Barbara RyderLevinson

Barbara RyderLevinson Poems

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Savuti

Sometimes it was early morning.
Sometimes in later golden light, when the air was clear and perfect as diamond dust.

You did not hear them.
You did not smell them though I suppose if you were closer and the wind was right...

One hundred feet away they silently appeared, cutting the brown-green, dry bush; gods entering our lives to grace us with their presence. You never knew when their gray necklace of two or three would slowly roll in, a band of liquid silver, soundless, constant, unrushed. Sometimes a baby among the threes and fours. Sometimes an elder, tusks bent, chipped, gnawed or partly missing, her belly less firm, his hide scarred and dry like old woman’s skin.

Old bulls missing their tusks are dangerous, we are told. They know they are vulnerable.

Every day, several times a day, they appeared as if by some magic we could not understand. They formed a line starting far away, coming closer now, and moving across the 50 foot sight line of our front porch. They follow the scent of water. We stood on our eucalyptus floors stretched out in our open wooden chairs, under a canvas canopy; acacia leaves matting under foot, sage and wild African basil in the air. All the colors of Africa tan and golden, perfectly Hemingwayesque; and the huge, gray wall of leathered hide moving slowly to the water at Savuti.

They came to drink, we stood in silence to watch and learn; their massive trunks pulling in a liter or two, then raising their heavy heads as they bring the water to impossibly small mouths releasing the river to quench their parched lives.

One old bull, perhaps close to death, is not able to drink. He draws in water but cannot raise his heavy head for the water to run down his throat. Over and over he pulls in massive amounts of liquid, curls his trunk to his small waiting mouth and the water gushes out, little ever reaching his dry throat.

A young bull sidles up to the old boy. This time, as the old-timer sucks in the cooling life force, the youngster supports the old man’s head and he finally drinks to his fill. Mesmerized, we cannot speak. We cannot look away.

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