The Elephant Whisperer: My Life With the Herd in the African Wild (12 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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One morning Françoise joined me on the quad bike, a four-wheeled all-terrain motorbike, while I tracked the herd.
As we zoomed off on a dusty track, I marvelled at the profound transformation she had made in adapting to a life in the bush. Unlike me, her sophisticated upbringing in the buzzing metropolis and boulevard cafes of Paris were light years removed from the African outbacks of my youth.
A good illustration of this was the first time she held a banquet at Thula Thula for some Parisian friends and laid a table out on the front lawn. It was groaning with Camembert and Brie cheese, exotic fruit, freshly baked rolls, salamis, pâtés and decorated in the most splendid wreaths of scarlet, white and mauve bougainvillea you could imagine.
That I considered these, her favourite flowers, to be rampant alien invaders cut no ice with her at all. ‘Zey are exotic and beautiful, and must be protected,’ she had instructed Biyela the gardener. Biyela having fastidiously verified the translation with Ngwenya, thereafter defended the colourful bushes with typical Zulu tenacity, threatening me with whatever garden implement he was carrying whenever I appeared too close.
She was still laying out the table helped by a friend when a passing troop of monkeys swooped from the trees. Instead of merely chasing the mischievous animals away, Françoise and her companion fled into the house and resorted to
shouting Gallic insults from behind a large plate-glass window.
Undeterred by the colourful language and unable to believe their luck, the troop settled in and leisurely devoured the best French cuisine in Zululand. Fortunately they didn’t have a taste for champagne, or else a few magnums of the good stuff would have gone down their gullets as well.
By the time Ngwenya and I had shooed them away it was too late. The monkeys had scattered into the trees grasping hunks of squelchy cheese and handfuls of pâté – not to mention every morsel of fruit and bread that had been laid out. The fact that I was almost paralysed with laughter didn’t help the situation much either.
But that was more than a year ago. Now she was much more comfortable in the bush and with her arms tight around my waist we rode through as shallow section of the Nseleni River to a high lookout point to see if we could find the elephants.
The hill had a panoramic view and we spotted them briefly in thick bush bordering the river below, close to where we had just come through. We must have missed them by fifty yards or so and it worried me that I hadn’t detected them – especially with Françoise riding pillion. I couldn’t shake that niggling unease as normally I’m able to sense when the elephants are around.
‘There they are again,’ I pointed, and we watched as the elephants loped into view about a mile away, moving in single file across the deep-green flood plain disappearing back into the riverbed.
‘They’re moving off. Let’s give them a bit of time to cross the river and go after them.’
About ten minutes later we rode back down the hill onto the flood plain and I slowly eased the bike down the cutting into the lazily flowing river, driving through with feet held high to avoid a drenching. Once on the other side, I gunned
the motor to scramble up the steep incline and we shot to the top of the riverbank.
Absolute disaster! I suddenly became aware of huge grey shapes morphing all around us. Incredibly we had ridden bang into the middle of the herd! The elephants had stopped to graze right at the exit of the river crossing – something I had not anticipated as I had thought they were on the move.
Shock shuddered through my body. I suddenly felt minuscule, puny, unprotected on a tiny bike surrounded by edgy five-ton mammals. And even worse, I had Françoise with me. My throat tightened as my mind raced; how do I get out of this? With a river and steep bank behind and a herd of agitated elephants in front, the options were limited.
What was even more disconcerting was that we had also cut off Marula and Mabula, who were slightly behind us, from their mother Frankie. They panicked and started squealing loudly. And if there was one single thing that could aggravate our already dire predicament even more, it was getting between an aggressive female elephant and her frightened young.
We were in trouble. Deep trouble.
Nana who was a few yards away on our right took two menacing steps forward with her trunk held high, and then thankfully stopped and backed off. That was terrifying enough on its own, but the real problem was coming from behind her: Frankie.
I frantically tried to turn the bike and make a bolt for it, but the riverbank was too steep, the bike’s turning circle too wide. We were hopelessly trapped.
Trying to sound as unconcerned as possible, I said to Françoise, surprised that my voice was still steady, ‘I think we have a problem.’ I was absolutely horrified that I had placed her in such mortal danger.
By now Frankie was furiously reversing out of a thicket, trying to swivel and charge us. I drew my 9-mm pistol and
handed it to Françoise to protect herself if anything happened to me. Basically, it was a peashooter as far as an elephant was concerned, but as a last resort, a shot may distract Frankie.
I then stood up on the bike to face Frankie who was now coming directly at us – fast, furious and deadly. Clive Walker, the famous African game ranger, describes the experience superbly in his book
Signs of the Wild
. ‘An elephant charge is accompanied by the sound of screaming demons. Except perhaps for the prospect of imminent hanging, there is nothing that serves to concentrate the mind more wonderfully.’
That summed it up exactly. On Frankie thundered. I pleaded for this to be a mock charge, desperately looking for signs that she just wanted to scare us away from her young. The key indication of this was if her ears flapped out. But no – with mounting horror I watched her fold her ears back and roll up her trunk to take full impact when she hit. A rolled trunk meant she was going all the way. This was for real, and with that awful realization my sensations heightened surreally, like in a slow-motion car crash. I heard someone hammering in the far-off village as if it was next door, while high above me I watched an eagle soaring and marvelled at its graceful flight, as if I had nothing better to do. I had never seen a sky so blue.
On she hurtled, her huge frame blotting out all else. Lifting my hands as high above my head as I could I started yelling at her, then began screaming at the monstrous sight in a last-ditch attempt to pierce her mist of rage.
Then just as I thought we were goners, her ears suddenly cracked out and she broke off and unrolled her trunk. But the massive momentum hurled her right up to the bike where she towered directly above us, glaring angrily through tiny eyes. I involuntarily sat down on the bike and looked up at the crinkled underside of Frankie’s throat in petrified
wonder. She shook her huge head in frustration, showering us in the thick red dust from a recent sand bath and then backed off a few paces.
Marula and Mabula scampered past her. After making another two or three terrifyingly threatening gestures at us Frankie turned and followed her son and daughter into the bush, away from us.
I eased stiffly down off the saddle and turned to Françoise. Her eyes were tightly closed and I gently whispered that it was over. It was OK. The two of us sat still, too stunned to do or say anything.
Eventually I found the energy to start the bike and pulled off in the opposite direction to the herd. We drove through the bush which seemed so still after the charge, as if the birds and trees themselves knew what had happened.
Eventually we saw a truck carrying some visiting friends, waved them down and got off the quad bike. As they came across, Françoise started vividly describing what had just happened, gesticulating energetically. The only problem was she still had the cocked 9-mm pistol in her hand, finger on the trigger and each time she emphasized some dramatic point she waved the gun around. Our friends scattered for cover until I managed to retrieve the gun and cleared the breech.
Back home I told the astonished staff what had happened. ‘I can’t believe you’re still alive,’ said David, whistling through his teeth. ‘She must have made a conscious decision not to kill you. Why do you think she did that?’
A good question. Elephants rarely break off once they’re at full steam and I still couldn’t believe that Frankie had actually halted at the last minute. Why had she changed gears, dropping down from a lethal real attack to a mock charge? It was virtually unheard of.
The next day I got on the bike and drove back to the river crossing where we had so nearly lost our lives to try to
figure it out. I needed some answers. But try as I might, the crucial moments of the charge were a total blank, as if my mind couldn’t grapple with the horror.
So I retraced our route, driving through the same river crossing several times, mentally scrolling over the incident again and again. Slowly the details started fleshing out. I remembered I had been standing on the bike and screaming as she charged. But what was I yelling? My mind was still a void.
Then in an instant it came flooding back. I was screaming, ‘Stop, stop, it’s me, it’s me!’
That was all. In retrospect it sounds rather ludicrous, but that’s exactly what happened. To shout ‘It’s me’ at a charging elephant, the most aggressive female in a herd protecting her panicked babies is about as lame as it gets. Yet it stopped her, and I knew then that she had somehow recognized me from the
boma.
I still believe she had spared our lives because she had witnessed her matriarch’s interaction with me the day before I let them out.
‘The power’s down again,’ said David with a grimace, ‘this time on the western boundary.’
We were having endless problems with the fence. Our electrified border was temperamental and unreliable, given to more mood swings and irrational behaviour than a menopausal rhino. Everything affected it. Too much rain drowned the current. Too little rain affected conductivity. Lightning struck it with regular monotony, sparking out the voltage. Hyena, bushpig and warthog constantly dug holes beneath it, shorting the circuit. These were just some of the obvious problems; sometimes I swear it went down just because it damn well felt like it. It certainly didn’t make our task of keeping a herd of angry elephants – one of which had just charged me – inside the reserve any easier.
We had also just discovered that both Nana and Frankie had been impregnated by the dominant bull sometime before leaving the previous reserve. As elephants have such bulk, it’s often difficult to tell early on when they are carrying, but it had by now become obvious that our two adult females were gestating.
Consequently, rule number one on the reserve was that the power always had to be on or we risked losing the elephant. Not that they were trying to escape any more, but all it took was for Nana to be walking near the boundary and sense that there was no power – and who knows what
would happen? That meant there were mandatory dawn and dusk inspections along the entire twenty-mile perimeter, and often others during the day as well. We never went to bed with the fence not fully operational.
The problem this time was not only that the power was down, the Land Rover also wouldn’t start and it was getting dark.
‘No problem,’ said David. ‘I’ll take the tractor.’
I looked across at Gunda Gunda, the onomatopoeic Zulu name for our faithful twenty-year-old beast. She was reliable all right and would do the job but she had no headlights and a twenty-mile bush drive in the dark without night vision can be a hairy ordeal.
The African wilderness is merciless and to survive you need every genetic advantage you can muster. Consequently almost all animals have excellent night vision enhanced by a reflective membrane behind the iris, which catches even distant starlight and magnifies it. This membrane is why their eyes reflect so brightly in the dark when a light is shined at them. The big cats apparently have the best night vision but all species rely on acute eyesight either to hunt or to escape the predators of the night.
Well, not all species. There’s a notable exception; the planet’s most dominant creature is completely night blind. And that’s us –
Homo sapiens
.
Try walking in thick bush on a moonless or cloudy night without a flashlight and see what I mean. It’s so black you can’t see anything … and I mean anything. Unless you can navigate by the stars (provided there is no cloud cover) you’ll be lost, maybe even panic-stricken, within minutes.
I once crashed on the quad-bike at night about four miles from the camp. I lost my flashlight in the accident and had to walk home in the dark. I still remember that journey with trepidation today. I was completely blind and walked through the bush with both hands in front of me so at least
I knew if I was going to hit something. I could have fallen into a hyena den and wouldn’t have known until I woke up – or more likely, didn’t.
It took hours to get back and I was a bruised, nervous, thorn-scratched wreck when I did. What concerned me most as I blindly stumbled along was that every other living creature around was watching my antics as clear as day. To any predator I would have appeared as a wounded or disabled animal. Twice, when the bush seemed to suddenly come alive, I frantically fired shots into the air with my pistol. I was lucky to get home.
So how did our ancestors survive the eons without keenly developed night vision? I know plenty of scientists and not one of them has ever been able to explain satisfactorily to me how puny, tasty, night-blind
Homo sapiens
endured so spectacularly when everything around us had to have excellent night vision if they were to make it through a summer, never mind evolve.
Yet despite my reservations, David jumped up on Gunda Gunda and set off into the dusk. It was only when he was gone that I realized he had forgotten his radio.
I went back to the house, made some phone calls and then walked out and sat on the lawn overlooking the reserve trying to spot David’s flashlight blinking on the far boundary when I heard a low moan crescendo into a rasping roar that made my blood chill. Max also froze staring out into the dark, alert.
‘It can’t be,’ I thought, and then I heard it again, oscillating eerily across the wilderness. This time there was no mistake. It was the call of a male lion marking his territory. As we had no resident lions on the reserve, this meant an itinerant animal had broken in.
But even worse, the call was suddenly reciprocated, a curdling growl that bounced off the cliffs. That meant there were at least two lions roaming on the reserve. And of all
places, the roars were echoing from the western boundary – exactly where David was driving along without headlights. They must have come in through the fence while the power was down.
Out in the dark every creature on Thula would have heard the ominous call, for it was death itself calling, beckoning out for you.
Nana too would have heard it. I imagined her standing frozen, ears flared, trunk up, smelling the air to work out where the call came from and thinking of the youngsters in the herd. Her tactics and habits would now change, as would everything else on the reserve.
I bent down and patted Max, reassuring him.
It sometimes happened that lions broke out of the nearby Umfolozi game reserve and went walkabout, raiding cattle and generally striking fear far and wide in the villages. When lions are on the loose they totally control the countryside. They’re difficult to corner and find cattle or other livestock exceptionally easy prey. If they become too much of a problem, they are usually hunted down and killed by rangers.
The breakouts are a result of pressure exerted, often forcibly, on young males by the dominant lion to quit the pride. An alpha male will not tolerate competition and once male cubs mature, they are chased off. However, with all territories in the reserve already taken by other resident prides, the youngsters are often forced outside the protected areas and into the human domain.
These young males, usually brothers, are absolutely formidable and will stay out until they are older and stronger, all the while gaining hunting and fighting skills. They then go back into the reserve and challenge a patriarch for his territory and his harem. And at two against one, they’re often successful.
I love lions, one of Africa’s most charismatic and iconic
creatures, but I wished this pair had chosen somewhere else to do their ‘gap year’. We weren’t ready for them at Thula Thula just yet.
However, my prime concern was for David. While he was on the tractor with its noise and greasy fumes he was relatively safe. But he was looking for an electrical fault, and to find it he would have to get off the vehicle and walk along the fence, sometimes for long distances. I knew he was carrying a small torch but no rifle, and walking in the bush at night unarmed with lions in the immediate vicinity is crazy stuff. If we had heard the lions earlier he certainly wouldn’t have gone out and I was hoping against hope that he had also heard the calls. But Gunda Gunda is pretty noisy and I couldn’t bank on that.
I called Bheki who was at the rangers’ house – he had also heard the big cats – and told him David was out alone. Bheki shook his head and clicked his tongue. I could see he was also worried.
‘We have to go to him,’ I said. ‘Please get my rifle and bring plenty of bullets.’
I wasn’t looking forward to the march in the dark but there was a rough outside dirt track running parallel to the fence for much of the way where there was little danger as the big cats were inside the reserve. If we were lucky we would find David and the hole the lions had dug.
Then we heard it again: that spine-chilling roar. It was close, perhaps a mile or two away. By now I was acutely alarmed – the lions must have scented the tractor, but would they also smell the human driver? And just how hungry were they? They may not have fed for several days.
The answering roar came back – this time even closer.
‘Bheki, we must move faster,’ I urged.
The Zulu grunted. He was as concerned as I was. David was extremely popular on Thula Thula.
Gripping our rifles tight, we broke into a jog – well, as
fast as you can go in the darkness. Even with flashlights it is always difficult out in the bush at night. Neither of us noticed our numerous trips and falls over rocks and bush roots. There was one aim only: to get to David before the lions did.
About two miles later we saw a dim flickering light and to our intense joy it was David at a gap in the fence with Gunda Gunda chugging away close by.
I was about to yell a warning, but he beat me to it.
‘Lion! Big ones!’ he shouted, then pointed to the hole. ‘They came in there. I left the tractor running to keep them away. Their spoor is all over the place.’
Relief washed over me. This guy was indestructible. ‘Leave the tractor here for the night and walk back with us on the outside path.’
We closed the hole where the lions had dug under the fence pushing up the wires and shorting the electrical strands, which got the power up effectively trapping the lion in the reserve, and walked home. Tomorrow would be an interesting day.
Telephone etiquette in the bush allows calls only after dawn. The sun was barely up before I had the Parks Board section ranger on the line.
‘Have you lost a couple of lions?’ I asked.
‘Ja,’ he replied. ‘Two got out day before yesterday and have been causing chaos around a couple of villages. They’re on the move, going your way actually. Have you seen them?’
‘They’re both on Thula,’ I replied. ‘Do you want to come and get them?’
‘We’re on our way. Try and keep tabs on them until we get there.’
All the reserve staff were told to be extra cautious and the work teams were sent home. None of our employees had experience with lions so we weren’t taking any chances.
While we were waiting for them to arrive I went out to
find the herd. I picked up their tracks and shortly afterwards found fresh elephant dung within yards of fresh lion scat. They had crossed paths with the big cats but there was no real risk as an elephant herd is far too formidable for lions, however hungry they were. Provided of course the youngsters didn’t wander off.
I couldn’t find them and went back to the house. Standing on the front lawn staring out into the bush, I remembered a harrowing incident last year when a hunting lioness charged Craig Reed, the senior ranger at Umfolozi. He was out on horseback with his five-months pregnant wife, Andrea, when the giant cat suddenly charged out of a reed bed at them. Craig’s horse was spooked and bolted, but the lioness had already targeted Andrea and gave chase. An expert rider, she galloped through the bush at full speed. Scenting the danger, the horse needed no encouragement and was in full flight when Andrea’s foot suddenly slipped out the stirrup and she started sliding out of the saddle.
As she fell she somehow managed to grab hold of the stirrup and was dragged through the bush as the horse galloped on with the lioness in hot pursuit. She watched horrified as the lioness got closer and closer until it was at her feet, and then, resigned to her fate, she let go. Amazingly, the lioness jumped right over her sprawling body, and got her claws into the horse.
By now Craig had managed to turn his horse and frantically rode up firing shots into the air, scaring the lioness off. Thankfully Andrea was OK, although badly bruised and shaken, and in true frontierswoman tradition, gave birth to a fine baby boy four months later.
The moral of the story is always to treat these magnificent creatures with absolute respect. I pondered this over a hurried breakfast and then met up with Bheki and his men to follow the spoor from the hole where the big cats had come in. But Thula Thula’s hard clay soil makes tracking
extremely difficult when it’s dry and after a few hours the trail had disappeared altogether. There also weren’t any vultures circling above, which meant the lions hadn’t made a kill last night. That would have made our lives much easier.
The Parks Board arrived and we searched the reserve for two days, alternately picking up and losing the trail until a fence check revealed a big hole under the wire. They were gone. We later heard that they had returned to Umfolozi.
A few weeks later I was in Umfolozi on a night drive, when I asked the driver to pull over for a ‘pit stop’, having drunk several cups of coffee. It was pitch-black and as I opened the door he said casually, ‘Better check first,’ and flashed a spotlight through the open door.
There lying in the long grass, just ten yards from where I was getting out, were two big male lions. I swear they were the same youngsters that had been on our reserve – it was close to our boundary and I simply had that uncanny feeling. We had just seen the resident male, a giant beast sporting an impressive golden mane, with his harem less than a mile away.

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