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

I swear Nana and Frankie knew exactly what I was doing with their unruly adopted child. If not, how do you explain the one instance when ET came at me out of the blue from a thicket, once again catching me on foot without an escape route? On this occasion I hadn’t seen her as I had approached cautiously thinking she was with the herd in thethick bush ahead when, unusually, she was on her own on the flank.

This time it was Frankie who reacted. She sprinted up alongside the galloping youngster and placed her tusks on ET’s rump, forcing her hindquarters sideways and down onto the ground. As ET sprawled in a cloud of dust, Frankie stood over her until ET clambered up in that ungainly way that fallen elephants do and sulked off to join the others. To have Frankie, who was once the definition of aggression, protect me was little short of phenomenal.

The third full-blooded charge was broken by Nana in a somewhat bizarre way. I was about thirty yards away from the herd just sitting and watching when ET started stampeding towards me. But to do so she had to run right past Nana, who was grazing a little way ahead. She heard the youngster coming and tilted her head. As ET began building up a head of steam Nana lifted her trunk and held a pose, waiting. When ET drew level she reached out and touched her ever so gently right in the middle of her forehead with the tip of her trunk.

ET stopped dead, as if she had been whacked on the skull with a sledgehammer. Yet all Nana had done was almost caress her. I had never seen that before.

All this activity would attract the attention of other animals and on this occasion it was a bachelor herd of kudu, with their spiralled horns so beloved by trophy hunters, who watched with interest. They stood stock still except for their twitching oval ears, taking it all in.

The kudu bulls were a reminder to me to be constantly alert. Wildlife is perpetually aware, always ready to flee or fight in an instant. It’s a life thrumming with eternal vigilance, absorbing every minuscule detail of one’s surroundings, continually assessing degrees of safety and danger. It’s knowing where or where not to be, perpetually analysing instinctual information so crucial for survival.

Every wild thing is in tune with its surroundings, awake to its fate and in absolute harmony with the planet. Their attention is focused totally outwards. Humans, on the other hand, tend to focus introspectively on their own lives too often, brooding and magnifying problems that the animal kingdom would not waste a millisecond of energy upon. To most people, the magnificent order of the natural world where life and death actually mean something has become unrecognizable.

I believed ET was making progress, and it appeared that working day after day with her was making a difference.

I was wrong; it was only effective when she was actually with the herd. She had developed another tactic to give vent to her overpowering instinct to kill me. Two junior rangers and I were following the herd on foot from a safe distance. I knew now that Nana and Frankie were implicitly on my side in disciplining the youngster, so I felt relatively safe.

But ET knew otherwise. She stood no chance against me with the matriarch and her deputy around, so she decided to become clandestine. So she broke away from the herd, surreptitiously moving off to the side as the rest moved on and waited in ambush. Before I knew it, I heard that awful sound as the bush came alive with snapping branches and she galloped into the clearing, dipping her head in the awesome way that elephants do when they start a charge – her prize at last within grasp without Nana or Frankie to stop her.

I looked at the out-of-reach Land Rover behind me, and shouted at the two young rangers, ‘She’s coming! Don’t move! It’s OK … it’s OK! Just don’t move.’

Running away can all too easily convert a bluff into something lethal and even though it’s possibly the most frightening thing to do, a mock charge must be confronted at all costs.

‘No! No!’ I yelled at ET as she came on at us. ‘No!’ I raised my arms above my head screaming at her as she thundered on.

At the last moment she broke off, swinging away at a lumbering gait, trunk high.

Then despairingly I watched her turn a wide circle and turn back at us. ‘She’s coming again! Stand still … don’t move. Don’t move!’

But I was talking to myself. The two young rangers, having just witnessed their first-ever up close and personal elephant charge decided that to stand still for another was the most insane notion ever conceived. They disappeared so fast I thought they had been ‘beamed up’ to the top of the giant fig tree next to us.

That was fine for them, but it left me confronting a charging ET alone. Emboldened after seeing the rangers ignominiously bolting and clambering up the tree – the very scenario I was trying to prevent – she was now more determined to press home her advantage.

The moment I know when a situation gets hairy with elephants is when pandemonium switches into slow motion and the shrieking, mind-numbing fear leaches out of my body and is replaced by a blissful calmness. And so it was this time. I watched abstractly as I screamed at her until she was virtually on top of me. Then at the last moment she went swinging past. I can tell you that she very nearly didn’t pull out of that one.

She kept running, joining the herd who were ambling across to see what all the fuss was about. Personally, I thought that Nana could have reacted a little quicker.

I looked up at the two tree-hugging rangers. ‘Jeez! That was unbelievable!’ shouted one from the top of the