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

On the plus side, she may have been mad as a snake at me, but she was absolutely ecstatic with her new family. And to see this previously depressed creature joyously bonding with the other youngsters, pushing, pulling and playing with all the physicality that elephants so enjoy, was simply phenomenal.

Mnumzane was still on the periphery, being shooed off if he got too close, and somewhat bemusedly watching thenewcomer being accepted. I reckon I was his best friend – albeit by default – and whenever I drove past he would trumpet and chase after me. I always stopped, and he would then block the road, trapping me for as long as possible as he browsed around the Land Rover. I loved our ‘chats’ together but this didn’t disguise his loneliness or unease. His newfound relationship with me, however expedient, was not natural and concerned me a little. Elephant bulls are always pushed out of the herd at puberty, and eventually they get over the rejection and join a loose affiliation with other bachelors.

However, we didn’t have other bachelors, and to bring in a dominant bull to provide Mnumzane with a father figure was not something KZN Wildlife would consider. New rules set by KZN Wildlife demanded a larger reserve for elephant bulls, and it would have to wait for the Royal Zulu project to come to fruition. Mnumzane was thus stuck in no man’s land living partly on his own and partly on the fringes of the herd.

One day, he was grazing a few yards off when I got an ominous radio call from the lodge. Penny our bull terrier was missing. She loved hanging out at the lodge where she was spoiled rotten by guests and we brought her down from the house most days. She relished swimming in the water-hole on the riverbank just in front of the lodge and would leap in regularly to cool off. As I have said before, her devotion to us and Françoise in particular was absolute. She was short for her breed but had the courage and character of a Titan.

I have always loved bull and Staffordshire terriers. They are the most tolerant, loving, friendly dogs imaginable, and you get a power keg of protection thrown in as a bonus. Unfortunately they don’t like other dogs much and you have to watch that, but they can be taught and are more than worth the effort.

With Max at my heels I searched around the lodge, periodically yelling Penny’s name. She normally reacted to my whistle, bursting out of the bush with a tail doing windmill facsimiles. But today there was only silence and I feared the worst. A dog AWOL on a game reserve usually meant one of two things: a leopard or a poacher’s snare, where the poor animal would die a horrible, lingering death if not found in time. I forced the images out of my mind and walked through the bush in ever-widening circles carefully searching for her spoor. Nothing at all.

I eventually gave up, turned around and made my way down to the waterhole where suddenly I saw fresh spoor. I followed her tracks down into the riverbed and then some way upstream past some deep green pools. I shuddered, goosebumps on my arm.

The Afrikaners have a saying ‘’n hond se gedgate’, which literally translated means ‘a dog’s thought’ or gut feeling, that innate sense of premonition that all humans have in greater or lesser degrees. Looking at those sinister pools I felt something was wrong and I involuntarily reached down for Max’s collar.

Then I saw it. With its knobby grey-green armour-plating barely detectable in the wind-rustled reeds, lay an absolute monster of crocodile. A flash of white caught my eye and just a few yards from it, lying motionless in a still backwater, was Penny. My heart sank into my boots. She had been snatched and drowned.

The crocodile was resting, about to submerge the corpse into its lair where it would decay. Despite its fearsome fangs, a crocodile cannot chew and unless there are two to tear a kill apart, a lone crocodile has to let its prey decompose into soft-rotted chunks before it can ingest it.

There was no way I was going to leave my loyal dog there. I edged closer. Crocodiles don’t like loud noises; they like being surprised even less. I crept forward and when Iwas barely fifteen yards away, I jumped up, screamed and clapped my hands. With a whoosh of its huge tail it was gone.

I waited until it resurfaced some way downriver and then waded into the pool to retrieve Penny’s body. Shocked and saddened, I carried her back up to the lodge and laid her gently on the lawn. Max, who had followed closely, pushed forward and sat silently next to her lifeless body.

Biyela and I buried her under a beautiful spreading buffalo thorn, the legendary umphafa tree which Zulus associate with the spirit world. It was just the two us. Brendan, who loved Penny, was on the other side of the reserve. Françoise was too tearful to come down.

‘She liked to swim too much,’ said Biyela as he laid his spade down. ‘The crocodile was waiting for her.’

Knowing Penny, I wasn’t so sure Biyela was right. Penny may have been domesticated, but she was still savvy to the bush. I couldn’t see any croc stalking her. She was quick, smart and possessed survival senses long distilled out of desk-bound humans. Her death niggled at me; I really wanted to know what had happened.

The next day I went down to where we suspected she had been snatched and started unravelling the tracks, trying to fathom what actually took place. Reading signs of the wild is a dying art which few today have mastered. But I had learned something of it over the years, so I decided I’d stay at the river and turn over every piece of bush testimonial until the mystery was solved.

First checking that