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

the monster crocodile wasn’t around, I settled down on a rock and studied the evidence with silent stoicism, trying to get the bush to talk to me. Penny’s tracks showed she had been pacing the riverbank. By the length of her stride, the scuff marks of her paws and the short turns executed indicated she was moving quickly and obviously excited. But the tracks were not at the water’s edge; she wasa few yards up the bank, relatively safe with her turn of speed from any hungry crocodile. There was only one place where she actually went down to the water, possibly to take a drink.

Then I left the rock and walking carefully so as not to disturb the signs, picked up the crocodile’s four-footed tracks from where it emerged on the bank, moving up towards the lodge to where it turned and slithered back into the water. Interestingly, Penny’s tracks were a couple of yards above. She had seen it come out and had been stalking it, probably worrying it as it lumbered along the bank. This ruled out any surprise attack on her.

So I went back and carefully studied Penny’s tracks at the only place where they led to the water’s edge – initially where I thought she had gone in for a drink. Something didn’t gel.

There were no signs of a struggle. And even more crucially there were no signs of the croc beaching itself in an attack, and no drag marks, not even in the mud under the water. Once a croc’s jaws snap shut it’s an inexorable slide to the water, an awful one-way ticket to hell which had to leave stark tracks of the victim’s frantic struggle. Especially in this still pool.

Yet Penny’s tracks indicated the exact opposite. Her footprints clearly showed that the sand had been scuffed backwards; that she had been charging into the river. It didn’t make any sense at all.

And then it came to me. She hadn’t gone to the river for a drink and been attacked by the crocodile. In fact, the exact opposite: the attack had happened the other way round. The croc hadn’t gone for Penny at all. My mad, insane, beautiful dog had instead attacked the crocodile. She had deliberately rushed into the water and taken on a killing machine twenty times her size. Bush signs do not lie.

There are those who will say Penny was little more thana dumb dog. I strongly disagree. I believe Penny saw a crocodile, recognized a threat and in her mind she was guarding our territory. With the limitless, impossible courage of her breed, she willingly gave her life to protect all that was important to her, all that she loved. In the same way that Max would soundlessly attack a spitting cobra, Penny went to her death doing what she considered her duty. Penny had perished in her own version of the Alamo or Thermopylae.

She was one of the finest and bravest creatures I have known.

Things, good or bad, never seem to happen singularly for me. They always come in triplicate.

Soon after losing Penny, Max was at the lodge dozing on the patio when he sat up sharply, sniffing the air. His nose followed the drift of the unfamiliar scent and quickly found its source. It was a bushpig, a hulking boar making his way rapidly across the lawn towards the lodge.

A bushpig is about two- to three-feet high, roughly the same size as a warthog and to the untrained eye the two are easily confused. But that’s where the similarities end. A warthog has semicircular tusks and frightens easily. A bushpig is feral to its core and should be avoided at all costs in the wild. It’s a real fighter, weighing up to 140 pounds and uses its lower incisor teeth with devastating effect on any creature that underestimates it.

Max didn’t know about that. There was an intruder in his territory and the wiry hair on his back sprung up. Characteristically, he did not bark and at a sprint he cut the boar off, forcing it to confront this unusual threat. I say unusual because even a couple of hungry hyenas will avoid taking on a healthy adult bushpig.

In the wild there is no such thing as an idle threat, and stand-offs usually end with one animal tactically retreating so that ‘face’ is saved all round. There is no medical care inthe bush and animals instinctively know that even a scratch can prove fatal if infected. Thus unlike humans who square up over something as flimsy as road rage, animals fight only as an absolute last resort. In this case there was no need for combat as neither could nor wanted to eat the other, and the bushpig was only a temporary trespasser. There was no need to take it further.

But they did. The big boar held his ground, refusing to back off and Max took up the challenge and began circling, looking for an opening. Then the boar did a little mock charge, and that was that. The fighting genes of Max’s terrier forebears kicked in and he smashed into the big pig in a silent full-blooded charge. I was at the main house at the time, but fortunately David was nearby. Realizing the terrible danger Max was in, forgot his own safety and ran at them screaming.

Too late. The boar swivelled and rammed his shovel-shaped head under Max’s gut, hoisting him high into the air. As Max toppled over the boar was on him, slashing with dagger-like incisors at his soft underbelly.

Max scrambled up and came at him again, fast and furious, but the boar, using his superior bulk bowled him over once more, hacking with lethal accuracy as Max rolled, desperately trying to regain his footing.

They parted briefly, the pig standing firm with Max, his pelt now slick with blood, circling warily, again looking for an opening. Both were completely oblivious to David’s yelling.

Once again Max propelled himself forward and after another vicious melee the