The Elephant Whisperer: My Life With the Herd in the African Wild (4 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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Hammering echoed like a drum roll in my head. I wondered hazily where it was coming from.
My eyes flickered open. It was no dream. The banging stemmed from a shuddering door.
Rat-a-tat. Rat-a-tat-a-tat
.
Then I heard yelling. It was Ndonga. ‘The elephants have gone! They’ve broken out the
boma
! They’ve gone!’
I leapt out of bed, yanking on my trousers and stumbling like a pogo-dancer on one leg. Françoise, also awake and wide-eyed at the commotion, threw a nightgown over her shoulders.
‘I’m coming. Hang on!’ I shouted and shoved open the top half of the bedroom’s stable door that led directly to the farmhouse’s lush gardens.
An agitated Ndonga was standing outside, shivering in the pre-dawn chill.
‘The two big ones started shoving a tree,’ he said. ‘They worked as a team, pushing it until it just crashed down on the fence. The wires shorted and the elephants smashed through. Just like that.’
Dread slithered in my belly. ‘What tree?’
‘You know, that
moersa
tambotie. The one that KZN Wildlife
oke
said was too big to pull down.’
It took me a few moments to digest this. That tree must have weighed several tons and was thirty feet tall. Yet Nana and Frankie had figured out that by working in tandem they
could topple it. Despite my dismay, I felt a flicker of pride; these were some animals, all right.
The last foggy vestiges of sleep vaporized like steam. We had to get moving fast. One didn’t have to be a genius to grasp that we had a massive crisis on our hands as the herd was now stampeding towards the border fence. If they broke through that last barrier they would head straight into the patchwork of rural homesteads scattered outside Thula Thula. And as any game ranger will attest, a herd of wild elephants on the run in a populated area would be the conservation equivalent of the Chernobyl disaster.
I cursed long and hard, only stopping when I caught Françoise’s disapproving glance. I had believed the electric
boma
was escape-proof. The experts had told me exactly that, and it never occurred to me that they might be wrong.
David’s bedroom was across the lawn and I ran over. ‘Get everyone up. The elephants have broken out. We’ve got to find them – fast!’
Within minutes I had scrambled to raise a search party and we gathered at the
boma
, astounded at the damage. The large tambotie tree was history, its toppled upper section tenuously connected to the splintered stump by a strip of its bark oozing poisonous sap. The fence looked as though a division of Abrams tanks had thundered through it.
Standing next to the shattered tree was the astounded Ovambo guard who had witnessed the breakout. He pointed us in the direction he had last seen the elephants heading.
Almost at running speed, we followed the spoor to the boundary. We were too late. The border fence was down and the animals had broken out.
My worst fears were confirmed. But even so, how on earth had the animals got through an electrified fence pushing 8,000 volts so effortlessly?
We soon found out. Judging by their tracks, they had reached the eight-foot fence, milled around for a while and
then backtracked into the reserve until – uncannily – they found the energizer that powers the fence. How they knew this small, nondescript machine hidden in a thicket half a mile away was the source of current baffled us. But somehow they did, trampling it like a tin can and then returning to the boundary, where the wires were now dead. They then shouldered the concrete-embedded poles out of the ground like matchsticks.
Their tracks pointed north. There was no doubt that they were heading home to Mpumalanga 600 miles away. To the only home they knew; even though it was a home that no longer wanted them – and where, in all probability, they would be shot. That’s assuming game rangers or hunters didn’t get them along the way first.
As daybreak filled the eastern sky a motorist three miles away spotted the herd loping up the road towards him. At first he thought he was seeing things. Elephants? There aren’t meant to be any elephants here …
Half a mile or so later he saw the flattened fence and put two and two together. Fortunately he had the presence of mind to call, giving us valuable updated information.
The chase was on. I gunned my Land Rover into gear as the trackers leapt into the back.
We had barely driven out of the reserve when, to my astonishment, we saw a group of men parked on the shoulder of the dirt road, dressed in khaki and camouflage hunting gear and bristling with heavy-calibre rifles. They were as hyped as a vigilante gang and their excitement was palpable. You could smell the bloodlust.
I stopped and got out of the vehicle, the trackers and David behind me.
‘What’re you guys doing?’
One looked at me, eyes darting with anticipation. He shifted his rifle, caressing the butt.
‘We’re going after elephants.’
‘Oh yeah? Which ones?’
‘They’ve bust out of Thula, man. We’re gonna shoot them before they kill someone – they’re fair game now.’
I stared at him for several seconds, grappling to absorb this new twist to my escalating problems. Then cold fury set in.
‘Those elephants belong to me,’ I said taking two paces forward to emphasize my point. ‘If you put a bullet anywhere near them you are going to have to deal with me. And when we’re finished, I’m going to sue your arse off.’
I paused, breathing deeply.
‘Now show me your hunting permit,’ I demanded, knowing he couldn’t possibly have obtained one before dawn.
He stared at me, his face reddening with belligerence.
‘They’ve escaped, OK? They can be legally shot. We don’t need your permission.’
David was standing next to me, fists clenched. I could sense his outrage. ‘You know, David,’ I said loudly, ‘just look at this lot. Out there is a herd of confused elephants in big trouble and we’re the only ones here without guns. We’re the only ones who don’t want to kill them. Shows the difference in priorities, doesn’t it?’
Fizzing with anger, I ordered my men back into the Land Rover. Revving the engine and churning up dust clouds for the benefit of the gunmen staring aggressively at us we sped up the road.
The acrimonious encounter shook me considerably. Technically the urban Rambos were correct – the elephants were ‘fair game’. We had just heard on our two-way radios that the KZN Wildlife authorities, whom we had alerted as soon as the herd had broken out, were issuing elephant rifles to their staff. I didn’t have to be told that they were considering shooting the animals on sight. Their prime concern was the safety of people in the area and no one could blame them.
For us, it was now a simple race against time. We had to
find the elephants before anyone with a gun did. That’s all it boiled down to.
After another mile up the road the herd’s tracks veered into the bush, exactly as the motorist had told us. Thula Thula is flanked by vast forests of acacia trees and
ugagane
bush, which grows thickly with interwoven thorn-studded branches that are as supple and vicious as whips. It’s a riotous tangle of hostile thickets; lovely and wild to view, but torturous to track in. The wickedly sharp thorns scarcely scratch an elephant’s hide, of course, but to us soft-skinned species it was the equivalent of running through a maze of fish hooks.
The forest spread north as far as the eye could see. Could we find the animals in this almost impenetrable wilderness?
I looked up to the heavens, squinting against the harsh yellow-white glare that indicated we were in for a savage scorcher of a day and found my answer – air support. For us to have a fighting chance of catching the elephants before some gunman did, we had to have a helicopter tracking above. But to get a chopper up would cost thousands of dollars, with no guarantee of success. Also, most commercial pilots wouldn’t have a clue as to how to scout elephants hiding in such rugged terrain.
But there was one man I knew who could track from the sky – and, fortuitously, he was a family friend. Peter Bell was not only a technical genius at Bell Equipment, an international heavy-duty vehicle manufacturer, but also an expert game-capture pilot and a good man to have on your side in an emergency. I quickly drove back to Thula Thula and phoned him.
Peter didn’t have to be told how serious the problem was and unhesitatingly agreed to help. While he got his chopper ready, we continued the chase on foot. But we had barely infiltrated the acacia jungle when our Ovambo game guards, staring at what appeared to me to be a flinty patch of dirt,
shook their heads. After some deliberation, they proclaimed the elephants had turned back.
I had inherited the Ovambos from the previous owner, who thought highly of them. There are thousands of Ovambos in Zululand today, many of whom had fought in the South African Army during the apartheid wars. They’re mostly employed in the security industry and are valued for courage and weapon skills. They seldom socialized with my Zulu staff.
Ndonga had told me his team were expert trackers, which was why we were used them now.
‘Are you sure?’ I asked the head tracker.
He nodded and pointed towards Thula Thula. ‘They have turned. They are going that way.’
This was news I was desperate to hear. Perhaps they would voluntarily return to the reserve. I grinned and slapped David on the back as we headed back through the bush towards home.
However, after twenty minutes of some of the toughest going I have ever experienced, I began to have doubts. Sweat was cascading down my face as I called over the chief tracker.
‘The elephants are not here. There is no spoor, no dung and no broken branches. No signs at all.’
He shook his head, as if patiently consulting with a child, and pointed ahead. ‘They are there.’
Against my better judgement we carried on a bit further and then I had had enough. There was something wrong here. It was obvious there were no elephants around. An elephant, due to its massive size and strength, does not need to be furtive. It leaves very clear tracks, piles of dung and snapped branches. It has no enemies apart from man, thus stealth is not in its nature.
Also, every indication was that they were heading
towards their previous home. Why would they suddenly backtrack now?
I called David, Ngwenya and Bheki and told the Ovambos they were wrong; we were returning to the original tracks. The Ovambos shrugged but made no move to join us. I was too wrapped up in the intensity of the chase to think much about that at the time.
An hour later we picked up the spoor again – fresh and heading in completely the opposite direction. Why had the Ovambos chosen the wrong route? Had they deliberately led me the wrong way? Surely not … I could only surmise that they were scared of stumbling without warning upon the elephants in the wild terrain. There was no denying this was dangerous work.
In fact, a few years back in Zimbabwe, an experienced elephant hunter had been killed on a safari doing exactly what we were doing – tracking elephant in thick bush. Following what he thought to be a lone bull, he suddenly discovered that he had walked slap into the middle of a herd spread out in the heavy undergrowth. The first sign of this comes when one realizes in horror that there are elephants behind, that you walked right passed them without noticing. They had turned the tables and the enraged animals came at the hunter and his trackers. Completely surrounded, he and his men had no chance. They died grisly deaths.
We kept in radio contact with Peter who flew tight search grids over the bush ahead while John Tinley, a KZN Wildlife ranger from our neighbouring reserve called Fundimvelo, visited nearby settlements asking headmen if any of their people had seen the herd. The answer was negative, which was good news. Our biggest concern was that the animals would wander into a village and stomp thatched huts into floor mats or, worse, kill people.
Hot and scratched, shirts dark with sweat and nerves
jangling, we kept moving, every now and again finding signs confirming we were on the right track. I reckoned we were at least two hours behind, but who knows – they could have been just ahead, waiting in ambush as the Zimbabwean herd had for the hunter. That fear was always with us. More than once we froze, hearts in our mouths as a kudu or bush-buck burst from its hiding place in a crackle of snapping sticks, often barely yards away so thick was the bush. It really was dangerous work and I could feel tensions starting to surface as we became more and more irritable.
Although progress was torturous, it was impossible to move faster. Thorns parted as one man squeezed through a gap and then snapped back like a hornet at the man behind.
What I was banking on was the animals stopping at a watering hole to rest, allowing us to catch up precious miles. A factor in our favour was that they had Nana’s two-year-old son, who we called Mandla, in tow. We named him Mandla, the Zulu word for ‘power’ in honour of his incredible stamina in staying with the herd during the long chase. He would slow them down significantly. Or so I hoped.

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