The Elephant Whisperer: My Life With the Herd in the African Wild (18 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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And then the sizzling abyss swept past and the sun broke bleakly through the murk and mayhem. We stared out at the blackened apocalyptic landscape, gulping air into smoke-seared lungs. We had made it, thanks to Nana. She had saved us all. How she drew us to Croc Pools was something I was to gain more insight into later.
Suddenly the radio came alive. ‘David, David, David! Come in! Where the hell are you guys? I’ve got big problems here, I need men fast.’
It was Brendan.
‘We’re on our way!’ yelled David as we scrambled for the Land Rover. ‘Hold on for fifteen minutes. We’ll be there.’
‘The fire’s jumped our boundary,’ shouted a soot-blackened Brendan as we arrived. ‘It’s gone over into the next farm trapping a troop of baboons. They came out of the bush
screaming, burning alive. It was terrible. At least six or seven are dead.’
He wiped a grimy paw over his bloodshot eyes. ‘It’s those bloody chromolaena weeds. They burn so hot nothing can stop them and the farm next to us had hundreds of acres of that alien rubbish growing thick and wild on their land between us and their sugar cane. The fire’s right in the middle of the cane now. No doubt they’ll blame us for it.’
Chromolaena odorata
is particularly bad in a fire as it has a high oil content and as each bush takes light it burns in a bright fireball destroying trees and bushes close by.
The ever-shifting gusts at last switched favourably and using that to our advantage Brendan got a last gasp back-burn going and I watched, throat in mouth, as his little fires gobbled up the bush in front of the flaring wall, starving the advancing blaze.
Now we were able to respond to the incessant calls for help on the other side of the reserve where all the remaining staff had gathered in a last-ditch Alamo-style stand to protect the lodge and houses.
Exhausted to our bones, there we confronted another wall of fire, and it was then I saw the most amazing sight. Driving along a remote road going straight towards the oncoming fire was a car with a family inside. They were completely lost. The driver pulled up and obviously unaware of the terrible danger they were in started jabbering away in Italian.
‘You are the luckiest man alive,’ I said laughing at the incongruity of the situation. ‘I will give you a tracker to take you out.’
As they left, the inferno thundered over the hill and then just as it seemed the thatched lodge and our homes were about to be atomized, a phalanx of 4x4s loaded with firefighting equipment came revving though the smoke down
the road. Every nearby farmer had heeded our emergency calls and now a wall of water confronted the wall of flames. The cavalry had truly arrived.
Thirty minutes later the seemingly unstoppable holocaust had collapsed. It was now just a mopping-up operation. But in its wake, it had destroyed more than a third of the reserve.
Fortunately the change of wind, which so nearly wiped us out, also brought the first pre-spring showers. That night a torrent of fresh rain sluiced clean the charred black earth.
The next morning, elephant, rhino, zebra, impala and other animals were out on the burned areas, eating fresh ash as they always do after a fire, absorbing the salts and minerals their bodies craved.
Two weeks later the areas that had been so apocalyptically torched were emerald green. Thanks – unwittingly – to the poachers, the bush clearing was done perfectly and we now had thousands of new acres of virgin savannah.
None of us, however, forgot that we had almost lost Thula Thula.
Or that we had an elephant to thank for our lives.
Most of my interactions with the herd had been from a Land Rover. This was deliberate as I wanted them to get used to vehicles.
It worked; our guests had great safaris and photo-opportunities as Nana and her family acted as wild elephants do, oblivious of the Land Rovers, provided of course the rangers kept a reasonable distance and respected their privacy.
But now I wanted to do it on foot, not only as I planned to introduce walking safaris, but I wanted the herd to get generally acclimatized to humans in the bush, or else labourers and rangers would always be at risk.
Taking Max with me I set out to find them for my first experiment. The herd was in an open area, grazing and browsing on the plentiful summer offerings. Nearby there were big trees for me to climb, a somewhat crucial consideration if something went wrong and I had to run for it.
Perfect! I pulled over next to a spreading marula and got out, leaving the Landy’s door open for hasty access if necessary. It’s vastly different communicating with elephants out in the open on foot compared with doing so from vehicles. If you step away from a vehicle with elephants close by, you wake up quickly.
Purposely going upwind so they could get my scent, I zigzagged toward the herd, ambling along as if on a Sunday
stroll, Max by my side. Everything was going well until I was about thirty yards away and Frankie’s trunk swivelled near the ground as she got my scent. I immediately stopped as she peered myopically at Max and me, but after a short while she ignored us and continued feasting. So far so good, and I continued my erratic approach in their general direction.
Just five paces closer and Frankie suddenly lifted her head sharply and aggressively spread her ears.
Whoa! I stopped but this time she continued glaring at me until I backed off for five or six paces. That seemed to make her happy and she went back to grazing.
I repeated the process several times over the next hour, a few paces in and then out and always got the same reaction. Studiously ignored, then angrily confronted. That’s interesting, I thought, she has created a boundary: outside I am welcome, inside she gets tetchy.
After checking the distance and making sure I could reach the Land Rover at a run if things went awry, I pushed through the imaginary boundary and walked closer in.
That did it! She swung around, took three aggressive steps towards me with trunk held high and I backed off – pronto.
I then drove to the other side of the spread-out herd, got out and repeated the process with Nana. The same thing happened, except that Nana would let me get much closer than Frankie did, and her reactions were petulant rather than aggressive.
Over the next weeks, through trial and error I learned that the herd set a very real albeit invisible boundary inside of which nothing – well, no human anyway – could enter. I also found that individual elephants did the same thing when straying from the herd. The boundaries were flexible but generally the adult’s ‘space’ had a much smaller perimeter than the youngsters’. However, it was trial and error,
and you had to be able to gauge it by judging the elephant’s demeanour and every elephant’s space was different and could be different on different days.
By repeating the exercise in the neighbouring Umfolozi reserve I discovered that generally a bull would tolerate closer intrusions than females. The reason was simple – big bulls are extremely confident of their ability to defend themselves and allow you to get closer. The smaller the elephant, the less confident they are and the wider the space they demanded. A mother and newborn baby away from a herd had the widest.
I had long noticed a similar phenomenon with other animals. A ‘fright – flight’ distance it is called, but with elephants it was more like an ‘attention – attack’ boundary.
So far so good, but to have walking safaris on Thula Thula I needed a completely settled herd otherwise the risk was not worth it. More research was needed so I did my experiment again, but this time with Vusi, a well-built, fleet-footed young ranger who bravely volunteered to be the guinea pig. All he had to do was repeat my earlier procedure of slowly walking around the herd as I watched their reactions. I dropped him off, estimated the herd’s safety boundary, told him where it was, and then told him to walk.
Big mistake. Thankfully Vusi hadn’t gone too far when Frankie bristled on full alert and the startled ranger legged it back to the Landy quicker than Carl Lewis.
A bit more experimenting with the brave young man and it became clear that as far as the herd was concerned, the boundary with a stranger was much, much wider.
OK, so how could I get the elephants to draw the boundary in? Not only for me, but for anyone walking on the reserve. I started hanging around the edges of the safety periphery, minding my own business until they got used to me being on foot, and then I slowly tried to move a bit
closer. The key to this was patience; it took endless hours of just being there. I also found that ignoring them or facing away attracted less attention.
Although tedious, this was an extremely tense procedure and I was constantly ready to dash off at a hair-trigger’s notice.
Eventually I started to despair. I was making zero progress, even Mnumzane would not come closer while he was with the herd – until one day Nana ambled over in my direction to access a small tree she fancied and shrank the no-go boundary by half without even looking up at me. A little later Frankie and the others joined her.
Then it dawned. As far as the herd was concerned, the boundary was not set in stone. They will reset it – but only when they are good and ready. It has to be their decision. You can’t do it. Only they can.
From this I also gleaned another important rule in associating with wild elephants and that is never to approach them directly, but rather put yourself in their vicinity and if they want to, they will come closer to you. If not, forget it: they take their imperial status most seriously.
During this time one elephant charged me repeatedly. Young Mandla, now a healthy two-and-a-half-year-old standing almost four foot. He would put his ears out and run at me for about five or six yards and then bolt back to the safety of his mum – Nana – who kept an eye on things but always ignored his ‘heroic’ antics. It became a great game between us and every day I would call out and talk to him as he put on his show and we would have fun, with him getting braver and braver and closer and closer. I had to be very careful with this as he was big enough to seriously hurt me but there was never anything but fun in his game.
Then one day Nana and Mvula were a little way from the herd grazing when she slowly started walking in my direction. Good God! Has she decided to come across to
me? She had approached me before in my vehicle, which she knew, and at the
boma
and the house, but on those occasions I was safe. This time, unless I bolted before she got any closer, I would be stuck out in the open without any escape route whatsoever. This was an entirely different ballgame.
She lumbered on in such a friendly way that I steeled myself and decided to stay and see what happened, gambling that the rest of the elephants would stay away.
Closer and closer she came with Mvula scampering at her heels. I glanced nervously down at Max who was watching keenly, dead still. He looked back up at me and suddenly wagged his tail. He hadn’t sensed anything dangerous. I hoped his judgement was on track for this was a very big elephant coming at us.
Suddenly some atavistic survival trigger, vehemently at odds with my decision to stand fast, jerked and the compulsion to flee this gargantuan alien shape exploded within me. I could scarcely breathe. It was all I could do to hold my ground. To this day I don’t know how I managed not to bolt. But stay I did and then she was there, her huge form towering above me, obliterating the sky.
I think she sensed my trepidation for she purposefully stopped about five yards away and simply started grazing again, oozing tranquillity. When you are standing five yards away from a wild five-ton elephant you are acutely aware of every little thing that goes on around you, especially the elephant’s emotional state.
I somehow retained enough presence of mind to reflect on the incongruity of standing out on an open plain with a matriarch and her baby – the most treacherous of all situations – but there was such an innocence about our impromptu ‘get together’ that it helped me maintain both my dignity and my ground.
Five minutes later she was still there and I realized we
were actually hanging out together. She was slowly moving around grazing, and I relaxed enough to notice that she had the most graceful table manners. Her trunk would search out and deftly encircle a chosen clod of grass, which she would pluck and delicately tap on her knee to dislodge soil from the roots and gently place in the side of her mouth leaving just the roots protruding. A gentle clamp of the molars and the roots would drift away while she savoured the morsel. I noticed too that she was very fussy about what she ate and the scent of each plant would be carefully sampled before being devoured.
Her browsing was no less fascinating. She would adroitly remove the leaves from a young acacia, place them in her mouth and then snap off a branch. As soon as she had finished chewing the leaves, the stem would go in one side of her mouth like a kebab and a little while later be ejected on the other, stripped white of all bark, the only part she was after.
All the while Mvula would peek at Max and me from behind his mother’s tree-trunk legs, occasionally stepping out to get a better look. Max sat silently, occasionally moving a few yards to smell where Nana had been standing, but otherwise just motionless.
I was intensely focussed on this magnificent creature standing so close to me. All the while Nana kept glancing across or staring at me. Every now and then she would turn her massive body slightly towards me, or move her ears almost imperceptibly in my direction. Her occasional deep rumblings vibrated through my body.
So this was how she communicated … with her eyes, trunk, stomach rumblings, subtle body movements, and of course her attitude. And then suddenly I got it. She was trying to get through to me – and like an idiot I hadn’t been responding at all!
I looked pointedly at her and said ‘Thank you’, acknowledging
her, testing her reaction. The alien words echoed across the silent veldt. The effect was immediate. She glanced across and held my gaze, drawing me in for several deep seconds, before returning contentedly to her grazing. It was almost as if she was saying, ‘Didn’t you see me, what took you so long?’
The final piece of the puzzle clicked perfectly into place. While I had been standing there like a robot, she had been prompting me to accept her presence and give some sign that I recognised her. Yet I had been as stiff and rigid as a plank. When I finally acknowledged her, just with a simple ‘thank you’, she instantly responded.
I had learned something of this before in dealing with some animals, but that ‘Eureka’ moment with Nana really drove it home to me. I had at last grasped that the essence of communicating with any animal, from a pet dog to a wild elephant, is not so much the reach as the acknowledgement. It’s the acknowledgement that does it. In the animal kingdom communication is a two-way flow, just as it is everywhere else. If you are not signalling to them that their communication has arrived with you then there can be no communication. It’s as simple as that.
Eye movements are perhaps the most important. A flick of the eye, a look, or the tiniest glance may seem like nothing to humans, but in the animal world it’s a very big deal indeed. Attitude, facial expressions (believe me elephants can smile beautifully) and body language can also be significant.
And how do you acknowledge them. Well I found that just a look, can be enough. Staring, whilst sometimes appropriate if you have a close relationship with the animal, can be interpreted as a challenge by strangers. Just using words in the tone you would naturally use to convey your feelings can achieve a lot.
There are other factors of course. Granting respect is as
important as it is with humans. Animals have an uncanny ability to pick up on your state of mind, especially if you are antagonistic or hostile. All it takes to make progress is an open-minded attitude, and with a bit of patience and persistence it eventually clicks into place. The best part is you will recognize it when it happens. Believe me anyone can do it, and as many people already know, it is so worthwhile. There are no deep secrets, no special abilities, and definitely no psychic powers necessary.
The wrong way to go about this is to say: Well, researchers have ‘proved’ that animals only understand fifty words or something similarly absurd. Or that communication with other species is an illusion. Communication is not the preserve of humans; it is the one thing that is truly universal.
I looked up to see Frankie leading the bunch across. There was no way I was going to risk that sort of interaction with the entire herd. I immediately took my leave, thanking Nana and telling her I would see her again soon, humbled by the experience.
It was a superb day, a gentle breeze taking the edge off the sun and I decided to walk back to the house with Max. I gave Vusi the Landy to drive back and we backtracked along the elephant spoor. The Nseleni River gushed and swirled angrily against the rock face far below our path and I was amazed at how close to the cliff the herd had been walking as even the babies’ footprints were sometimes just a couple of yards away from the steep precipice. Elephants are seldom orderly when they are on the move. There is plenty of activity as they jostle, play and push one another as they amble along to wherever they are going. Yet they were obviously quite comfortable and surefooted enough to edge along this huge vertical drop. I recalled Kobus Raadt, the vet who had delivered the herd, telling me that an elephant can go where a monkey with a briefcase can’t. He was right.

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