Love, Life, and Elephants

by Dame Daphne Sheldrick

  We also had environmental concerns, one being the silt-load coming down the floodwaters of the Voi River, which was affecting Kanderi, one of the Park’s loveliest natural waterholes. Since independence, laws prohibiting cultivation along riverbanks had fallen into abeyance, and this combined with poor farming practices in the high forested Taita Hills meant topsoil was being washed down in huge quantities every time the heavy rains caused the seasonal Voi River to flood. Previously the waterhole had been a permanent scenic paradise for water birds, with rich vegetation behind and the twin massifs of Ndara and Sagalla mirrored in its glassy surface. Snow-white egrets and sacred ibis were always perched on skeletal inundated trees in the centre of the pool, while wild ducks, Egyptian geese, storks, darters and cranes gathered in the shallows to feed on the abundance of frogs and fish. Recently, however, silting had caused the river to keep altering its course and the Kanderi waterhole had turned into a treacherous swamp. A sun-baked crust on the surface lent the illusion of stability, but beneath lay a soft quick-mud bog that was proving a death trap for elephants and other large herbivores.

  Although elephants were usually careful to avoid walking anywhere that might prove problematic, the Kanderi waterhole was so deceptive that it fooled them; having broken through the crust, they sank down in the mud until they almost disappeared completely, with just a portion of their body and head visible above the surface. Several elephants perished in this way before we realized what was happening, as they were not easily detectable from the road. Thereafter, we kept a close watch on the swamp and managed to extract at least twelve, towed out of the mud by the Park’s Michigan bulldozer.

  It was clear to me that these animals understood perfectly that they were being assisted, lying still so that David could position the steel cable from the tractor beneath their heads and around their bodies before towing them to firmer ground. Several of them, having struggled for many hours to the point of complete exhaustion, were too weak to get up unaided once out. It requires a lot of effort for an elephant to stand up from a recumbent position, first throwing back its head in order to rise front legs first, but many of the victims could not even summon the strength for this initial effort. By digging the bulldozer blade beneath them to include a protective cushion of earth, it was possible to lift them on to their feet, and, once up, not one of them made any attempt to attack either the tractor or the people standing about but instead ambled off, understanding that they owed their lives to the humans around them whom they would normally have viewed as their enemy.

  There was one small elephant that didn’t appreciate our efforts to extricate his bogged mother and older brother, and on this occasion rescue efforts were severely hampered as he bravely chased everyone around in an attempt to protect his family. It fell to me to try to keep him at bay, using the Landcruiser to drive him off, but it was heart-warming to witness the joyful reunion with his mother and brother, after which he showed no signs of further aggression.

  During one short safari to the Tiva River in the northern area of the Park in 1973, David had to shoot two elephants, both victims dying from the effects of arrow poison: one a beautiful young bull with two hits in his hindquarters, and the other a marvellous old matriarch with three youngsters who had one arrow projecting from her hind hip and another from the top of her trunk. She was clearly in great distress, moving painfully and laboriously, constantly brushing her hip wound with her tail. David ended her agony with a shot to the brain, and it was heartbreaking to see the emotional suffering of her offspring, who crowded round their fallen mother, desperately trying to lift her and coax her back to life. As we drove away I couldn’t hold back my tears, knowing that they would be keeping a lonely vigil by the side of their mother for some days until the oldest calf assumed the responsibility thrust upon her and led her siblings away in search of food and water. On the way back we spotted another female elephant in among a herd of others, her intestines hanging out of a burst arrow abscess on her stomach, and this time we could do nothing to help because she was in the midst of wild elephants hell-bent on protecting her.

  It was patently obvious that poachers had again invaded the Park in great numbers and the elephant herds were now visibly fearful, consorting again in large numbers. The Field Force patrols in the northern area of the Park reported seeing poachers’ tracks everywhere, and they intercepted gangs carrying ivory. Scuffles between rangers and poachers were taking place on an almost daily basis, and we also had to deal with a distressing in-house poaching incident incriminating David’s long-serving and trusted sergeant along with members of the old Field Force. Sentences imposed by the local magistrates were ludicrously lenient; one poacher who had been arrested six times was charged only 100 Kenyan shillings – the equivalent of about £3. In despair, David flew to Nairobi to appeal to the Attorney-General, the result of which was the transfer of our poaching cases to a First Class Magistrate Court in Mombasa, where stiffer penalties were likely to be given. The downside was that this involved a great deal more inconvenience, since Mombasa was 100 miles from Voi.

  By September 1973 the price of ivory on the world market had risen again. Official figures published by the Customs Department in the first three months of 1973 were revealing, putting Kenya’s ivory exports at $2.2 million compared with only $285,000 during the same period the year before. By May, just two months later, this figure had risen to $5 million. And whereas in 1972 Kenya’s elephant population was around 500,000, by 1973 it was estimated to have fallen to 300,000. In March 1974 the ivory rooms in Mombasa were closed and the sale of all ivory and rhino horn banned, but it was reported that the day after this declaration, a staggering nine tons left the country for China followed by even larger consignments, the volume of which far exceeded the stockpile that had been legally registered for auction, proving yet again that the black market trade in ivory and rhino horns was flourishing.

  David was undeterred by this deceitful corruption and set up Operation Mshale – mshale being the Swahili term for arrow. Our recruits were based on top of the Yatta escarpment, directed by radio from a base at Lugard’s Falls. The Attorney-General agreed to make a magistrate available so that cases could be dealt with on the spot. The new rangers were smart, well-equipped and fully briefed. Poachers attempted to conceal their tracks by walking along rock seams or doubling back to confuse and hold up the rangers – even sometimes walking on their toes or heels, hoping that the prints might be mistaken for those of a hoofed animal, or wearing their tyre sandals back to front so as to appear to be going in the opposite direction. However, none of these tricks could fool the skilled Shangilla trackers, who could follow spoor at a run, keeping in touch with one another through their special ‘yipping’ signals.

  David was constantly in touch with the patrols from Tango Papa, and as soon as he had word that the rangers were closing in, he circled low overhead, forcing the poachers to take cover. In this way the rangers were able to catch up, close in and capture the offenders. Within just two weeks some 125 offenders had been caught, charged and sentenced by the magistrate, who, on the instructions of the Attorney-General, handed out more effective sentences than his urban counterpart. David estimated that for every animal positively identified as having fallen victim to poachers, another five had almost certainly been killed. This alarming assumption meant that the Park had probably lost at least 1,040 elephants during the first six months of 1973 alone.

  Our ivory stores were soon bulging at the seams, packed with tusks, rhino horns, leopard-skins, bows and arrows. Ominously, the local Game Department representative in Voi began taking an interest in our stockpile, wanting to know how much we had accumulated. David informed him that we couldn’t divulge any information without the authority of the Trustees, who seemed to be in a confused sense of limbo as they awaited the passage of the new Merger Bill. Then, out of the blue, came an instruction from the Game Department to send all the ivory to Mombasa, despite the closure of the ivory room. We spent two full days and
nights extracting all the ivory and rhino from our stores, to correlate each tusk and horn with the number and weight in our trophy register and eventually to load it on to the waiting trucks. We sent 3,710 tusks weighing 31,203 kilos and 950 rhino horns weighing 1,564 kilos to Mombasa in a convoy of eight trucks.

  David led that ivory convoy, keeping in radio contact with the eight trucks, each one with two armed guards aboard and with a Field Force sergeant, also armed, in a separate vehicle at the rear of the column. It was, in essence, an immeasurably sad elephant and rhino funeral procession, for the contents in those trucks represented the remains of over 1,000 elephants and 400 rhinos. In Mombasa the attendant was visibly shocked, having never seen such a massive haul, and had to find extra storage space. When David returned, he was morose, declaring as he kissed me that we needed a break to escape from ‘all this madness’ and restore our sanity.

  It was not like David to express his emotions forcefully but I knew that he meant what he had said, so I packed up just what we would need for a few days away and soon we were heading to our special retreat – the Ntharakana blind on the slopes of the Yatta, overlooking the Tiva Valley and 3,000 square miles of wilderness. This was a place to soothe troubled souls, a place that imparted a mysteriously healing and uplifting magic, touching the human soul and reminding the subconscious of its primeval home. The natural waterfall tumbling down from the rock-face made a welcome splashing sound in this hot, dry land, and the pink, red and crimson blooms of the desert roses that sprouted from the surrounding rocks lent a surreal beauty to an otherwise arid setting. Wild creatures, of all shapes and sizes, came in a steady stream to drink from the pool below, hesitant during daylight but confident under the cover of darkness. Lost in quiet contemplation of the animals and our surroundings, it was easy to appreciate the intrinsic beauty of wilderness and the need to preserve it in its wild and natural state.

  Inevitably, it was just a matter of time before our reverie was shattered. A magnificent bull elephant with long sweeping tusks approached the waterhole, clearly in excruciating pain, pausing at almost every step to touch the horrendous wounds on his body. We could almost feel his pain, the agony of the poison seeping through his blood, and we could see there was no hope for him. After he had quenched his thirst, David followed at a safe distance to avoid distressing him further – and quietly ended the elephant’s suffering beneath the shade of a giant baobab tree. As he fell, the earth seemed to tremble under his great weight. His mournful soft brown eyes gazed one last time through the great boughs of the tree before David closed them.

  The death of this great elephant evoked in us a lament for all the wild creatures of Africa and the vanishing wilderness that had protected and sheltered them for so long. It was symbolic of the tenuous future all wildlife faced in a continent where poverty bred corruption and greedy people in faraway lands created the demand that fuelled the killing. The bull’s very size and magnificence heightened the sense of tragedy, for there is nothing so profoundly dead as a five-ton elephant with the allotted lifespan of a human, who has died before his time simply to supply some unthinking Westerner with a trinket. Those beautiful tusks were worth a small fortune to any trophy hunter, but for the elephant they were the very mark of his majesty and rank, a symbol that elevated him among the elite within his community – the identity that generated respect and awe from his peers and made him a dominant breeding bull. We knew that the beneficiaries of these splendid tusks would be the unscrupulous and corrupt ‘big names’ who by their avarice had violated this precious wilderness and inflicted so much chaos.

  It was with sadness that we drove back home, diverted only from despair by stopping to watch the subterranean naked mole rats who were busy clearing out debris from one of their tunnels, sending puffs of earth flying. I had never seen these creatures up close before, so David picked one up to show me. He was not a thing of great beauty – his skin was soft, pink and naked, but for a few sparse hairs, and his eyes were somehow undeveloped, probably only equipped to determine shades of darkness in order to gauge the depths of the tunnels that linked his underground country. Two ferocious-looking incisors protruded from his tiny whiskered face and his feet were equipped with the tough claws needed for tunnelling in hard earth. We didn’t keep him long, aware that the sun would be damaging to his tender skin, and he was soon gone, disappearing at the speed of light down the tunnel he had just cleared.

  Naked mole rats are the subterranean animal equivalent of termites, bees and wasps, living in colonies and travelling through a network of tunnels in order to mine roots and tubers for a livelihood. We stood for a while looking at the soft earth mounds as I asked David about these odd little rats, and it never ceased to delight me how he could enlighten me on just about any animal in Tsavo. He explained that their society was rigidly segregated into categories of workers and soldiers, the females infertile and the males subservient, all under the matriarchal dictatorship of a dominant queen rat who employed a hands-on system of ‘shoving management’ to keep everyone in line and ensure that the colony functioned as it should. She shoved the workers from behind to keep them tunnelling, bullied the females to keep them infertile and gave the largest males a hard time to make sure they didn’t rise above their station. She made a point of ‘shoving’ each and every one of her subjects constantly, in between giving birth to another generation, for she was the sole breeding female of the colony, suckling the babies in the same way as other mammals. Her mate enjoyed the privilege of having to endure less shoving than the others, whose Sisyphean task it was to clear the subterranean tunnels of their homeland and excavate fresh ones to access new feeding grounds, passing each other in little lay-bys and shoving loose earth from the tunnels to puff out at the surface, using their hindlegs. Inhabiting the arid regions of Kenya, Somalia and Ethiopia, they have long remained an enigma to all except the most discerning of naturalists, and watching them that day, after the tragedy of our fallen elephant, I marvelled again at how the wilderness is filled with wonders, that there is always something to observe and be amazed at, that Nature is awash with living miracles.

  That year another very large elephant died – the legendary Ahamed – king of the northern Marsabit Mountain. Unlike the Ntharakana bull, Ahamed had died of malnutrition, his sixth and last set of massive teeth worn too low in old age to enable him to ingest the quantity and variety of vegetation needed to sustain his huge frame. Because of his magnificent ivory tusks, which reached in perfect symmetry to the ground, Ahamed had become world-famous and a target of international trophy hunters. Two American hunters had let it be known that they were out to ‘bag’ him, but because of the subsequent press outcry and the iconic status Ahamed enjoyed, with people journeying from all corners of the world, President Kenyatta had afforded him special protection. Five ranger bodyguards were assigned the special task of guarding him, and when he died near Lake Paradise, the President declared that his body must be preserved for posterity. Ahamed’s tusks weighed 140lb each – heavy enough – but it was their length of 9 foot 6 inches and 9 foot 10 inches that was most impressive. On his death they were insured for 20,000 Kenyan pounds and supposedly secured in the vaults of a local bank. To this day a replica of Ahamed stands in the courtyard of the Nairobi National Museum, a lasting monument to the memory of this great elephant.

  Marsabit was a long way off from our orphanage in Voi, but it was one of Ahamed’s descendants that enabled me to unlock the mystery that had eluded me for so long.

  13. Turmoil

  ‘The greatness of a Nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way its animals are treated…I hold that the more helpless a creature, the more entitled it is to protection by man from the cruelty of man.’

  – Mahatma Gandhi

  She was the smallest elephant I had ever seen – still covered in the soft fuzz of elephant infancy, her tiny trunk tinged with pink, toenails of pale yellow – soft and brand new. My heart sank. She had come from far-off Marsabit, having
fallen down a disused well, and was sent to us because apparently we would know what to do and would be sure to keep her alive. I remember thinking: but we don’t, not one this young. We looked at the hind side of her ear, which I could see was as soft and pink as the petal of a flower, and I knew that this baby was younger than three weeks old. She was far too young to be handed over to Eleanor, for she needed milk and only milk. I stroked her head – we had never managed to rear an elephant as young as this and with the death of each one, the sense of failure deepened. David often said that it might be kinder not to even try, to simply accept that the hand-rearing of infant milk-dependent African elephants was impossible. But my conscience could not agree with this, for it would be even more distressing to hand out a death sentence without even trying. Nature intends elephants to live three score years and ten, the same as ourselves, and we would never turn a baby away for fear of failure. I knew I had to persevere.

  The garden orphans had all gathered around, for the arrival of any newcomer caused interest in varying degrees: Bunty and her visiting sons decidedly disapproving; Baby and Jimmy curious; our peacocks and guinea fowl chattering excitedly, stretching out their necks to stare. I took a deep breath. I was under no illusion as to how much work this tiny newcomer would entail – three-hourly feeds day and night, constant companionship, relentless clearing up. But this was nothing compared with the desperation of, in all likelihood, having to watch her decline daily, with the prospect of burying her in our graveyard beyond the lily pond. But, I reminded myself, only by trial and error would a suitable formula emerge, and as the newcomer was steered towards the orphan stables, trailed by a retinue of furred and feathered onlookers, I steeled myself for a tricky few weeks.