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

‘Mkhulu! Mbomvu! We are in danger; the elephants are trying to kill us.’

It was Bheki breathlessly shouting out the emergency Mbomvu – Code Red, the bush equivalent of Mayday.

I grabbed the radio.

‘Mkhulu standing by. What’s your position?’

‘We are at the fence near the river where it leaves the reserve. The elephants are chasing us. We are running. Mkhulu, it is bad!’

I could hear the panic rising in the normally stoic ranger’svoice. They were many miles away on the other side of the reserve and there was no chance we could get to them in time. The herd had certainly moved along quickly to be so far away from our house. A few hours earlier they had been trampling Françoise’s garden flat.

‘How close are they?’ I shouted into the radio.

‘They are here. She is trying to kill us! The big ones want to kill us!’

Bheki is a hugely experienced ranger and the horror in his voice startled me. He also is one of the toughest men I know.

‘Get out, Bheki!’ I yelled into the radio. ‘Take your men through the fence, cut it or find a place and go under.’

‘Ngwenya is out already. We are trying to go under.’

Then I heard two shots over the radio.

‘Shit! Bheki what’s happening? Who’s shooting?’

‘It’s Ngwenya. He’s shooting …’ The radio went off in mid sentence.

‘Go! Just get out!’ I shouted, desperately trying to make contact, but Bheki’s radio stayed dead.

David who had been listening ran off and brought the Land Rover over, driving across Françoise’s mutilated garden to our front door. I climbed in and he pulled off cursing the Landy’s infamously wide turning circle as he spun the wheels through the soft sand of demolished flower beds and sped for the gate.

‘Bheki, Bheki come in, come in.’

But there was no reply. The radio remained ominously silent for the forty minutes it took us to hurry across the reserve, bouncing across the ridged tracks at breakneck speed, not knowing what we would find, and not daring to imagine the worst.

Then about a hundred yards from the fence I saw the herd milling about restlessly. On the other side, barely visible in the thick bush huddled Bheki and his men. I did aquick head-count, first of the rangers, and then the elephant and exhaled deeply in absolute relief. They were all there.

Frankie noticed us first and angrily lifted her foot, stamping the ground until it trembled, shaking her mighty head. She was extremely agitated by whatever had happened and was letting us know it.

We pulled over and called out to the rangers who gingerly emerged from the thicket, all eyes on the herd now starting to move off.

‘Are you OK?’ I asked. ‘What happened?’

‘Ayish … Mkhulu, these elephant are crazy,’ Ngwenya said with a sweep of his arm at the departing herd. ‘We found them here on the fence and they wanted to kill us. They charged us and we ran and ran but they chased us. Then just as we thought we were finished, we found the stream that goes under the fence and we crawled out. The electricity was biting us but we had to go on. My radio is finished. It was in the water.’

I took out a pair of pliers, snipped the fence and lifted the electric wires with a stick so they could crawl back into the reserve.

‘You were lucky,’ I said, as I rejoined the severed fence. ‘Now you have seen up close how dangerous these elephants are. Tell the others, tell everyone working here to keep their eyes open and stay far away from them.’

I knew this episode would quickly spread through the village – with hugely colourful embellishments – which I hoped would further discourage potential poachers.

But that was not my main concern. Instead, what really alarmed me was the fact the herd had no obvious reason to charge the rangers. Either the animals had been inadvertently provoked by Bheki and his men, or they were just hell-bent on ridding their new territory of all strange human beings. Perhaps the guards with their rifles reminded them of poachers from earlier encounters in their troubled lives.

However, the more I thought about it, I began to believe the real reason was probably more innocuous. The rangers had probably been casually chatting among themselves and paying scant attention to their surroundings when, before they knew it, they had stumbled into the elephants’ space. Suddenly they were in deep trouble. Or at least that’s what I hoped had happened. We would never know, but what was certain was this was still an extremely dangerous herd and there was lots of work to be done before we could relax. If indeed we ever could.

On the upside, my rangers now knew exactly how alert they had to be in the bush and I was sure they wouldn’t make the same mistake twice. And to their eternal credit, they hadn’t shot directly at the animals but kept their heads and got out of the reserve.

They all climbed on the back of the Landy and we drove back to the house, whereupon they called all the other staff together and animatedly recounted their perilous experience as only Zulus, who are born raconteurs, can do, with everyone laughing loudly as they argued about who ran away the fastest.

My sons Dylan, twenty-one, and Jason, twenty-three, from my first marriage were arriving later that day to spend some time on Thula Thula and I was looking forward to seeing them. Jason is a city boy who enjoys the bush. Dylan on the other hand is nuts about the wild and spends every spare moment he can out in the sticks.

We had a treat in store for them as David and I had chanced upon an active hyena den a few weeks earlier and planned to stake it out that night. Soon after the boys arrived we packed some supplies and drove out to the den, but to our dismay found that it had recently been