The Elephant Whisperer: My Life With the Herd in the African Wild (32 page)

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Authors: Lawrence Anthony,Graham Spence

BOOK: The Elephant Whisperer: My Life With the Herd in the African Wild
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Something strange was going on with Mnumzane. It happened out of the blue. A young ranger was on a game drive with two guests, a married couple, when they rounded a sharp corner and unexpectedly ran into him coming in the opposite direction.
He started ambling over. The ranger panicked and reversed too fast, smashing into a tree. They were stuck with Mnumzane coming straight for them. To the frightened ranger’s credit he didn’t reach for the rifle. Instead he told his passengers to sit tight and make no sound as Mnumzane strode up to the vehicle. I know first-hand that this is one of the most frightening sights imaginable. A six-ton bull literally breathing down your spine is something else all right. Then he lightly bumped the Land Rover and his tusk actually grazed one of the guest’s arms. Somehow the man didn’t scream.
Showing great presence of mind, the Zulu tracker jumped off his seat on the front of the vehicle and sneaked around to the other side, surreptitiously helping the guests off the vehicle. They all fled into the bush. Mnumzane fiddled around the Land Rover for a bit without causing any damage, and then moved off. Once they were sure he was gone, they crept out of their hiding places and drove at speed back to the lodge.
From initial accounts, Mnumzane was just being inquisitive
rather than aggressive. The ranger also played the incident down, so I didn’t take it too seriously. I only got the full story months later when I was phoned by the couple.
After that encounter, Mnumzane started on occasion approaching our open guest game-drive vehicles. But again, the reports I got was that he was never angry, just curious. It was not dangerous as the rangers would merely drive away as soon as he approached. The bigger problem was that this was totally out of character; he simply was not behaving as an elephant should. Elephants automatically ignore us humans as long as we don’t move into their space.
Then I discovered the reason for his sudden interest in game-drive vehicles. Prompted by a few pointed questions, a staff member told me that two of our young rangers had been teasing the bull, driving up and playing ‘chicken’ with him, daring each other to see who could get nearest then speeding away when he approached. They had seen me with Mnumzane before – totally without my knowledge as my interactions with him were deliberately kept private – and thought that they would also try to get up close. It never occurred to these two idiots that taunting the ultimate alpha male from a game-drive vehicle that normally carried guests on viewing safaris was teaching him a terribly bad habit. Both rangers had resigned before I found this out and hopefully they have since embarked on careers far removed from wildlife.
The most non-negotiable rule on the reserve was that no one was allowed to have any self-initiated contact with the elephants. Anyone who disobeyed that law would be instantly dismissed. Perhaps my biggest failure was to trust that all my carefully chosen staff had the same ingrained ethics and common sense that David and Brendan had shown. Sadly, that does not always hold true.
A little later a trainee lodge manager left without notice. The dust had barely settled as he sped from the reserve
when I heard that he too had been using a game-drive Land Rover to approach Mnumzane, trying to imitate my call. These were the worst possible scenarios. Mnumzane had always been a very special case and the continuous teasing by strangers was dangerously altering his attitude to humans. He considered the shouting and revving of engines as a direct challenge and as a result game drives were forced to move off whenever they saw him. My concern was mounting.
I had also just bought a brand-new white Land Rover station wagon. The faithful old battered bush-green Landy had now gone around the clock a good few times and had to be retired, her innards due to be cannibalized for other vehicles. It was a sad day for me. The well-weathered seat, the simplistic dashboard, the worn-smooth gear stick, the bush-smell of the cabin … I loved her.
Taking delivery of this spanking new vehicle, I decided to do a test drive in really rough terrain to see if she was as rugged as my old Landy. She performed beautifully off-road, but eventually a tight copse of trees forced me to make an extremely tight 360-degree turn. I had just about completed this when suddenly I felt unaccountably apprehensive.
An instant later Mnumzane towered next to me. He had appeared silently from the shadows as only an elephant can and was just standing there. I looked up into his eyes and my heart skipped a beat. His pupils were cold as stones and I quickly called out his name, repeatedly greeting him. It took ten chilling seconds before he started relaxing. I completed the turn, talking continuously to him as he gradually settled down and let me go.
I drove off with a heavy heart. Things were not the same any more. Perhaps his aggression had been because he had not recognized the new vehicle. I fervently hoped so. But he shouldn’t be approaching any of our vehicles, let alone acting aggressively towards them. My entire interaction with
Mnumzane was based on an intensely private, personal interplay between us, whereas now for the first time since arriving at Thula Thula he was being teased by rogue rangers.
Then in another incident our lodge manager Mabona was driving up to the house when Mnumzane appeared from nowhere and blocked her path. Doing exactly as she had been trained, she cut the engine and sat motionless. Mnumzane moved to the back and leaned on the car, shattering the rear window. The crackling glass surprised him and he backed off, giving Mabona enough time to turn the key and accelerate away.
After this we hacked out a dozen or so outlets on the road to the lodge where vehicles could rapidly reverse and turn if necessary. I also had all encroaching bush on the track cleared so we could see Mnumzane before he got too close.
This worked. The game drivers were avoiding him and the road to the lodge – the reserve’s most travelled route – had easy escape routes. Mnumzane now had no contact whatsoever with any human except me. Best of all, any idiotic ranger activity had now been completely rooted out.
In short, everything started returning to normal.
But I was still worried. I began spending more time with him again, trying to reassure him and get him to settle down. With me he was always the same friendly accommodating giant that I loved. He seemed OK.
However, my senior rangers remained unhappy and shook their heads when I told them this. ‘That’s only with you,’ they would say. ‘He trusts you, but it’s very different for the rest of us.’ They wouldn’t go near him and all walking safaris were stopped if he was anywhere in the area.
A few weeks later a journalist and good friend asked to film me interacting with Mnumzane. I very rarely do this
and eventually agreed only on condition that the camera crew’s vehicle was out of Mnumzane’s sight and no one spoke during the entire episode.
We found him and I drove forward and got out of my new Land Rover leaving a young ranger in the back of the vehicle. I called out and Mnumzane started ambling over. I had some slices of bread in my pocket to throw to the side when I wanted to leave. I had recently taken to doing this with Mnumzane … much as I dearly love him, when on foot I would only turn my back on him if he’s distracted.
As he approached I studied his demeanour and decided he was fine. We had a wonderful ten minutes or so interacting, chatting about life – well, me doing that while Mnumzane contentedly browsed – and as I decided to leave I put my hand in my pocket for the bread. However, it had hooked in the material of my trousers and I looked down trying to yank the slices out.
At that moment it was me, not Mnumzane, who was distracted. He suddenly moved right up against me and I got the fright of my life. For not only was he almost on top of me, his entire mood had changed. Something behind me had disturbed him, possibly the young ranger in the Landy and he wanted to get at him. There was malevolence in the air.
I hastily threw the bread on the ground and thankfully he moved over to snuffle it up as I retreated.
By the time I got back to the film crew my heart was pounding like a bongo drum. I knew his temper was on a knife edge; something had changed with him.
I would soon realize by how much.
 
A few weeks later I was taking some VIP visitors on a game drive in my Landy as the sun was setting and we spotted Heidi, the rhino orphaned as a calf by Mnumzane years
ago, slinking into the bush. We were crawling along at five miles per hour when out of the twilight the herd appeared, crossing the road fifty yards ahead.
‘Elephant,’ I said, switching on the spotlights.
It was the first time my two passengers had seen an elephant, let alone a herd, and their excitement attested, as always, to the ancient bewitchment of Africa. I switched off the engine to let them savour the moment, perhaps one they would not experience again.
Then I saw Mnumzane bringing up the rear. I knew he was now in musth, a sexual condition where a bull elephant’s testosterone levels shoot up by an incredible fifty times and this is when bulls can become dangerously unpredictable, especially when following females as he was doing now. I never dared interact with any bull in musth. It was just too volatile. Anyway I was with guests, so it was out of the question.
Nana was leading her family towards Croc Pools and I waited for about five minutes to make sure they were well off the road before I started the Land Rover and again moved forwards.
Suddenly the man in the passenger seat started shouting: ‘Elephant! Elephant!’
The yell shook me rigid. What was he on about? The elephants were gone. I strained my eyes searching the headlight-illuminated track in front, unable to see anything.
‘Elephant!’ he shouted again, pointing to his side window.
It was Mnumzane, barely three yards away in the dark. Prompted by the loud noise he stepped forward and lowered his massive head right onto the window as if to see what all the shouting was about and with instant dread I saw his eyes. They were stone cold and there was malevolence in the air.
Mnumzane then prodded the window with his trunk, testing its resilience. Realizing that at any second he was
going to shatter through and in the process crush my passenger, I slammed the vehicle into reverse while desperately pleading with the two men to calm down. All I managed to do by reversing was to skid Mnumzane’s tusk across the glass, snagging it at the edge of the door with a jarring bang. He lifted his head and trumpeted in rage. With that I knew we were now in grave danger. As far as Mnumzane was concerned, the car had ‘attacked’ him. In retaliation, he swung in front of us and hammered the bull bar so hard my head smacked the windscreen as we shot forward like crash-test dummies. Then he put his huge head on the bull bar and violently bulldozed us back twenty yards into the bush only stopping when the rear wheels jammed against a fallen tree.
I opened my window and screamed at him, but it was tantamount to yelling at a tornado in the dark. I watched in horror as he backed off sideways to give himself space to build up speed then lost sight of him as he moved out of the headlights. At least the guests had stopped yelling. All three of us were now deathly silent.
There was only one way out. As he set himself up for the charge I revved until the engine was screaming and dropped the clutch, trying to wrench the Landy out of his way. Too late. He came at us out of nowhere in an enraged charge. The shock of the colossal impact jarred my teeth as he smashed his tusks into the side of the Landy just behind the back door and then heaved us up and over.
Ka-bang!
The Landy smashed down, landed on its side, then flipped over onto its roof and into a thicket as he drove on with his relentless attack. Another almighty charge flipped us back onto our side.
My shoulder was lying on the grass through the broken side window and the guest in the passenger seat was practically on top of me. My head hurt terribly from the strike on the windscreen as I tried to gather my senses. I wasn’t
injured but my biggest concern was that this wasn’t over. In fact, our ordeal was in its infancy. Bull elephants have a terrifying reputation of finishing off what they start. To confirm this, just inches away Mnumzane stomped around the upturned vehicle in a rage.
I had to snap him out of his red mist and amid all the confusion I somehow remembered that elephants that have been exposed to gunfire sometimes freeze when they hear shots. I also knew that it could go the other way, that the gunfire could prompt a final lethal attack, but I had no choice.
Twisting around, I drew Françoise’s tiny .635 pistol from my pocket just as the Landy shuddered with another titanic blow. I pointed at the sky through the broken windscreen and fired … again and again and again. I fought the compulsion to fire all eight shots in the magazine. My last-ditch plan was that if he got to us I would shoot the final four slugs into his foot and hope like hell it hurt enough to divert his attention and we could somehow get out and run for our lives.
To my eternal relief he froze. It had worked. As he hesitated I called out to him but I was trembling so much my voice was way off-key. I gulped lungful after lungful of oxygen until everything steadied and tried speaking again. As my voice calmed, he recognized me and his ears dropped; the anger visibly melting from his body.

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