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

by Lawrence Anthony

  Driving home through the dark, Obie – a natural raconteur – recounted the story over and again in the minutest detail, mimicking accents and actions with deadly accuracy. I laughed delightedly, adrenalin still fizzing with the manic relief of survival. I knew Obie would memorize the story and it would be told and retold around the night fires of his kraal, woven into the rich fabric of his tribe’s folklore: of how we had called the bluff of one of the most powerful headmen and his tsotsis in the area – and lived to tell the tale.

  With that, the cabal was now in full retreat. They knew the police had infiltrated them; that there was an informer in their midst. I also had assurance from one of their leaders that I would not be harmed. It remained to see whether he would keep his word.

  chapter twenty-seven

  I was keen to see how ET was settling in with her new family and spent as much time as I could out in the bush near them.

  However, it didn’t take long to experience the consequence of her inclusion. While Nana and Frankie were as content as always with me in the vicinity, ET went ballistic if I came near, especially if I climbed out of the Land Rover. She just couldn’t believe that her matriarch was permitting a human – evil incarnate in her mind – to get close and she quivered on full alert, ready to charge at a moment’s notice. This meant that I had to be as unobtrusive as possible. She may be a youngster, but she still weighed a couple of tons and was more powerful than a human could imagine, and I wasn’t sure what Nana or Frankie’s reaction would be if she attacked. This was uncharted territory for me, so there was nothing to do except be patient and let ET’s malevolence dissipate.

  On the plus side, she may have been mad as a snake at me, but she was absolutely ecstatic with her new family. And to see this previously depressed creature joyously bonding with the other youngsters, pushing, pulling and playing with all the physicality that elephants so enjoy, was simply phenomenal.

  Mnumzane was still on the periphery, being shooed off if he got too close, and somewhat bemusedly watching the newcomer being accepted. I reckon I was his best friend – albeit by default – and whenever I drove past he would trumpet and chase after me. I always stopped, and he would then block the road, trapping me for as long as possible as he browsed around the Land Rover. I loved our ‘chats’ together but this didn’t disguise his loneliness or unease. His newfound relationship with me, however expedient, was not natural and concerned me a little. Elephant bulls are always pushed out of the herd at puberty, and eventually they get over the rejection and join a loose affiliation with other bachelors.

  However, we didn’t have other bachelors, and to bring in a dominant bull to provide Mnumzane with a father figure was not something KZN Wildlife would consider. New rules set by KZN Wildlife demanded a larger reserve for elephant bulls, and it would have to wait for the Royal Zulu project to come to fruition. Mnumzane was thus stuck in no man’s land living partly on his own and partly on the fringes of the herd.

  One day, he was grazing a few yards off when I got an ominous radio call from the lodge. Penny our bull terrier was missing. She loved hanging out at the lodge where she was spoiled rotten by guests and we brought her down from the house most days. She relished swimming in the water-hole on the riverbank just in front of the lodge and would leap in regularly to cool off. As I have said before, her devotion to us and Françoise in particular was absolute. She was short for her breed but had the courage and character of a Titan.

  I have always loved bull and Staffordshire terriers. They are the most tolerant, loving, friendly dogs imaginable, and you get a power keg of protection thrown in as a bonus. Unfortunately they don’t like other dogs much and you have to watch that, but they can be taught and are more than worth the effort.

  With Max at my heels I searched around the lodge, periodically yelling Penny’s name. She normally reacted to my whistle, bursting out of the bush with a tail doing windmill facsimiles. But today there was only silence and I feared the worst. A dog AWOL on a game reserve usually meant one of two things: a leopard or a poacher’s snare, where the poor animal would die a horrible, lingering death if not found in time. I forced the images out of my mind and walked through the bush in ever-widening circles carefully searching for her spoor. Nothing at all.

  I eventually gave up, turned around and made my way down to the waterhole where suddenly I saw fresh spoor. I followed her tracks down into the riverbed and then some way upstream past some deep green pools. I shuddered, goosebumps on my arm.

  The Afrikaners have a saying ‘’n hond se gedgate’, which literally translated means ‘a dog’s thought’ or gut feeling, that innate sense of premonition that all humans have in greater or lesser degrees. Looking at those sinister pools I felt something was wrong and I involuntarily reached down for Max’s collar.

  Then I saw it. With its knobby grey-green armour-plating barely detectable in the wind-rustled reeds, lay an absolute monster of crocodile. A flash of white caught my eye and just a few yards from it, lying motionless in a still backwater, was Penny. My heart sank into my boots. She had been snatched and drowned.

  The crocodile was resting, about to submerge the corpse into its lair where it would decay. Despite its fearsome fangs, a crocodile cannot chew and unless there are two to tear a kill apart, a lone crocodile has to let its prey decompose into soft-rotted chunks before it can ingest it.

  There was no way I was going to leave my loyal dog there. I edged closer. Crocodiles don’t like loud noises; they like being surprised even less. I crept forward and when I was barely fifteen yards away, I jumped up, screamed and clapped my hands. With a whoosh of its huge tail it was gone.

  I waited until it resurfaced some way downriver and then waded into the pool to retrieve Penny’s body. Shocked and saddened, I carried her back up to the lodge and laid her gently on the lawn. Max, who had followed closely, pushed forward and sat silently next to her lifeless body.

  Biyela and I buried her under a beautiful spreading buffalo thorn, the legendary umphafa tree which Zulus associate with the spirit world. It was just the two us. Brendan, who loved Penny, was on the other side of the reserve. Françoise was too tearful to come down.

  ‘She liked to swim too much,’ said Biyela as he laid his spade down. ‘The crocodile was waiting for her.’

  Knowing Penny, I wasn’t so sure Biyela was right. Penny may have been domesticated, but she was still savvy to the bush. I couldn’t see any croc stalking her. She was quick, smart and possessed survival senses long distilled out of desk-bound humans. Her death niggled at me; I really wanted to know what had happened.

  The next day I went down to where we suspected she had been snatched and started unravelling the tracks, trying to fathom what actually took place. Reading signs of the wild is a dying art which few today have mastered. But I had learned something of it over the years, so I decided I’d stay at the river and turn over every piece of bush testimonial until the mystery was solved.

  First checking that the monster crocodile wasn’t around, I settled down on a rock and studied the evidence with silent stoicism, trying to get the bush to talk to me. Penny’s tracks showed she had been pacing the riverbank. By the length of her stride, the scuff marks of her paws and the short turns executed indicated she was moving quickly and obviously excited. But the tracks were not at the water’s edge; she was a few yards up the bank, relatively safe with her turn of speed from any hungry crocodile. There was only one place where she actually went down to the water, possibly to take a drink.

  Then I left the rock and walking carefully so as not to disturb the signs, picked up the crocodile’s four-footed tracks from where it emerged on the bank, moving up towards the lodge to where it turned and slithered back into the water. Interestingly, Penny’s tracks were a couple of yards above. She had seen it come out and had been stalking it, probably worrying it as it lumbered along the bank. This ruled out any surprise attack on her.

  So I went back and carefully studied Penny’s tracks at the onl
y place where they led to the water’s edge – initially where I thought she had gone in for a drink. Something didn’t gel.

  There were no signs of a struggle. And even more crucially there were no signs of the croc beaching itself in an attack, and no drag marks, not even in the mud under the water. Once a croc’s jaws snap shut it’s an inexorable slide to the water, an awful one-way ticket to hell which had to leave stark tracks of the victim’s frantic struggle. Especially in this still pool.

  Yet Penny’s tracks indicated the exact opposite. Her footprints clearly showed that the sand had been scuffed backwards; that she had been charging into the river. It didn’t make any sense at all.

  And then it came to me. She hadn’t gone to the river for a drink and been attacked by the crocodile. In fact, the exact opposite: the attack had happened the other way round. The croc hadn’t gone for Penny at all. My mad, insane, beautiful dog had instead attacked the crocodile. She had deliberately rushed into the water and taken on a killing machine twenty times her size. Bush signs do not lie.

  There are those who will say Penny was little more than a dumb dog. I strongly disagree. I believe Penny saw a crocodile, recognized a threat and in her mind she was guarding our territory. With the limitless, impossible courage of her breed, she willingly gave her life to protect all that was important to her, all that she loved. In the same way that Max would soundlessly attack a spitting cobra, Penny went to her death doing what she considered her duty. Penny had perished in her own version of the Alamo or Thermopylae.

  She was one of the finest and bravest creatures I have known.

  Things, good or bad, never seem to happen singularly for me. They always come in triplicate.

  Soon after losing Penny, Max was at the lodge dozing on the patio when he sat up sharply, sniffing the air. His nose followed the drift of the unfamiliar scent and quickly found its source. It was a bushpig, a hulking boar making his way rapidly across the lawn towards the lodge.

  A bushpig is about two- to three-feet high, roughly the same size as a warthog and to the untrained eye the two are easily confused. But that’s where the similarities end. A warthog has semicircular tusks and frightens easily. A bushpig is feral to its core and should be avoided at all costs in the wild. It’s a real fighter, weighing up to 140 pounds and uses its lower incisor teeth with devastating effect on any creature that underestimates it.

  Max didn’t know about that. There was an intruder in his territory and the wiry hair on his back sprung up. Characteristically, he did not bark and at a sprint he cut the boar off, forcing it to confront this unusual threat. I say unusual because even a couple of hungry hyenas will avoid taking on a healthy adult bushpig.

  In the wild there is no such thing as an idle threat, and stand-offs usually end with one animal tactically retreating so that ‘face’ is saved all round. There is no medical care in the bush and animals instinctively know that even a scratch can prove fatal if infected. Thus unlike humans who square up over something as flimsy as road rage, animals fight only as an absolute last resort. In this case there was no need for combat as neither could nor wanted to eat the other, and the bushpig was only a temporary trespasser. There was no need to take it further.

  But they did. The big boar held his ground, refusing to back off and Max took up the challenge and began circling, looking for an opening. Then the boar did a little mock charge, and that was that. The fighting genes of Max’s terrier forebears kicked in and he smashed into the big pig in a silent full-blooded charge. I was at the main house at the time, but fortunately David was nearby. Realizing the terrible danger Max was in, forgot his own safety and ran at them screaming.

  Too late. The boar swivelled and rammed his shovel-shaped head under Max’s gut, hoisting him high into the air. As Max toppled over the boar was on him, slashing with dagger-like incisors at his soft underbelly.

  Max scrambled up and came at him again, fast and furious, but the boar, using his superior bulk bowled him over once more, hacking with lethal accuracy as Max rolled, desperately trying to regain his footing.

  They parted briefly, the pig standing firm with Max, his pelt now slick with blood, circling warily, again looking for an opening. Both were completely oblivious to David’s yelling.

  Once again Max propelled himself forward and after another vicious melee the bushpig, unaccustomed to such determination from an obviously smaller opponent, retreated into the bush.

  Seconds later Max proudly trotted back to David, ignoring the fact that his stomach had been gutted and his entrails were hanging out in ropes.

  ‘Max, you’re a complete bloody mess,’ said David, shocked rigid. He picked the dog up, making sure the slithering intestines followed, and sprinted to the Land Rover. He didn’t ease his foot once in the twenty miles to Empangeni, slamming on the brakes only at the surgery. The vet said it was touch-and-go when he began operating.

  I visited Max regularly and a few days later he was back at Thula Thula, tail thumping away. Except for a fence of stitches in his stomach, he looked no worse for wear.

  Incredibly, a few days later the third incident with our dogs occurred. This time it was Bijou, Françoise’s little princess, who got herself into trouble. As I said earlier, Bijou defines the word ‘pampered’. She prefers carpets to grass, and will not – or cannot – sleep on the floor. At Françoise’s insistence, she only drinks bottled water (‘still or sparkling?’ the rangers mock when getting her a drink).

  I say this only to emphasize how absurd it was for this cosseted mutt to decided to ‘attack’ a full-grown nyala bull grazing on the lawn close to the lodge’s front door. Bijou, who stands an impressive six inches at the shoulder, rushed at the massive buck, yapping for all she was worth. David watched, laughing.

  He suddenly choked on his guffaw … in an instant the tiny Maltese was too close; in fact, fatally close. Before David could intervene the bull lifted his head and in a blur rammed its long horns down on her.

  Bijou lay still on the ground, little bigger than a crumpled white handkerchief and David’s heart stopped. He knew his life was worth peanuts if he had to tell Françoise that Bijou had been killed on his watch.

  Frantically chasing the bull away, David rushed over and picked the poodle up, checking for wounds. There were none, not even a splotch of blood. She’s had a heart attack, he thought … then slowly she wriggled back to life. Bijou had simply fainted from fright as the horns pierced the ground on either side, missing by fractions. Today, Bijou still struts imperiously indoors but doesn’t go outside much any more.

  However, the numerous nyala grazing literally outside our bedrooms reminded me that we had a surplus of these magnificent antelope on the reserve and I decided we should sell about thirty off to other reserves for breeding purposes.

  A phone call later and a game-capture specialist was on Thula Thula darting the animals, which we placed in a boma with plenty of fresh water and alfalfa until we had reached the sell-off quota. We would then load them into the customized van and he would deliver them to the buyer.

  Brendan was overseeing the capture and radioed to say we had our quota and the van would be leaving the next morning. It had been a long day. I was tired and looking forward to an early night. Thus I was surprised to be woken by a radio call from Brendan at 11 p.m. ‘You’d better come down. The most amazing thing has just happened.’

  I cursed, pulled on some clothes and drove down to where Brendan and the team were waiting. The first thing I noticed was that the door to the boma was open.

  ‘Where’re the nyala? Surely you didn’t load at night!’

  I turned to the game-capture man who was standing with his staff staring at the open door. He looked as though he had seen a ghost.

  ‘You’re not going to believe what happened,’ he said.

  ‘Try me!’ My patience was somewhat aggravated by lack of sleep.

  ‘We were sitting by the boma, just chatting,’ he said, ‘when we heard the elephants come. A couple of min
utes later Nana led the herd into the clearing and so we moved right off – some quicker than others,’ he grinned, looking at Brendan. ‘We thought she had smelled the alfalfa. We had twelve buck inside and we were worried what would happen to them if the boma was flattened by the herd going crazy for the food.

  ‘Then the herd stopped, as if on instruction. Nana walked alone to the boma. Just as we thought she would smash through the fence, she stopped at the gate. It wasn’t locked because the clasps were folded and were secure enough. She started fiddling with the clasps and got one open, then the other, and then pulled open the door. We couldn’t believe it, she actually opened the damn door!’

  He looked around as the others nodded.

  ‘Then instead of going for the alfalfa, which we thought was her whole mission, she stood back and waited. After a few seconds a nyala came out, then another, and before we knew it they had all found the gap and were gone.

  ‘The weirdest thing is that as the last one fled, Nana just walked off and the others followed. They didn’t even go for the alfalfa – a pile of prime chow and they just ignored it.’

  I looked at him, smiling. ‘Okaaaay. So what you’re saying is that the elephants felt sorry for the poor old nyala. They came across the reserve just to release them out of the goodness of their hearts. Because they had nothing better to do. Good try. Now … what really happened?’

  ‘I swear to God that’s exactly what happened. Ask the others.’ And with that they all started jabbering away simultaneously, backing up him and outdoing one another in verifying the story.

  It took me a bit of time to digest it but there was no doubt they were telling the truth. There were elephant tracks all around the boma and Nana had thoughtfully dumped a steaming pile at the gate as a smoking gun. The lock clasps were also all smothered in trunk slime.