Running Wild. Michael Morpurgo
me a great deal more than it was hurting her. My hands ached with it. My throat was raw with it. Whatever I said or did, the elephant was not paying me any attention, that was for sure. She simply continued on her wandering way through the jungle, munching nonchalantly as she went, seemingly without a care in the world. I tried everything I knew over and over again. But even as I was doing it, I could see it was useless, that neither sweet-talking, cajoling, begging, whacking, or threatening was ever going to work. This elephant would do what she would do, and that was that. In the end I simply gave up trying.
Exhausted and angry, I lay down in the howdah, which I now thought of more as a cage than a throne, and sobbed. Into my head from nowhere came Dad’s old joke: “You’ve got to chill, Will.” I said it out loud then, as Dad would have said it. “You’ve got to chill, Will.” Repeating his words time and again was a comfort to me somehow. It was the rhythm of them maybe, or the familiarity. I longed for sleep, because I longed to put out of my mind everything that had happened, all the discomforts I was enduring. It was the only way to forget the gnawing hunger in my stomach, that my tongue was leathery dry, that my throat was parched and sore.
Once, when sleep came at last, I heard Dad’s words again in my dreams, and I saw him too. “You’ve got to chill, Will,” he was saying. “You’ve got to keep it going. You can do it, Will.” I was back in the sea at Weston when I was little. I was swimming towards Dad, who was holding his arms out towards me. I was kicking my legs frantically, trying all I could to keep my chin above water, trying to reach those outstretched hands before I sank, but the seawater kept coming into my mouth and was choking me. I woke then, suddenly, and sat up spluttering. For a few moments the sunlight blinded me.
The elephant had stopped. There was the sound of rushing water all around me. I sat up. Oona was standing in a river, the water washing over her back and up to her neck and her ears, so that the howdah was simply an island now, the river swirling all around. And somehow the howdah had worked itself loose. I could feel it shifting sideways off Oona’s back, so that some of the cushions were already waterlogged. The river was running fast, but I did not hesitate. This was the chance I’d been waiting for. The shore wasn’t that far away. I could make it. If there were crocodiles I did not care. I needed to have water. I had to drink.
I put a foot on the rail and leaped off. Before I knew it I was in the river, and swimming hard for the shore. Just a few strong strokes and I was there. I crouched at the river’s edge and drank till I could drink no more, filling myself to bursting. Breathless with drinking now, triumphant with it, I found myself laughing and whooping and slapping the water, filling the forest with my noise, sending thousands of screeching birds flying up out of the trees. “Look at them, Oona!” I cried. “Look!”
All I could see of Oona was her head and her trunk. She seemed to have drifted further down the river, and was right out in the middle now, where the flow was faster. I was quite confident I could swim that far. So without another thought I plunged in. But I found that the current was a great deal stronger out there than I had imagined, and I soon realised that I wasn’t going to make it. I just didn’t have the strength to sustain the effort. So I had to turn back again, and swim hard for the shore to get myself out of trouble. It was a long swim and I felt myself tiring fast, so it was a huge relief when I felt my feet touch the bottom, and I could clamber out of the river at last.
I looked round then to see where Oona was. She had vanished. Panic-stricken at finding myself suddenly alone, I began calling out for her, tentatively at first, then louder and louder as my fears multiplied. My first thought was that Oona must have gone off into the forest and abandoned me. I was sure of it. There could be no other explanation. With panic came hurt. I let her know just what I thought of her. “Go off and leave me then, you great lump, see if I care! I don’t need you, you hear me? I don’t need you!”
It was then that I caught sight of the howdah being swept away downriver towards the rocks, but there was still no sign of Oona. The howdah sank as I watched. All I could see of it now were its straps, and then my water bottle and a cushion from the howdah bobbing away into the distance. As I stood there I was thinking that the bottle was the last thing Mum had given to me, that and my hat and the sun cream, all of which must have been at the bottom of the river by now with the howdah. All I had left was what I stood up in: my shirt and my shorts.
That was when Oona erupted from under the water only a few metres from me, rising up to her full height with the water cascading from her, trunk flailing and splashing. When I got over my surprise, I found myself overwhelmed with sudden joy and relief, all my earlier fury at her instantly forgotten. Oona sank down again into the river, leaving only the great dome of her head and her eyes visible. It seemed to me that she had been playing hide-and-seek with me, that this must be an invitation to come and play with her. It was an invitation I could not resist. As I ran down into the water I wondered how I could ever have doubted her.
Oona was better than any wave machine I had ever known. Whenever she rolled over to loll on her side, she created huge waves that I would dive into. Time and again she’d submerge herself completely, then rear up out of the water, so that it came rushing down her sides like a waterfall, and I would stand there beside her, shrieking under the shower she was giving me. She swished her trunk at me, sprayed water at me. It was a performance, a game. I was in fits of laughter the whole time, and loving every moment of it.
I remembered then the last time I had loved messing around in the water like this. It had been with Dad at Weston. I remembered diving down and swimming between his legs, and when I came up again there’d been a long galloping piggyback ride, out of the sea and up the beach towards where Mum was waiting for us. She’d screamed at us not to drip on her, and we had, as she knew we would, shaking ourselves like dogs all over her. It had all been so good. The whole day by the seaside at Weston came back to me, every detail of it, then all the treasured memories of home, of Dad and Mum, of all of us together, of how everything had been before Dad had gone off to the war, before the tidal wave.
I felt suddenly racked by sadness and guilt. I left Oona in the river and went to sit on the rocks. All I could think of was that nothing would ever be the same. Those days were gone for ever. Mum and Dad were gone for ever. I would never see them, or hear their voices ever again. And what had I just been doing? A moment or two before I’d been having the time of my life, shrieking with laughter as if none of this had ever happened, as if everything was just ‘fine and dandy’, as Grandpa used to say. Dad was dead, and down on the coast hundreds of people had been drowned by the tidal wave, thousands maybe, Mum among them. How could I have allowed myself to forget them both so quickly? How could I have been laughing when I should have been crying?
But even as I was thinking this, even as I watched Oona wafting her trunk at me from way out in the river, I found I was smiling inside myself, and I knew there was nothing wrong in it, that Mum and Dad wouldn’t mind. There was a hummingbird hovering nearby over a flower. She was so tiny, miraculously tiny, and beautiful. And butterflies of all colours were chasing each other over the water. That was the moment I felt all the gloom and guilt lifting from me. I was not thinking of the past any more, nor of Mum and Dad. I was thinking that if I had any family at all now, it was Oona. It was a strange idea, I knew that. But the more I began to think about it, the more I believed it was true.
As I sat there watching Oona in the river, I began to take stock of my whole situation. I knew for certain that without Oona I would not have survived at all, I would have no hope at all, I’d be utterly lost. I had only seen that one helicopter, and that was a few days ago at least by now. The only evidence I’d seen of any human existence was the occasional glimpse of a vapour trail high in the sky, thousands of metres above the canopy. No one knew I was here. No one even knew I was alive, so certainly no one would be out looking for me. I had ridden into this jungle on the elephant. If anyone knew the way out, I reckoned, it was her. All I had to do then was to stay with her, and learn to live with her, and I’d be all right. One day sooner or later she’d carry me out of the jungle, just as she’d carried me in.
Meanwhile I had to find some way of communicating with her, of getting her to understand I was starving hungry. I’d heard the mahout talking to her down on the beach that morning, but it had been in his language, a language