The Elephant Whisperer: My Life With the Herd in the African Wild by Lawrence Anthony (the ebook reader txt) 📕

A good illustration of this was the first time she held a banquet at Thula Thula for some Parisian friends and laid a table out on the front lawn. It was groaning with Camembert and Brie cheese, exotic fruit, freshly baked rolls, salamis, pâtés and decorated in the most splendid wreaths of scarlet, white and mauve bougainvillea you could imagine.

That I considered these, her favourite flowers, to be rampant alien invaders cut no ice with her at all. ‘Zey are exotic and beautiful, and must be protected,’ she had instructed Biyela the gardener. Biyela having fastidiously verified the translation with Ngwenya, thereafter defended the colourful bushes with typical Zulu tenacity, threatening me with whatever garden implement he was carrying whenever I appeared too close.

She was still laying out the table helped by a friend when a passing troop of monkeys swooped from the trees. Instead of merely chasing the mischievous animals away, Françoise and her companion fled into the house and resorted toshouting Gallic insults from behind a large plate-glass window.

Undeterred by the colourful language and unable to believe their luck, the troop settled in and leisurely devoured the best French cuisine in Zululand. Fortunately they didn’t have a taste for champagne, or else a few magnums of the good stuff would have gone down their gullets as well.

By the time Ngwenya and I had shooed them away it was too late. The monkeys had scattered into the trees grasping hunks of squelchy cheese and handfuls of pâté – not to mention every morsel of fruit and bread that had been laid out. The fact that I was almost paralysed with laughter didn’t help the situation much either.

But that was more than a year ago. Now she was much more comfortable in the bush and with her arms tight around my waist we rode through as shallow section of the Nseleni River to a high lookout point to see if we could find the elephants.

The hill had a panoramic view and we spotted them briefly in thick bush bordering the river below, close to where we had just come through. We must have missed them by fifty yards or so and it worried me that I hadn’t detected them – especially with Françoise riding pillion. I couldn’t shake that niggling unease as normally I’m able to sense when the elephants are around.

‘There they are again,’ I pointed, and we watched as the elephants loped into view about a mile away, moving in single file across the deep-green flood plain disappearing back into the riverbed.

‘They’re moving off. Let’s give them a bit of time to cross the river and go after them.’

About ten minutes later we rode back down the hill onto the flood plain and I slowly eased the bike down the cutting into the lazily flowing river, driving through with feet held high to avoid a drenching. Once on the other side, I gunnedthe motor to scramble up the steep incline and we shot to the top of the riverbank.

Absolute disaster! I suddenly became aware of huge grey shapes morphing all around us. Incredibly we had ridden bang into the middle of the herd! The elephants had stopped to graze right at the exit of the river crossing – something I had not anticipated as I had thought they were on the move.

Shock shuddered through my body. I suddenly felt minuscule, puny, unprotected on a tiny bike surrounded by edgy five-ton mammals. And even worse, I had Françoise with me. My throat tightened as my mind raced; how do I get out of this? With a river and steep bank behind and a herd of agitated elephants in front, the options were limited.

What was even more disconcerting was that we had also cut off Marula and Mabula, who were slightly behind us, from their mother Frankie. They panicked and started squealing loudly. And if there was one single thing that could aggravate our already dire predicament even more, it was getting between an aggressive female elephant and her frightened young.

We were in trouble. Deep trouble.

Nana who was a few yards away on our right took two menacing steps forward with her trunk held high, and then thankfully stopped and backed off. That was terrifying enough on its own, but the real problem was coming from behind her: Frankie.

I frantically tried to turn the bike and make a bolt for it, but the riverbank was too steep, the bike’s turning circle too wide. We were hopelessly trapped.

Trying to sound as unconcerned as possible, I said to Françoise, surprised that my voice was still steady, ‘I think we have a problem.’ I was absolutely horrified that I had placed her in such mortal danger.

By now Frankie was furiously reversing out of a thicket, trying to swivel and charge us. I drew my 9-mm pistol andhanded it to Françoise to protect herself if anything happened to me. Basically, it was a peashooter as far as an elephant was concerned, but as a last resort, a shot may distract Frankie.

I then stood up on the bike to face Frankie who was now coming directly at us – fast, furious and deadly. Clive Walker, the famous African game ranger, describes the experience superbly in his book Signs of the Wild. ‘An elephant charge is accompanied by the sound of screaming demons. Except perhaps for the prospect of imminent hanging, there is nothing that serves to concentrate the mind more wonderfully.’

That summed it up exactly. On Frankie thundered. I pleaded for this to be a mock charge, desperately looking for signs that she just wanted to scare us away from her young. The key indication of this was if her ears flapped out. But no – with mounting horror I watched her fold her ears back and roll up her trunk to take full impact when she hit. A rolled trunk meant she was going all the way. This was for real, and with that awful realization my sensations heightened surreally, like