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

Silence.

‘We have a big buck here. There is plenty of inyama for all. We will share it with you. Real bush meat – not the stuff women eat.’

Silence.

‘Come and join us!’ another called. ‘We will feast like kings tonight.’

Bheki inched slightly towards me, whispering so low I could scarcely hear him.

‘They’re trying to distract us while they climb the fence. I hear the wire moving.’

Then suddenly he roared the ancient Zulu war cry, ‘Uzodla iklwa lethu’ – you will eat our spears – and as he opened fire someone screamed and pandemonium erupted, guns barking like a cacophony of wild dogs.

I worked my pump-action shotgun furiously, spraying a maelstrom of SG in the direction I presumed the men would be scattering. Dylan did the same.

As suddenly as it started, the firing stopped and we reloaded. We waited for five minutes, an eternity in that deathly silence, but nothing stirred.

Then I heard a low groan – at least one man had been hit. Shotgun at the ready, I moved to the edge of the mound, stuck out my arm and flicked the spotlight switch.

In fact we had wounded three of them; one sprawled at the foot of the fence, shot through the legs by a .303 and two others badly punctured with shotgun pellets. The rest had got away, but judging by the gouts of blood dripping from where they had scrambled through the fence, there had been some serious casualties.

Thankfully, the six of us were unscathed.

Bheki shouted at the injured men, brightly illuminated in the spotlight beams, telling them that if they so much as looked at their guns he would kill them. We adjusted the beams to their eyes to blind them while he walked over and snapped on handcuffs.

Then Ngwenya came across and looked into their faces. ‘These men are not from the village. They are not even Zulus,’ he spat on the ground. ‘They’re Shangaans, bush-meattraders and ivory poachers from far away. Tonight they will have learned not to come back again.’

One of the rangers radioed for a vehicle while the rest of us patched the wounded thugs up as best we could. Max sniffed around for a bit, and then just sat and watched as if this was all in a day’s work. The injured men watched him fearfully – Max can look pretty ferocious.

Soon afterwards a Land Rover arrived and we drove the injured to the Buchanana police station where an ambulance was called. I handed in the poachers’ weapons to the police, a .375 and a .458 – both calibres capable of killing an elephant. There were no bullets. They had shot at us with everything they had, emptied their magazines before trying to make a run for it. Our men still had fifty rounds left. That was the difference – they had run out of ammo and we hadn’t.

I was hoping also to track down the dead rhino’s horns, but the police said they believed these had been shipped out of the country on a Taiwanese trawler moored in Richards Bay harbour on the same night that the animal was killed.

Fighting poachers is all about bush rumours and reputation. The poachers will always go where pickings are easiest and the syndicates, many of them employed by the same buyers, all speak to each other. The news of our victory tonight would spread like wildfire and we would be left alone for a while.

We were coming of age. We had taken on a team of hardened professionals and won.

After a peaceful few weeks in which I was able to spend wonderful sessions with the herd we got the terrible news that Phineas, the gate guard and our prime testifier against the Ovambo guards, had died. Flu and bronchitis had swept through the village and Phineas’s Aids-wracked immune system simply couldn’t fight the virus. As sad as this was, Ialso had to reflect on the fact that we had lost our key witness.

A few days later I got more bad news. The Ovambos, who had been tracked down to Durban, had abandoned their jobs in the city and for all intents and purposes disappeared from the face of the earth.

I reported all this to the prosecutor who looked over the file and said matter-of-factly, ‘I’m sorry Mr Anthony but we no longer have a case.’ He closed the file and shrugged.

As always with running a game reserve, one problem disappears and another crops up. Our next challenge came with an unexpected visit from our accountant. He had bad news: our money was running out fast. We had not opened the reserve to guests as we were still settling the elephant herd, and so we had been operating on capital with no income coming in.

‘You need to increase your bottom line,’ he said. ‘Unless you do something to start making money and quickly, there’s going to be a problem.’

It wasn’t just cash flow. Thanks to a series of interest rate hikes, our budgets had been thrown into disarray. I scrutinized the numbers from all angles, trying to crunch them this way and that but to no avail. It seemed as though we had to throw in the towel. The thought of putting Thula Thula on the market made me feel ill.

Then Françoise spoke. ‘Let’s build the little luxury lodge we’ve always wanted. We need to attract more guests if we want to generate income – and we can’t do that without building some accommodation for tourists.’

‘No. That means borrowing money at these extortionate rates,’ said the accountant. ‘That means even more risk.’

He scratched his head, punched a whole lot of figures into his calculator and then looked up at us.

‘You know, Françoise may be onto something. Building asmall “boutique” guest lodge may sound crazy in the current financial climate, but it actually makes sense. You need to start creating more revenue. And getting guests is one way to do it.’

I stared at the figures gloomily.