The Elephant Whisperer: My Life With the Herd in the African Wild (17 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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Eight lashes later and the skin on the man’s back was a pulped bloody mess and he was pulled to his feet and led groggily out of the door. Yet still he did not utter a sound.
‘He didn’t cry out once,’ I said to the aide next to me. ‘I’m impressed.’
‘He must not,’ he replied. ‘A criminal gets an extra two lashes every time he squeals.’
Tough justice indeed, but it was justice quickly dispensed in keeping with Zulu traditions and one thing was
certain: the knifeman wasn’t going to stab anyone else in a hurry.
A few months later I was privy to another incident of brutal justice, which gave a jolting reminder that just below the thin skin of civilization lay much of what is wrong with this exotically beautiful country.
I was driving in the deep rural areas surrounding Thula Thula when I noticed a vocal group of men from a neighbouring tribe walking down the road dragging something. At first I thought it was an animal, perhaps an impala they had shot, but to my surprise it was a man who had been so severely assaulted that he couldn’t stand. As I pulled up they dropped the semi-conscious body onto the ground like a rag doll.
‘
Sawubona
, Mkhulu,’ said one who recognized me.
‘What’s happening?’ I asked, getting out of the Land Rover, shotgun in hand, horrified at the bloodied condition of their prisoner.
‘This man has raped and murdered a woman. We are taking him down to the river to kill him,’ one replied casually, almost in a ‘why don’t you join us’ tone.
‘Are you certain it’s the right man?’ I asked, trying to defuse the situation. As I spoke the crumpled victim moaned and tried to crawl away, only to be viciously kicked back by one of the group.
‘It is him,’ they replied. ‘His house has already been burned.’
‘Why don’t you take him to the police? He will be severely punished by the magistrate.’
‘Ha!’ spat one caustically. ‘The magistrate … he will do nothing.’
Tiring of the conversation they grabbed the beaten man and started dragging him along.
‘But surely there must be another way. Is there nothing I can do?’ I said, blocking their way.
As I stood before them, their mood changed in an instant. The leader of the group’s eyes hardened.
‘This is not your business Mkhulu. Leave us,’ he said, ignoring the fact that I was carrying a shotgun. The tone of his voice was final. If I pushed more I would be transgressing the shadow line into a tribal matter, with possibly violent repercussions. I stepped aside.
As I drove off, I thought of going to the police but the nearest station was thirty miles away on a barely drivable road. I wasn’t even sure they would have a vehicle to respond with. As for a search, they would never find the body and the perpetrators would have long since disappeared into the surrounding huts and hills.
Such is Africa, the flawed, beautiful, magnificent, beguiling, mystical, unique, life-changing continent … its seductive charm and charisma, its ancient wisdom so often stained by unfathomable spasms of blood.
That night after returning from the meeting I got further bad news. David told me he was resigning to go to England. He had met an attractive young British guest at the lodge, whom I noticed had kept extending her stay.
‘It’s just “khaki fever”, David,’ I teased, referring to the well-known attraction some female guests have for uniformed rangers. ‘When you get to England, whatever you do don’t take off your uniform or it will all be over.’
Nevertheless he left and it was a massive blow to us. He was an integral part of Thula Thula and had been my right-hand man and friend for so long it was like losing a son. He loved the bush so much – I just couldn’t imagine him in rainy England.
The lodge had just opened and David had been a tremendous help to Françoise in getting it up and running, but she took it with her customary good humour. ‘I know guests sometimes steal a towel or soap,’ she said, ‘but this one stole our ranger.’
Sadly we had to move on and she advertised in various wildlife publications for a new reserve manager. The first applicant phoned from Cape Town.
‘I’d like to come up for the interview but the flight’s expensive,’ said the caller. ‘So if I come all that way and spend all that money, I must get the job.’
This was not the conventional method of impressing potential employers; in fact, it bordered on impertinence. I was about to tell him to take a running jump when I paused for a moment … perhaps Brendan Whittington Jones, a name more suited to a firm of august lawyers than a game ranger, could afford a touch of ‘unusualness’. He certainly had impressive credentials on paper. But how could I decide on his merits – or, as his phone call suggested, otherwise – without first seeing him? This really intrigued me. All my life, I have been attracted by unusual approaches.
‘Do you play sport?’ I asked, the question coming out of nowhere.
‘Yes. Field hockey.’
I mulled this over for a second or two.
‘You can start as soon as you get here.’
Field hockey is a gentleman’s game. My father was an international player and for whatever reason he always said it was a sport which attracted the right sort of people. I decided to follow his advice, though probably not the way he intended it.
Brendan arrived a few days later with a battered suitcase containing his sum total of worldly goods. He was an athletically built young man with a shock of strawberry-blond hair, a slow smile and a deliciously sardonic sense of humour. He would need it to sustain him at Thula Thula.
He had a degree in zoology and wildlife management with a major in entomology and loved insects with an almost mystic passion. Through him I learned that everything in the
wild happened ‘down there’ on the ground and in water. In the mulchy stew of undergrowth and seething-yet-still ponds and rivers, the often invisible bug world is the font of any wild eco-system.
However, he also loved animals and his bright attitude and innate sense of fairness quickly won over Françoise and the staff.
It wasn’t long before he had adopted an epileptic young warthog which he called Napoleon. The grandly named hog had been abandoned as an infant by his mother and we had found him wandering aimlessly on the reserve, lost and alone and easy prey for any passing leopard or hyena. The poor creature we found out later, sometimes had seizures, which is probably why it had been dumped by his mother. However, Napoleon soon regarded Brendan as his surrogate mother and even joined him in his bed at night. Max also took to Brendan immediately and tried to emulate Napoleon by slipping out of our room one night and getting into the new ranger’s bed.
Going into Brendan’s room the next morning was an experience. Once you had cut through the fog of sweaty bush clothes, Max’s jowly head emerged from the blankets, followed by the quizzical Napoleon, then a little later blearyeyed Brendan.
Françoise, who took to Brendan immediately, was aghast at this somewhat eccentric ménage à trois.
‘How will you ever find zee wife if you sleep with zee dog and zee pig?’ she asked, shaking her head.
Soon after Brendan had settled in I received a surprise call from David. He had just landed in Johannesburg.
‘It didn’t go well in England, boss. I’ve just got back to Johannesburg. I’m stuck in a traffic jam and I hate it. Can I have my job back?’
‘But I’ve just employed someone else.’
‘I don’t care. You don’t have to pay me, I’m coming
anyway. I’ll be there tonight,’ he said, putting down the phone before I could reply.
He certainly meant it. The summer rains had fallen in torrents over Zululand and the Ntambanana River had burst its banks, cutting off Thula Thula from Empangeni. The roads were quagmires and virtually impassable.
David’s father drove him as far as he could, just past the Heatonville village where the Ntambanana was in full spate and completely swamping the concrete bridge. No problem for David; he somehow forged the raging river in the dark on foot and then hiked a sodden twelve miles until he reached Thula Thula.
He arrived sopping wet and covered in mud but ecstatically happy to be back in the bush. Brendan took one look at this drenched, muscular apparition and then shook his head, laughing.
‘OK. I’m handling the scientific side and will concentrate on the environmental studies – which you really need to get done. He could have his old job back.’
They complimented each other extremely well and in time they became the closest of friends, so much so that the staff nicknamed them ‘Bravid the clone ranger’.
Late winter, with its mantle of copper, chocolate and straw, had cloaked the land. The bush had shed its dense summer foliage and game viewing had soared magnificently for the increasing number of guests who were discovering Thula Thula.
‘We must put in burns this year,’ I said to David and Brendan, ‘we have to open up some of the thicker areas.’
All game reserves burn sections of the land in late winter, primarily because the act-of-God fires that have raged through the countryside since time immemorial are nowadays always extinguished as soon as they take hold. A wilderness needs fire for a variety of reasons, not least to regenerate itself. Dead growth is burnt off and the land is reborn as green shoots take root among the fertile ashes.
We always burned our lands late in winter as all smaller life forms were hibernating and thus safe underground. Burns are done in selected blocks usually defined by roads and rivers which act as natural firebreaks. They are called controlled burns, which is a misnomer for I’ve yet to see a fire that could safely be labelled ‘controlled’. Fires have an inconvenient habit of jumping breaks and wind shifts can switch their direction in an eye-blink. Thus even ‘controlled’ burns often end up with a lot of people chasing one crisis after another.
Malicious fires – arson, in other words – are even worse
because by the time you reach them they are already at inferno stage.
David and Brendan nodded at my instruction. ‘When do you want to burn?’ asked Brendan, eyeing the skies. It was vital to pick the weather just right, with a mild wind blowing in the direction you want your fire to run.
‘Let’s select the areas, and if the wind is right do it the day after tomorrow.’
Within hours, the decision was wrested from our hands.
‘Fire!’ shouted David into the radio with binoculars fixed on the highest hill on the reserve. ‘Fire behind Johnny’s Lookout! Code Red! Code Red!’
Even with the naked eye I could see the first wisps of smoke streaking crazily into the sky.
Every able-bodied man on the reserve responds immediately to a Code Red: rangers, guards and work teams instantly stop what they are doing and rush to the main house as fast as they can. Those close by sprint; those far off leap into the nearest truck.
Within minutes we had about fifteen men assembled and David and Brendan gave a quick briefing and organized them into teams. They clambered onto the vehicles grabbing as many bottles of drinking water as they could carry. They knew from experience it was going to be a hard, thirsty day.
David was in the first truck and braked briefly to pick me up. ‘This was started on purpose,’ he said as I got in. ‘Three men were seen running away. I’ve sent Bheki and Ngwenya to the other side of the reserve to check for poachers in case it’s a diversion.’
Arson was a new poaching tactic – or at least new on Thula Thula. One group had cottoned on to the idea that starting a fire on the far side of the reserve would suck up all our manpower and thus they could hunt on the other side at will. It had worked, but only once, as we soon wised up. Bheki and Ngwenya were experienced veterans and
would be more than a match for any thugs they came up against.
It was a mild day and as we already had plenty of firebreaks set up in preparation for the controlled back-burns to arrest the fire, I wasn’t overly concerned and expected we should wrap this one up quickly. Our teams split up with Brendan’s group driving a half a mile or so in front of the blaze, ready to set the first back-burn where fires are lit across the front of the approaching fire in order to destroy anything inflammable in its path. It’s called back-burning as the fire is set to burn backwards into the wind, towards the main fire coming at it.
‘OK, everybody is in place,’ barked David into the radio. ‘Go!’
Brendan’s team immediately lit clumps of grass and started dragging the back-burn along the edge of the road, spreading it out wide in front of the fast-advancing flames.
We couldn’t have timed it worse. Ten minutes later the wind switched and a squall came screaming out of nowhere, sweeping the back-burn away from us to join the main fire already flaring rapidly across the veldt. Instead of one fire to fight, we now had two. From a routine drill, we now were in big trouble.
Four hot, sooty hours later our water was finished, our back-burns were failing, and the flaming monster was ripping through the bush completely out of control. Watching it effortlessly jump block after block I realized with horror that we were now fighting for the life of Thula Thula itself.
All animals understand fire well. Their survival synapses instinctively know that fire is a friend as well as a foe as it re-energizes the bush. Provided they are not trapped, which can cause blind panic, they watch developments carefully and will either cross a river or backtrack behind the blaze and wait on the previously scorched patches where they know they’re safe.
This time the fire was a formidable foe with the intense heat popping burning clods of grass high into the sky. The Zulus call them
izinyoni
, bird nests, and these sizzling ashes caught in the super-heated vortexes were the dreaded harbingers of the main fire, sparking as they blew ahead and settled in tinder grass, starting new burns every few minutes.
Then incredibly the blaze jumped the river as nimbly as a galloping Derby contender. I stared from my vantage point with mounting despair. We weren’t going to make it. This was too big even for professional firemen. With the howling gale rendering the back-burns totally useless, my men armed only with buckets, hand-pumps and fire-beaters had precious little chance of winning the day.
The inferno then leapt across another break and the chaotic gusts swirling around the hill ripped into it, driving massive black-orange flames up the slope below me.
I froze, despite the intense heat. There was a crew directly in the blaze’s path that would be frazzled in seconds if we didn’t get them out. I hurriedly sent two rangers into the thick smoke to shout to the men to run for their lives.
Twenty minutes later as the ten-foot wall of flames roared ever closer the two rangers returned – but without the crew they went to find.
‘What happened?’ I shouted as they came out of the bush, gagging from the smoke.
‘They’re not there. We couldn’t see them!’ one yelled back.
My mind raced. Not only was the reserve under threat, but we were on the brink of losing people as well. There was no way the men at the bottom of the hill could survive two crackling walls of fire clashing together on top of them.
There was nothing we could do. Brendan had the only water tanker with him. And he was miles away trying to light the rearguard of back-burns, our last flimsy glimmer of hope in stemming the runaway flank that threatened to
torch the rest of the reserve, including the lodge and our homes.
Without a word David sprang into the Land Rover, flicked the headlights on and drove as fast as he could into the smoke and flames. All I could hear was the vehicle’s horn blaring as he drove to let the trapped men know where he was. No one could see anything in the billowing soot.
Ten minutes later he broke back through the smoke. There, sitting on the back of the vehicle, was the missing fire crew. Biyela, our gardener, was calmly smoking a cigarette.
As he jumped off the truck I shouted to him: ‘Did you get a light for your
bhema
in there?’
He looked at his cigarette. ‘
Hau!
’ he laughed with delight.
We desperately piled onto the Land Rover and David sped off, just yards in front of the flames. There was only one road out of the area, and as long as David kept his foot to the floor, perhaps we could make it.
As we raced for our lives I scoured the bush below us looking for any sign of the elephants. The fire could not have come at a worse time for Nana and Frankie with their two new babies. I was terrified they would be trapped and as the situation worsened I could think of little else.
The road took us parallel to the advancing fire which was now a mile wide, flaring and roaring and leaping on our right, drowning us in toxic fumes and swirling tendrils of smouldering ash.
‘The elephants came through here!’ shouted David above the crackling bellow of the flames. He pointed to the ground. ‘Those tracks are as fresh as hell.’
I motioned for David to stop and quickly got out and felt the dung between thumb and forefinger. It was slimy and wet, sure evidence that they were nearby.
‘They stopped here!’ I shouted back. ‘Probably to rest the babies, but more so I think to let Nana assess the situation. I think she is trying to get to Croc Pools.’
I looked back at the barricade of flame and felt my stomach tighten. Trees were being incinerated whole without pause. Nothing in its path could possibly survive.
‘God, please make it, Nana,’ I said under my breath as I got back into the vehicle.
David gunned the engine and we bounced down the track as fast as we could. Suddenly he swerved wildly as a female nyala bolted out of the bush right in front of us. The poor creature, panicked out of her mind and blinded by a deluge of smoke and ash, ran straight into a tree and careered off into another. With a sickening crack that we could hear above the inferno, her leg snapped. Petrified and unable to get up, she lay there staring with stricken eyes as we drove past.
I grabbed the rifle off the seat next to me and David, seeing what had to be done braked hard in a cloud of dust, jerking the men at the back off-balance and then reversed.
‘Boss!’ he shouted as I got out. ‘Quickly! Quickly or we’re not going to make it ourselves.’
I lifted the Lee – Enfield, leaned on the open door, and two rapid shots later the poor creature was out of its pain and we were again hurtling through the bush in a race with the devil; to crest the hill and then turn onto another track that would at least take us out of the path of the raging monster. We didn’t even have time to load up the dead buck.
David made the top with the flames minutes behind and the men in the back cheered wildly. But I feared their jubilation was premature. The awful reality was that we were still trapped. There was no road out; the towers of flames were rampant on both sides, about to engulf us within minutes and for the first time I felt panic slithering into my thoughts.
‘Where to?’ yelled David. ‘Hurry or else we’ve had it!’
Then in a flash I realized what we had to do. Nana had shown the way.
‘Croc Pools!’ I shouted back. ‘If Nana thinks it’s safe enough for the herd it’ll be safe enough for us.’
Somehow amid the acrid blinding smoke David found the turn-off and ten bumpy minutes later we rounded the corner at the pools just as Nana was shepherding the last of her charges into deeper water. She and Frankie were standing at the edge of the dam in the shallows with babies Mvula and Ilanga, making sure the others were safe.
Nana looked up at us, and only then did I understand why they were there. It was not just because of the water; the veldt around every game reserve dam is always overgrazed and consequently there was little fuel for the fire to consume in a thirty yard radius.
‘Clever, clever girl,’ I thought. In our haste even we hadn’t thought of Croc Pools, let alone the natural safety barrier.
We drove to the opposite side, manoeuvred the Land Rover into a bare spot as close to the Pools as we could, splashed water over it to cool it down and then waded kneedeep into the pool. The coolness and relief was exquisite.
There is a good reason why this particular stretch is called Croc Pools and I looked around hurriedly. There in the reed beds to our left were two huge crocodiles lying still in the shallows, watching through hooded reptilian eyes. Fortunately because of the drama of the fire their major concern was survival, the last thing on their minds was lunch. We would be fine where we were. For good measure, though, I reached down and grabbed Max’s collar tightly. He was filthy with ash so I quickly washed him, which would also protect him against the approaching fireball.
And there we were, a herd of elephants, two huge crocodiles, a dog and a bedraggled sweaty group of men united by the most basic instinct of all – survival.
As Hades itself approached we watched yellow-billed kites soaring and swooping down on seared insects fleeing the flames, while flocks of glossy starlings darted in and out
of the smoke doing the same. Two large monitor lizards came hurtling out of the bush and splashed headlong into the water next to us. Then a herd of zebra came galloping out of the fumes and stopped. The stallion sniffed the air before changing direction and speeding off with his family. They knew exactly where they were going – they would outpace the fire.
The thick smoke poured from the burning bush over us, obliterating the sun and we stood together in the surreal murk of midday twilight, broken only by the flaming orange and red of the biggest inferno I have ever seen.
Then it was on us, the heat sizzling and hissing across the water. Yet in that intense theatre I became aware of something transcending the din and fury and chaos. I felt Nana’s stomach rumblings roll across the water, a dominating, calming presence. There she stood, towering over the dam, shielding the babies with her body and spraying water over herself. I found myself doing the same, scooping water over my head as if I had joined the herd.

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