The White Giraffe Read online

  As if sensing danger, the frogs fell silent. Tendrils of mist hovered over the water and the night air was laden with threat. Martine quelled the butterflies in her stomach. She’d come too far to go back now. She lifted her flashlight and shined it into the surrounding bush. Nothing moved. Not a mouse, not a lion, not even a bird. Disappointment hit her like a blow. What had she been thinking? A mythical giraffe! She’d risked her life in pursuit of a fairy tale and now she had to try to get home in one piece.

  Sheer instinct warned Martine something was behind her. The same sixth sense told her to turn around very, very slowly. A Cape cobra was coiled in the mud barely six feet away from her, hood spread wide, swaying in the yellow light. Martine recognized it immediately as one of the most poisonous snakes in Africa. Its golden coloring was unmistakable. So was the band around its throat.

  The cobra’s lips parted and its black tongue flickered out evilly. Martine dropped her flashlight in panic. It rolled behind a boulder and dimmed to a faint glow.

  Then it went out.

  In the split second before she was plunged into darkness, Martine saw the cobra draw back its head to strike. Helplessly, she waited for its lethal bite.

  It never came. Instead, a pale blur exploded from the trees. There was a hideous hissing sound and the flash of flying hooves. The last thing Martine saw before she crumpled to the ground was the white giraffe.

  Something was tickling Martine’s face. Something that blew warm, sweet air reminiscent of a freshly mown lawn on a summer’s day in England. Or strawberries at Wimbledon. Or the rose garden in Greenwich Park in London, which she had visited one spring on a school trip.

  There was something else in the scent too, something wild and exotic and . . . African.

  Africa!

  Martine suddenly came to and realized that she was not dozing in the hammock in her garden in safe, suburban England. She had illicitly entered a South African game reserve in the middle of the night, and something was sniffing at her and possibly preparing to eat her. Cautiously, she opened one eye. A pair of liquid-black eyes framed by impossibly long lashes stared down at her.

  “You saved my life,” she said.

  The white giraffe drew back with a nervous snort. It gave a half rear, like a horse, and retreated to a safe distance. Martine climbed carefully to her feet. The white giraffe towered over her. The sky had cleared a little and in the dim light of the watery moon, Martine could see it was an immensely beautiful creature. Its coat shimmered like sunlit snow and it was patterned all over with patches of silver tinged with cinnamon.

  She reached out her hand to it and it wheeled around and made as if to flee before sliding to a halt, breathing hard and shaking. The wildlife book in her room had explained that although giraffes are basically very gentle creatures, they are quite capable of using their long front legs to kick with force if they feel threatened. But something told Martine that this particular giraffe would never hurt her.

  She reached out her hand again and took a couple of steps toward it. “It’s all right,” she said soothingly. “It’s all right. I only want to stroke you, not to harm you.”

  This time the giraffe stood still. When her fingers made contact with its skin, it quivered with fear, but didn’t move away. Martine felt a tingle of electricity run up her arm— the same tingle she’d felt when Grace had put a hand on her forehead. In that instant, she had a strange sense she knew exactly what the animal was thinking. She knew, for example, without having any idea why, that his name was Jeremiah—Jemmy for short. And she knew that Jemmy was lonely. Every bit as lonely as she was.

  “I’m alone too,” Martine confided to the giraffe. “Five weeks ago, I lost everything I loved in a fire in England. Now I live with my grandmother who doesn’t want me, and go to a school where I don’t fit in.”

  The white giraffe watched her warily. He didn’t respond. Instead he sidled restlessly out of range so she could no longer touch him. Perhaps, thought Martine, he was waiting for a sign that he could trust her. And who could blame him? If she wanted to get close to him, the first thing she was going to have to do was to prove to him that she was a friend. But how?

  Then it came to her. In England, her mum and dad had had a poster in their bedroom of a dove being released into a sunset. On it was written: If you love something, set it free. If it comes back to you, it’s yours. If it doesn’t, it never was. Martine could remember as if it were yesterday her mum’s voice reading it aloud to her, and then saying with a smile, “Isn’t that wonderful, Martine? And it’s true. The more you love something, the more you have to give it space to find its own way in the world. That way you’ll know that if it comes back to you, it’s because it truly cares for you.”

  As miraculous as it was that she’d found the white giraffe, Martine knew she had to walk away from him. She took a last lingering look at him. Her heart ached, as if she were losing a friend she’d only just made, but somehow she knew they’d meet again. For reasons she didn’t fully understand, she felt as if their souls were already entwined.

  “Thank you for saving my life, Jeremiah,” she said, adding hopefully: “See you soon.”

  With that, she began picking her way through the mud to the grassy track. She was a bit hazy on the fate of the cobra, but she hoped it was either extremely dead or cowering in its burrow. She wasn’t sure she would survive another encounter with it.

  She was almost there when a twig snapped like a firecracker in the darkness. Martine had never been much of an athlete, but she was on the verge of sprinting like an Olympian for the house when she spotted a reflection in the water. The white giraffe was following her! She pretended to walk on. The mirrored giraffe stepped gracefully after her, his white-gold coat and silvery patches flowing across the steely water like an elegant ghost. Martine paused. The white giraffe paused. She continued. The white giraffe continued. She swung around abruptly.

  The giraffe slid to an awkward stop in the mud. He contemplated Martine from his great height. He seemed inquisitive now, rather than afraid. Martine craned her neck and tried to read his expression. She decided that it was like gazing into the eyes of the wisest creature on earth and the most innocent at the same time. Her overwhelming impression was one of gentleness.

  She waited to see what the giraffe would do. At first nothing happened, but then he lowered his head, inch by inch, until his slender nose was close enough to touch. Again Martine smelled his clean, newly cut grass scent. She longed to put her palm against his satiny white jaw, but she forced herself to stay still.

  Then something extraordinary happened. The giraffe rested his head on Martine’s shoulder and made a low, musical fluttering sound.

  For one perfect moment they stood there—the small girl and the white giraffe—mirrored in the moonlit water. It was only a minute, but it was long enough for the emotions and confusion of the past few weeks to leave Martine in a rush and suffuse her with a feeling of contentment. She knew then that she’d come home.

  A lion roared. In the eerily quiet aftermath of the storm, the sound blasted through the night as though the beast was about to pounce on them. Martine and the giraffe were in full flight—in opposite directions—before either of them had given the matter any conscious thought. There were no good-byes. By the time she’d reached the safety of the garden, the white giraffe had vanished as if he had never been.

  10

  Back in her room, Martine fell into an exhausted sleep. When her alarm woke her at six, she forced herself to spring out of bed, pull on her wet, muddy jeans, and rush out into the early-morning sunlight, pausing only to splash icy water on her face. She knew she had to find an excuse for the state of her clothes. By the time her grandmother emerged to feed Shaka at six thirty, Martine was on her knees in the vegetable garden, weeding furiously.

  Gwyn Thomas could hardly believe her eyes. “Whatever are you doing, child?” she asked. “You’re absolutely filthy.”

  “I’m just trying to clear the weeds
away from these carrots,” Martine said brightly. “I’ve been doing some thinking and I’ve realized that I need to start helping you a bit more around the house.”

  “Well . . .” said her grandmother. “Well, I . . . well, thank you, Martine.”

  Neither of them mentioned the fight of the evening before. However, Gwyn Thomas, who generally served up an unchanging breakfast of boiled eggs and toast, made Martine a special treat of fresh papaya and mango, a South African porridge called jungle oats, and homemade bread with Cape gooseberry jam. Martine was just savoring the last incredible bite when Alex du Preez’s gray Land Rover came roaring up the drive.

  Martine scowled. She’d only met the game warden once, but she’d disliked him on sight. He was what her mum would have described as a “snakeoil salesman,” overfamiliar and full of insincere patter. He gave her the creeps. She couldn’t believe he had any empathy with animals.

  His freckled face, topped by a shock of strawberry blond hair, appeared at the front door. “Good morning, Mrs. Thomas, Martine,” he said breezily. “How are you ladies on this beautiful day?”

  “Very well, thank you, Alex,” said her grandmother, smiling. “What brings you here so early?”

  “Ma’am, I’m just heading into Storm Crossing to buy some zebra feed. I know you’ve got a lot to do, so I thought it might be helpful if I gave Martine a lift to school today.”

  “Why Alex, it most certainly would. I’ve got the vet arriving first thing to check on Shaka and the two buffaloes who had that awful fight yesterday, and a party of twenty-four Swedish businessmen coming at ten. I really do appreciate your thoughtfulness. Wait a moment while I get her packed lunch.”

  Martine’s heart sank. She trailed out of the door after Alex’s stocky frame.

  Once on the road, Alex started up a stream of boring chatter in his thick South African accent. Martine, who wanted nothing more than to lose herself in a dreamy reverie about her encounter with the white giraffe the previous night—he’d followed her, and rested his satiny head on her shoulder!—gave him a series of one-word answers, but it didn’t seem to discourage him.

  “You’re a smart little thing, aren’t you?” he said as they stopped at the single traffic light in Storm Crossing. “I bet you’re much better than I was at schoolwork.”

  “I’m eleven,” Martine said rudely. “Don’t talk to me like I’m a five-year-old.”

  A sly look came across Alex’s face. “Okay,” he said. “If that’s the way you want to play it. You haven’t by any chance come across a white giraffe at Sawubona, have you, Martine?”

  Martine did her best to keep the shock from showing on her face. “The white giraffe doesn’t exist,” she answered. “Everybody knows that.”

  Alex put his hand in his pocket and took out Martine’s precious flashlight. He threw it on the cracked leather seat beside her. She itched to pick it up but didn’t dare.

  Alex gave a cruel laugh. “Be like that, then.” He put the flashlight back in his pocket. “The thing is, Martine, the white giraffe, if it did exist, would be very, very valuable. Your grandmother, for instance, would really benefit from the sale of such an animal. I mean, we’re talking about tens of thousands of dollars here, not chicken feed. Now, I would hate to think that you would jeopardize the future of everyone on Sawubona by poking around in things that are none of your business. How do you think your grandmother would feel about that?”

  Martine was livid. How dare he talk about Jemmy as if he were just another animal to be hunted down and turned into money? She was pretty sure her grandmother didn’t know about his ideas either.

  “And how do you think my grandmother would feel if she knew about your little secret?” she retaliated, just to test him.

  Alex’s blue eyes blazed. He pulled into the school, slammed on the brakes, and reached across her to open the door. “My girl,” he said, “you are playing with fire now.” He smiled grimly. “And you know what happens to people who play with fire . . .”

  Martine tried to be strong until she was out of the jeep, but as soon as she turned away from him the tears began to pour down her face.

  His laughter followed her all the way across the school yard.

  11

  It is possible that Martine would have continued to settle into Caracal School and, in spite of her shyness, would eventually have made friends, but on her third Sunday in Africa something happened to change everything. It all Africa something happened to change everything. It all started with a school outing to the Kirstenbosch National Botanical Gardens in Cape Town, a place, Miss Volkner told them, of “incomparable marvels when it comes to the plant kingdom.”

  Throughout the week Miss Volkner had drummed them into a state of excitement about it, promising them a weekend treat they would never forget, during which they would explore things like the Fragrance and Medicine Gardens, and enjoy a special picnic at the foot of Table Mountain while watching a world-renowned African band.

  Martine had looked forward to the trip with some trepidation and was very relieved when, a short time after boarding the bus at Caracal at noon on Sunday, she found she was enjoying herself. There was a good atmosphere on the way into Cape Town and some of the children were telling jokes and singing. “Why was six cross?” Sherilyn Meyer asked Martine. “Because seven ate nine! Eight, ate, do you get it?”

  Martine was laughing harder than she actually meant to when she caught sight of Ben—alone, as usual, at the back of the bus. She looked away guiltily. Maybe today she would try to find a way to speak to him. To distract herself, she reflected on the conversation with Alex two days previously. The way he had talked, anyone would think there was a conspiracy at Sawubona to preserve the secret of the white giraffe until it could be captured and sold for a king’s ransom. And yet both Tendai and Gwyn Thomas had insisted to her that it was a myth. Either Alex knew more than they did, or they were lying.

  Martine thought again about her encounter with the white giraffe; about the moment when she first saw him towering above her, shimmering white like sun on snow, with patches of silver tinged with cinnamon. A shiver of excitement went through her. Nothing on earth would stop her from seeing Jemmy again—no storm, no lock, no game warden, no threat. Nothing was more important than the white giraffe.

  The squeal of the bus brakes interrupted Martine’s thoughts. They were entering Gate Two at Kirstenbosch Botanical Gardens. As she waited to get off, she stole a glance at Ben. He didn’t seem to have noticed that the bus had stopped. He was staring out at the paradise of trees and flowers and Table Mountain rising into the blue sky behind it, and his face was alive with anticipation.

  At the Kirstenbosch Nature Study School, smiling staff greeted them with fruit juice and a lecture on the Botanical Gardens, which had been established in 1913 and were spread over a massive 1,300 acres. After that, they were split into three groups of eight. Two of the groups were to explore Kirstenbosch with an education officer, but Martine’s group, which consisted of four members of the Five Star Gang (everyone except Pieter), plus Sherilyn, a big sporty boy called Jake, and Ben, was to be led by Miss Volkner, who had done a special course at the center to enable her to guide them.

  Their first stop was to be the Fragrance Garden. They set off over the manicured lawns, where tourists picnicked and guinea fowl hovered hopefully for tidbits, crossing a bubbling brook along the way. It looked innocent enough, but it had a brutal and bloody history as an escape route of slaves in the days when the British ruled the Cape colony. “Legend has it that one slave who escaped here was eaten by a leopard, and all that was found of him was his skeleton,” Miss Volkner told them. “Ever since then, this has been known as Skeleton Stream and the area above it as Skeleton Gorge.

  “The older forest beside it is called Donker Gat, Afrikaans for Dark Corner.” She added for effect, “Many a child has been lost up there.”

  An echo passed through Martine—a sort of chill. Her eyes followed Miss Volkner’s pointing finger up t
he forbidding slopes of Table Mountain, where forests of yellowwood and ironwood sprawled in a dense green carpet. The scene looked familiar, as if she’d seen it before in a photograph. Goose bumps rose on her arms. Less than an hour ago the sky had been clear, with only a few wisps of cloud over the mountain, but already the day was turning ugly. They had been warned about the unpredictability of the weather. For no particular reason, Martine suddenly felt apprehensive.

  The Fragrance and Medicinal Gardens were wonder-lands of aromatic plants and healing herbs, but Martine found it difficult to concentrate. At the Dell, they drank from an ice-cold spring in a bird-shaped bath and then it was on to the Cycad Ampitheater, where Miss Volkner explained that the palm-like cycads were actually living fossils that were around in the time of the dinosaurs. “Some of them are two hundred million years old,” she said. “Can you believe that? Two hundred million years old.”

  The final stage of their journey was the Fynbos Walk on the lower slopes of the mountain. Fynbos was one of the world’s six plant kingdoms and was unique to the Cape Region. It consisted of heathery-type bushes like the bright red fire heath, silver trees, reeds, lilies, and pink, velvety proteas, which were South Africa’s national flower. Sprawling alongside the winding paths in a blaze of color, it made for a spectacular display. When they reached the Protea Garden Miss Volkner showed them the orange-headed nodding pincushion flower, a favorite nectar of the sugar birds. Just then, her beeper went off. She checked it with a grimace, the wind whipping her curly hair.

  “Okay, everyone, pay attention,” she called. “One of the other children has suffered an allergic reaction to a bee sting and I’m urgently needed back at the Nature Study School. It would be a shame for you to miss out on seeing the sugar birds feed, so I’m going to trust you to stay here quietly and wait for them. Under no circumstances is anyone to go wandering off. Luke and Lucy, as prefects, I’m putting you in charge. If I’m not back in the next twenty minutes, follow the signs to the concert area and I’ll meet you there.”