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

guests cavorted around slipping on the tiles while the larger animals drank their fill and bathed themselves in huge squirts and sprays.

All was sort of going well until suddenly Nana picked up my scent. She slowly swung around and lumbered towards where I was standing next to a thatch pole just inside the lodge patio. I held my ground as she lifted the tip of her dripping-wet trunk across to my chest. The show of affection was understandably misinterpreted by several of thehidden guests, who, by now certain of my impending death, bolted silently for the safety of the bathroom.

‘Clever girl! You found the cleanest water on the reserve – and managed to scare the hell out of everyone in the process,’ I added, with just a touch of discipline in my voice.

I took a step forward and raised my hand to the body of her trunk and caressed her. ‘But you really are frightening the hell out of the guests and you really do need to leave now.’

Nana decided otherwise, and five minutes later she was still standing there peacefully, while in the background Frankie stared and flicked her ears at any guest who so much as moved from their hiding places.

Nana really needed to go; the lodge certainly wasn’t the place for her and her family to visit, so I took my leave of her and backed off three or four paces under the thatch, clapping my hands lightly and encouraging her to move off.

Well, she didn’t like that at all. Moving forward she leaned her head on the support pole in front of me, and gave a heave. With that the lodge’s whole roof shifted and controlling my urge to shout I quickly moved forward again and resumed stroking her trunk speaking soothingly to her. Incredibly, she leaned forward again, this time with more force, and judging by the melancholic groaning of the timber supports it seemed that the whole structure was on the verge of collapsing.

I instinctively did the only thing I could and putting both hands high on her trunk pushed back on her with all my strength pleading with her not to destroy our livelihood.

And there we stayed, her leaning on the pole and me pushing back on her for an eternal thirty seconds before she stepped back, shook her head at me and walked away, taking a huge dump on the patio to show her disgust.

It was a game of course. Nana could have collapsed thepole easily and my puny effort at pushing her off was but a feather in the wind. She was just making a point.

The rest of the herd followed as she walked down onto the lawn and eventually moseyed off back into the bush.

‘Now I know you are completely mad!’ shouted an astounded and angry Françoise coming out from behind the bar and ignoring the emerging guests. ‘What the hell are you doing? Do you want to die? Oh-la-la, you are crazy non, pushing an elephant!’ And with several loud shouts of ‘Merde’ she stormed off to the kitchen to try to resurrect the dinner.

The next morning we put up a single electric strand around the lodge grounds at adult elephant head height. To keep Nana happy, we also set up a water pipe from an underground well to a new drinking trough just outside the wire.

The arrangement works well and even if the wire is down, they never try to come back to the lodge.

chapter twenty-four

A week later I got the sad news that my good friend Nkosi Nkanyiso Biyela had died. He was no longer a young man and had been unwell for some time. Despite expert medical attention from my own doctor, he succumbed. It was not unexpected. A fortnight earlier we were sitting outside together and despite the sub-tropical heat he shivered uncontrollably even with a blanket around his shoulders.

The tribe was in deep mourning and wailing echoed across the hills. Nobody came to work at Thula and we knew we would be operating with skeleton staff until well after the traditional funeral proceedings reserved for royalty, which would last weeks. All Zulu chiefs are kings for life, though colonialism degraded the title.

Nkosi Biyela was a man of his times, a powerful traditional leader with a foot in both worlds. He had grasped both the value of tested tradition as well as the necessity of modernity. Using tact and wisdom, he had begun the absolutely thankless task of merging the proven ‘old’ with the prophetic ‘new’.

He was succeeded by his son Phiwayinkosi Biyela from his first wife, whom I only knew slightly. I attended the colourful induction ceremony bearing gifts.

The family members promised to arrange a meeting with him, which never materialized despite frequent requests.

The new Nkosi’s authority was soon tested. Shortly afterhe took power a simmering tribal dispute boiled over into violence and from the reserve we could hear sporadic gunfire crackling about a mile away near the village of Buchanana. I placed guards on the boundaries to make sure nothing could possibly affect Thula Thula.

After a day of trying I eventually managed to get the local police on the phone.

‘What’s going on?’ I asked the captain, an amiable Afrikaner who had just taken over the station.

He sighed wearily. ‘Faction fight.’

Just what I had expected. Faction fights – as tangled and eternal as Appalachian feuds – are internecine tribal disputes. They are as messy and bloody and old and brutal as the ancient land itself. They can continue forever, from generation to generation, as a brother seethes over a sibling’s murder or a son remembers a dead father.

As is often the case, this feud was over land. Buchanana village, my immediate neighbour, was created in the late 1960s when Zulu tribes surrounding the town of Richards Bay were evicted to make way for the harbour development, the biggest in Africa. These unfortunates were simply dumped onto traditional Biyela land without Nkosi Biyela’s permission, such was the arrogance of the apartheid government of the