by Adam Johnson
As the pro-hunting side has it, elephant safaris assist conservation by pretty simple means: A bull killed on a legal hunt is, in theory, worth more to the local economy than an animal slaughtered by poachers. In the most far-flung parts of the Botswana bush, the hunting industry has been the chief employer, offering a paycheck to people in places where there simply is no other gainful work.
When locals’ livelihoods are bound to the survival of the elephants, they’re less likely to tolerate poachers, or to summarily shoot animals that wander into their crop fields. Furthermore, hunting concessions are uninviting to poachers. Hunters like Jeff Rann employ private security forces to patrol the remoter parts of the preserve.
Hunting’s critics maintain that, in practice, the industry tends to fall short of these ideals. For every professional hunter who follows the rules, there are others who overshoot their quotas, or engage in illegal ivory tracking, or cheat their employees of a living wage. In countries more corruption-plagued than Botswana, crooked officials commonly siphon off safari profits before they reach the elephants’ rural human neighbors on whose mercy and financial interest the fate of the species ultimately depends. And lately, in Tanzania and Zimbabwe (where last year 300 elephants were poisoned in a single massacre), the hunting industry has proven no antidote to poaching. Citing “questionable management“ and “lack of effective law enforcement” in Zimbabwe and Tanzania, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, in April 2014, suspended the import of elephant trophies from both nations.
But Satsumo, the Department of Wildlife and National Parks employee who’s tagging along on the Waldrips’ safari, believes that Botswana’s hunting ban may ultimately turn out badly for the elephants. “There will be more poachers,” she says. “More elephants will get out of the reserve. They will go to people’s crop fields. The hunters pump the water for them, but now they will have to move to the villages to find it. It’s a bad thing. It’s a very bad thing.”
Abhorrent as the practice is to most Western, Dumbo-adoring sensibilities, elephant hunting occupies an awkward, grayed-out space in the landscape of conservation policy. Some nonprofits such as the World Wildlife Fund have quietly endorsed it as part of a conservation strategy but decline to discuss their position on record. The issue is such an emotional live wire, for people on both sides of the debate, and is so deeply laced with PR perils, that it’s just about impossible to find a frank and disinterested expert opinion about hunting’s efficacy as a means to help conserve the species. It’s worth noting that I couldn’t find anyone on the anti-hunting side who could convincingly answer this question: If hunting is so disastrous for the long-term survival of the species, why do the countries where it’s legal to hunt elephants have so many more of them than those where the practice is banned?
With the next couple of tourist seasons, most of Botswana’s elephant concessions will be converted to photographic-safari destinations, which many conservationists promote as an effective way to monetize the animals and thereby protect them. But according to Jeff Rann, photo safaris aren’t all that difficult for poachers to work around. “[Photo tourists] are not armed. And they stick to a set, predictable routine, so the poachers just go kill animals in parts of the concessions where they know the photographers aren’t going to go.”
Obviously Rann’s got a vested interest in this perspective. But looking at the case of Kenya, home to one of Africa’s largest photosafari sectors and a poaching problem of catastrophic proportions, you sort of have to give Rann his due. Of course, there’s every possibility that some combination of public policy, private money, and anti-ivory market pressures will render hunting obsolete as a conservation instrument. But for now, if you are one of those people who chokes up at reports of poachers poisoning elephants by the herd, you may have to countenance the uncomfortable possibility that one solution to the survival of the species may involve people paying lots of money to shoot elephants for fun.
Chapter 3: The Killing
The hunt continues. We are not back in the truck ten minutes before the tracker calls for a halt. Robyn and Will linger in the Land Cruiser while Jeff and the tracker go off into the bush to investigate. On the heels of our run-in with the monotusker and his pal, it feels as though the day has already coughed up a full lode of potential prey. So it registers as something of a surprise when Jeff returns with this news: “There’s five bulls, all of ’em pretty good size.” One of them is carrying at least sixty pounds of ivory, Jeff’s threshold, I gather, for trophy viability. “It’s a shooter,” he says. “If we get a shot, we’ve gotta shoot it.”
Robyn shoulders her rifle. Her eyes are incandescent. Off we troop over the sand.
The bush resounds with a din of timber destruction. The sun is making its descent, and perhaps a hundred yards off, through the brambles, tusks glow in the rich light. The animals are fanned out ahead of us, noisily munching. We come in closer, and the elephants begin to take note, though we register more as a mild irritant, not a mortal threat. The trophy animal is in a lane of dense shrubs, mooning us. Robyn could conceivably flank it and get an angle on its head, but in the thick undergrowth it would be a poor shot, and that first bullet might be all she’d get. There’s a risk that she would only wound it and her $60,000 would sprint off into the weeds. Jeff and Robyn whisper tactically. The elephant’s obliviousness is exasperating. It seizes my lungs with a breathless frustration to watch the elephant foolishly grubbing salad while we stand within a stone’s throw, plotting the proper method to put a bullet in its brain.
Not thirty feet from us, the elephant with the missing tusk, the same elephant we just ran into, suddenly appears, having made its approach way more stealthily than an animal the size of a bread truck ought to be capable of. The bull is pissed. It nods and snorts and tosses snoutfuls of sand our direction. Okay, whatever you are, it’s kind of annoying, so get the fuck out of here, please.
I find the performance convincing. It keeps coming. Two more strides and the elephant could reach out and touch someone with its trunk. The elephant looks to be about twelve feet tall. The trunk weighs hundreds of pounds and is easily capable of breaking a human spine.
Apologies if that sounds like sensationalistic inanities you’ve heard intoned sotto voce by Discovery Channel narrators trying to ramp up the drama of snorkeling with porpoises and such. But the elephant is about fifteen feet away, and I will now confess to being scared just about shitless. The elephant snorts and brandishes its vast head. Lunch goes to lava in my bowels. If not for my present state of sphincter-cinching terror, I would well be in the market for an adult diaper. This is an amazingly pure kind of fear. My arteries are suddenly capable of tasting my blood, which right now has the flavor of a nine-volt battery.
Jeff Rann is in dialogue with the elephant. This consists of whispering menacingly and jabbing his rifle around in the air. The elephant does its pissed-off little shuffle for perhaps a minute, probably less. And then the tape runs in slow reverse. The elephant retreats backward into the shrubs, eyeing us, curtsying hostilely as he goes.
“Wells, you good, buddy?” Robyn asks, grinning. Apparently I’m visibly, risibly freaked. I regain my bearings, and we resume our approach to the trophy bull.
It requires the same strategy. The target is in the middle of the fan of five. The elephants have arranged themselves such that it’s kind of difficult to get an angle on the prize without straying into the paths of the others. A disquiet, a shared unease, is taking hold among these fellows. The racket of salad consumption is tapering off. The elephants are beginning to push on. But, goddamn, these guys could use a coach. The interaction with the one-tusker notwithstanding, their defense pretty much sucks. They’re moving, but it’s not so much flight as a slow and cranky mosey.
The light is caramelizing. If Robyn can’t get a shot in the next five or ten minutes, the sun will sink past the trees and it will be lion-o’clock out here. The sun, too, seems murderously slow in its descent. We move past one elephant, past an
other, until we are on the trophy beast. Again, its butt is to us. Nothing in the animal world tops an elephant’s ass as an emblem of indifference and reproof.
Coyness is keeping the elephant alive. If he does not turn his head, the sun will set and the elephant will not be killed today.
And then he turns his head. His expression is wary, rueful. In his long-lashed bedroom eyes is the look of an old drag queen turning to regard an importunate suitor tugging at the hem of her dress.
Robyn raises her rifle. For the past few months, she’s been rehearsing this moment in her bedroom closet in Texas, aiming, reloading, aiming again. She shoots.
The rifle’s thunder is somehow insignificant. The shot catches the elephant in the appropriate place, at the bridge of its trunk. But an elephant brain is a big piece of equipment—it can weigh as much as twelve pounds. Robyn’s bullet did not apparently sever enough vital neurons to kill the animal in a single shot. He shakes his head, as if to wag away the pain of a wasp’s sting. There is a second shot that strikes him in the neck. He turns to flee, but his right foreleg has buckled. He strives to stand. The effect is of a cripple trying to pitch a broken circus tent. In the franticness of his movements, one can sense the elephant’s surprise that his body, a machine that has served him well for over fifty years, has suddenly stopped accepting his commands. To see so large and powerful an animal vised in an even larger and more powerful inevitability is, for lack of a better word, intense.
The other elephants scatter. Robyn and Jeff jog toward the animal. In the fervor of the moment, Robyn has momentarily forgotten to put fresh rounds in her gun. “Reload, reload, reload,” Jeff instructs. They advance to a distance of maybe twenty-five feet. “Okay, shoot him right in the hip.” The gun fires twice. The tent sags right and seems to sort of sway and billow, as though surrendering to wind.
“Okay, come with me,” Jeff says. He leads Robyn along the animal’s left flank. At the sound of the hunters coming in close, the elephant struggles more direly to rise, but instead, he loses ground against gravity and settles closer to the earth. “Just watch his trunk. [Be sure] he doesn’t hit you with it.”
Jeff leads her to a position perhaps ten feet from the elephant’s left temple. “Okay, hit him right in the ear hole.” At this point there is little the elephant can do except to turn his face away. The last shot claps into the elephant’s ear.
“Perfect,” says Jeff Rann. “Brain shot. You brained him.”
And the elephant, still swaying on its haunches, a slow faucet of blood trickling from his forehead, is no more.
Chapter 4: How It Felt to Watch an Elephant Die
So that is how the elephant got shot. Once in the forehead, once in the neck, twice in the hip, once in the ear. How it felt to watch the elephant get shot is something else. As I watched the elephant go down, what obtruded into my consciousness was a kind of a thing, a psychological sensation with a very particular shape and weight and texture, a geometry as discrete and seemingly physical as a house key or a tire iron, but which I don’t have any useful language to describe. This thing, this mute-pseudo revelation, had something to do with adrenaline’s power to catalyze time into taffy. Forty seconds elapsed between the first shot and the last, yet what happened in those forty seconds seemed to happen out of time. It was another kind of time in which a new understanding of death impressed itself upon me more rapidly than my cognition could accommodate.
The indescribable thought sensation was not this, but some tiny part of it was sort of like this: Before I saw the elephant get shot, I understood that there was life, and there was its cessation. But now I understand there is this other thing—dying, when death stops being an idea and becomes a thing that the body, if not the conscious mind, grasps in its full intensity. Watching the elephant die granted the illusory understanding of death’s grammar and meaning, as with an alingual child who hears five words and thinks he knows a language. The first word went through the forehead, the second through the neck, the third and fourth through the hip, the fifth through the ear. The month before this trip, on another assignment for this magazine, for the first time in my life, I handled the corpse of a dead human being, and I learned nothing about death. I learned nothing about death, either, when Robyn Waldrip shot the elephant. But it left in my skull at least the languageless shadow of the indescribable thing: Death is this. Death is the elephant taking the first shot in the forehead, and the second in its neck, slumping, listing right, taking two in the hip, struggling, sinking, turning, taking one through the ear and not moving anymore. As it was in the beginning, and as it always will be: one in the forehead, one in the neck, two in the hip, one in the ear, world without end.
Sorry about all that. Useless, I know.
Chapter 5: The Strange Rush of Death
The dead elephant is leaking audibly. A substance resembling scrambled egg is spattered on its ear. I’m jotting notes and hoping Jeff Rann or Robyn does not notice how badly my hand is shaking. But Robyn is off in her own intense moment. She is sort of hooting and jumping up and down, going “Oh, my God, oh, my God,” and generally experiencing an order of ecstasy we tend to share only with our intimates. On either side of the animal, we are both of us breathing hard, massively doped with a storm of neurochemicals that, if you could synthesize in a smokable form, would make you very rich. But the manner in which we are riding our respective highs is a pretty good illustration of why, in high school, Robyn was almost certainly a more welcome and popular presence at parties than I was. While I am privately gibbering darkly and visibly whacked-out, she is pepped up, thrilled. We embrace her congratulatorily. She kisses her fingertips and touches the bull’s trunk. Salt water, rather gratuitously, spills from the elephant’s eyes.
Chapter 6: Breaking Down an Elephant
In the morning, the elephant is as we left it, unmolested by snacking carnivores. Today, the animal will be cleaned and butchered, its flesh shared out among the locals. The hide and other mementos will be packed up for the Waldrips. Though the tusks and the rest of it are, ostensibly, the prizes Robyn came to Africa to collect, the electricity has gone out of the safari. Returning to the animal has a cleaning-up-after-the-party sort of feel.
A team of a half-dozen Botswana men and women have turned out for the event. The equipment list includes an ax, a winch, and a bunch of cheap-looking plastic-handled boning knives. First order of business is a stropping orgy that lasts the better part of half an hour. While that’s going on, the Waldrips’ children—Lola, 6, and Will junior, 8—who have been back at the camp, play with the elephant, touch its trunk for its rough, lichenish feel, handle its ears.
“It’s surreal, isn’t it?” Will senior says, squinting at the creature.
“Yeah,” says Robyn, a little dreamily. “I hope it stays that way for a long time.”
I’m feeling it, too, the slightly spongy sense of dislocation emanating from the previous day, but this is why I will never be a hunter: She wants to savor it. I am ready for it to go away. Before the skinning commences, the tableau is beautified and made camera-ready. The elephant’s tusks are scrubbed. One of Jeff’s assistants takes an ax to a tree that is casting an unphotogenic shadow.
“Look how long it takes him to chop that down,” Will observes. “An elephant would walk right over it.”
Larry the videographer takes some footage of the children perched on the elephant’s skull, though Jeff cautions him, “You might get shit if you put that in the show. You don’t want to be seen as disrespecting the animal.”
The children dismount, and the skinners move in.
The cleaning goes like this: First you take the ears. Each is the size of a manta ray. It is severed close to the head and laid in the dirt. Next, the trunk, the size of a middle-aged gator, is girdled at its bridge and then removed. Blood comes forth in an incredible tide, more of it than I’ve probably seen in aggregate over the course of my lifetime. Yet the flaying, surprisingly, inspires none of the mortal vertigo the killing did. A
s the knives flash, the animal becomes less extraordinary, less like the world’s largest land mammal and more a bricolage of familiar butcher-shop hues. The trunk is stripped of its leather, and for a time it lies in the dirt, looking like an automobile transmission made of fresh raspberry sorbet.
Will is by the elephant’s rear. He has taken up a knife, eager to do his share of the dismantlement. “I always tell my kids, anything you kill, you gotta clean it yourself. I know Jeff’s got clients who come out here and kill five elephants. Shoot ’em and leave ’em. To me that’s not right. Out of respect for the animal, you gotta do it yourself. I didn’t kill this elephant, but even still.”
A cut has been made along the spine. Will slashes away, pulling at the skin, revealing a goreless expanse of fibrous white fascia. The winch is applied to help peel the hide. The resistance is sufficient to pull the truck forward at first when the crank turns on.
Once the skin has been freed, Will and the skinners begin blocking out the meat. The sound is of hard, wet work. Up front, they are getting at the skull. The skin is gone from the elephant’s cheeks, and the bare eye peering from the pale tissue is demonic. Below the eyes, the look of the tuskless head, still actively suppurating, recalls a cliff face after a strong rain. Then the head itself is cut off, into the arms of a pair of catchers. Later today or tomorrow, the skull will be buried for a period of ten days. Insects will attend to the finer details of cleaning the skull for its voyage to Texas.