The Elephant Whisperer: My Life With the Herd in the African Wild (11 page)

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Authors: Lawrence Anthony,Graham Spence

BOOK: The Elephant Whisperer: My Life With the Herd in the African Wild
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Then suddenly, she swung off the back of the line, triumpeted harshly, and started coming at me, fast as a truck, her ears flared and trunk raised high. I knew instinctively it was a mock charge, and the worst thing to do would be to drive off as this could encourage her, perhaps spark a real charge. I braced myself as she pulled up spectacularly just yards away in a whirlwind of flapping ears, dust and rage. After tossing her head in anger once or twice, she stomped off back to the herd with her tail angrily erect.
I stared after her, transfixed. Even though I had seen it many times a charging elephant is one of the most awesome physical spectacles in the world. I’ll have to be careful with Frankie, I thought, once I had regained my ability to think. She was still too ill-tempered, too eager to vent her fury. Even though Nana was the matriarch, Frankie was far more dangerous.
I followed them for a bit, thorns squeaking and stabbing the Land Rover’s paintwork until the bush became too wild and I turned off on an old overgrown track and set course for home.
I had just gulped down a pint of ice-cold water when the phone rang. The wildlife dealer was on the line.
‘Really, Lawrence, I can’t for the life of me understand why you’re wasting your time with this herd,’ he said. ‘I can let you have a much better one within a week and your problems will be over. You know, you could easily get yourself killed by this lot. They need more space, to be completely away from humans. Surely you owe that to them.’
‘You may be right,’ I said, fumbling for a pen and some paper. ‘By the way, I never got the name of your company – or even your phone number. What is it?’
I wrote down the details and immediately dialled the Elephant Managers and Owners Association in Johannesburg, asking for Marion Garai.
‘Marion, do you know who these people are?’
‘Oh God, Lawrence. Please don’t tell me you’re dealing with them.’
‘Why?’
‘This lot was trying to get your herd first but I beat them to it. They are registered wildlife dealers, perfectly legitimate, and I had heard they had already pre-sold your animals to a Chinese zoo – that’s why I was in such a hurry to get them to you. They’re pretty upset with me and are now trying to get the animals back to fulfil their contract. If you sell them
to him, your elephants’ lives will be a misery. There’re few animal rights laws in China, so anything could happen. And even worse, the zoo only wants the babies so the two adults will probably be shot. Please … please don’t deal with them.’
‘Well, you can relax,’ I said, relieved finally to hear the truth. ‘My elephants are going nowhere.’
I phoned the dealer and told him politely never to contact me again.
He was flummoxed. ‘You can have all this money plus a new herd and you prefer to keep the problem, which is only going to get worse. Don’t come crying in three months’ time because it will be too late for us. And for you.’
‘I’m not selling.’
‘OK, OK.’
He then hesitated for a bit and I could tell he was mentally wrestling with something. ‘Listen … don’t tell my boss I told you this, but the previous matriarch, the one they shot, wasn’t so bad. I reckon she was just trying to get the herd to better water and grazing, that’s why she kept busting the fences. She was just doing her job.’
I put the phone down as that revelation slowly sunk in. The old matriarch had been doing her duty to her family – and she had paid for it with her life. They had even shot her baby daughter. My anger flared; no wonder this herd was traumatized.
I never heard from the dealer again.
During the next few days fresh information about the poachers kept popping up, all of it helpful.
The Ovambos, unable to hunt due to our constant surveillance, had taken to slipping out into the village at night and getting rat-faced drunk at the local shebeen, a traditional, usually illegal, tavern. The more they drank the more they talked, and we made sure we always had an informer there. With alcohol-fired machismo, they bragged openly about their exploits. Slowly we were piecing together our case.
‘OK, what do we do now?’ David asked.
‘We go to the police and give them the statements. I have set it up with a lieutenant who’s expecting us.’
The next day we drove into Empangeni, met with two senior policemen and recounted the full story, handing over all the affidavits.
‘This is an open and shut case,’ said one after reading Phineas’s statement. ‘They’re as guilty as hell. We’ll be out there later to make the arrests.’
That was exactly what I wanted to hear and at 5 p.m. on the dot two police vans arrived. David and I led them through the reserve to the Ovambos’ cottage. It was strangely silent, with no one to be seen. Leaving the cars quietly, we split into two groups, heading for the front and back of the building.
We were too late. As we burst into their rooms, all we found were rifles strewn on the floor and cupboard doors flapping open. All their personal possessions were gone. No doubt they saw us coming and instantly hotfooted it. They were now running for dear life through the bush and without knowing which direction they had taken, there was no way we would catch them before dark.
The police said they would put a general alert out for the fleeing guards, which was all we could do for the moment. ‘They are probably halfway to Namibia by now,’ one of the police said ruefully.
Back at the house I recounted the drama to Françoise and we strolled outside, watching the blood-red sun ease itself down beyond the sweeping hills. The reserve looked tranquil. Perhaps I was imagining it, but with the guards gone the whole mood had changed – as if some particularly malignant force had been purged.
Thula Thula, at last, was finding its equilibrium.
The elephants weren’t trying to be serial escapers and the poaching problem was largely solved. I knew we would never entirely stamp out poaching. In Africa a few tribesmen shooting the odd impala or duiker for the pot is going to happen whatever you do, and spending night after night out in the bush from dusk till dawn on guard against a few poorly armed youngsters soon loses its romance. It’s when the operations go commercial, as what had happened to us, that problems skyrocket.
On another front, my discussions with the
amakhosi
and the tribes about converting their surrounding cattle land to a game reserve were continuing well and progress was being made, albeit in tiny fractions, as the idea started taking hold. Trying to persuade thousands of Zulus, for whom cattle are an iconic form of wealth, that they should switch the use of their land to wildlife was an ambitious undertaking and fraught with many complications, cultural and otherwise. But there was no doubt it was the right thing to do. Patience and persistence were the keys.
So now for the first time I could concentrate on our core mission – running an African game reserve.
It is a tough, rewarding life. Each day starts at dawn and not only are there are no weekends, but if you are not careful you can also quickly lose track of the days of the
week. Fences have to be checked and fixed daily, roads and tracks must be repaired and wrested back from bush encroachment or you lose them forever. The never-ending invasion of alien plants needs constant attention – some plants are invaders from other countries, varieties that don’t have natural enemies in Africa and are not palatable to wildlife, so their growth is rampant. Then there are game counts and veldt assessments, dam inspections and repairs, fire breaks to maintain, anti-poaching patrols, maintaining good relations with neighbouring tribes, and a hundred other things to do. But it is a good, clean life with just enough danger and adventure to keep you on your toes and enjoying it.
The elephant herd was settling in nicely and staying away from the fences. I spent as much time as I could near them. Despite only being out of the
boma
for three weeks, they were already stuffing themselves on a myriad of delicacies and putting on weight noticeably.
Obviously I always kept a comfortable distance and was as unobtrusive as possible, watching and learning about their behaviour, where their favourite watering holes were, what they were eating and where. But sometimes things didn’t always go to plan. Once I got a fright when I thought the herd was some distance away. I got out of the Land Rover to make a call on my brand-new cellphone.
Something made me look over my shoulder. To my horror, about twenty yards behind watching me was Frankie. And behind her was the rest of the herd.
The Landy was only a short distance away and with an alacrity that impressed even me, I yanked open the door and leapt inside. However, in my haste I had dropped my fancy new phone, and the elephants were now milling around it. I had no option but to wait until they moved off before I could retrieve it.
Then it rang; the ringtone piercing the wilderness like a
whistle blast. The elephants stopped, and then almost in unison, moved over to the source of the alien noise. Frankie was there first, snaking her trunk over the piece of plastic, trying to figure out what it was. The others joined in and I watched this bizarre spectacle of seven elephants swinging their trunks over a chirruping cellphone in the middle of the bush.
Finally Frankie decided she had had enough. She lifted her mighty foot above the phone and thudded it down. The ringing stopped.
The herd moved off, ambling along in their own sweet time. When they were finally out of sight I got out of the Landy to fetch the phone. It was embedded an inch into the ground and I had to prise it free. The clear plastic section of the casing was shattered.
As an experiment I punched in a number – and it rang. It was working just fine.
I later phoned Nokia and told them about the incident, congratulating them on the ruggedness of the phone. After a long silence the manager thanked me and hung up. I reckon even they didn’t believe their products could withstand being stomped on by a wild elephant.
However, it wasn’t just the elephants that were adjusting. With the removal of the Ovambo guards, scores of other animals suddenly appeared on the landscape, as if by magic. Wherever I went I saw kudu, nyala, herds of wildebeest and impala and a host of smaller game scurrying about seemingly without a care in the world. Previously hunters had taken a shot at any creature that moved, and then the poachers had muscled in, blinding antelope with megawatt spotlights and shooting indiscriminately from vehicles both at night and during the day. No wonder the animals had been so skittish whenever a Land Rover drove past. Until now the only time I had really had occasion to appreciate the wildlife on Thula Thula was when David and I were
camping outside the
boma
. A car engine would set the entire reserve in panic mode – with good reason, as I now realized.
No longer. Almost overnight, a radical transformation had occurred. Hyena became more brazen in the evenings and we even got occasional glimpses of leopard, lynx and serval, the beautiful tawny black-spotted cats of the night, whose pelts are unfortunately still highly prized. The more the creatures lost their fear, the more of them we encountered and with mounting jubilation I discovered that despite mass poaching, we still had healthy populations of almost all of Zululand’s indigenous animals thriving on our doorstep. The whole reserve was now truly energized, and us with it.
I found this totally astonishing. How could the simple removal of the guards have such an instant effect on the game? How could they know they were now safe; that the major poaching threat had been removed? Obviously this would not be regarded as evidence in a court of law, but to me, in the natural order of things, it was proof that the animals themselves now knew it was over.
Years later I was in the Sudan on a conservation project when I heard an incredible story on good authority that sounded similar to my own. During the twenty-year war between northern and southern Sudan elephants were being slaughtered both for ivory and meat and so large numbers migrated to Kenya for safety. Within days of the final ceasefire being signed, the elephants left their adopted residence en masse and trekked the hundreds of miles back home to Sudan. How they knew that their home range was now safe is just another indication of the incredible abilities of these amazing creatures.
Immersed in the bush each day with no pressing problems reignited another of my loves; birdwatching. With its diverse habitats Thula Thula has over 350 identified species of bird and is an absolute haven for ‘twitchers’, those unusual
people obsessed with spending every free moment watching birds.
On one glorious Zululand morning David and I were following the herd on foot through thick riverine bush, our footsteps on the leaf litter the only sound, when we came across a troop of monkeys grouped on top of a tall, flat acacia robusta. They were chattering and screaming insults at a magnificent martial eagle circling just low enough to demand their attention, but high enough for them to show some bravado.
Or so they thought. Emboldened by the distance, the little creatures with their animated black faces were recklessly exposing themselves at the edge of branches instead of hiding within the foliage.
As we watched, another martial appeared, coming in low and fast on huge silent wings. Flying barely ten feet off the ground and skirting tree trunks with deft twists and turns, her fiercely hooked beak and snowy undercarriage were just a blur as she glided under the tree canopy, hidden from the raucous monkeys. With a wingspan of more than seven feet, a martial in flight is always a stunning sight. But up as close as this it was pure wizardry – as she came over us we could feel the wind from her wings.
With an imperceptible twitch of her tail feathers she suddenly pulled into an almost vertical climb heading straight up for the troop like a Stealth jetfighter. Before the monkeys could even guess what was happening she had plucked one off a branch, and was soaring through the sky to meet her mate with the still squirming primate hooked in her gnarled talons.
The tawny eagle is also a masterful predator and, often hunting in tandem like the martials, it is a particular threat to newborn fawns in the breeding season. One day, Nana and the herd were browsing off on our left when for some reason I glanced skywards and picked out two of these
majestic raptors, just specks in the azure sky, swooping vertically in perfect synchrony and eventually blasting into the tree canopy at impossible speed. They are going much too fast, I thought, as they plummeted through the tangled green foliage – they can’t possibly stop in time.
But a tawny can plummet down from the sky, strike its prey, and then land in the space of just a few yards. As we rounded the corner we found them both with their claws sunk into a nyala fawn, flapping their giant wings in unison as they coordinated their take-off to lift the deadweight. The impact of the high-velocity attack had instantly killed the fawn, but the mother was determined to fight back with all her worth. She grabbed her baby’s foot in her mouth and with legs locked stiff as metal shafts, she anchored herself in an awful tug-of-war to prevent the birds from flying off. The eagles, startled by our sudden appearance, dropped their booty and glided back into the heavens.
No matter how heart-wrenching the situation, we never interfered with nature. Brutal as the food chain is, that’s the balance of life in the wild. Terrible as the tragedy was for the nyala mother, the eagles also had to feed their young.
But it’s not all blood and gore; there are also the brilliant colours and exquisite song in Zululand birds. Plum-coloured starlings, turquoise European rollers that winter with us, the gorgeous bush-shrike, blood-red narina trojans and countless others boasting plumages so flamboyant, the visual feast was unbelievable. Catching sight of a gwala gwala in flight, the only time it flashes its vivid scarlet wing feathers, can send the soul soaring.
It did mine. Poaching, elephant charges … well, that was all yesterday, I thought happily.
I didn’t know how wrong I was.

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