The Eye of the Elephant

by Mark James Owens

  The track I was following twisted and turned across the southern tip of the dry lake bed. Driving back and forth, leaning over the steering wheel, I looked for signs of the old track that had for many years led us into the reserve. The plains looked so different now after years of drought; faint tracks wandered off in odd directions and then faded altogether in the dust and drifting sand.

  I climbed to the roof of the truck for a better view, squinting against the glare. A hot wind blew steadily across the wasteland. Dust devils skipped and swirled. I couldn't find a trace of the old track; either it had faded from disuse or I was lost.

  There was another way into the reserve: I could drive to the top of Kedia Hill and head due west along an old cutline. It was a longer but more certain route. I turned onto the track to the hill and pressed down hard on the accelerator.

  As I reached the edge of the plains, I looked back. This was where, only four years ago, a quarter of a million wildebeests had trekked for water—and died. In one day we had counted fifteen thousand dead and watched hundreds of others dying. They had migrated for several hundred miles only to find that their Way to water was blocked by a great fence. For days they had plodded along the barrier until they had come to the lake plain, already overgrazed by too many starving cattle. Now it lay naked, empty, and abused. Not one wildebeest, not one cow, was in sight.

  The conflict between domestic stock and wild animals had not been resolved, but we had submitted some ideas to the government that we hoped would benefit both people and wildlife. I was reminded of how much work there was yet to do to conserve the Central Kalahari. I left the plains and headed up Kedia Hill.

  Ivory-colored sand, deeper than I had ever seen, was piled high along the track and in places had drifted across the path like powdered snow. The truck's canopy and heavy load of supplies made it top-heavy; it swayed along in the spoor, leaning drunkenly from side to side. I urged it up Kedia's rocky, forested slopes and easily found the old survey track. It had been made in the early '70s by our late friend Bergie Berghoffer, who had once saved us from the desert. I felt as though he was here now, showing me the way with his cutline, which pointed like an arrow straight into the Kalahari.

  Several hours later I came to the sign we'd made from wildebeest horns to mark the boundary of the Central Kalahari Game Reserve. I stepped out of the truck for a moment to be closer to the fingers of the grass and the face of the wind. Other than the sign there was nothing but weeds and thornscrub, but we had darted the lioness Sassy just over there, under those bushes. As we put the radio collar around her neck, her three small cubs had watched from a few feet away, eyes wide with curiosity. We had known Sassy herself as a cub. If she had survived the drought, the hunters, the poachers, and the ranchers, she would be twelve now, old for a Kalahari lion. "Where are you, Sas?"

  I expected Mark to zoom over the truck at any moment. He would drop down low and fly by, the belly of the airplane just above my head—one of his favorite tricks. But there was no sign of the plane.

  I drove on, the truck's wheels churning steadily through the deep sand. I was glad to see that the survey ribbons left by the mining prospectors were no longer hanging in the tree. They had been shredded by the sun and blown away by the wind. The Kalahari had won that round.

  Seeing fresh brown hyena tracks in the sand, I jumped out and bent down to look at them. They had been made last night by an adult moving east. I was torn between savoring every detail of my return to the Kalahari and rushing on to camp to see about Mark.

  An hour later my heart began to race as I reached the crest of East Dune. I scrambled to the truck's roof and squinted under my hand, trying to see if the plane had landed at camp, nearly two miles away on the dry riverbed. The heat waves stretched and pulled the desert into distorted mirages, making it difficult to distinguish images. Even so, the broad white wings would have been visible against the sand—but the plane was not there.

  Jumping to the ground, I flung open the door and drove furiously down the sand ridge. Oh God, what do I do? It had all sounded so easy to radio Maun if Mark was not here, but we had not radioed the village in four years. What if the radio didn't work? What if nobody answered?

  The truck plowed on. The engine was overheating badly and complained with a deep rumbling noise—too much noise. If something was wrong with the truck, I was in bad trouble. The sound grew louder.

  VAARRROOOOOM! A rush of air and thunder roared in from behind me and passed over my head. Instinctively I ducked, looking up. The belly of the plane filled the windshield as Mark skimmed ten feet above the truck. He zoomed down the dune slope and soared south toward camp. Stopping the truck, I leaned my head against the steering wheel with a rush of relief. Then I pounded it with my fists. "Damn! Where has he been? He always roars in at the last second." But I smiled. He was safe, and we were back in the Kalahari. Now I could enjoy my homecoming.

  I climbed onto the roof again. I was standing in exactly the same spot from which we had first looked down on Deception Valley eleven years ago. At that time the ancient riverbed had been covered with thick, green grass and majestic herds of gemsbok and springbok. Now, stretching north and south between the dunes, the valley floor looked naked and gray, with only an occasional antelope standing in the heat. Then I noticed the faintest hint of green; only someone who had lived for years in the desert would call it green, but it was there. It had rained a few inches very recently, and the grass was struggling up through the sand. The Kalahari was neither dead nor tired, she was merely waiting for her moment to flower again.

  Other people have neighborhoods that they come home to, streets with houses, familiar faces, jobs, and buildings. As I gazed down on Deception Valley, I saw my neighborhood, my home, my job, my identity, my purpose for living. Standing atop East Dune, I was looking down on my life.

  Quickly I drove over the dune and across the riverbed. Mark had landed on our old strip and was rushing to greet me as I rounded Acacia Point several hundred yards from camp. I jumped out of the truck and hugged him.

  "What happened? Why didn't you buzz me?" I asked.

  "I almost didn't make it." Mark looked a little dazed as he recapped his flight. "...so I reached a point when I had to decide to go east or west. I turned west and after a few minutes recognized Hartebeest Pans. At least I knew where I was, but any second the engine was going to quit and it was still ten more minutes to the valley. When I finally landed at camp, I cut the engine and just rolled out of the cockpit onto the ground. It was a few minutes before I could even move." He had drained the tanks and measured the rest of the fuel; less than ten minutes of flying time had remained. I hugged him again and we turned toward the thorny thicket that had been our home. Camp—a lifetime in seven years. We walked back into it.

  ***

  When we first decided to make this tree island our home, thousands of green branches had reached for the sky in a tangle of undergrowth. Now drought had gutted its luxuriant thicket, and its trees were gray and leafless. But here was the bush that the lions Muffin and Moffet always marked, and there was the old fireplace that had warmed our lives for more than two thousand nights. The lions of the Blue Pride had ransacked camp many times, pulling bags of flour, mealie-meal, and onions out of the trees around the kitchen boma—an open enclosure of grass and poles.

  During our absence another couple had used the camp while studying desert antelope, but they had departed more than six months ago. The same faded tents lay draped across their poles, their flysheets ripped and tattered by cheeky desert storms. One side of the tent that held our lab and office had collapsed, and a small pool of rainwater from the recent shower lay bellied in its canvas. Mark planted the tent back on its poles, gingerly drew back the flaps, then with a stick chased a spitting cobra from inside. In the sleeping tent, the packing-crate bed sagged under the weight of a sodden mattress, and the tent floor was caked with mud.

  The kitchen boma, with its thick, shaggy thatch roof, was still standing at the
other end of camp. Inside were the cutting board Dolene had given us, the fire grate Bergie had made for us, and the blackened water kettle, scarred by the teeth of hyenas who had pirated it so often.

  I looked around hopefully for the yellow-billed hornbills, those charismatic, comic birds with whom we had shared the island during every dry season. But I didn't see any. The recent light rain must have lured them back to the woodlands to mate, as it did every rainy season.

  "Look who's here!" Mark exclaimed. I whirled around to see a Marico flycatcher fluttering to a branch ten inches from Mark's head. It immediately began shaking its wings, begging for something to eat. I slipped away to the cool-box in the truck and returned with a piece of cheese, one of the Marico's favorite snacks. I tossed a few bits to the ground at our feet. Without hesitation the bird swooped down, stuffed its beak with cheddar, and flew to the other side of camp.

  Unloading boxes and trunks of supplies from the truck and the plane, we began the enormous job of cleaning and unpacking. Mark built a fire with some scraps from the woodpile, while I washed mud, spiderwebs, and a mouse's nest from the table in the kitchen boma. We made tea and laid out a lunch of bread, cheese, and jam on the table.

  "We've got to start looking for lions right away," Mark began as soon as we sat down. April was supposed to be the end of the wet season, but according to the rain gauge only two inches of precipitation had fallen instead of the usual fourteen. Although this was enough to fill the water holes, it would evaporate in a few days. Soon the lions would be following the antelope away from the valley to their dry-season areas; we had to find and radio collar them before they left, so that we could monitor their movements with the radio receivers in the airplane and truck.

  Even before our departure in 1980, the lions of the Blue Pride were already roaming over more than fifteen hundred square miles, and as much as sixty miles from their wet-season territory, in search of widely scattered prey. After four more years of drought, who could say where they were or whether they were still alive. They had led us to exciting new scientific discoveries: that they could survive indefinitely without water to drink—obtaining moisture from the fluids of their prey—and that their social behavior was different from that of other lions who lived in less harsh environments. We were anxious to continue our research for many years, and to determine how the die-off of tens of thousands of antelope had affected the lions. Their radio collars would have failed long ago; finding them would be a long shot. But if we could locate even a few, we could document not only their longevity and their ability to survive drought, but also their range sizes and the changes in pride composition during such periods.

  Working feverishly that afternoon, we pulled everything out of the sleeping and office-lab tents and scrubbed the mud-caked floors. An elephant shrew with two babes clinging to her backside had to be gently evicted from her nest in the bottom drawer of the filing cabinet, and we found another snake behind the bookcase. While I continued with the cleanup, Mark prepared the darting rifle and radio collars for the lions.

  Late in the afternoon, Mark carefully excavated our "wine cellar," a hole dug long ago under the thick, scraggly ziziphus trees. We had buried a few bottles in 1980, to drink on our return. The spade clanked against glass, and Mark pulled up a Nederburg Cabernet Sauvignon 1978. Sitting on the dry riverbed at the edge of camp, we watched the huge sun rest its chin on the dunes as we sipped red wine by the fire. Slowly Deception Valley faded away in the darkness.

  ***

  Awakened by the distant call of jackals, we had a quick breakfast around the fire. Then, pulling the old trailer, we drove to Mid Pan to collect water. We stopped at the edge of what amounted to an oversize mud puddle with antelope droppings and algae floating on the surface. We stood for a moment, silently staring at the sludge, and we seriously considered driving out of the reserve for water. But that would take too much time—lion time. As always before, we would boil the water twenty minutes before drinking it. Squatting on the slippery mud, we scooped our cooking pots full, avoiding the animal droppings as best we could, and poured it through funnels into jerry cans. A full can weighed roughly sixty pounds, and Mark lifted each onto the trailer and emptied it into one of the drums. By the time we had collected 440 gallons, our backs and legs ached.

  That evening, our second in the valley, I cooked a supper of cornbread and canned chicken stew, which we ate by lantern and candlelight in the cozy thatched boma. Then, weary but warmly satisfied with the day's work, we slid into a deep sleep in our shipping-crate bed. Not many sounds would have awakened us that night; but just as a mother never sleeps through her baby's cries, the deep rolling roar that drifted over the dunes brought us both awake at the same instant.

  "Lions!"

  "To the south. Quick, get a bearing."

  Lion roars can carry more than five miles in the desert; the fact that we could hear them didn't mean they were close. The best way to find the big cats would be from the air, so we took off at dawn. Swooping low over the treetops, we searched for them or for vultures that might lead us to their kill. Looking in all the favorite places of the Blue Pride, we saw small herds of springbok, gemsbok, hartebeest, and giraffes. But no lions.

  The next morning we heard their bellows from the south again and Mark suggested, "Look, we've heard lions to the south two nights. Let's camp down there. We'll have a better chance of finding them."

  There was no track in that direction, so I drove across the dunes, making a turn just before Cheetah Tree and keeping to the east of a low ridge of sand. I chose a campsite near a clay pan where Mark could land. Seconds later he appeared, seemingly from nowhere, flew by once to check for holes, then landed. We built a fire under a lone tree overlooking the gray depression; as we ate our stew, we felt as if we were camped on the edge of a moon crater. Knowing that the lions could wake us anytime during the night, we sacked out early on the ground next to our truck, the compass by our heads.

  Lion roars. Three A.M. We bolted up in our bedrolls, and Mark took a bearing on the roars. Within minutes we were driving toward them. After we'd gone a mile through the bush, we stopped to listen again. Another bellow surged across the sands, breaking over us with the resonance of a wave thundering into a sea cave. We turned the truck toward the sound and drove about two hundred yards. Mark switched on the spotlight and a medium-size acacia bush jumped to life with the reflections of eleven pairs of eyes—an adult male, three adult females, and seven cubs. They were feeding on a fresh gemsbok kill.

  Mark turned off the engine, lifted his binoculars, and searched the lions for ear tags or any familiar markings we knew. But we had never seen these individuals before.

  Without a minute's hesitation, all seven cubs sauntered over to investigate our truck. Only three and a half to four months old, they almost certainly had never seen a vehicle before. They walked to Mark's door and peered at him, seven small faces in a row; they smelled the tires and bumpers and crawled under the truck. Their curiosity satisfied, they began tumbling and play-fighting in a small clearing nearby, their mothers watching with bland expressions.

  We sat quite near—within thirty yards—habituating them to our presence so that we could dart them that evening. By the time the sun warmed the sand, they had settled into the shade of a large bush; soon all of them, including the cubs, were asleep.

  Moving to a shady spot of our own, we had a lunch of peanuts and canned fruit, then checked all of the darting equipment again. Just before sunset we drove back to the lions and found the adults feeding, while the cubs climbed all over them. Perfect. Their attention would be on the carcass, not on us, and they would be unlikely to associate the pop of the gun or the sting of the dart with our presence.

  We sat very still, not making a sound, waiting for one of the lionesses to stand so that we could dart her without risk of hitting a cub. The dose intended for a three-hundred-pound lion could kill a twenty-pound youngster.

  Several minutes later, one of the largest females stoo
d and turned full flank to us. Mark loaded the dart, took aim, and squeezed the trigger. Nothing happened.

  "What the...!?" Mark pulled the gun back through the window and thumbed the safety "on." The gun fired and the dart flew out the window into the bushes. Mark cocked the unloaded gun and pulled the trigger; it didn't fire. When he clicked the safety on, it did. Whatever the problem was, we had no time to fix it. The more the lions gorged themselves, the more drug it would take to sedate them. Mark would use the safety to fire the rifle. He took aim again as one of the females stood up; but as he did, a cub crawled under her neck.

  Mark waited a few seconds, his cheek against the gun stock, while the cub moved past the lioness. He thumbed the safety on and the gun fired with a muted pop. Just as the dart lobbed out of the barrel, another cub stepped from under the female's belly. We watched helplessly as the dart arched lower and lower, striking the cub in the flank. He squealed, spun around, and stumbled off into the thick bush.

  "Good God!" I cried.

  "Where did it come from? The cub I was watching moved off!"

  We had darted lions and other carnivores more than a hundred times, and nothing like this had ever happened before.

  "Should we go after it?" I asked.

  "There's nothing we can do. That cub doesn't have a chance. Let's concentrate on getting collars on the adults," Mark said. "First, we have to see about this damned gun." As saddened as we were about the cub, I knew Mark was right. We drove off about four hundred yards and while I held the flashlight, Mark repaired the gun on the hood of the truck.

  After driving back to the lions, Mark darted the female that he'd missed, then the male, whose golden mane tinged with black was one of the most beautiful we had ever seen. The two darted lions moved off into the bush where, seventeen minutes later, they slumped down under the influence of the drug.