The Elephant Whisperer: My Life With the Herd in the African Wild

by Lawrence Anthony

  Soon the telephones started jangling with the Mpumalanga reserve managers wanting to know what was going on.

  ‘Everything’s fine,’ I boomed cheerfully over the phone, lying through my teeth. If they knew the problems we had with unrealistic deadlines and workers being shot at by a rogue gunman they probably would have called the deal off. Sometimes I would put Françoise on the line to pacify them, which she did admirably with her entrancing French lilt.

  Then one day we got the call I dreaded.

  The herd had broken out again and this time damaged three of the reserve’s lodges. We were bluntly told that unless we took the elephants immediately, the owners would have to make a ‘decision’.

  Françoise fielded the call and crossing her fingers said we only need to get our elephant proofing approved by KZN Wildlife – the province’s official authority – and all problems would be over.

  Somehow the owners bought that and reluctantly agreed to an extension. But just a few more days, they warned, or else there would be a ‘decision’.

  That word again.

  chapter three

  Exhausted teams were still hammering in the final fence nails when the Mpumalanga reserve manager phoned to say he could wait no longer and was sending them, ready or not. The elephants were being loaded as we spoke and would arrive at Thula Thula within eighteen hours.

  I hurriedly called our Parks authority, KwaZulu-Natal Wildlife, to come and inspect the boma, stressing that the animals were already on their way. Fortunately they were able to respond instantly and said an inspector would be at Thula Thula within a couple of hours.

  David and I sped down for a final look-see as I wanted everything to be perfect. But while we were double-checking that all vulnerable trees were beyond toppling distance from the fence, something suddenly struck me as being odd. Something didn’t look right.

  And then I saw the problem. Damn it! While the electric wires were bracketed on the inside, the fence itself, including the heavy-duty cables, had been strung up on the outside of the poles. This was a fatal flaw because if an elephant braved the power and leant on the mesh it would rip off like paper. The poles thus provided at best flimsy inner-lateral support, literally just holding the fence up. Once the inspector saw this he would instantly condemn it. That meant the truck would be turned and the herd sent back to certain death.

  I clenched my fists in exasperation. How could we make such an elementary error? It was too late to do anything as the dust mushrooming above the savannah signalled the arrival of the inspector. I prayed we could bluff our way through, but inwardly I despaired. The project was doomed before it began.

  The inspector jumped out of his bush-worn Toyota Land Cruiser and I began effusively thanking him for arriving at short notice, stressing that the elephants were already on the road. I hoped that adding a deadline edge might swing things our way.

  He was a decent guy and knew his business, making particular note of a large tambotie tree with gnarled bark knotted like biceps that was close to the fence. Tambotie is an exceptionally hard wood that blunts the sharpest chain-saw and the inspector remarked wryly that not even an elephant could snap this particularly ‘muscular’ one. He deemed it safe.

  Then he went to check the meshing and my mouth went dry. Surely he’d notice the wire was on wrong side.

  The Gods were with us that day, and to my gut-churning relief, he – like us – didn’t spot the obvious mistake. The boma was given the green light. I now had my crucial authorization and summoned every available hand to secure the fence correctly.

  The 600-mile drive south from Mpumalanga to Thula Thula would take all day and much of the night as the eighteen-wheeler needed plenty of pit stops to feed and water the jumbos. I wasn’t concerned about the journey as one of Africa’s top elephant hands, Kobus Raadt, was in charge.

  It was only then I got the news from Françoise – that she had heard that the herd’s matriarch and her baby had been shot during the capture. The justification was that she was ‘bad news’ and would lead breakouts at Thula Thula as well. We learnt this via a telephone call after the animals had left and I was as stunned as if I had been hit in the spleen. This was exactly what we at Thula Thula were fighting against. While I understood the conventional reasoning behind the choice to kill the matriarch, I felt that decision should have been mine. As elephants are so big and dangerous, if they create problems and pose a risk to lodges and tourists it is quite usual for them to be shot out of hand. However, I was convinced that I would be able to settle the herd in their new home. Consequently I was prepared to take the risk of accepting the escape-artist matriarch and her baby and work with her. Even so, this killing cemented my determination to save the rest of the herd.

  The Zulus who live close to the land have a saying that if it rains on an inaugural occasion, that event will be blessed. For those in step with the natural world, rain is life. That day it didn’t just rain, it bucketed. The bruised skies sprayed down torrents and I wasn’t too sure the Zulus had this ‘blessed’ story right. When the articulated truck arrived outside Thula Thula in thick darkness the deluge had turned the dirt tracks into streams of mud.

  Barely had we opened the gates to the reserve when a tyre burst, the reinforced rubber cracking loud as a rifle shot. This panicked the elephants, who had just seen their leader gunned down and they started thumping the inside of the trailer like it was a gigantic drum, while the crews worked feverishly to change the wheel.

  ‘This is Jurassic Park!’ Françoise cried. We laughed, not necessarily in mirth.

  Françoise and I first met some years back in London at the Cumberland Hotel. It was minus 17 degrees Celsius and I urgently needed to get to Earls Court for a meeting. There was a long queue snaking up to the taxi rank outside the hotel and the doorman, who knew I was in a hurry, said he would see if anyone would share a cab. As it happened, a gorgeous woman right at the front was also going to Earls Court. The doorman asked if she would mind sharing and pointed at me. She leaned forward to get a better look, and then shook her head. It was the most emphatic ‘No’ I had seen.

  Well, that’s life. Rather than hang around I decided to take the Underground and as I strode off, to my surprise, the same woman miraculously appeared next to me at the Tube station.

  ‘’Ello,’ she said in a thick French accent, ‘I am Françoise.’

  She said she felt guilty about not agreeing to share a cab and to make amends offered to show me which train to take. To say I was smitten would be putting it blandly.

  She knew London well and asked if I was interested in jazz. I wasn’t, but I also wasn’t stupid enough to say so. In fact, I professed undying love for the genre. Thank the stars she didn’t ask for proof – such as my favourite musician – and instead suggested that as jazz lovers we go to Ronnie Scott’s Jazz Club that night. I pondered this for a fraction of a nanosecond before answering ‘Yes’ with more enthusiasm than absolutely necessary.

  Apart from wondering why I had never appreciated the bewitchment of jazz before, I spent much of that evening telling her of the magic of Africa – not hard in the middle of an English winter. Was there plenty of sun in Africa, she asked? I scoffed … was there sun? We invented the word.

  Well, here we were twelve years later drenched to the marrow in the bush, wrestling with a gigantic wheel on a muddy rig loaded with elephants. I don’t recall mentioning this could happen while piling on the charm during our first date.

  The spare wheel had scarcely been bolted on when to the surprise of no one the truck slid just a few yards before it sank into the glutinous mud, its tyres spinning impotently and spewing muck all over the place. No amount of cajoling, swearing, kicking or packing branches underneath worked. And even worse, the elephants were becoming more and more agitated.

  ‘We’ve got to sort this out quickly or we’re going to have to release them right here,’ said Kobus, his brow creased with worry. ‘They cannot stay in the truck any longer. Let’s just pra
y like hell the outer fence holds them.’

  We both knew that with this hair-trigger herd, it wouldn’t happen. We also both knew that if the elephants escaped they would be shot.

  Fortunately the driver, sick of all the pontificating, took matters into his own hands. Without a word he slammed the truck into reverse, and somehow skidded the huge rig out of the bog and veered off the greasy road into the savannah that had marginally more grip. Dodging tyreshredding thornbush and slithering past huge termite mounds he somehow kept momentum until he reached the boma.

  The crew cheered as though he had scored a touchdown at the Superbowl.

  Coaxing the animals from the truck was the next problem. Due to their massive size, elephants are the only animals that can’t jump at all, and so we had dug a trench for the semi to reverse into so the trailer’s floor would be level with the ground.

  However, the trench was now a soggy pit brimming with brown-frothed rainwater. If we backed into it, we would have a major problem extracting the vehicle. Mud is like ice; what it seizes it keeps. But with a herd of highly disturbed elephants inside, it was a risk we had to take.

  Disaster! Not because the truck got stuck – instead, the trench was too deep and the trailer’s sliding door jammed into the ground. To compound matters it was 2 a.m., dark as obsidian and the rain was still sluicing down thick as surf. I put out an emergency wake-up call to everyone on the reserve and armed with shovels we slithered around in the sludge hacking a groove for the door. I was surprised that my staff didn’t mutiny.

  Finally the big moment arrived and we all stood well back, ready for the animals to be released into their new home.

  However, as it had been an extremely stressful few hours, Kobus decided first to inject the herd with a mild sedative, using a pole-sized syringe. He climbed onto the roof of the trailer, which had a large ventilation gap, and David jumped up to give him a hand.

  As David landed on the roof a trunk whipped through the slats as fast as a mamba and lashed at his ankle. David leapt back, dodging the grasping trunk with a heartbeat to spare. If the elephant had caught him he would have been yanked inside to a gruesome death. As simple as that. Kobus told me he had heard of it happening before; a person pulled into a confined space with seven angry elephants would soon be hamburger meat.

  Thankfully all went smoothly after this and as soon as the injections had been administered and they had calmed down the door slid open and the new matriarch emerged. With headlights throwing huge shadows on the trees behind, she tentatively stepped onto Thula Thula soil, the first wild elephant in the area for almost a century.

  The six others followed: the new matriarch’s baby bull, three females – of which one was an adult – and an eleven-year-old bull. The last out was the fifteen-year-old, three-and-a-half-ton, teenage son of the previous matriarch. He walked a few yards and even in his groggy state realized there were humans behind. He swivelled his head and stared at us, then flared his ears and with a high-pitched trumpet of rage turned and charged, pulling up just short of slamming into the fence in front of us. He instinctively knew, even at his tender age, that he must protect the herd. I smiled with absolute admiration. His mother and baby sister had been shot before his eyes; he had been darted and confined in a trailer for eighteen hours; and here he was, just a teenager, defending his family. David immediately named him ‘Mnumzane’ (pronounced nom-zahn) which in Zulu means ‘Sir’.

  The new matriarch we christened ‘Nana’, which is what all Anthony grandchildren call my mum Regina Anthony, a respected matriarch in her own right.

  The second female in command, the most feisty, we called ‘Frankie’ after Françoise. For equally obvious reasons. The other names would come later.

  Nana gathered her clan, loped up to the fence and stretched out her trunk, touching the electric wires. The 8,000-volt wires sent a jolt shuddering through her hulk. Whoa … she hurriedly backed off. Then, with her family in tow she strode the entire perimeter of the boma, her trunk curled fractionally below the wire to sense the current’s pulse, checking for the weakest link as she must have seen her sister, the previous matriarch, do so often before.

  I watched, barely breathing. She completed the check and smelling the waterhole, led her herd off to drink.

  The crucial aspect of an electrified boma is fine-tuning how long you keep the animals inside. Too short, and they don’t learn enough to respect the mega-volt punch the fence packs. But if it’s too long, they somehow figure out that it’s possible to endure the convulsions for the few agonizing seconds it takes to snap the strand – like the previous matriarch did. Once that happens they will never fear electricity again.

  Unfortunately no one knows exactly what that ‘perfect period’ is. Opinions vary from a few days for more docile elephants to three months for wilder ones. My new herd was anything but docile, so how long I should pen them was anybody’s guess. However, what the experts had told me was that during the quarantine period the animals should have no contact with humans. So once the gates were bolted I instructed everyone to move off except for two game guards who would watch from a distance.

  As we were leaving I noticed the elephants lining up at a corner of the fence. They were facing due north, the exact direction of their former home, as if their inner compasses were telling them something.

  It looked ominous.

  Soaked and freezing with my personal magnetic needle pointing unwaveringly towards a warm bed, I left with a deep sense of foreboding.

  chapter four

  Hammering echoed like a drum roll in my head. I wondered hazily where it was coming from.

  My eyes flickered open. It was no dream. The banging stemmed from a shuddering door. Rat-a-tat. Rat-a-tat-a-tat.

  Then I heard yelling. It was Ndonga. ‘The elephants have gone! They’ve broken out the boma! They’ve gone!’

  I leapt out of bed, yanking on my trousers and stumbling like a pogo-dancer on one leg. Françoise, also awake and wide-eyed at the commotion, threw a nightgown over her shoulders.

  ‘I’m coming. Hang on!’ I shouted and shoved open the top half of the bedroom’s stable door that led directly to the farmhouse’s lush gardens.

  An agitated Ndonga was standing outside, shivering in the pre-dawn chill.

  ‘The two big ones started shoving a tree,’ he said. ‘They worked as a team, pushing it until it just crashed down on the fence. The wires shorted and the elephants smashed through. Just like that.’

  Dread slithered in my belly. ‘What tree?’

  ‘You know, that moersa tambotie. The one that KZN Wildlife oke said was too big to pull down.’

  It took me a few moments to digest this. That tree must have weighed several tons and was thirty feet tall. Yet Nana and Frankie had figured out that by working in tandem they could topple it. Despite my dismay, I felt a flicker of pride; these were some animals, all right.

  The last foggy vestiges of sleep vaporized like steam. We had to get moving fast. One didn’t have to be a genius to grasp that we had a massive crisis on our hands as the herd was now stampeding towards the border fence. If they broke through that last barrier they would head straight into the patchwork of rural homesteads scattered outside Thula Thula. And as any game ranger will attest, a herd of wild elephants on the run in a populated area would be the conservation equivalent of the Chernobyl disaster.

  I cursed long and hard, only stopping when I caught Françoise’s disapproving glance. I had believed the electric boma was escape-proof. The experts had told me exactly that, and it never occurred to me that they might be wrong.

  David’s bedroom was across the lawn and I ran over. ‘Get everyone up. The elephants have broken out. We’ve got to find them – fast!’

  Within minutes I had scrambled to raise a search party and we gathered at the boma, astounded at the damage. The large tambotie tree was history, its toppled upper section tenuously connected to the splintered stump by a strip of its bark oozing poisonous sap. The fence loo
ked as though a division of Abrams tanks had thundered through it.

  Standing next to the shattered tree was the astounded Ovambo guard who had witnessed the breakout. He pointed us in the direction he had last seen the elephants heading.

  Almost at running speed, we followed the spoor to the boundary. We were too late. The border fence was down and the animals had broken out.

  My worst fears were confirmed. But even so, how on earth had the animals got through an electrified fence pushing 8,000 volts so effortlessly?

  We soon found out. Judging by their tracks, they had reached the eight-foot fence, milled around for a while and then backtracked into the reserve until – uncannily – they found the energizer that powers the fence. How they knew this small, nondescript machine hidden in a thicket half a mile away was the source of current baffled us. But somehow they did, trampling it like a tin can and then returning to the boundary, where the wires were now dead. They then shouldered the concrete-embedded poles out of the ground like matchsticks.

  Their tracks pointed north. There was no doubt that they were heading home to Mpumalanga 600 miles away. To the only home they knew; even though it was a home that no longer wanted them – and where, in all probability, they would be shot. That’s assuming game rangers or hunters didn’t get them along the way first.

  As daybreak filled the eastern sky a motorist three miles away spotted the herd loping up the road towards him. At first he thought he was seeing things. Elephants? There aren’t meant to be any elephants here …

  Half a mile or so later he saw the flattened fence and put two and two together. Fortunately he had the presence of mind to call, giving us valuable updated information.

  The chase was on. I gunned my Land Rover into gear as the trackers leapt into the back.

  We had barely driven out of the reserve when, to my astonishment, we saw a group of men parked on the shoulder of the dirt road, dressed in khaki and camouflage hunting gear and bristling with heavy-calibre rifles. They were as hyped as a vigilante gang and their excitement was palpable. You could smell the bloodlust.