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

with a family inside. They were completely lost. The driver pulled up and obviously unaware of the terrible danger they were in started jabbering away in Italian.

‘You are the luckiest man alive,’ I said laughing at the incongruity of the situation. ‘I will give you a tracker to take you out.’

As they left, the inferno thundered over the hill and then just as it seemed the thatched lodge and our homes were about to be atomized, a phalanx of 4x4s loaded with firefighting equipment came revving though the smoke downthe road. Every nearby farmer had heeded our emergency calls and now a wall of water confronted the wall of flames. The cavalry had truly arrived.

Thirty minutes later the seemingly unstoppable holocaust had collapsed. It was now just a mopping-up operation. But in its wake, it had destroyed more than a third of the reserve.

Fortunately the change of wind, which so nearly wiped us out, also brought the first pre-spring showers. That night a torrent of fresh rain sluiced clean the charred black earth.

The next morning, elephant, rhino, zebra, impala and other animals were out on the burned areas, eating fresh ash as they always do after a fire, absorbing the salts and minerals their bodies craved.

Two weeks later the areas that had been so apocalyptically torched were emerald green. Thanks – unwittingly – to the poachers, the bush clearing was done perfectly and we now had thousands of new acres of virgin savannah.

None of us, however, forgot that we had almost lost Thula Thula.

Or that we had an elephant to thank for our lives.

chapter twenty-three

Most of my interactions with the herd had been from a Land Rover. This was deliberate as I wanted them to get used to vehicles.

It worked; our guests had great safaris and photo-opportunities as Nana and her family acted as wild elephants do, oblivious of the Land Rovers, provided of course the rangers kept a reasonable distance and respected their privacy.

But now I wanted to do it on foot, not only as I planned to introduce walking safaris, but I wanted the herd to get generally acclimatized to humans in the bush, or else labourers and rangers would always be at risk.

Taking Max with me I set out to find them for my first experiment. The herd was in an open area, grazing and browsing on the plentiful summer offerings. Nearby there were big trees for me to climb, a somewhat crucial consideration if something went wrong and I had to run for it.

Perfect! I pulled over next to a spreading marula and got out, leaving the Landy’s door open for hasty access if necessary. It’s vastly different communicating with elephants out in the open on foot compared with doing so from vehicles. If you step away from a vehicle with elephants close by, you wake up quickly.

Purposely going upwind so they could get my scent, I zigzagged toward the herd, ambling along as if on a Sundaystroll, Max by my side. Everything was going well until I was about thirty yards away and Frankie’s trunk swivelled near the ground as she got my scent. I immediately stopped as she peered myopically at Max and me, but after a short while she ignored us and continued feasting. So far so good, and I continued my erratic approach in their general direction.

Just five paces closer and Frankie suddenly lifted her head sharply and aggressively spread her ears.

Whoa! I stopped but this time she continued glaring at me until I backed off for five or six paces. That seemed to make her happy and she went back to grazing.

I repeated the process several times over the next hour, a few paces in and then out and always got the same reaction. Studiously ignored, then angrily confronted. That’s interesting, I thought, she has created a boundary: outside I am welcome, inside she gets tetchy.

After checking the distance and making sure I could reach the Land Rover at a run if things went awry, I pushed through the imaginary boundary and walked closer in.

That did it! She swung around, took three aggressive steps towards me with trunk held high and I backed off – pronto.

I then drove to the other side of the spread-out herd, got out and repeated the process with Nana. The same thing happened, except that Nana would let me get much closer than Frankie did, and her reactions were petulant rather than aggressive.

Over the next weeks, through trial and error I learned that the herd set a very real albeit invisible boundary inside of which nothing – well, no human anyway – could enter. I also found that individual elephants did the same thing when straying from the herd. The boundaries were flexible but generally the adult’s ‘space’ had a much smaller perimeter than the youngsters’. However, it was trial and error,and you had to be able to gauge it by judging the elephant’s demeanour and every elephant’s space was different and could be different on different days.

By repeating the exercise in the neighbouring Umfolozi reserve I discovered that generally a bull would tolerate closer intrusions than females. The reason was simple – big bulls are extremely confident of their ability to defend themselves and allow you to get closer. The smaller the elephant, the less confident they are and the wider the space they demanded. A mother and newborn baby away from a herd had the widest.

I had long noticed a similar phenomenon with other animals. A ‘fright – flight’ distance it is called, but with elephants it was more like an ‘attention – attack’ boundary.

So far so good, but to have walking safaris on Thula Thula I needed a completely settled herd otherwise the risk was not worth it. More research was needed so I did my experiment again, but this time with Vusi, a well-built, fleet-footed young ranger who bravely volunteered to be the guinea pig. All he had to do was repeat my earlier procedure of slowly walking around the herd