Love, Life, and Elephants

by Dame Daphne Sheldrick

  For two more days the skies remained clear, but around midday on the third day, large brooding black clouds gathered in the sky as if from nowhere and the air turned humid and hot. It was breathlessly still as a hush descended, every living creature seemingly waiting for something to happen. Even Higglety tore himself away from the camels and came dashing back to seek shelter in the tent. And then came great claps of thunder and the first drops of rain fell from the sky – big, heavy droplets, hesitantly at first, sending up tiny puffs of dust as they hit the dry powdery soil of the ground. It wasn’t long before we found ourselves in the midst of a monumental tropical downpour, so heavy that the afternoon became as dark as dusk and the roar of the rain on the tent deafened all other sound. The tent began to sag under the strain, and we had to continually heave up the canvas to release a waterfall that gushed down the sides and seeped beneath the groundsheet.

  At first, we savoured the refreshing scent of newly dampened earth, our spirits uplifted, but then with rising alarm we watched the parched earth rapidly becoming saturated and turning into a sea of mud. Little rivulets were forming, tentacles spreading out in all directions and racing off to swell the Tiva watercourse. Once this flooded, we could be cut off completely, isolated in this remote corner of the Park for months. Meanwhile, as we were harbouring mixed feelings about this unexpected downpour, the camels, who had probably never experienced anything like this before, were the epitome of misery, as was Higglety, who had curled up into a shivering little ball beneath the blankets at the foot of David’s bed.

  The fury of the storm abated and the next morning we awoke to a newly wet world – a tinge of green rising from the enlivened vegetation and the air vibrant with the joyous chorus of innumerable birds. The fallen gossamer wings of countless flying ants carpeted the ground outside our tent, and those termite queens that had not fallen prey to birds were scuttling around with their tails in the air, sending their scent out to suitors. I had seen this before, of course; when joined in tandem, the queen and her mate would disappear to a lifetime underground, where her sole role would be the laying of eggs to create and sustain a new colony of termites, while he would be condemned to a life of imprisonment – the proverbial ‘drone’, seemingly with no other function than keeping the queen company once their union had been consummated.

  The sudden appearance after rain of these insects in their billions presented a welcome banquet for all, so on this wet morning the camp was abuzz with activity. Mr Hornbill feverishly embarked on a rapid shuttle service back and forth to his wife with a beak full of wriggling victims, while Higglety stationed himself on the nearby termite mound and crunched up the insects as they emerged. Other birds swooped and dipped, taking them on the wing, while Agama lizards devoured them in pairs before they could dig themselves into the ground. The rangers were busy feasting on the termites, roasting them over the coals, enjoying what they said was their delicious nutty flavour. I knew from my childhood days on the farm that like the locust, flying ants were a delicacy to most African tribes. Indeed, some tribes from the Nile region had even perfected the art of inducing the would-be termite queens to emerge out of season, simulating the sound of falling rain on their nests by the tapping of sticks and pouring of water.

  There was so much to watch that Jill and I could have stayed there all day, but David decided it would be unwise to dally at Ndiandaza in case the region flooded, so later that morning we packed up camp. It turned out that the Kori bustard had been correct, for this storm heralded the onset of a pluvial decade of plenty, and in honour of this prophetic bird we named the borehole ‘Elgubu’. Now, over fifty years later, a windmill above it draws up the life-giving water for the Field Force rangers who still patrol this sensitive region of Tsavo.

  Arriving home, we were presented with a box containing a mate for Higglety. I was getting used to the ongoing appearance of wild baby orphans in my life at Tsavo, gaining in confidence about how to rear each species based on knowledge of their wild habits. It was a steep learning curve, but I enjoyed every moment nurturing the orphaned young. Combined with David’s patient tutoring, each one taught me so much, laying the foundation of all I know today. Needless to say Higglety was frantic to investigate the contents of the latest box, chirruping away with his tail in bottlebrush mode. Knowing how fraught the introduction of wild creatures could be, I had doubts about Higglety’s good intentions, but David insisted that they had to meet and opened the lid of the box. Instantly the little orphan shot out and tore underneath an armchair, pursued by Higglety, who had a dangerous glint in his eye. Fortunately he had been eating so much cheese that he was now too rotund to follow, so he busied himself prowling ominously around the chair, from which squeaks and angry growls emanated. I couldn’t bear the thought of a mongoose fight, so I left David to it, only venturing back about an hour later, expecting to find a mangled corpse. Instead I was amazed to see Higglety and his new companion walking round and round each other, well on the way to establishing an amicable friendship, and by nightfall they were quite obviously delighted with each other and slept curled up together.

  Thereafter Pickle and Higglety were inseparable. Higglety was becoming increasingly independent from us and started taking Pickle off with him, sometimes two miles from home each day, to his favourite spot at the main Voi entrance to the Park. At first I doubted Higglety’s homing ability and went to retrieve them in the car, but I soon discovered that he knew his way around very well. Nevertheless we were concerned that Pickle was still far too young for such adventures, but Higglety was determined that she should accompany him everywhere he went and was most persistent in his persuasion, running off chattering away, then stopping to look around to see whether she was following, and if not, returning to prod her with his nose, before repeating this strategy all over again.

  We decided that since it was company that Higglety craved, we should try to introduce him to his wild cousins down on the Voi River circuit. A resident pack of banded mongooses lived there and it seemed an ideal place – plenty of cover, no shortage of food, water nearby – in fact, a mongoose paradise. That evening, feeling like Judas, we took him to the river and placed him on the ground beside the car. For a few moments he looked rather confused, regarding us with his baleful lopsided look, but soon he set about busying himself with an interesting hole in the grass and while he was so engrossed, we slipped away. Taking one last backward glance, I could see Higglety gazing at the departing car. We drove away in silence, feeling very guilty. ‘I feel an absolute cad,’ said David. Back at home, we poured ourselves a drink and sat miserably on the front verandah as darkness closed in. Pickle lay in my lap, dejected and still, and as I stroked her I was overcome with remorse, picturing Higglety confused and alone in a strange place, without even the comfort of his nest and the bedclothes he snuggled up to as he fell asleep each evening. Even David looked anxious as he sat contemplating his drink. Jill was already in bed. I had no idea how I was going to tell her the next morning.

  All of a sudden Pickle began to chatter, leaping off my lap and heading out of the front door. We followed her and there, hurrying up the stairs, was Higglety, every hair on his tail standing at right angles in mongoosian outrage. With enormous relief, I rushed up to him, intending to pick him up and welcome him home, but he made it clear he wanted none of it and nipped me sharply on the toe. Ignoring David and Pickle, he refused all food – even cheese – plonked himself in his bed, wrapped himself in his cuddle blanket and lay down to sleep in an offended huff. Over the coming days we tried to ingratiate ourselves with him but he remained aloof for ages, obviously not prepared to forgive our treachery, although actually he couldn’t stay mad at Jill for too long. Eventually his animosity vanished and life returned to normal.

  One evening, a few weeks later, when Higglety and Pickle failed to return from their daily excursion, I drove down to the main gate to see if anyone had seen them. I had only gone a short distance when I caught sight of a large martial eagle sitting o
n the ground, devouring a small animal. I left the vehicle in order to investigate, and as I approached, the eagle took off into the sky carrying what I recognized as Pickle’s little corpse in its talons. Stumbling through the bush, I clapped my hands and shouted in an attempt to make the eagle release its hold, but it was too late and it soared off into the sky with Pickle in its talons. Putting my face in my hands, I sat down in the bush and sobbed. After a while I became aware of something rubbing against my back, and remarkably, there was Higglety. At least he was still alive. I held him tight and carried him back to the car.

  I knew that for Pickle it had been a natural end, but her death haunted me for days. I hoped that the endomorphins released by the brain had made it painless and swift. Higglety was terribly subdued, staying close to home for a few days, keeping one eye directed sky-wards. Inevitably, though, the call of the wild returned and once again he took to disappearing, sometimes spending a night out and then days on end until he disappeared entirely, and we never saw him again.

  When caring for animals, whether domestic or wild, one experiences a whole range of emotions from love to grief. I had known both many times. Parting was always painful and never became easier. Of course, Higglety had returned to where he rightfully belonged, and as David reminded me, this was cause for celebration, not self-pity. It was the quality of life that counted, he said, not the duration, and our orphans, irrespective of their end, had enjoyed a second chance of life that would otherwise have been denied them.

  David loved me to massage his scalp and in the evenings, when Jill was asleep and the day had settled, he would sit at my feet as I rubbed his head, mulling over the events of the day. These were precious moments and we discussed a great deal – David’s philosophy playing a very important part in my understanding and interpretation of animal behaviour. He believed that wild animals were, in many ways, more sophisticated than us humans, more perfect in terms of Nature, honed by natural selection over millennia and specially adapted for the environmental slot they occupied, contributing to the wellbeing of the whole. He was intolerant of those who viewed animal ‘intelligence’ as inferior to that of the human animal, for in his view, each species had evolved along a different branch of life in a way that suited its purpose; there were bound to be things that we humans would never fully understand about animal ‘intelligence’, and those who claimed that they did merely illustrated ignorance. ‘The more you know, the more you know you don’t know,’ he said. We should never be so arrogant as to believe that we had all the answers.

  David was of the firm belief that all animals possessed powers of communication, mysterious and hidden to human ears – for example, telepathy and the infrasound of the elephants and also probably the language of giraffes, animals that were believed to be mute. He had already taught me how to observe the body language of many animals, and that chemistry played an extremely important part in daily rituals – the footprints that left more than a mark on the ground, a whiff of scent on the wind that gave advance warning of impending danger. He understood that identity was a subconscious quest of all male mammals, mankind included, and inherent to a lesser degree in the females as well. How one was rated among one’s peers had a bearing on self-esteem, and the confidence that brought peace of mind. ‘Mammals require three essentials in life,’ he said, ‘identity, stimulation and security, and by far the most important of these three psychological cornerstones is identity.’ No doubt he was right, but during these tender moments, I was secretly convinced that love was the source of all wellbeing.

  David was openly contemptuous of those who viewed animals as a mere commodity placed on earth for the benefit of mankind, as well as of those who had the ‘anthropomorphic block’ which prevented them from accepting that animals were endowed with the same emotions as humans. After all, we humans in terms of Nature were also ‘animals’, and since Nature often repeats certain basic blueprints for mammals, such as warm blood and mammary glands, why not psychological and emotional parallels as well? Like us, each animal is individually unique. They can be happy and joyful, or depressed and sad. Furthermore, he often voiced the opinion that in terms of Nature we humans were arguably the most endangered species of all, having become so alienated from the natural world. We ran the risk of imploding, said David. And this was in the 1960s!

  Life in Tsavo was becoming hectic. David and I were rarely at home for very long, for the distances involved in supervising development work in remote areas of the Park usually involved camping out, sometimes for extended periods, often accompanied by Jill if she was not spending time with Bill and Ruth. When Jill turned six, Bill and I decided to send her to the Government Primary School north of Nairobi in Nyeri, a well-respected boarding school not far from Bill and Ruth’s Mweiga home at the foot of the Aberdares. Boarding school in those days was the only option for parents who lived far from suitable schools, and since my siblings and I had always been boarders, I thought nothing of it, knowing that when the time came Jill would have to do the same. As usual, it was the parting that was the difficult and always tearful part. Jill accepted her lot stoically, and during term time Bill and Ruth visited her regularly, keeping me updated on her progress. David and I would join her at the half-term breaks, taking the opportunity to also visit his mother and see Bill and Ruth, and I consoled myself that the terms were relatively short.

  David was always eager to head out into the field. There was an urgent need to utilize the Water for Wild Animals grant – allocated to us to produce watering points for wildlife in arid areas such as Tsavo – before up-country rains rendered the causeway at Lugard’s Falls impassable and cut off the northern area entirely. Following the 1960 drought, a new pumping station was being installed at the Athi section of the Galana River near the Thabangunji Pass in the Yatta Plateau, along with a huge holding tank on top of the plateau itself, the idea being that water from the river would be pumped to the Yatta holding tank and then gravity-fed to a series of natural waterholes in the arid country beyond, thereby avoiding another rhino catastrophe. This entailed complex engineering that necessitated David’s presence, so we established our camp at a place called Kitani ya Ndundu, higher upstream.

  I had a new, rather unusual, orphan to nurture on this safari – a civet cat that we named Old Spice. He was a kitten-sized nocturnal creature, who when brought to me looked more dog than cat, since he lacked retractile claws, but as an adult would be about the size of a small bull terrier and resemble a raccoon. His body was covered in coarse grey hair with black blotches and his long sturdy tail was marked with prominent black bars. His most striking feature, however, was a crest of long black hairs along his back, which were the barometer by which you could gauge his mood. When angry or alarmed, he would erect this crest and suddenly appear twice his normal size.

  He acquired the name Old Spice because just a whiff of David’s Old Spice aftershave lotion sent him into a rubbing and jumping frenzy. My own precious perfume had an even more electrifying effect, but since it was an expensive luxury that did not come along too often, I was reluctant to let him have any. David wasn’t all that keen to share his aftershave either, but when Old Spice began to return from nights out reeking of a rotting carcass or worse, we decided it saved a lot of trouble if we gave him the scent of our choice rather than leaving the selection to him. After only a brief altercation, it was decided that it was David’s Old Spice that had to be sacrificed.

  Because Old Spice was a nocturnal animal, he found us rather dull company. Invariably, just as he was beginning to wake up, we were about to go to bed. Thereafter, throughout the night in an attempt to make us play with him, he would jump on our bed and nuzzle our arms with his rubbery nose while kneading us strongly with his front paws, until our arms felt as though they had been pulped. When he realized we were falling asleep, he would jump off the bed and pad his way out into the night, crunching up the beetles attracted by the verandah light and pouncing on any hapless millipede, which was obviously a civet delica
cy.

  I didn’t know much about civets, having never had contact with them before. David told me that they were battery farmed in Ethiopia and North Africa, where they were cruelly confined in small hutches stacked one on top of the other for the perfume industry, their anal scent gland ‘milked’ and the pungent contents collected for use as a base to make perfume linger longer on the wearer. It troubled me greatly knowing that these wild, gentle creatures should have to suffer so for the vanity of women. Jill was so upset when she learned of this practice that to this day, some fifty years later, she refuses to wear expensive perfumes that might include a product derived from the suffering of an animal, choosing instead the essence of flowers and essential oils.

  Old Spice was secretive and reclusive. Whenever there was a stranger in the house, he would not appear until the dead of night. He underwent a marked mood change at the first hint of daylight, becoming tense and eager to retreat into hiding, seeking out the densest thicket around. We learned that this secluded spot had to be his secret alone, for if he so much as suspected that anyone had seen him entering it, he would become agitated and instantly move house. I always felt more comfortable knowing where he was during the day, but in order to do so I had to resort to subterfuge methods, spying on him with my back turned, using a mirror to monitor his movements.