The Elephant Whisperer: My Life With the Herd in the African Wild (33 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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I then told him it was OK, that it was me, and he had frightened the hell out of me – that he didn’t need to be angry any more. Thankfully he recognized my voice and slowly came right up to where I lay on my side in the cab. His feet, practically the size of dustbin lids, were literally inches from my head. All he had to do was lift his foot onto the flimsy cab and that would be it. I aimed my puny gun at his foot and then watched entranced as he pulled out shards of the shattered windscreen, then gently reached in and put
his trunk onto my shoulder and head, touching me, smelling me all over. All the while I talked to him, telling him we were in terrible danger and that he must be careful.
He could not have been more gentle. Eventually he walked off and started browsing on a nearby tree as if nothing had happened.
‘The radio, the radio!’ whispered one of the guests. ‘Call for help!’
I reached for the mouthpiece only to find that the radio had been smashed off its hinges. In the darkness I found it and fumblingly reconnected the wires and got it going, whispering a Code Red, describing where we were and what had happened, and then turned the volume right down. I didn’t want any loud responses to unsettle our precarious situation with Mnumzane.
Françoise took the call and relayed the bush version of a Mayday to get to us fast. Luckily there were rangers on a night-time-viewing safari close by who had heard the shots and they were with us in minutes. But whenever they approached, Mnumzane started challenging their vehicle, keeping them away.
I knew they carried a rifle and whispered strict instructions into the radio that despite how bad everything looked, under absolutely no circumstances was Mnumzane to be shot. They must just wait until he left.
But he wouldn’t leave. Each time he came to the vehicle, one of the guests would panic and frantically climb over chairs to the opposite side of the Landy station wagon. This was prompting his interest and he would walk round and bump the vehicle making the poor man scramble back again. It was horrifying lying there absolutely helpless in the dark with this giant stomping around outside hitting the vehicle. Every now and then I would call out to him and he would come around to my side and stand quietly for a while, and then go back and continue worrying the guest. On top of
that he kept circling our upturned vehicle, chasing off the rangers coming to our aid.
Then as I started to despair, I heard the ranger anxiously calling out on the radio, ‘The herd is here, the whole herd is here … They’re coming straight towards you. Oh my God, they’re going to your Landy, what must we do? Over.’
‘Nothing,’ I replied, relieved. ‘Just wait.’
This was good news, not bad as the ranger thought. Leaning forward out of the vehicle I could just see Nana and Frankie followed by the herd and I called out to them repeatedly.
But unusually they ignored me completely. Without breaking stride, they walked right past us and then, to my astonishment, surrounded Mnumzane, jostling him away from us. He could easily have butted them off – he certainly had the strength – but amazingly he didn’t. From my cramped horizontal position on the ground I could hear their stomachs rumbling. I have no idea what the communications were, but moments later Mnumzane stopped his aggressive vigil over the wrecked Land Rover and left with them.
When they were about fifty yards away the rangers sped up, climbed on top of the Land Rover and pulled us out via the smashed side windows, one by one. Thankfully, incredibly, no one was hurt.
As we drove off I watched the elephants walking with Mnumzane, the undisputed dominant bull, submissively in tow. Given that adult bulls are loners, it was most unusual to see him herding with them. I had no doubt Nana understood what was going on and that she and Frankie had intervened to get him away. Not only for our good but for his. She had probably saved our lives.
But as we passed by some forty yards off, Mnumzane lifted his head sharply and took some angry steps towards us. That he again showed aggression towards the safari
Land Rover concerned me infinitely more than my wrecked vehicle. I had a big problem on my hands.
Back at the lodge Françoise gave me a fierce hug and ushered the guests to the bar. One, a lifelong teetotaller, gulped down three double whiskies before uttering a word.
Despite the drama, no one had a scratch.
My brand-new Land Rover was not so fortunate. The bemused insurance company took one look at the wreck and assigned it to the scrapheap. They had never before paid out a claim for an ‘elephant incident’.
Our traumatic escape had me going in a dozen different directions trying to figure out what to do. Predictably the ‘I told you so’ brigade kicked off with a vengeance with some wildlife experts saying that Mnumzane should be put down immediately; that he was an accident waiting to happen; and that if I didn’t do it now, someone was going to get killed.
Once again I rose to his defence and justified the series of events, saying that all he had done was come to my vehicle as he had done hundreds of times before. He had then become confused by strange voices shouting and being in musth he had lost it when the Landy suddenly reversed and hit his tusk. The proof was as soon as he heard my voice he stopped his craziness and actually came to me, pulling out the windscreen fragments and snuffling his trunk over me to check if I was OK.
I refused to shoot him and instead started to put into place other measures to ensure his and everyone else’s safety. The rangers were experienced enough to take care of themselves. It was the lodge staff driving back and forth that concerned me, so we cleared out every inch of bush and shrubbery for thirty yards on each side of all roads between the house and the lodge. Now if he was anywhere near the track he could be seen from a long way off. At night I had a
ranger drive well ahead of any staff vehicle with a spotlight to check if he was around.
But there was no need as he had gone deep into the bush alone and stayed there, almost as if atoning for his outburst.
The herd, on the other hand, were just being wild elephants, doing things that contented elephants do such as pulling down whole trees for grazing, wallowing in mudbaths and providing great game viewing. Even ET had settled down and I took solace from this success. After a few weeks of no trouble I dared to start thinking that Mnumzane had learned something from the incident and could be saved.
Then early one morning I was radioed by a safari drive ranger to say that he had a breakdown and had left the Land Rover in the bush to go and get parts. When he returned, the vehicle had been smashed off the road and overturned.
‘Stay right there,’ I radioed back with a deep sense of foreboding. ‘I’m on my way.’
But even before I got there, I knew what had happened. Mnumzane’s spoor was all over the place. He had found the stationary vehicle and destroyed it, flipping it upside down and smashing it off the road. Despondently I surveyed the damage.
A safari Land Rover is an open vehicle to facilitate game viewing. It has no roof, and if turned over like this one had been, people could get killed. Mnumzane had attacked an empty Landy for no reason and therefore would surely attack one with passengers in it as well.
I fruitlessly tried to find justifications; anything to put off the inevitable but there was no way out. It was over and I knew it. He was completely out of control. In fact, in virtually any other reserve, he would have been put down immediately after killing the rhino never mind also flipping the Land Rover, and now it was a guest game-drive vehicle as well.
I took a slow lonely drive home and called a friend.
‘I need to borrow your .375,’ I asked, numbed by the words coming out of my mouth.
‘Sure, why?’ came the reply.
‘Nothing major, thanks. I’ll have it back by tomorrow.’
‘No problem.’ Then he paused, ‘Are you OK?’
‘I’m fine, I’ll see you later.’
I put the phone down, appalled at my decision but I knew in my heart we had reached the end of the road. If I left it any longer someone was going to die.
My .303 would probably suffice but the task was difficult enough as it was and I didn’t want to make any mistakes. I wanted maximum firepower so I drove into town, collected the rifle and eight rounds of 286 grain monolithic solid ammunition. Without telling anyone, I went out onto an adjacent property, marked a tree and fired three shots, sighting the rifle to make sure it was perfectly on target. An hour later I found my big boy grazing peacefully near the river.
At the sound of my car he looked up and came ambling over, pleased to see me as always. Feeling absolutely treacherous, I got out, readied the rifle on the open door and took aim, his familiar features looking completely out of place in the telescopic sight. As he arrived I was still standing there, wracked by emotion, unable to pull the trigger … tears flowing freely.
I couldn’t do it. I stuffed the rifle in the car as he stood by, warmly radiating greetings in that special way he had. I gathered myself and said goodbye to him for the last time, telling him we would see each other again one day. A few moments later I drove off leaving him standing there, palpably bewildered by my hasty departure.
The next morning two sharpshooters I had earlier phoned arrived. I watched as they sighted their rifles on a target in a riverbed. This is absolutely essential when hunting dangerous
game – you have to ensure your rifle is absolutely on target. These were retired professional hunters, now conservationists who knew exactly what they were doing.
‘So you’re not coming with us?’ asked one of them, an old friend of mine. ‘You sure you don’t want to do this yourself?’
‘I tried. I know him too well.’ My voice was dead.
‘Yeah, I heard about that. It’s amazing, what happened.’
‘He’s now completely lost the plot,’ I said, not wanting to go into the details.
‘I understand,’ he said, giving me a brief pat on the shoulder.
An hour later I was standing outside on the lawn looking over the reserve that I loved so much when I heard two distant shots. As the finality of it came crashing home I was seized by a terrible loneliness, both for my beautiful boy and for myself. After nine years of friendship I had failed. He had gone to join his mother whose violent death just before he came to Thula Thula he never really recovered from.
I forced myself to go to where Mnumzane’s immense body was lying, the hunters nearby. I was pleased he hadn’t fallen badly, lying on his side as if asleep.
‘It was painless. He was dead before he hit the ground,’ said Peter. ‘But we had a bit of a fright at the last moment as he suddenly came at us and it was touch and go. There’s something wrong with that elephant. You made the right decision.’
I looked at the magnificent body, the ground and sky still pulsing with his presence.
‘Goodbye, great one,’ I said and got back into the Landy and went to call the herd, to bring them, to let them see what I had done.
What I had had to do.
‘These things always seem to happen in threes,’ I thought mournfully a couple of days later, pondering over the deaths of baby Thula, Max and now Mnumzane in the space of little over a year. The bush, though, is a great place to regain perspective and I was comforted by the belief that although they were gone physically, they would always be part of this eternal piece of Africa. Their bones would always be in this soil.
With the exception of elephants and crocodiles which can live a man’s three score years and ten, animals generally do not live long. In the wild, everything is continuously regenerated. Lions only live about fifteen years, as do impala, nyala and kudu. Zebra and wildebeest can reach twenty and giraffe a little more. Many smaller animals and birds live very short lives indeed; insects sometimes only weeks.
Each spring the bush comes alive with pulsating new life as Thula Thula morphs into a giant nursery, tended by thousands of caring mothers of all shapes and sizes, all bringing a new generation into the world. And they need to, for regardless of its vitality, wildlife succumbs rapidly. Despite its infinite beauty, the wilderness is a hostile environment and only the fittest, wisest and luckiest reach old age. Death is an integral part of life. This is the dominant bush reality and I like it that way. It’s natural, uncluttered by materialism or artificial ethics and it helps me to maintain a
wholesome perspective of my own existence and that of my friends and family.
I was sitting on a termite mound near a grove of acacias, still deep in thought when a Land Rover approached and Vusi, who had been my ‘guinea-pig’ ranger in initiating walking safaris with elephants – or running safaris, as was sometimes the case in those experimental days – got out. A powerfully built man with steely self-assurance whom I had just promoted to senior ranger, he told me he had just driven past Mnumzane’s body.
He paused for a moment, looking at me directly. ‘There was only one tusk.’
I instantly snapped out of my reverie. ‘What do you mean only one! Where’s the other?’
‘It’s gone. Stolen.’
‘How did that happen?’ I was shocked to the core.
‘It was there yesterday evening. I saw it myself, and today it’s gone.’ He continued staring at me, a rare gesture for rural Zulus whose culture demands that eyes be averted. I think he was as shocked as I was.
‘We searched for hundreds of yards around the body. Then I had every inch of the fence checked and there are no holes cut by poachers. Nobody broke in last night.’
I stared back, astounded.
‘Also I advised security and every car today has been searched. I didn’t want to tell you until I was sure.’
‘That’s unbelievable,’ I said, thinking back to our early poaching days, ‘I mean … who the hell took it then?’
‘It’s still on the reserve,’ replied Vusi confidently. ‘It’s one of the staff and it has been hidden somewhere here. Someone with a vehicle. I saw the lights near the body last night, but it was gone before I got halfway.’
Just then Ngwenya walked up carrying the second tusk over his shoulder and lowered it heavily onto the ground.
‘There is something that will interest you,’ said Vusi,
abandoning the topic of the theft. ‘Feel here,’ he knelt down next to the magnificent piece of ivory, his fingers running lightly over its length. ‘There is a bad crack.’
I crouched next to him. I had always known that the tip of Mnumzane’s tusk had a slight crack, but as this is fairly common among elephants, I didn’t worry much about it.
But then I followed the path of Vusi’s fingers with my own and whistled. On closer inspection the crack was much bigger and deeper than I had realized; in fact the tusk was splayed right open at the end and the blackened interior was visible. A tusk is just an extended tooth. And just as with a human, a break like that in a living tooth is a magnet for infection and absolute torture, as anyone who has ever had an abscess will attest.
‘
Yebo
, Mkhulu,’ said Vusi. ‘There was a big swelling right at the top of the tusk, deep inside. I cut it open. It was rotten.’
I whistled again, for now everything made perfect sense. Poor Mnumzane had been in so much pain for so long that he just couldn’t stand it any more. That’s why he became so evil-tempered. And, I suddenly realized, that’s exactly why he went berserk and flipped the Land Rover over. When I reversed I jarred his excruciatingly sensitive tusk on the edge of the Landy’s window. He must have seen blinding stars in his agony. It took the gunshots from my pistol just to yank him out of it.
I sat down on the lawn and put my head in my hands. Although unusual to do with a wild elephant, all it would have taken was a dart of sedative, a good vet and some antibiotics and we could probably have taken his pain away. And he would have still been with us. A picture of him contentedly browsing before me during our ‘chats’ flashed through my mind. He basically had been a happy creature – despite the tragedies he had witnessed in his short life.
I shook myself out of it, forced myself to focus and then stood up. There was nothing I could do about it now.
‘Let’s get the tusk cleaned and then store it in a safe place,’ I said to Vusi. ‘Now at last we know what happened to him and why he went crazy.’
‘
Yebo
, Mkhulu.’
‘And let’s find that other tusk!’
I walked away astonished that one of my own staff could even think of stealing Mnumzane’s tusk at a time like this. I had wanted them mounted as a pair in the lodge as a commemoration of his life.
We never found the tusk. But that doesn’t mean I’m not still looking.
 
That afternoon I received a surprise phone call from
Nkosi
Biyela. We had been in regular contact, but more often than not through his
izindunas
, headmen, as intermediaries.
‘I would like to meet with you,’ he said cheerfully. ‘I will come to Thula Thula tomorrow afternoon late.’
‘I look forward to it,’ I replied heartened by the call, ‘and may I make a suggestion? Please bring your wife and stay the night with us at the lodge as our guests.’
‘Yes, good idea, thank you. It will give us time to talk about our game-reserve project. I will see you tomorrow then.’
The game reserve, the Royal Zulu, was the main reason I had come to Thula Thula all those years ago. My heart jumped – especially as he had referred to it as ‘our project’, which was a first since the project had first been presented to his father Nkanyiso Biyela twelve years ago. I had pursued the vision relentlessly but as so often happens in Africa, the delays and complications at times seemed insurmountable.
Nkosi
Biyela was the key to its success as he was by far the most powerful chief in the area and controlled the biggest chunk of the land. And he wanted to talk!
That afternoon he arrived and we drove through the reserve on a late Zululand afternoon, observing the lush wilderness and robust wildlife and talking about the future.
‘Whose land is that?’ asked the
Nkosi
pointing to a stretch of heavy bush just outside our boundary.
‘It is yours.’
‘Good! Then I would like to join it with you,’ he said. Simple as that.
I realized he wanted to continue and held off a reply. He then got out of the Landy and looked around, pointing to the KZN Wildlife reserve that adjoined Thula Thula to the north.
‘That I know is Fundimvelo. It was my grandfather’s land. They have offered it to me. I will take it back and join with you. We will then do the joint project you have spoken of for the benefit of my people.’ Again, simple as that.
‘Thank you,
Nkosi
.’
‘Now the Ntambanana land, why are they taking so long in releasing it to us?’ he asked, referring to the tract of bush and thorn on my western boundary. Ntambanana was originally land excised by the apartheid government from various tribes some decades ago and was now being returned. The Biyelas had the biggest claim over it, and so for
Nkosi
Biyela to query why this process was taking so long meant that the project was now going to get massive impetus from him.
‘I do not know,
Nkosi
. It worries me as well.’
‘We must start pushing them now,’ he said, referring to the local government. And when
Nkosi
Biyela talks about ‘pushing’, it certainly gets people’s attention.
In those few minutes – completely out of the blue – he had described most of the land that made up my dream African game reserve, but not all of it. There was one last piece of the jigsaw, the most important piece: Mlosheni, an 8,000-acre section which ran north from Ntambanana right
up to the White Umfolozi River, the gateway to the worldfamous Umfolozi game reserve. Once we had that, we could lower fences with the Umfolozi reserve and have a massive tract of pristine Africa.
‘Mlosheni,’ I said, then hesitated.
‘What of Mlosheni?’
‘Mlosheni will join us to the Umfolozi reserve. It is important.’
‘Of course! I have spoken with my
izinduna
, it is already agreed,’ he said matter-of-factly. ‘The animals will migrate as they used to before the apartheid government put up the fences.’
I reached out and we shook hands. I was elated, scarcely able to believe what I was hearing. This project would do more for his people than anything that had ever happened before and my mind raced, assessing the benefits to wildlife as well.
Nkosi
Biyela would lead a coalition of traditional communities into a brave new world.
I knew too that while this agreement represented a fundamental breakthrough that had been twelve years in the making, there was still a lot of work to be done and many lengthy tribal meetings lay ahead. But at long last he was fully committed – now we would win. His word was absolutely crucial; it was without question what we needed most. Everything now could start happening.
That evening in the lodge we continued discussing the Royal Zulu project and what it could do to regenerate our area. I felt the gloom of Mnumzane’s death lift; his soaring spirit would be part of a magnificent new reserve that would be Africa as it should be: wild, beautiful, with people and animals living in harmony. Indeed, to me the new reserve would be a monument not only to Mnumzane but to Max and baby Thula as well, who had also shown in spades the qualities most needed in the fight for our last remaining wild lands – courage, loyalty, and above all, perseverance.
It was an evening I will remember for the rest of my days – a vision of what Africa can be. And not least thanks to the cooperation of a remarkable leader,
Nkosi
Biyela. This new reserve, imbued with Zulu history dating from their first king, Shaka Zulu, will kickstart the area both physically with job creation and investment, and spiritually with a true wilderness ethos. One only has to look at the comments in the guestbook at Thula Thula to see how often tourists remark on the spiritual effect the wild has had on them during their stay. Now with
Nkosi
Biyela onside, the final major barrier had been removed. Royal Zulu would at last become a reality and, I hope, a cornerstone of conservation in Africa.
The next morning, after a hefty breakfast with the
Nkosi
during which his enthusiasm for the new project seemed, if anything, even more animated, I switched on the TV news. The looming war against Saddam Hussein in Iraq was being ratcheted up by the hour. It seemed now that an invasion was inevitable. But that morning the news also featured a clip on the Kabul Zoo in Afghanistan and filling the entire screen was a lion, blind in one eye with a tormented face full of shrapnel. A Taliban soldier had thrown a grenade at him. Somehow he’d survived. His name was Marjan. His pock-scabbed face, his baleful, accusing stare seared into my soul. This truly was the reality of animals caught up helplessly – faultlessly – in the vicious vortex of man’s folly. More graphic than any words, that awful image was an indictment of our species. Something snapped in my mind. My anger gnawed corrosively at my innards. I knew I had to get to Iraq and make sure the same thing didn’t happen to the creatures at the Baghdad Zoo, the biggest menagerie in the Middle East.
Ten days later, during the coalition invasion, I was in the bomb-blasted Iraqi capital. It didn’t long take to grasp the enormity of the task before me and I needed a good man at
my side. It took one phone call, and a few weeks later Brendan arrived.
Brendan was with me in those crucial first few months when we saved the last remaining animals in the zoo and elsewhere in Baghdad. He then stayed in the Iraqi capital for more than a year after I left doing absolutely critical work in making sure the animals were well cared for.
After that he went to Kabul where he also did sterling stuff in advising the Afghans on how to improve their zoo. Sadly, Marjan had died long before he arrived. In the process, he left Thula Thula. But I take immense pride in the fact that he had been part of the journey with us, both at Thula Thula and internationally.
Like David, he was integral to what we achieved.
He still comes ‘home’ to us for regular visits.

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