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

violently again. Suddenly I heard the sound of dogs barking … hunting dogs. Zulus traditionally hunt with indigenous hounds and there was a hunting party somewhere out beyond Mandla. Nana heard them too and she stopped rattling the fence, spreading her ears to absorb every sound.

The hunters were on their own land and in themselves not a problem. What concerned me was that if the dogs got the scent of Mandla and started harassing him, Nana would tear through the fence like a bulldozer.

We took the wire cutters out of the toolbox. The question now was how do we open the fence and cut the electric wires in front of Mandla with a herd of agitated elephants breathing down our necks?

I answered my own question: we cut the hole fifty yardsaway. I then call Nana, she comes, Mandla follows on the other side of the fence, finds the hole, realizes he can get through and the drama is over.

Easy … right?

We moved away, cut the hole, folded back the fence and dropped the bottom two electric wires. The first part of the plan worked fine. Not so the second part: Nana refused to move away from Mandla and I spent a fruitless ten minutes trying to call her. It was a stalemate.

With the yapping of the dogs in the background getting louder I turned to Musa and asked him to go through the hole, backtrack behind Mandla and then make a noise to frighten him forwards toward the hole.

‘He’s just a youngster,’ I said. ‘Stay a good distance away and clap your hands to make him run to the hole. There is no danger.’

‘Yebo, Mkhulu,’ he said without enthusiasm.

‘Good. We will speak on the radio and I will tell you exactly what to do.’

Musa was a good man but could be a bit of a show-off and often regaled other staff with fantastical stories of his courageous encounters with wild animals – including the elephants. ‘I am not scared of them,’ he would say, imitating Frankie’s gait, using his arm as a trunk. ‘They are scared of me.’

Well, now we would see.

He climbed through the fence and after giving him five minutes to get into position I called: ‘Where are you?’

‘I am here,’ he replied, and I wanted to pull my hair out. Musa thought I could ‘see’ him through the radio. One can laugh at this, but it is just as easy for rural Zulus to laugh at how ignorant many technologically competent Westerners are in the wild.

‘Okaaay. Where is here?’

‘It is here,’ he replied confidently. ‘Here where I am.’

I promised myself I would strangle him later.

‘Good, can you see the young elephant?’ I asked.

‘Yebo, Mkhulu. I can.’

‘How far are you?’

‘Close.’

‘Good. Now clap your hands and I will call the mother at the same time.’

Silence.

‘Musa why are you waiting? Clap your hands.’

Nothing.

‘Musa! Clap your flipping hands!’

Then I heard clapping … well, barely. Painfully slow and methodical and so gentle it would not startle a flea. Worst of all it was happening right next to me, just on the other side of the fence. I looked around and there he was sitting on the ground in the middle of some shrubs slowly clapping his hands. He had gone through the hole in the fence and then hidden in the bush a few yards away rather than approach baby Mandla. So much for him not being afraid of the elephants.

‘Musa?’

‘Yebo?’

‘I see you, come out from where you are.’

This made him doubly certain that I could see through the radio and he slowly emerged staring at me, then at the transmitter.

There was nothing left to do but continue trying to call Nana to come to where we had cut the hole and get Mandla to follow her. After forty minutes or so with me going hoarse calling, asking, begging and pleading, she ambled over. Mandla followed dutifully, found the hole, scampered into the reserve and it was over.

As he got back, every one of the elephants crowded around him, touching him with their trunks, fussing over him and rumbling their stomachs. It was humbling to watchthe care and affection being showered on him after his ordeal.

I found out later that a flooded stream had taken out a small piece of the fence but left one electric strand still standing that was just high enough for Mandla to walk under – but too low for the rest of the herd. Once out, he panicked and couldn’t get back.

I was so relieved to get Mandla back that I forgot to compliment Musa on his ‘bravery’ – about how scared the elephants, particularly Frankie, were of him. But I’m sure the yarns he told around the village campfire that night more than made up for that.

chapter thirty

Most rural Zulus believe that spirits, in countless forms and guises, are very busily involved in the destiny of man, that they take form in the plant and animal kingdoms, and that the rivers, skies and mountains are inhabited by supernatural beings.

They believe that after death there is no heavenly reward or hellish retribution, only a reassumption of the personality of an ancestor, from where one continues a never-ending role in the eternal symbiosis between the spiritual and material worlds. These deep-seated beliefs are poorly understood and too easily ridiculed by many Westerners who think they know best.

That is of course, until you turn out the lights. For there is nothing like darkness, nothing like experiencing night in the African bush with rural Africans who know strange stories to lead your spirit down the same roads. For surely it was not ‘civilization’ that eroded the spirit world, it was electric light at night, the light that took away the dark, blinded us to ghosts, angels and demons, and vanquished our ancestors.

It was nearly midnight and I was taking the lodge’s night staff back up to their houses. There was a tree lying across the road. Mnumzane had come through the area earlier and he had a habit of