a few whitening bones spread out here and there; and the general trend of wild life is towards the marshy malarial lands where hunters will not follow willingly.
The giraffe has seen strange sights in these latter days—lions, hyænas, leopards and jackals coming to the stream to drink with big deer and giraffes and zebras, and then moving off without as much as a growl because man the hunter is on the track, and before his advance one and all must retreat in terror. There are nights that Maami will remember as long as he lives, when among the beasts that come to the pools his sharp eyes have counted wounded lions, leopards and elephants. He has seen a great tawny lion permanently lame, his shoulder inflamed to an indescribable condition, an old bull elephant staining the pool red, a leopard drinking with feverish haste and then dropping dead by the side of the hard-sought water. All these things tell the tale of the destroyer with an eloquence beyond words, and account for the strange spirit of fraternity that seizes upon the beasts as they retreat pell-mell before the irresistible advance of the white man.
Maami is travelling alone now; it is his last journey. The white hunter has been too much for the herd; he has dropped one and wounded another, the rest have gone off in their odd swinging style, tails flapping, necks waving, heads erect.
Terror-stricken and badly hurt, Maami is running alone, he does not quite know where. He passes over a great expanse of plain, through a wood strip wherein he has often taken his fill of tender leaves, but, for once, no thought of food comes to him, he is conscious only of growing weakness and increasing thirst. It is the pool that he is running for, and happily it is not far off. He drinks deep of dwindling waters; the dry season has come upon the land of late—now he is running quite aimlessly through the scrub and high grasses. He thinks the herd is before him, always a little out of reach; he makes a special effort to overtake it and sinks down very slowly, his head still high.
From a neighbouring tree a white bird with red bills looks down compassionately. The heat is intense, thirst is coming back, a dark pool is forming by his side, but this is not water. High up in the air a vulture is looking at him; it descends very slowly.