Love, Life, and Elephants

by Dame Daphne Sheldrick

  By now she was spending more time in Dr Glover’s garden than our own, which was not popular with his wife, Barbara, who kept beautifully pristine flowerbeds and a lush lawn. I did my best by providing biscuits and grain to try to take the edge off Wiffle’s appetite, but even so, the ends of all of Barbara’s most treasured plants were routinely nipped off. Towards the end of her pregnancy Wiffle was waddling about, lethargic and bloated, not the bouncy dikdik she had once been, and when we heard she had given birth, I hurried over to the Glovers’ house. However, although the baby had obviously been born, it was clear as we searched the foliage surrounding the house, with Wiffle strolling nonchalantly behind us, that we were not going to be allowed the privilege of seeing it. Not until six weeks later did Wiffle bring her baby out, and thereafter the baby dikdik accompanied her mother everywhere. Wiffle made herself even more unpopular with Barbara Glover, for she took to nipping her with the incisors on her lower jaw every time she was discouraged from a flowerbed. In the end Barbara had to resort to donning gumboots whenever in the garden, and complained bitterly to me about being ‘bitten’ by my dikdik, something which, at first, I could scarcely believe, until I witnessed it for myself.

  Some months after the arrival of her first baby, Wiffle stepped into the role of principal wife to the male, whose other wife had mysteriously vanished, probably having fallen prey to some predator. She also acted as guardian to the first wife’s youngster, which was roughly the same age as her own, and all three of them could be regularly seen together pruning the shrubs around Barbara’s garden. Soon Wiffle was again taking on a matronly look, and seven months after the arrival of her first fawn, her second baby was born. This time we were fortunate in being able to have a peep before she sequestered it properly. Wiffle went on to have seven offspring before she vanished entirely and I sadly lost contact with her for ever. Over the years I would become preoccupied with a host of other orphaned antelopes, but Wiffle was a particular favourite of mine. She taught me so much about her species and I have loved all members of the antelope family ever since.

  In a life such as ours there was always loss to contend with, and while each loss left me extremely heart-sore, it was, of course, far worse when people we loved died. At the age of eighty-seven, Granny Chart succumbed to stomach cancer and was laid to rest in the Nakuru cemetery alongside our beloved Granny Webb. Granny Chart had been the eldest of Great-Grandpa Aggett’s eight pioneering offspring and a formidable icon of courage, resilience and strength. We mourned her passing deeply. We had also recently lost our good friend Philip Hucks, who one night woke up in his caravan, asked his wife, Mavis, if she had fed the regular night-time wild genet that came for its bowl of food, and then fell back, dead. The Hucks’ legacy lives on to this day, for they had pressed, photographed and documented every known plant in Tsavo; these today lie preserved for posterity at Kew Gardens, the National Museum in Nairobi and sadly, in a state of disintegration at the current Tsavo Research Centre’s Herbarium.

  There was a severe drought in 1970 that brought loss on an unimaginable scale. Day after day, the sun beat down from a brassy sky with a fierce, desiccating intensity, and it became increasingly pitiful to watch the weary resignation of the elephants as many became emaciated. Although dying from malnutrition was not starvation, and was the natural end for an elephant at the end of its long life once the last set of molars was too worn to be able to ingest a sufficient quantity of food to maintain strength, the immense emotional suffering among them was so intense that it left us dejected and depressed. It was ironic that while people seemed able to detach themselves from the emotional impact of the organized slaughter of large numbers of elephants, easily satisfied by that magic word ‘cropping’, there was no such emotional reserve when Nature stepped in to do the job for them, quietly, peacefully and in a way that could never be achieved by artificial means. David and the Trustees were left reeling from the public outcry accusing them of allowing the Tsavo elephants to starve to death because they had opposed them being artificially culled. It was stressful to find ourselves embroiled in rampant press intrusion, with journalists turning up unannounced and unexpectedly from all corners of the world, bent on sensationalizing what was essentially a much needed die-off of mainly females and young, which would impact on recruitment and bring the Tsavo elephant population in balance with the modified habitat.

  Of course, it wasn’t only in Tsavo that elephants were dying from malnutrition. The drought turned out to be the severest on record, affecting a wide swathe of the country as far north as the border with Somalia, where thousands of cattle and even camels perished. Elephants also died on the neighbouring Galana Ranch and in Tsavo itself, the worst affected area being Kowito, where Dr Laws’s sample of 300 had been taken. It was extremely doubtful therefore whether the large-scale die-off in Tsavo and beyond – 10,000 elephants in all – could have been averted, even if the elephants had been artificially culled. And where were the scientists when this natural event of such importance was taking place – the first time a natural mass die-off of elephants could be monitored and documented? It fell to David and my cousin Tim Corfield to number and chart the sex of every elephant that died, to record the location, to remove the lower jaw, label it with a correlating number to the body and dry and store it in the purpose-built shed at the research centre. They found that female herds were hit most, for they were anchored by weakening offspring and spent a great deal of time sleeping near permanent water, lacking the strength to venture out to browse. What we were witnessing was the enactment of Nature’s most powerful tool – natural selection, where only those units led by an energetic and strong leader survived, and the sick and weak were removed en masse from the population, leaving the gene pool pure and strong.

  Eleanor received each of the drought orphans with compassion, but usually by the time they reached us they were too far gone to be saved, the shock of capture proving the final straw. Those that were still milk-dependent had no chance, for we had yet to unravel a suitable formula that could keep an infant elephant alive. Eleanor began to associate lying down with death, refusing to allow her charges to sleep. As soon as they wanted to lie down, she would lift them to their feet to satisfy herself that they were still living. At this time we never quite knew how many elephants we would have each day, for Eleanor would collect odd waifs and strays down by the Voi River and bring them back home with her. Such additions did not always end up as permanent residents, particularly if they were independent little bulls that wanted to break free from the orphans’ unusual routine and human companions.

  We had recently been forced to try to release Rufus back to the wild after he had inadvertently wounded a stand-in member of the caring team – as it turned out, fatally, although the man’s death was actually due to negligence, the local hospital’s failure to investigate the extent of his arterial bleeding. He had apparently tossed stones at Rufus to dissuade him going where he wished, and as a result Rufus turned aggressive to all Africans. We were astounded that he had developed this dual personality, for he was still perfectly well behaved with David and me; we could scarcely believe that this was the same docile rhino we had allowed Angela to ride.

  We settled him at Aruba, where a deep elephant and rhino ditch surrounding the compound prevented him from gaining access to the lodge. There he would be situated near permanent water and within hearing range of human presence, and we could monitor him. It broke my heart to see Rufus go, though quite obviously we had no choice but to remove him. David reminded me that black rhinos were a solitary species, and since Rufus was now almost fully grown, being alone was no hardship for him. It was, David said, far prefer able to being expelled to a foreign zoo or spending life incarcerated in the Nairobi National Park Orphanage where Eleanor had been so unhappy.

  Some time later, while driving home over the Ndara plains, rangers travelling with David spotted vultures hovering over a dead rhino, its horns intact but its body lacerated by deep gashes and bites. He s
aw immediately that it was Rufus, killed by the onslaught of a pride of lions. The wounds were septic, evidence that the lions had failed to kill him outright but had left him so severely injured that he had succumbed to a slow and painful end. I was haunted by the image of the vultures pecking out his eyes. Rufus had been such a gentle, sloppy favourite of our orphan group. I realized that we had been able to gift him a longer and happier life than had he not been rescued, but I couldn’t help feeling terribly sad about his brutal end.

  For David, even sadder news was to come. While flying near the Galana River on his way home, David spotted a young lone bull that was obviously wounded. As he circled to get a better look, he could see that the elephant could barely put one foot in front of the other, his eyes sunken and great bones protruding at angles from beneath loose skin hanging in dry, flaking folds. After each agonizing step, the elephant stood for a long time, feeling his front leg carefully with his trunk, and even from the air David could see that the leg was three times its normal size. There was, he thought, something achingly familiar about this elephant, so he landed on a nearby sandbank in order to investigate further. As he walked to the wounded bull David knew in his heart that this was Samson, in the last stages of the effects of the deadly acokanthera arrow poison, and he knew too that there was nothing he could do now to help him other than end his suffering with a merciful bullet from his trusty .416 rifle.

  David held a very special place in his heart for Samson, for he had known him for over twenty years. He had rescued him when a helpless calf, saving him from certain death; nurtured him through his formative years and learned so much from observing him, gaining a valuable insight into the elephant psyche, a complex range of emotions and compassion. Memories and thoughts flooded through his mind in the brief moment before David raised his rifle to end his beloved Samson’s life with a shot to the brain. And in that brief moment Samson looked up and there was a flicker of recognition in his eyes before he fell. Hurrying to his side, David caressed his face as he lay in the throes of death, David’s own eyes moist with tears. Samson’s eyes seemed to be looking straight back at him until David drew the lids gently down and closed them. He spent a long time sitting silently beside Samson’s inert body, his gun at his side, enveloped by the sounds of the bush and by an overwhelming sadness tempered by a deep underlying anger. Eventually, taking his knife from his belt, he cut into the swollen and rotting foot and removed the arrowhead. He was disappointed that it was unmarked, which would have enabled him to hunt down Samson’s killer.

  When David came home I knew that something had happened, as he was visibly troubled. Being a man of few words, taught from a young age to keep his emotions in check, I could also sense that he did not want to talk. It was much later that I learned of Samson’s tragic end – ‘Having to shoot a trusted friend is the hardest thing I have ever had to do,’ said David, and he never spoke of it again. He asked the Field Force rangers to remove Samson’s ivory and he placed the tusks in a corner of the ivory store. There they remained for many years, David unable to add them to the annual pile that went for auction in Mombasa.

  After the quiet decade of the 60s and the elephant die-off of the early 70s, once again the price of ivory began to rise on the world market and yet again Tsavo’s elephants found themselves under pressure, not only from the effects of the drought but also from opportunists in search of ivory. Very early on David recognized the escalating threat and tried to impress the seriousness of the situation on Kenya’s newly independent government, but invariably political considerations intervened and his warnings fell on deaf ears. Where there was life, there was death, and we certainly had to contend with a lot of death in those drought-ridden days. But David’s dictum, ‘Turn a new page and put it behind you,’ proved useful, for just as soon as we lost one orphan, another arrived and it was all hands on deck nurturing it back to life. These little lives depended on us, on our skilled workers and above all, on the tenderness of Eleanor and the other, more robust and settled orphans.

  Our orphan group was about to expand to its biggest yet.

  11. Discovery

  ‘I’ve watched the zebra herd in panic fly before the menace of the stalking pride. The dusty, sun-soaked thorn bush at midday; the solitude, star filled at latest night. The hour when hills are dark, and far away, with rose-blush peaks, in false dawn’s lovely light.’

  – Larry Wateridge

  The composition of Eleanor’s herd was constantly changing and her assorted orphans had to adapt to new animals with differing temperaments, some more compatible to communal living than others. One orphaned rhino arrived in a pitiful state of advanced malnutrition, her mother having been shot on the neighbouring sisal crop estate. She was extremely aggressive, expending her last ounce of strength pounding the door of her stable – and anything else that caught her eye – and her behaviour prompted us to name her Stroppie. We weren’t actually able to handle her until she collapsed into a coma, and for the next ten days we were involved in a desperate struggle to save her life. The soft skin behind her ears became a pincushion from the endless injections needed to cure the ailments that assailed her – pneumonia, tick fever, even trypanosomiasis – all having taken hold due to stress and malnutrition that had compromised her immune system. She was old enough not to be milk-dependent, but every morsel of food needed to be hand-fed, so I spent hours feeding her one leaf at a time, willing her to make the effort to live. It was a real struggle and we would have lost the battle had it not been for the timely arrival of another feisty newborn zebra that we named Punda – a name we had used before on the biltong safari and for Huppety, but one we wanted to use again.

  This latest addition had trailed a zebra-striped minibus for several miles until the passengers insisted on picking him up and depositing him on our doorstep. After the experience of Huppety, I was not over-keen to take on another zebra, but I was incapable of rejecting a needy animal. Through trial and error, we had learned by now that both rhinos and zebras thrived on the full-cream Lactogen baby formula that Jill and Angela had been raised on, so having given the new arrival a feed, we steered him to the nursery, where poor Stroppie was hovering between this world and the next.

  From the moment he arrived, it was clear that Punda was a busy-body, keen to know what was going on even if it had nothing to do with him. As soon as he entered the enclosure and became aware of Stroppie, he immediately made her his business, gripping her button-like horn between his teeth and tugging at it. The indignity of this was too much for Stroppie, even in her fragile state, prompting her to open one rheumy eye and attempt a bubbly, sickly sort of snort that sent Punda bucking and kicking around the enclosure. At this, Stroppie’s eyes opened a fraction wider, and as they began to focus a little better, a look of outrage crept into them as Punda was advancing for another onslaught on the horn. And so it went on – the more determined Stroppie was that she would not have her horn chewed, the more determined Punda was that it would be chewed – and in those moments Stroppie realized that it was necessary for her to live. As she began to recover the two became inseparable. In fact, over time it became apparent to us that Punda saw himself as a rhino.

  When the rains eventually ended the great drought of 1970, Eleanor became happier and more settled, less worried about the fate of her charges. She and the other elephant orphans often left Punda, Stroppie and the buffaloes with Ali, their keeper, while they wandered off to investigate the scent of other elephants along the banks of the Voi River. Raru loved these excursions. He was not at all daunted by larger elephants and took all sorts of liberties not usually permissible to bulls of his age. While Eleanor and Bukanezi would hang back hesitantly, Raru would daringly jump the queue at waterholes or force his way among strange cows in search of a playmate. I was surprised that he did not take these opportunities to attach himself to a more mature elephant matriarch, but his devotion to Eleanor never wavered and he was always in the column that filed back to the stockades each evening.

/>   During these outings, it wasn’t long before Raru and Punda recognized a devilish mischievousness in each other – two kindred spirits who may never have otherwise been united, but a special relationship blossomed between the two of them. They played for hours, tussling together in what to me seemed overly rough on Punda, who soon began to resemble a battle-scarred old warhorse, tusk marks and weals marring the beauty of his striped coat. But with incredible tenacity he would come back for more and more – and more. There were occasions when Punda would find himself caught with his neck wedged between Raru’s tusks like a yoke, or his head in a vice-like grip beneath Raru’s chin, but the two continually energized each other. It was amusing to see such an unusual friendship.

  One day, down near the Voi River, as Raru and Punda were busy playing, Eleanor halted abruptly in her tracks, spreading out her ears and testing the wind for scent. Ali stopped too, intrigued as to what Eleanor was sensing. Vultures were clustered in tall riverine trees beyond a bend in the riverbed, from where came a faint chopping sound. Clearly agitated, Eleanor stood for a few minutes swaying and listening before deciding to venture forth. Silently, she and Ali rounded the bend to find two men busy hacking the tusks from the skull of a recently deceased elephant, while at the same time keeping a wary eye on a group of wild elephants led by a seasoned old matriarch, who was advancing slowly towards them. Engrossed in hacking and watching, the men were totally unaware of Eleanor’s approach until she was almost within trunk range. Ali shouted ‘Simama! – Stand still!’ The two poachers almost leapt out of their skins, aghast at being caught red-handed, and also scared witless by the proximity of an elephant with outstretched ears and a raised trunk. Then, as the rhinos, Punda and Raru rounded the bend, followed by an assortment of buffaloes and ostriches, the poachers became incoherent, fearing witchcraft and pleading on their knees for mercy. Ali, who was not normally the bravest of the brave, suddenly found he had all the courage in the world, backed up as he was by the assorted orphans. The wild herd retreated, leaving Ali and the orphans in charge.