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 I hadn’t understood at all. Oona must have understood, though, otherwise why would he have talked to her as much as he had? So if she had understood his language then she could learn English – it stood to reason. All I had to do was teach her. I remembered how her mahout always whispered to her, never raised his voice. I would do the same. Somehow I had to teach her to understand me.
I wasted no time. As soon as Oona came out of the water, I went right up to her. I held her trunk and stroked it as I talked to her, just as the mahout had done. As I spoke I was looking her right in the eye, her wise, weepy eye. “Oona,” I began, “I know your name, but you don’t know mine, do you? You don’t know anything about me. So I’d better tell you, hadn’t I? Here goes then. I’m Will. I’m nine years old, ten soon, and I live near Salisbury in England, which is a long way away, and that’s where I go to school. My Grandpa and Grandma have a farm in Devon, where it’s muddy, and he’s got a lot of cows, and a tractor, and I go there for holidays. Dad was a soldier and he was killed by a bomb in Iraq because there’s a war there, and now I think Mum’s dead too, drowned by that big wave, the one you saved me from. If you hadn’t done that I’d be dead by now, like she is. But the thing you’ve got to understand is that I’ll be dead anyway pretty soon, if I don’t get some food to eat. I’m hungry, Oona, really hungry. I need to eat. Understand? Eat.”
I opened my mouth wide, said “aah” several times, sticking my fingers down my throat. Oona looked down at me knowingly from a great height, so knowing that I felt she must be understanding at least the gist of what I was saying. Much encouraged by this I went on. I rubbed my stomach. “Yum, yum. Food. Food.” Unblinking, she looked back at me. She was listening, I could tell that much, but now I wasn’t so sure she’d understood a single word I’d been saying.
Maybe her eye wasn’t knowing after all, simply kind. I just didn’t seem to be getting through to her. I had an idea. I decided I’d have to try another tack altogether. I ran off to the edge of the forest, and came back after a while with a long leafy branch I’d torn from a tree. I offered it to her, hoping these might be the kind of leaves she liked. She sniffed at it for a few moments, then curled her trunk around it, ripped off what she wanted and shoved it into her mouth. “Yes, yes, Oona,” I cried. “You see? Food. Yum, yum. Me. Me too, I need food. But not leaves, Oona. I can’t eat leaves. Fruit. Fruit.”
As she chomped and chewed her eyes never left me once, and from somewhere inside her there came a deep groan of contentment. I was hopeful that these were all signs that she understood now, that she was grateful to me for fetching her food, that she would do the same for me. But when she’d finished stuffing in the last of her leaves, all she seemed interested in was exploring my hair and then my ears with her trunk. Exasperated now, I lost my patience. I pushed her away, and shouted up at her. “Can’t you understand anything, you stupid elephant? I’m hungry! I just want food! I have to have food!”
I looked around in desperation, and saw there was some kind of red fruit, they looked like huge ripe plums, and they were growing high up in a tree on the far side of the river. “There! Look, Oona! That’s what I want. It’s too high for me to climb. You could reach them easy as anything, I know you could. Please, Oona, please.” But Oona just turned from me and began walking away from the river and up into the trees, her trunk searching out more leaves. Once she was busy eating again, I discovered that no amount of yelling at her, or leaping up and down, or slapping her leg would distract her. Oona was feeding, and nothing and no one was going to stop her.
I felt my eyes filling with tears. I tried to blink them back. But it was no good – they kept coming anyway. I sat down beside the river, clasped my knees to my chest and let the tears flow. I was sobbing not out of self-pity or grief. There were no thoughts any more of Mum or Dad. I was crying out of fury and frustration, and hunger too. I buried my face in my hands and rocked back and forth, moaning in my misery.
When at last I did look up again, I saw that the howdah had now become firmly wedged between rocks. It was obvious that there was no possible way I could retrieve it from the river. Without it, I knew I could never ride Oona again. And without Oona how was I ever going to be able to find my way out of this forest, and back to safety? Strangely, it was only now, as I came to understand all this, that I finally stopped crying, and began to calm down and collect my thoughts. If I couldn’t ride the elephant, and if she wouldn’t find me food, then she couldn’t save me. In which case I’d have to search for
