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

in a slow-motion car crash. I heard someone hammering in the far-off village as if it was next door, while high above me I watched an eagle soaring and marvelled at its graceful flight, as if I had nothing better to do. I had never seen a sky so blue.

On she hurtled, her huge frame blotting out all else. Lifting my hands as high above my head as I could I started yelling at her, then began screaming at the monstrous sight in a last-ditch attempt to pierce her mist of rage.

Then just as I thought we were goners, her ears suddenly cracked out and she broke off and unrolled her trunk. But the massive momentum hurled her right up to the bike where she towered directly above us, glaring angrily through tiny eyes. I involuntarily sat down on the bike and looked up at the crinkled underside of Frankie’s throat in petrifiedwonder. She shook her huge head in frustration, showering us in the thick red dust from a recent sand bath and then backed off a few paces.

Marula and Mabula scampered past her. After making another two or three terrifyingly threatening gestures at us Frankie turned and followed her son and daughter into the bush, away from us.

I eased stiffly down off the saddle and turned to Françoise. Her eyes were tightly closed and I gently whispered that it was over. It was OK. The two of us sat still, too stunned to do or say anything.

Eventually I found the energy to start the bike and pulled off in the opposite direction to the herd. We drove through the bush which seemed so still after the charge, as if the birds and trees themselves knew what had happened.

Eventually we saw a truck carrying some visiting friends, waved them down and got off the quad bike. As they came across, Françoise started vividly describing what had just happened, gesticulating energetically. The only problem was she still had the cocked 9-mm pistol in her hand, finger on the trigger and each time she emphasized some dramatic point she waved the gun around. Our friends scattered for cover until I managed to retrieve the gun and cleared the breech.

Back home I told the astonished staff what had happened. ‘I can’t believe you’re still alive,’ said David, whistling through his teeth. ‘She must have made a conscious decision not to kill you. Why do you think she did that?’

A good question. Elephants rarely break off once they’re at full steam and I still couldn’t believe that Frankie had actually halted at the last minute. Why had she changed gears, dropping down from a lethal real attack to a mock charge? It was virtually unheard of.

The next day I got on the bike and drove back to the river crossing where we had so nearly lost our lives to try tofigure it out. I needed some answers. But try as I might, the crucial moments of the charge were a total blank, as if my mind couldn’t grapple with the horror.

So I retraced our route, driving through the same river crossing several times, mentally scrolling over the incident again and again. Slowly the details started fleshing out. I remembered I had been standing on the bike and screaming as she charged. But what was I yelling? My mind was still a void.

Then in an instant it came flooding back. I was screaming, ‘Stop, stop, it’s me, it’s me!’

That was all. In retrospect it sounds rather ludicrous, but that’s exactly what happened. To shout ‘It’s me’ at a charging elephant, the most aggressive female in a herd protecting her panicked babies is about as lame as it gets. Yet it stopped her, and I knew then that she had somehow recognized me from the boma. I still believe she had spared our lives because she had witnessed her matriarch’s interaction with me the day before I let them out.

chapter fifteen

‘The power’s down again,’ said David with a grimace, ‘this time on the western boundary.’

We were having endless problems with the fence. Our electrified border was temperamental and unreliable, given to more mood swings and irrational behaviour than a menopausal rhino. Everything affected it. Too much rain drowned the current. Too little rain affected conductivity. Lightning struck it with regular monotony, sparking out the voltage. Hyena, bushpig and warthog constantly dug holes beneath it, shorting the circuit. These were just some of the obvious problems; sometimes I swear it went down just because it damn well felt like it. It certainly didn’t make our task of keeping a herd of angry elephants – one of which had just charged me – inside the reserve any easier.

We had also just discovered that both Nana and Frankie had been impregnated by the dominant bull sometime before leaving the previous reserve. As elephants have such bulk, it’s often difficult to tell early on when they are carrying, but it had by now become obvious that our two adult females were gestating.

Consequently, rule number one on the reserve was that the power always had to be on or we risked losing the elephant. Not that they were trying to escape any more, but all it took was for Nana to be walking near the boundary and sense that there was no power – and who knows whatwould happen? That meant there were mandatory dawn and dusk inspections along the entire twenty-mile perimeter, and often others during the day as well. We never went to bed with the fence not fully operational.

The problem this time was not only that the power was down, the Land Rover also wouldn’t start and it was getting dark.

‘No problem,’ said David. ‘I’ll take the tractor.’

I looked across at Gunda Gunda, the onomatopoeic Zulu name for our faithful twenty-year-old beast. She was reliable all right and would do the job but she had no headlights and a twenty-mile bush drive in the dark without night vision can be a hairy ordeal.

The African wilderness is merciless