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

by Lawrence Anthony

  Sure enough, even from a distance I could see they had entered the dam on the overflow wall and their combined weight had collapsed it. It was no big deal, the labour team could fix it in a day and so I decided to park off for a while, enjoy the peace and quiet and see what was going on.

  There is always plenty of life around water and a couple of hours spent at a dam are infinitely worth making time for. The season’s first tadpoles were out, schooled together in tight underwater clusters, some as big as soccer balls rolling gently just under the water, while in the reed banks orange dragonflies hovered and darted.

  A large shongololo, the impressive six-inch long African millipede with its thick black body and orange legs came out of a crevice in the gabion retaining wall. I put my hand out and it climbed on and kept walking right up my arm as they always do. Eventually I pulled it off and let it down gently – in fact, very gently, for if you scare them they excrete a foul-smelling substance which even soap and water won’t readily remove.

  Plenty of insects indicates an abundance of life, and the still surface of the brown water was continually marbled by barbell and tilapia rising to feed.

  Nearby a bent old acacia robusta leaned over the water, laden with hundreds of weavers’ nests hanging like straw-coloured fruit from its branches. These beautiful bright-yellow birds were busy building their seasonal homes, and as usual there was at least one domestic argument going on.

  It’s the male’s job to construct the nest and he is watched carefully by his mate who takes her role as self-appointed quality control officer very seriously indeed. The poor little guy, who had probably spent three days collecting reeds and slaving away to get the nest just right, was hopping from branch to branch, twittering and complaining. His wife had just been inside for the final inspection and was now pecking at the support knot that tied the nest to the branch. This meant one thing: the nest had been rejected and he was grumbling bitterly as the condemned home came away and fell into the water, joining dozens of other similarly discarded abodes. His new home had failed the test and he was now going to have to start from scratch, or lose his mate.

  I took off my cap and, using it as a pillow, stretched out on a nearby grass bank and dozed, surrounded by paradise.

  A gut feeling is a strange and advantageous thing. It comes from nowhere and is often illogical. Yet it is very real, and in the bush infinitely valuable. While I was dozing, a distant feeling of latent fright suddenly impinged on my serenity. It took me a few moments to recognize it, and when I did I instantly came awake and frantically looked around.

  Everything seemed peaceful. Max was at the water’s edge having a drink, and he would have given a warning if there was any danger. But what was it that had caused this worry to engulf me?

  I checked and rechecked the calm surroundings repeatedly, but absolutely nothing was awry. I was about to rest my head on my cap again and very nearly missed it. Moving across the dam surface was an almost imperceptible ripple. That’s interesting, I thought sitting up again. What is it?

  It seemed so innocent, so slight that it was barely worth worrying about. But something nagged and then my gut feeling kicked in again. I looked harder and went stone cold. For hidden in the murk-brown water under the barely visible ripple was a huge crocodile, its great tail propelling it towards Max. The ripple was generated by the tip of its nose nudging microcosmically out of the water.

  I jumped up yelling at Max and rushed towards him. ‘Max come here; come here, Max … Maaaaaax!’

  He stopped drinking and looked at me. He had never heard me screaming manically at him before and as he wasn’t doing anything wrong he must have concluded that my ravings had nothing to do with him. He put his head down and continued lapping.

  I scrambled over the wall, grabbing at a small loose stone to throw at him to regain his attention, then slipped and fell, cutting myself on the sharp rocks and losing my missile. I got up and continued running towards him, but by now the crocodile was almost at the bank’s edge. Still Max continued lapping, oblivious to the terrible danger.

  Then at the last moment, realizing that I actually was screaming at him, Max turned and sprinted up the bank with me fractionally behind – both fleeing for our lives; me wittingly, him not. I have seen a croc launch itself out of a river before and it’s pretty low on my list of preferred ways to die.

  Those awful moments before I reached the top lasted forever. As we made the safety of the ridge I turned and saw the water swirling around the huge shape of the monster surfacing exactly where Max had been drinking. It was probably twelve feet long.

  We were safe and I sunk down on the ground to recover both my sanity and my breath. I reached out and put an arm around Max who gave me a big wet lick, obviously pleased that I wasn’t crazy any more. Then facing forward again he suddenly saw the croc, tensed and came on full alert. It was so lucky I had my arm around him for he started towards the monster. I just managed to grab his collar in time. I immediately thought of my brave Penny and how she died. The bush signs were right; she did go for the croc that killed her. Foolhardy or not the courage of the bull and Staffordshire terrier is truly unlimited.

  It was Max’s drinking that had done it. Crocodiles are attracted by the sound of an animal’s tongue lapping. Their killing technique is simple: stay underwater, get close, then launch a vicious surprise attack from the depths. And they are very, very good at it. You have precious little chance of escaping death in the jaws of hell itself. With crocs there are no prior warnings.

  We were alive due to a gut instinct. Nothing more, nothing less.

  Fifteen minutes later the reptile surfaced on the far side of the dam, slowly pulling his bulk out of the water and crawling up the bank. That’s what I had been waiting for. Now at least I could get a good look at it.

  It’s difficult, if not impossible, to sex a crocodile from a distance but I took him for a male, an old one from the dark colouring on his back. And judging by his hunting technique, he certainly was a cunning old fellow. He was a new arrival on the reserve and must have come down the river, perhaps during the recent floods, and walked the two miles to claim Gwala Gwala dam for his home. As such he had joined the extended Thula Thula family and was now entitled to protection and to be left alone to live out his natural life. There were plenty of barbel in the dam to support him between the occasional bigger meals – though hopefully not Max or me. He would be happy here.

  chapter thirty-three

  ‘Boss! Boss come in, come in!’

  It was David on the two-way radio.

  ‘Standing by. What’s up?’

  ‘There’s a big mistake here,’ said David, using the word ‘mistake’ in the Zulu context to mean a major problem. ‘I’m up from the Kudu River crossing. You better get here quickly.’

  ‘Why?’

  He paused.

  ‘We have another dead rhino.’

  ‘Shit! What the hell happened?’

  ‘Rather come and see for yourself. You’re not going to like this at all.’

  Puzzled, I picked up my .303 half expecting an encounter with poachers – as had happened after our first dead rhino – and ran for the Land Rover with Max at my heels. What was it that David wouldn’t tell me over the radio?

  The crossing was about twenty minutes away and driving along my focus was snapped by Mnumzane loping off across the veldt to the left of me. Despite my haste I stopped. Something was wrong; I could sense it from where I was sitting.

  I called out, but instead of coming to me he lifted his head, spread his ears and deliberately moved off. Every new elephant reaction intrigues me and normally I would have trailed him to find out what was going on, but David was sitting on a crisis.

  Ten minutes later I reached David. He was squatting on his haunches in the shade of a young umbrella thorn tree, staring sombrely at the ground. I pulled up next to him and got out.

  ‘What happened?’ I asked, looking around. ‘Where’s the rhino?’

 
He stood up slowly. Then without a word he led the way down an old game path and into a clearing. In the middle lay the gray carcass. It was a female. From the look of it, her death was recent.

  Her horns were still intact. That surprised me, for I had expected them to be butchered off, the first thing poachers do. I walked up to the immense motionless body, automatically looking for bullet wounds. There were none.

  I then scrutinized the corpse for signs of disease or other causes of death, while David stood by silently. Except for some nasty fresh gashes on her armour-plated hide, she had been strong and healthy. In fact, even in death she was so imposing that I half expected her to suddenly rise up.

  I was so transfixed by the grim scenario that I hadn’t taken in my wider surroundings, and as I looked up I was shocked. A tornado could not have done more damage. Bushes were crushed and trees lay sprawled and splintered all over the place. The earth itself had been gouged up, as if a bulldozer had lost its driver and careered around recklessly flattening everything. Nothing made sense; no rhino could cause such havoc. What the hell was going on?

  I instinctively looked to the ground for answers. Rhino spoor was everywhere, heavy and mobile in its tread, yet unnatural in its twisting and turning patterns. Then elephant tracks jumped out at me; big heavy pachyderm spoor, the aggressive earth-wrenching footprints of an enraged bull in full cry.

  Mnumzane!

  I tried to suppress the dawning realization, hoping against hope I was wrong.

  ‘He killed her, boss.’ David’s words whispered into my thoughts. ‘She put up a helluva fight but she was no match for him – never could be.’

  I nodded, not wanting to believe it. But the tracks told the story as clearly as if they were on celluloid.

  ‘I once saw an elephant kill a black rhino at a waterhole in Namibia,’ David continued, almost as if speaking to himself. ‘He hammered the rhino so hard it shot back thirty feet and went down and died right there, its ribs smashed in, collapsed over the heart. And then the elephant put his front foot on the body and stood over it rolling it over back and forth as if it was a plaything. The power was just unbelievable.’

  He stared at the corpse in front of us. ‘I know she is a white, and nearly twice the size of a black rhino. But still, she stood no chance.’

  A slight flicker in the bush to my left caught my eye. Max had also seen it and following his gaze through the foliage I caught sight of a camouflaged rhino calf silently watching from a nearby thicket. It was Heidi, the dead animal’s two-year-old daughter. A rhino will fight to the death under most circumstances – but with a youngster, that’s an absolute given.

  ‘What a mess up!’ I fumed, my words echoing harshly through the bush. ‘What the hell did he do that for? The bloody idiot!’

  ‘We … we’re not going to shoot him, are we?’ said David and for the first time I realized why he had been so downcast.

  Shoot Mnumzane? The words shocked me rigid.

  In most South African reserves, aggressive young male elephants, orphaned by earlier culls and reared without sage supervision of adult bulls, have gratuitously killed rhino before. And when they did, retribution by reserve owners was swift and harsh. Rhinos in South Africa are rare and very expensive. Elephants, on the other hand, are more plentiful and comparatively cheap. Past records indicated that elephants which killed rhino before would do so again. Thus to protect valuable rhino, an elephant that kills one effectively sentences itself to death.

  Through one senseless violent act, Mnumzane had made himself an outcast … an untouchable. I now couldn’t keep him; nor could I give him away for love or money. Who would want an elephant that killed rhino just for the hell of it? On most game reserves an owner in my position would immediately set up a hunt and end the problem there and then.

  ‘No,’ I said trying to reassure myself. ‘We’re not going to shoot him. But we really have a bloody big problem on our hands.’

  I paused, trying to get my head around it all. ‘Let’s unpick this slowly. Firstly Heidi will be fine, she’s big enough to survive without a mother and she will herd with the other rhinos.’

  ‘Secondly we have to retrieve the horns,’ interrupted David. ‘The word will get out and they’re too much of a temptation for poachers. I’ll get the men and we’ll cut them out, clean them and put them in the safe.’

  I nodded. ‘Good thinking. I’ll phone Wildlife and let them know what happened. They’re not going to be too happy with the way she died but I’ll speak to them about that as well. The carcass will stay here and there’ll be plenty of hyena and vulture activity for guests.’

  David started to say something, then paused. ‘Boss …’ again almost whispering, ‘you’re sure we’re not going to shoot Mnumzane?’

  The million-dollar question. One I didn’t have an answer for, so I decided to wing it. ‘I’ll go and find him and see what I can do. I need to spend time with him and try to work something out.’

  David looked at me, unconvinced, but it was the best I could come up with. We both stood and took a long hard look at the hulking grey carcass and then left in different directions. He was going to get the team to dehorn the once-magnificent creature. I was going to have a serious chat with Mnumzane.

  As we left I saw the calf trot out of the thicket she had been hiding in and stand vigil over her valiant dead mother. Mnumzane had really messed things up big time.

  It was another hour and a half before I found him browsing near the Gwala Gwala dam. I approached slowly, pulled up about thirty-five yards away, got out and leaned on the Land Rover’s hood unsheathing my binoculars. I didn’t call him, but he knew full well I was there. Instead he chose to ignore me and continue grazing which is exactly what I wanted. A swift scan of his body with the binoculars showed the scars of battle.

  Congealed blood revealed he had been gored in the chest and there were deep grazes and scrapes on both his flanks. This had not been a brief encounter; the battle had been fierce and long, probably only because he was not used to fighting. A veteran brawler of his size would have ended it with one thundering charge.

  There also must have been plenty of opportunities for the rhino to escape, but with a calf, that word was absent from her dictionary. She held her ground as her gallant species always do and paid the highest price for her stubbornness.

  Eventually he finished eating and looked at me.

  ‘Mnumzane!’ I called out sharply, focusing on connotation and intonation rather than volume. ‘Have you any idea of what you have done, you bloody fool?’

  I had never used that furious tone with him before. I needed him to understand I was extremely angry about the death of the rhino.

  ‘This is a big problem, for you, for me, and for everyone. What the hell got into you?’

  He stood motionless as I berated him, his stare static and it was only after I drove off that I saw him move away.

  From then on I tracked him daily, staying near him as much as possible, but if he approached I deliberately drove off. I could see that bugged him.

  Then through extreme good fortune I found him near the scene of the crime. I immediately drove to the rotting remains of the rhino still festering on the ground and making sure I was upwind of the intolerable smell and in a good getaway position, I gently called him.

  Obviously pleased to hear my usual genial tone of voice again, he ambled over towards me. I let him keep coming until he was right at the kill, and then leaned out the window and lambasted him in a firm and steady voice, stopping only when he uncharacteristically turned and walked off in the opposite direction.

  There are those who will say that all of this is nonsense; that of course elephants don’t understand … that I was wasting my time. But I believe Mnumzane got the message. He never hassled another rhino again, let alone killed one. Our relationship returned to normal and Mnumzane would again emerge for a chat in the bush again, like in the old days.

  He even, on occasion, came up to the house to say hell
o and there was no one more relieved than David.

  Shortly afterwards David knocked on my door, looking a little doleful.

  ‘Can I come in, boss?’

  ‘Sure. What’s up?’

  ‘My mum and dad are leaving the country. They’re going to England. Emigrating.’

  You could’ve knocked me over with a twig. David’s family came from pioneer Zululand stock and were well respected throughout the area. This must have been a big decision for them.

  David noticed my astonishment and smiled, almost embarrassedly.

  ‘That’s not all. I’m going with them.’

  This time I nearly did fall over. If I couldn’t visualize David’s family in England, I could do so even less with him. He was a man of the bush – something of which there is precious short supply in England. The wild was his element.

  ‘You’re sure it’s not khaki fever again?’ I asked smiling, remembering the last time he had left us was for a pretty English tourist who fancied hunky game rangers. That only lasted a month or so before he came charging back, asking for his old job.

  He laughed. ‘Not this time. It’s going to be hard for my mum and dad to adjust in a foreign country. I’m going along to help out.’

  I nodded, knowing how close he was to his family.

  ‘Anything we can do to make you stay?’

  ‘Afraid not, boss. It’s been a terribly difficult decision and as much as I’m going to miss Thula Thula and you guys, I have to go with my folks.’

  ‘We’re going to miss you too.’

  He left later that month. It was a melancholic day as I shook his hand for the last time as his ‘boss’.

  Being David, with his inextinguishable cheerfulness, he soon landed on his feet in Britain and joined the British Army. He was selected for an officer’s course at the world-famous Sandhurst Military Academy and did a tour of combat duty in Afghanistan as an officer – where I believe his outdoor skills and natural leadership skills helped make him a superb officer.