After tracking it five hours the pygmies stop it just before the
river, stack its rear right leg with arrows, so it dances a
paralysis of panic: kneels like a business in depression.
Creeping forward they foreclose, cut its hams like the strings of
a baby grand.
The end comes by degrees:
its trunk sawn off high up, it slips obliquely into death,
rides blood's slow escalators to heart's basement.
They climb its felled side and pose: as with a State tank captured
by guerrillas.
The harvest is labour-intensive.
Then, disassembling like a football crowd, flesh parcels
swinging trussed on poles, they carry it off in pieces.
A last man lugging the trunk in a fireman's lift: jerking spastic,
an arm lopped at the shoulder,
its slim end kissing the heels of his bare feet.
Thus brought down like the Hindenburg, just touching home, the
beast at the last moment might imagine it's a butterfly:
herding the floundering stampede of its blood into the knot
* of clotted trees across the river.
[Postscript] French kiss with elephant
The lead-hunter kneels at its altar head like a man taking drink
from a river,
hacks a window in its skull, levels his creased eyes
Ñ leans, conjoins his head with its.
And sucks:
of all this vast, dark smorgasbord of flesh, the raw meat of
the animal's headbone is watermelon-pink, and prized as
being sweetest.
