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

as I watched their reactions. I dropped him off, estimated the herd’s safety boundary, told him where it was, and then told him to walk.

Big mistake. Thankfully Vusi hadn’t gone too far when Frankie bristled on full alert and the startled ranger legged it back to the Landy quicker than Carl Lewis.

A bit more experimenting with the brave young man and it became clear that as far as the herd was concerned, the boundary with a stranger was much, much wider.

OK, so how could I get the elephants to draw the boundary in? Not only for me, but for anyone walking on the reserve. I started hanging around the edges of the safety periphery, minding my own business until they got used to me being on foot, and then I slowly tried to move a bitcloser. The key to this was patience; it took endless hours of just being there. I also found that ignoring them or facing away attracted less attention.

Although tedious, this was an extremely tense procedure and I was constantly ready to dash off at a hair-trigger’s notice.

Eventually I started to despair. I was making zero progress, even Mnumzane would not come closer while he was with the herd – until one day Nana ambled over in my direction to access a small tree she fancied and shrank the no-go boundary by half without even looking up at me. A little later Frankie and the others joined her.

Then it dawned. As far as the herd was concerned, the boundary was not set in stone. They will reset it – but only when they are good and ready. It has to be their decision. You can’t do it. Only they can.

From this I also gleaned another important rule in associating with wild elephants and that is never to approach them directly, but rather put yourself in their vicinity and if they want to, they will come closer to you. If not, forget it: they take their imperial status most seriously.

During this time one elephant charged me repeatedly. Young Mandla, now a healthy two-and-a-half-year-old standing almost four foot. He would put his ears out and run at me for about five or six yards and then bolt back to the safety of his mum – Nana – who kept an eye on things but always ignored his ‘heroic’ antics. It became a great game between us and every day I would call out and talk to him as he put on his show and we would have fun, with him getting braver and braver and closer and closer. I had to be very careful with this as he was big enough to seriously hurt me but there was never anything but fun in his game.

Then one day Nana and Mvula were a little way from the herd grazing when she slowly started walking in my direction. Good God! Has she decided to come across tome? She had approached me before in my vehicle, which she knew, and at the boma and the house, but on those occasions I was safe. This time, unless I bolted before she got any closer, I would be stuck out in the open without any escape route whatsoever. This was an entirely different ballgame.

She lumbered on in such a friendly way that I steeled myself and decided to stay and see what happened, gambling that the rest of the elephants would stay away.

Closer and closer she came with Mvula scampering at her heels. I glanced nervously down at Max who was watching keenly, dead still. He looked back up at me and suddenly wagged his tail. He hadn’t sensed anything dangerous. I hoped his judgement was on track for this was a very big elephant coming at us.

Suddenly some atavistic survival trigger, vehemently at odds with my decision to stand fast, jerked and the compulsion to flee this gargantuan alien shape exploded within me. I could scarcely breathe. It was all I could do to hold my ground. To this day I don’t know how I managed not to bolt. But stay I did and then she was there, her huge form towering above me, obliterating the sky.

I think she sensed my trepidation for she purposefully stopped about five yards away and simply started grazing again, oozing tranquillity. When you are standing five yards away from a wild five-ton elephant you are acutely aware of every little thing that goes on around you, especially the elephant’s emotional state.

I somehow retained enough presence of mind to reflect on the incongruity of standing out on an open plain with a matriarch and her baby – the most treacherous of all situations – but there was such an innocence about our impromptu ‘get together’ that it helped me maintain both my dignity and my ground.

Five minutes later she was still there and I realized wewere actually hanging out together. She was slowly moving around grazing, and I relaxed enough to notice that she had the most graceful table manners. Her trunk would search out and deftly encircle a chosen clod of grass, which she would pluck and delicately tap on her knee to dislodge soil from the roots and gently place in the side of her mouth leaving just the roots protruding. A gentle clamp of the molars and the roots would drift away while she savoured the morsel. I noticed too that she was very fussy about what she ate and the scent of each plant would be carefully sampled before being devoured.

Her browsing was no less fascinating. She would adroitly remove the leaves from a young acacia, place them in her mouth and then snap off a branch. As soon as she had finished chewing the leaves, the stem would go in one side of her mouth like a kebab and a little while later be ejected on the other, stripped white of all bark, the only part she was after.

All the while Mvula would peek at Max and me from behind his mother’s tree-trunk