The Eye of the Elephant

by Mark James Owens

  Mark was standing by the plane, parked in the dilapidated boma we built years ago to keep the Blue Pride lions from chewing the tires. He walked out to greet me and we sat on the dry riverbed near our old camp and homestead. To the north was Acacia Point, Mid-Pan Water Hole, Eagle Island, Cheetah Hill, and North Dune; to the south, Bush Island, Tree Island, and Jackal Island in South Bay—all as familiar today as they were years ago. The Kalahari's face was ashen with drought, sandblasted, wrinkled, and lifeless from the harsh wind. I wondered if she had noticed a similar change in us; for we too had endured a long dry spell.

  After a while we walked into what was left of our camp. The Ziziphus mucronata and Acacia tortillas trees had managed to produce leaves, but they were gray and withered. As I stepped into the barren tree island, a Marico flycatcher swooped past my head and landed on a branch five feet away. He chirped urgently, wings trembling at his sides as he begged for food. Surely this was one of the flycatchers we had known before. I ran to the cool box, tore off a piece of cheese, and held it out to him. He took it as if we had fed him only yesterday.

  After we had been deported, friends had removed our tents, but the kitchen boma with its ragged thatch roof was still standing. The "hyena table"—built six feet off the ground to keep the brown hyenas from our pots and pans—remained beneath the acacia tree. The bath boma and a few stick tables lay in various stages of termite consumption. Tomorrow we would clean it all up, stack it into a huge pile, and burn it.

  Late in the afternoon we dug up a bottle of Nederburg Cabernet Sauvignon that was still buried in our "wine cellar" beneath the ziziphus tree. We replaced it with a new bottle and a note in a jar, thinking that someday we might pass this way again. Then, sitting crosslegged on the riverbed, just a few yards from where our water drums once stood, we watched the sun disappear beyond the dunes. Sipping wine from tin mugs, we listened to the click-click-click of barking geckos and the mournful, wavering cries of a jackal somewhere beyond the dunes.

  The next morning Mark was determined to search for the lions we had radio collared in 1985 on our initial return to the Kalahari, just weeks before we were deported. I didn't want to discourage him, but my own feeling was that there was very little chance of ever finding them. It had been two and a half years since we had darted and collared eight of them, including Happy, whom we had known for years, and Sunrise and Sage, her younger pridemates. Since our departure the lions must have scattered for thousands of square miles, searching for prey in the far reaches of the desert. But how could we not try to find them? We mounted the antennas under the wings, and Mark took off as he had hundreds of times, to search for lions in the dunes.

  I stayed behind and began the grueling task of taking down the kitchen and bath bomas, the airplane fence, and the tables. I hacked away with an ax and dragged poles and grass to a large pit. The heat around me was intense, something you could almost reach out and touch. As I worked, I wondered how we had endured this for so many years. Sometimes I could hear the drone of the plane, as Mark flew on and on—north, south, east, and west on imaginary grid lines across the sky. When he landed for a lunch of nuts and fruit, his face was red with heat, grim and determined. All morning he had heard nothing through his earphones except static and phantom signals. He tried for hours again that afternoon, and landed just before sunset, shrugging his shoulders. Nothing.

  The next morning he took off and flew until noon, landed to refuel, and took off again. I burned poles and cleared rubbish. I was beginning to think that hauling heavy logs through the heat while Mark waffled around in the cooler altitudes was a lousy arrangement. Then I heard the plane making a beeline for camp. It landed. Mark jumped out and ran toward me, shouting, "I've found them! You're not going to believe it. I've found seven of the eight lions! And Happy is just beyond East Dune."

  As though we had never been away, we found ourselves once again in the truck, trundling over the dune faces, toward the beep-beep-beep of a lion's radio signal. This time my throat knotted, not from thirst but from the laboring of my heart. "Are you sure you saw her? Maybe she slipped her collar. Or maybe she's dead."

  "Hang on, Boo. You'll see."

  The dune grasses, bleached blond by the sun, rattled with drought as they swayed gently in the midday heat. The sun's rays beat straight down, making a desert without shadows. Mark stopped the truck and pointed ahead. Three lionesses sleeping under an acacia bush slowly raised their heads, panting as they peered at us. Two were very young, and we did not recognize them. But the other had a vaguely familiar face and wore a tattered radio collar. She stood, her eyes wide. It was Happy, now thirteen years old—ancient for a Kalahari lioness. We had sat with her for hundreds of hours, followed her across star-lit dunes, and even slept near her on the desert sands on several occasions. We had found Happy on our first return to the Kalahari in 1985, and here she was again.

  She staggered to her feet and walked slowly toward us, her ribs jutting out in dark lines under skin like parchment, her belly high and tight to her sagging spine. She was old and she was starving. She stumbled, then hesitated, swaying, her strength dissipated in the waves of midday heat. She started forward again and came to within ten feet of the truck. I thought for a moment that she might chew the tires, as she and the other Blue Pride lionesses had done so often before. Instead, she looked at us with soft, golden eyes whose lack of fear told us all we needed to know about whether or not she recognized us. If only we could ask her, "Where's Blue? Whatever happened to Moffet? Are these your cubs?" But years had gone by, and the answers were forever lost in the desert.

  She walked around the truck, nearly touching its rear bumper with her side, and rested again in the patchy shade of a few scrawny branches. We stayed with the lionesses all afternoon and that evening watched them try unsuccessfully to kill a large male gemsbok. The effort exhausted them and they stood panting, their shrunken bellies heaving. They were a pitiful trio: Happy too old to hunt well anymore, the young ones too inexperienced. Born in a land that only rarely offers water and is stingy even with shade, they stood like three spindly monuments to survival. We left them at sunset, feeling the way the Kalahari always makes us feel; intrigued by her wonders, sobered by her harshness, saddened by her finality.

  The next morning we drove across East Dune and found Happy one final time. She was with three older females as well as the two younger ones: the Blue Pride members, unnamed, unknown, but enduring. Tucked under an Acacia mellifera bush was a freshly killed gemsbok. All of the lions' bellies, including Happy's, were full.

  Animals know about greetings: long-separated lions rush to one another, rubbing heads and bodies together in reunion; brown hyenas smell one another's necks and tails; jackals sniff noses. But do animals know about good-bye, I wondered as we drove away from Happy for the last time. I held her eyes with mine until her tawny face faded into the straw-colored grasses of the Kalahari. We knew we would not see her again; she would never survive another dry season. But at least she was surrounded by her pride in a reserve that was secure.

  We returned to North Luangwa to continue our programs there, and on landing at the airstrip we were told by the guys that a lioness had been visiting their camp every evening. Several nights later we found her near the strip, where we darted her. And as always we weighed, collared, and named her. She is small, not very strong, but she is still here. She is Hope.

  Postscript

  DELIA

  WHEN WE BEGAN our project in 1986, the elephants of North Luangwa National Park were being poached at the rate of one thousand each year. By the end of 1991 that number had been reduced to twelve.

  On January 16, 1992, David Chile of Mwamfushi Village, one of the scholarship students of our North Luangwa Conservation Project, presented newly elected President Frederick Chiluba with a petition signed by three thousand Zambians requesting that their government observe the ivory ban. Many other organizations and individuals in Zambia—the David Shepard Foundation and the Species Protection Divi
sion are but two examples—participated in the effort to convince the Zambian government to join the ban. On Save the Elephant Day, organized by Wanda and Tom Canon, students all over Zambia and in the United States sang a special song they had written about the elephants. The singing was coordinated so that it lasted for five hours across Africa and America. The song was heard.

  In a press statement on February 7, 1992, President Chiluba's government announced that it would join and fully support the international ban on ivory trade: "After reviewing evidence of a disastrous decline of the country's elephant population under the previous government, [the new government] has announced a radical change in Zambia's elephant policy ... Zambia effectively is opposed to the resumption of international trading in elephant products." The new minister of tourism went on to request that other African nations still trading in ivory follow Zambia's lead, and he invited their cooperation and coordination in establishing measures that would ensure the conservation of their collective wildlife resources. Finally: "On Friday, 14th February 1992, the Minister has arranged for a ceremonial burning of ivory seized by National Parks and Wildlife Services and other Zambian agencies from poachers and smugglers."

  The North Luangwa Conservation Project (NLCP) is now housed in a smart office in Mpika. Evans Mukuka, our current education officer, visits ten schools a month, presenting slide shows about wildlife and conservation to the children. These programs, which first began on the red, dusty clay of Chishala Village, now reach twelve thousand students in thirty schools, in villages that once were notorious for poaching. Our scholarship program sponsors a student from each village to attend the University of Zambia.

  Recently Mukuka held a wildlife quiz competition among the sixth-graders of the Mpika area schools. Teams from each school answered a battery of questions about the wildlife of North Luangwa—and the children of Mwamfushi won!

  With the assistance of the Canons, Max Saili, Ian Spincer, and Edward North, our village programs help people find new jobs, start cottage industries, and grow more protein. In all, the NLCP has created more than two hundred jobs for local men and women, many of whom were once involved with poaching.

  In much of Mpika District, for many years there were no butcher shops or other places to buy domestic meat. So the Bemba people, who have a long history of subsistence hunting and a keen desire for meat, were poaching wild animals to extinction. As a way of discouraging subsistence and commercial meat poaching, the project loaned enough cash to a Zambian businessman in Mpika to open a butcher shop. He brings cattle up by train from the Southern Province, butchers it, and sells beef at a lower price than that charged by black marketers who sell poached meat. A sign on the side of his butchery urges, SAVE WILDLIFE: BUY BEEF, NOT BUSH MEAT.

  Confronted by the American ambassador, the official who had swallowed Bwalya Muchisa's story and charged Mark with buying black-market military rifles backed down. Bwalya has disappeared. The Anticorruption Commission has formed a Species Protection Division (SPD), which is charged with looking into official corruption related to poaching. Periodically, SPD officers come to Mpika to investigate officials who collaborate with poachers. In 1991 they arrested Mpika's chief of police, the police station commander and an armory officer at Tazara, and two tribal chiefs. In early 1992 Warden Mulenga was discharged and Isaac Longwe, a very capable and trustworthy man, was made acting warden.

  In spite of the progress, we cannot yet claim that North Luangwa is secure. Corruption is still unbridled, although under President Chiluba's administration we have renewed hope that it will diminish. Poaching continues, though it is much reduced. The police released Simu Chimba, the "little" big poacher captured by the Mano scouts; but later he was killed in the Zambezi Valley—by a charging elephant. Chikilinti eludes the scouts with his powers of invisible juju; these days, however, he poaches more often in the game management areas outside the park.

  Pressured by former warden Mulenga to join his corrupt activities, Kotela—who so transformed the Mano Unit—requested a transfer to another post. We will be sad to lose him, as ultimately the protection and development of the park depend on him and his countrymen. It is up to them, not us, to make it work.

  In October 1991 the new democratic government in Zambia, the MMD (Movement for Multiparty Democracy), was voted into office by an overwhelming majority—in a free and fair election monitored by former U.S. President Jimmy Carter. President Chiluba's administration is committed to the conservation of Zambia's natural resources, including its wildlife, and is supportive of a free-market system that welcomes visitors to Zambia. Many of the high-level officials of the previous one-party system who were heavily involved in poaching have been voted out of office, and the new government is addressing the widespread problems of corruption and exploitation. Poaching is so institutionalized that it will take some time before the administration can stamp it out. Nevertheless, Zambia has an opportunity to start over, and to demonstrate that man and wildlife can live side by side for the benefit of both.

  The country will need strong support in this quest for a truly effective national conservation program.

  Until substantial benefits can be realized from tourism and other wildlife-related industries, the North Luangwa Conservation Project must continue to find ways of fostering an economic bond between the park's animal communities and nearby villages, which might otherwise destroy the wildlife. Unfortunately, if our project and its community services were to disappear tomorrow, poaching would again threaten the park. The short-term advantages to the villagers eventually must be replaced by sustainable benefits that come directly from the park.

  Tourism may be the answer, but it must be designed so that it does not disrupt the ecosystem. We have strongly recommended that it be limited to old-fashioned walking safaris. Everything is ready: the park has been secured from commercial poachers, the tour camps are set up, and there will soon be an official way to return money from tourism to the Bemba and Bisa people. All that remains is for tourists to come.

  They have started. Two small companies have established walking safaris in the park. Their visitors do not have to ride in radio-controlled minibuses and elbow their way through crowds to see lions on a kill. Each person who comes and walks in the real Africa helps save elephants by making living wild animals valuable to the local people.

  In the meantime Mark and I will continue in North Luangwa, assisting the government in its responsibility to secure, manage, and develop the park for the benefit of people and wildlife.

  Simbeye, Mwamba, and Kasokola, who joined us at the very beginning, are still with us and still smile every morning. They and the other members of our Zambian team are working with spirit and determination to save North Luangwa.

  Bouncer and his pride continue to move from the plains in the wet season to the forest near Nyama Zamara lagoon in the dry season. The Serendipity Pride maintains its territory along the Mwaleshi and tries to avoid a certain crocodile. Mona, the monitor lizard, has abandoned our bathtub and made a new nest in the side of the riverbank nearby.

  Sometimes Survivor and Cheers come by our camp as they migrate to and from the mountains. On rare occasions Survivor ventures into our camp at night to feed on the marula fruits. He walks as softly as before, slurps the fruits as loudly as ever, and lulls us to sleep with his song.

  Appendix A

  Fences and Kalahari Wildlife

  In the Kalahari Desert, fences are blocking antelope migrations and extinguishing wildlife populations. The fences are being erected (a) to control foot-and-mouth disease (FMD) and (b) to enclose large commercial cattle ranches.

  FOOT-AND-MOUTH DISEASE QUARANTINE

  In some cases fences constructed for this purpose run for hundreds of miles across the savanna. They were built along the southern, western, northern, and part of the eastern boundary of the Central Kalahari Game Reserve, blocking antelope migrations to and from the Botetle River and Lake Xau, the only natural watering, points for animals during drough
t.

  These fences divide Botswana into quarantine sections, so that in the event of an FMD outbreak diseased cattle can be isolated, theoretically preventing spread of the infection to another sector. Another purpose of the fences is to segregate wildlife populations suspected of harboring the disease from domestic stock.

  After years of research in the Kalahari we questioned the efficacy of these fences for several reasons:

  No FMD virus has ever been found in Kalahari wildlife.1

  During FMD outbreaks the virus often spreads from one quarantine area to another, irrespective of the fences—which therefore do not seem to be effective barriers. Furthermore, in Europe FMD virus has been carried in damp soil on the feet of birds and rodents, on the wheels of vehicles, or even in the air.2 Posts and wire cannot contain the movement of such vectors, and so the disease spreads across the fences.

  It has never been proved that wild ungulates can transmit FMD to domestic stock.3

  In spite of the fact that the fences do not control FMD, since they were erected in the early 1950s nine major desert antelope die-offs have occurred, similar to the one we witnessed near Lake Xau. In at least five consecutive years, beginning in 1979, massive extinctions of migratory wildebeests were recorded at Lake Xau (the drought and the DeBeers diamond mine had pumped the lake dry) by the two of us and by Doug Williamson, who manned our Deception Valley camp from 1981 to 1984. Rick Lamba, a film producer, also witnessed the tragedy and made a documentary about it entitled "Frightened Wilderness." The film was aired on the Turner networks and shown on Capitol Hill. The numbers of animals perishing at Xau each year varied from fifteen thousand to sixty thousand, but eventually more than a quarter of a million wildebeests died.