The Elephant Whisperer: My Life With the Herd in the African Wild (28 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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We were alive due to a gut instinct. Nothing more, nothing less.
Fifteen minutes later the reptile surfaced on the far side of the dam, slowly pulling his bulk out of the water and crawling up the bank. That’s what I had been waiting for. Now at least I could get a good look at it.
It’s difficult, if not impossible, to sex a crocodile from a distance but I took him for a male, an old one from the dark colouring on his back. And judging by his hunting technique,
he certainly was a cunning old fellow. He was a new arrival on the reserve and must have come down the river, perhaps during the recent floods, and walked the two miles to claim Gwala Gwala dam for his home. As such he had joined the extended Thula Thula family and was now entitled to protection and to be left alone to live out his natural life. There were plenty of barbel in the dam to support him between the occasional bigger meals – though hopefully not Max or me. He would be happy here.
‘Boss! Boss come in, come in!’
It was David on the two-way radio.
‘Standing by. What’s up?’
‘There’s a big mistake here,’ said David, using the word ‘mistake’ in the Zulu context to mean a major problem. ‘I’m up from the Kudu River crossing. You better get here quickly.’
‘Why?’
He paused.
‘We have another dead rhino.’
‘Shit! What the hell happened?’
‘Rather come and see for yourself. You’re not going to like this at all.’
Puzzled, I picked up my .303 half expecting an encounter with poachers – as had happened after our first dead rhino – and ran for the Land Rover with Max at my heels. What was it that David wouldn’t tell me over the radio?
The crossing was about twenty minutes away and driving along my focus was snapped by Mnumzane loping off across the veldt to the left of me. Despite my haste I stopped. Something was wrong; I could sense it from where I was sitting.
I called out, but instead of coming to me he lifted his head, spread his ears and deliberately moved off. Every new elephant reaction intrigues me and normally I would have
trailed him to find out what was going on, but David was sitting on a crisis.
Ten minutes later I reached David. He was squatting on his haunches in the shade of a young umbrella thorn tree, staring sombrely at the ground. I pulled up next to him and got out.
‘What happened?’ I asked, looking around. ‘Where’s the rhino?’
He stood up slowly. Then without a word he led the way down an old game path and into a clearing. In the middle lay the gray carcass. It was a female. From the look of it, her death was recent.
Her horns were still intact. That surprised me, for I had expected them to be butchered off, the first thing poachers do. I walked up to the immense motionless body, automatically looking for bullet wounds. There were none.
I then scrutinized the corpse for signs of disease or other causes of death, while David stood by silently. Except for some nasty fresh gashes on her armour-plated hide, she had been strong and healthy. In fact, even in death she was so imposing that I half expected her to suddenly rise up.
I was so transfixed by the grim scenario that I hadn’t taken in my wider surroundings, and as I looked up I was shocked. A tornado could not have done more damage. Bushes were crushed and trees lay sprawled and splintered all over the place. The earth itself had been gouged up, as if a bulldozer had lost its driver and careered around recklessly flattening everything. Nothing made sense; no rhino could cause such havoc. What the hell was going on?
I instinctively looked to the ground for answers. Rhino spoor was everywhere, heavy and mobile in its tread, yet unnatural in its twisting and turning patterns. Then elephant tracks jumped out at me; big heavy pachyderm spoor, the aggressive earth-wrenching footprints of an enraged bull in full cry.
Mnumzane!
I tried to suppress the dawning realization, hoping against hope I was wrong.
‘He killed her, boss.’ David’s words whispered into my thoughts. ‘She put up a helluva fight but she was no match for him – never could be.’
I nodded, not wanting to believe it. But the tracks told the story as clearly as if they were on celluloid.
‘I once saw an elephant kill a black rhino at a waterhole in Namibia,’ David continued, almost as if speaking to himself. ‘He hammered the rhino so hard it shot back thirty feet and went down and died right there, its ribs smashed in, collapsed over the heart. And then the elephant put his front foot on the body and stood over it rolling it over back and forth as if it was a plaything. The power was just unbelievable.’
He stared at the corpse in front of us. ‘I know she is a white, and nearly twice the size of a black rhino. But still, she stood no chance.’
A slight flicker in the bush to my left caught my eye. Max had also seen it and following his gaze through the foliage I caught sight of a camouflaged rhino calf silently watching from a nearby thicket. It was Heidi, the dead animal’s two-year-old daughter. A rhino will fight to the death under most circumstances – but with a youngster, that’s an absolute given.
‘What a mess up!’ I fumed, my words echoing harshly through the bush. ‘What the hell did he do that for? The bloody idiot!’
‘We … we’re not going to shoot him, are we?’ said David and for the first time I realized why he had been so downcast.
Shoot Mnumzane? The words shocked me rigid.
In most South African reserves, aggressive young male elephants, orphaned by earlier culls and reared without sage
supervision of adult bulls, have gratuitously killed rhino before. And when they did, retribution by reserve owners was swift and harsh. Rhinos in South Africa are rare and very expensive. Elephants, on the other hand, are more plentiful and comparatively cheap. Past records indicated that elephants which killed rhino before would do so again. Thus to protect valuable rhino, an elephant that kills one effectively sentences itself to death.
Through one senseless violent act, Mnumzane had made himself an outcast … an untouchable. I now couldn’t keep him; nor could I give him away for love or money. Who would want an elephant that killed rhino just for the hell of it? On most game reserves an owner in my position would immediately set up a hunt and end the problem there and then.
‘No,’ I said trying to reassure myself. ‘We’re not going to shoot him. But we really have a bloody big problem on our hands.’
I paused, trying to get my head around it all. ‘Let’s unpick this slowly. Firstly Heidi will be fine, she’s big enough to survive without a mother and she will herd with the other rhinos.’
‘Secondly we have to retrieve the horns,’ interrupted David. ‘The word will get out and they’re too much of a temptation for poachers. I’ll get the men and we’ll cut them out, clean them and put them in the safe.’
I nodded. ‘Good thinking. I’ll phone Wildlife and let them know what happened. They’re not going to be too happy with the way she died but I’ll speak to them about that as well. The carcass will stay here and there’ll be plenty of hyena and vulture activity for guests.’
David started to say something, then paused. ‘Boss …’ again almost whispering, ‘you’re sure we’re not going to shoot Mnumzane?’
The million-dollar question. One I didn’t have an answer
for, so I decided to wing it. ‘I’ll go and find him and see what I can do. I need to spend time with him and try to work something out.’
David looked at me, unconvinced, but it was the best I could come up with. We both stood and took a long hard look at the hulking grey carcass and then left in different directions. He was going to get the team to dehorn the once-magnificent creature. I was going to have a serious chat with Mnumzane.
As we left I saw the calf trot out of the thicket she had been hiding in and stand vigil over her valiant dead mother. Mnumzane had really messed things up big time.
It was another hour and a half before I found him browsing near the Gwala Gwala dam. I approached slowly, pulled up about thirty-five yards away, got out and leaned on the Land Rover’s hood unsheathing my binoculars. I didn’t call him, but he knew full well I was there. Instead he chose to ignore me and continue grazing which is exactly what I wanted. A swift scan of his body with the binoculars showed the scars of battle.
Congealed blood revealed he had been gored in the chest and there were deep grazes and scrapes on both his flanks. This had not been a brief encounter; the battle had been fierce and long, probably only because he was not used to fighting. A veteran brawler of his size would have ended it with one thundering charge.
There also must have been plenty of opportunities for the rhino to escape, but with a calf, that word was absent from her dictionary. She held her ground as her gallant species always do and paid the highest price for her stubbornness.
Eventually he finished eating and looked at me.
‘Mnumzane!’ I called out sharply, focusing on connotation and intonation rather than volume. ‘Have you any idea of what you have done, you bloody fool?’
I had never used that furious tone with him before. I
needed him to understand I was extremely angry about the death of the rhino.
‘This is a big problem, for you, for me, and for everyone. What the hell got into you?’
He stood motionless as I berated him, his stare static and it was only after I drove off that I saw him move away.
From then on I tracked him daily, staying near him as much as possible, but if he approached I deliberately drove off. I could see that bugged him.
Then through extreme good fortune I found him near the scene of the crime. I immediately drove to the rotting remains of the rhino still festering on the ground and making sure I was upwind of the intolerable smell and in a good getaway position, I gently called him.
Obviously pleased to hear my usual genial tone of voice again, he ambled over towards me. I let him keep coming until he was right at the kill, and then leaned out the window and lambasted him in a firm and steady voice, stopping only when he uncharacteristically turned and walked off in the opposite direction.
There are those who will say that all of this is nonsense; that of course elephants don’t understand … that I was wasting my time. But I believe Mnumzane got the message. He never hassled another rhino again, let alone killed one. Our relationship returned to normal and Mnumzane would again emerge for a chat in the bush again, like in the old days.
He even, on occasion, came up to the house to say hello and there was no one more relieved than David.
Shortly afterwards David knocked on my door, looking a little doleful.
‘Can I come in, boss?’
‘Sure. What’s up?’
‘My mum and dad are leaving the country. They’re going to England. Emigrating.’
You could’ve knocked me over with a twig. David’s family came from pioneer Zululand stock and were well respected throughout the area. This must have been a big decision for them.
David noticed my astonishment and smiled, almost embarrassedly.
‘That’s not all. I’m going with them.’
This time I nearly did fall over. If I couldn’t visualize David’s family in England, I could do so even less with him. He was a man of the bush – something of which there is precious short supply in England. The wild was his element.
‘You’re sure it’s not khaki fever again?’ I asked smiling, remembering the last time he had left us was for a pretty English tourist who fancied hunky game rangers. That only lasted a month or so before he came charging back, asking for his old job.
He laughed. ‘Not this time. It’s going to be hard for my mum and dad to adjust in a foreign country. I’m going along to help out.’
I nodded, knowing how close he was to his family.
‘Anything we can do to make you stay?’
‘Afraid not, boss. It’s been a terribly difficult decision and as much as I’m going to miss Thula Thula and you guys, I have to go with my folks.’
‘We’re going to miss you too.’
He left later that month. It was a melancholic day as I shook his hand for the last time as his ‘boss’.
Being David, with his inextinguishable cheerfulness, he soon landed on his feet in Britain and joined the British Army. He was selected for an officer’s course at the world-famous Sandhurst Military Academy and did a tour of combat duty in Afghanistan as an officer – where I believe his outdoor skills and natural leadership skills helped make him a superb officer.
There hadn’t been a snakebite on Thula Thula for nearly sixty years. The previous owners had been here for fifty years without incident and we had been bite free for the eight years we had been here.
This is not surprising, for although Thula Thula, like every African game reserve slithers with serpents of all types and sizes, these intriguing reptiles avoid man for three very good reasons. Firstly, they don’t want to get stomped on and will move away long before you get near them; secondly, humans are not their prey; and thirdly, they have long since learned that we will kill them for no other reason than that they exist.
The only exception to the first proviso is the puff adder. It relies on its dull yellow-brown and black colouring as camouflage, and will not budge however close you come. It has a thick body, averaging about three feet in length, and because it is so aggressive it is responsible for more deaths in African than any other snake. Every veteran ranger has at some time stood on – or almost on – an immobile puffy, only noticing afterwards that he or she has just missed a deadly injection of venom. They just don’t move, sometimes even if you stand on them. But they do bite, faster than you can jump.
Dispelling myths about snakes opens the minds of visitors to appreciating and perhaps even befriending these
fascinating creatures that are so vital to the environment, particularly in keeping down rodent populations.
There is, however, one snake that is a law unto itself.
‘We’ve just lost two zebra,’ said John Tinley, the veteran ranger from KZN Wildlife’s Fundimvelo reserve next door who had stopped in for a cup of tea one day. ‘Both dead, right next to the waterhole, fat and healthy, no sign of disease and not a mark on them.’
He looked at me waiting for comment, testing me.
‘OK, what happened?’ I said, taking the game out of it.
‘Black mamba,’ he replied, blowing on his hot tea. ‘Killed both of them. Stone dead.’
‘You’re having me on,’ I said sitting up. ‘A mamba killed two adult zebra?’
He clicked his fingers. ‘Just like that. They were history when we got there. They must have frightened the damn thing, or stood on it … or something.’
‘You’re sure?’ I asked, amazed at what I was hearing. A zebra can weigh 600 pounds. ‘Two of them?’
‘The spoor doesn’t lie. There isn’t another snake that leaves marks like that. You may have seen the fire. I burned the bodies. Don’t want anybody or anything eating that meat, not even hyena.’
As soon as he was gone I got on the phone and after a couple of calls I sank back in my chair. He was right, a mamba can easily kill a zebra; in fact it can kill almost anything – lion, towering kudu bulls … even giraffe have been dropped. As for humans, one mamba packs enough venom to kill up to forty adults.
It grows up to fifteen feet long and is as thick as a man’s arm. It’s also the fastest snake around, sometimes hurtling along with its head three or four feet above the ground. To complete the picture, it’s not actually black; more of a metal grey. However, the inside of its mouth is pitch-black, hence
its name. The sight of a mamba almost gliding with its coffin-shaped head raised several feet above a grassy plain is the ultimate game-viewing experience.
Several days afterwards, I was in my office when I heard Biyela shouting at the top of his voice.
‘Mkhulu, come quick! Mamba!’ The word galvanized me and I grabbed my shotgun, locked up Max, and bolted outside to find Biyela standing at the rear of the house, backed up against a storeroom wall, pointing.
‘Mamba!’ he shouted again.
I put my finger to my lips to get him to lower his voice. He nodded, thankful for the presence of the shotgun and pointed to a small fenced-off courtyard which housed general bric-a-brac.
‘It went in there.’
‘You sure it was a mamba?’ I asked, aware that for Biyela all snakes are automatically mambas.
‘
Ngempela
– absolutely.’
As a rule we never kill snakes. Even with a black mamba we try for a catch and release into the bush. But if something so lethal looked like it was going to escape into the house, I wouldn’t hesitate to shoot it. The last thing I wanted was several slithering yards of venom surfacing in one of the bedrooms or settling down behind some sofa cushions.
We edged closer and suddenly Biyela grabbed my sleeve and we watched the tail disappearing – of all places into our open bedroom window.
‘Damn!’ I exclaimed as I started running back around to the front door with Biyela hot on my heels.
We rounded the still-open front door at a dash and bolted through into the bedroom and stopped dead. Edging in, we cautiously scanned the area immediately around us, then the floor of the room, and then the poles spanning the thatched roof above us. Nothing, nothing at all. It had gone. We
searched everywhere, under the bed, in the cupboards, behind the curtains. Everywhere. It had completely, but completely disappeared.
‘This is unbelievable. A mamba in our bedroom and we can’t find it? A bloody mamba for Pete’s sake! Where the hell is it?’
‘They are like ghosts,’ Biyela replied.
Dismayed, I suddenly I heard Françoise chatting outside with some of the staff. ‘What do you mean there’s a mamba in my bedroom? Where’s Lawrence?’
‘Hi. I’m here in the lounge!’ I called out, trying to sound unconcerned.
She walked in with Bijou scampering at her heels. ‘What’s all this nonsense about a mamba in our bedroom?’
‘Well … maybe. I think there was one but now … well, maybe it’s gone.’ I nodded sternly as if I was in total control of the situation.
‘You’re not sure if there is a mamba in our room?’ She stood on tiptoes peering over my shoulder through the bedroom door. ‘Well, OK oh great white hunter. I’m sleeping at the lodge tonight and if you are so sure it’s gone you can stay here. Just make sure your will is up to date.’
Then Bijou, who had somehow slipped past us, started growling from the bedroom and I instinctively knew she had found it. Or worse, maybe the deadly snake had found her.
I hurtled back into the bedroom. In the middle of the floor was the poodle … and rearing itself directly in front of her was … not a mamba but a full-grown Mozambican spitting cobra. A
mfezi
– Max’s favourite adversary. But unlike Max, who would quickly circle a reptile before striking, Bijou was no snake fighter.
The snake was in the classic attack position: head raised and hood flared, hypnotically focused on this bite-sized ball of fluff before it. Luckily, emboldened by our arrival, Bijou
started prancing about and yapping for all she was worth, denying the lethal serpent a fixed target.
Now while an
mfezi
has enough venom to kill a man, it plummets way below a mamba on the snake Richter scale. Relief poured out of my system.
A black mamba, as mentioned earlier, is actually grey, almost the exact same top colour as a
mfezi.
From the tail slithering into the window Biyela and I had somehow mistaken one for the other. But my relief that it was ‘only’ a deadly Mozambican spitting cobra was soon tempered by the fact that if anything happened to Bijou, Françoise’s wrath would ensure I’d be on my way to the North Pole without a sleigh.
‘Lawrence! Do something!’
Adjusting my glasses closer to my face for protection against venom spray, then shutting my mouth (recently opened for a retort) for the same reason, I edged around the poised snake, scooped up the excited poodle and delivered her still yapping to Françoise.
Biyela then handed me my trusty snake-catching broom and I moved in cautiously, not wishing to antagonize Mr Mfezi any more than absolutely necessary. I manoeuvred the broom painfully slowly towards the erect serpent, which – as they usually do – allowed the bristle-head to be eased under its body. For some reason the reptile is not threatened by the broom. However, the momentum of the broom moving forward gently ‘trips’ the upright snake – which is only balancing on the bottom half of its body – onto the broom’s head. Once it collapses onto the broom head, it’s a simple matter of lifting the broom up by the handle with the snake still coiled on the far end and carrying it outside. I then released it a good distance from the house.
Hallelujah! Bijou was saved and I was accorded mega domestic hero status with Françoise. I was also pleased that a couple of trainee rangers had witnessed the capture and
afterwards I went over the broom technique again with them, stressing that it only worked with cobras and they had to be upright in the attack position before you could edge the broom underneath the lower part of their body.
Unfortunately a few days later the impromptu lesson had serious unintended consequences.
 
‘Code Red! Snakebite at the main house!’ the rapid-fire call cranked out of the Land Rover’s radio as Brendan and I were parked out in the bush with the herd, watching Mandla playfully wrestling with the much larger Mabula.
Brendan’s reply was cool and calculated, just what was needed to calm the panic. ‘Who was bitten, where, and what type of snake?’
‘It’s the new trainee Brett. We think it may be a black mamba. We’re trying to find it so we can do the identification. ’
As the voice trailed off I felt sick to my stomach. Black mamba! Flooring the Land Rover’s accelerator I rushed back to the house in a blur, unable to get a word in among the frenetic radioactivity.
The drive from Thula Thula to the hospital in Empangeni was about forty minutes, way too long in case of a full-dose mamba bite, which can kill in half that time. Also, we didn’t keep mamba serum on the reserve. In fact nobody keeps it on hand, for the simple reason that it goes rotten after a short time. Sometimes the serum could kill you as surely as a bite.
‘God, I hope it’s not a mamba,’ I prayed. ‘And if it is, then not a big one.’
But I knew that didn’t matter, for even a day-old hatchling mamba packs enough venom to kill a full-grown man.
I pulled into the parking area behind our house in a billow of dust, leapt out and ran over to where the rangers
were gathered around a large dead snake, hoping against hope that it wasn’t a mamba.
It was.
‘Who took Brett to hospital?’ I asked.
‘Nobody. He wanted to pack a suitcase, but we’re going to take him now,’ came the absurd reply from another trainee.
‘What! Does he know it was a bloody mamba?’
‘Yes, but it was only a small bite on the finger.’
‘Only on the finger! For Pete’s sake – it’s a mamba! It doesn’t matter where it bit!’
I couldn’t believe what I was hearing and yelled at Brett, who had just appeared from his room carrying a suitcase as if he was going on holiday, to hurry.
I then took a deep breath, the last thing I wanted to do was panic the kid. ‘Brett,’ I said quietly. ‘Please don’t run as it will only increase your heart rate and spread the venom. This is a mamba. OK? Show me the bite.’
He gave me his hand and there on the finger was the fang wound. I exhaled with relief. Just one puncture.
‘Did it hook into you?’ I asked.
‘No. It just struck at me and moved off, but my finger is getting as sore as hell.’
With no purchase to inject venom and only one fang in one finger Brett might – maybe just – have a chance.
‘Are your hands tingling?’
‘Yes, strange you should say that. So are my toes.’
Tingling in the extremities are the first symptoms of a mamba bite, a sure sign that venom was in his system.
‘That’s from the bite. You must go right now. Just slow everything down – your breathing – everything down.’
I then turned to the driver. ‘Go like hell,’ I hissed, making sure Brett couldn’t hear me. He nodded and sped off.
I looked at my watch, six precious minutes had passed
since the bite and we had no way of knowing how much venom was in his body. If it was anything more than just a scratch we had to accept that he would be dead before they got halfway to town. I put the horrible thought of the phone call I’d have to make to his family out of my mind.
‘What happened?’ I asked Bheki.
‘
Ayish
, that young man doesn’t listen. We were here when we saw the mamba in there.’ He pointed to the small courtyard behind our bedroom window.
I stared at the courtyard, the same one where Biyela had seen a snake earlier that week and it suddenly dawned what had happened. There were two snakes that day. Biyela had been absolutely right. It was indeed a mamba he had seen going in to the courtyard. It must have came face to face with the
mfezi
, which then bolted out of the courtyard and climbed into our window to get away, straight into the growls of ‘brave’ Bijou. The mamba had been operating from the courtyard ever since.
‘
Yehbo
,’ said Biyela who was standing next to Bheki, as if reading my thoughts. ‘It was a mamba I saw, not an
mfezi.
We became confused.’

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