The Last Train to Zona Verde

by Paul Theroux

  “How old is she?”

  “Eighteen,” he said in the Australian way, ay-deen. “She was orphaned from a cull at Kruger with Thandi and Seeni. They were brought to Gaberone. That’s where we got them. Steady, girl!”

  Now the seating platform — a howdah-like contraption — was lifted onto their backs and strapped around the elephant’s middle, and when this was done each elephant was verbally hectored until it knelt, its whole body flat to the ground. This was accomplished by a slow folding of the legs beneath it and a sagging collapse of the big gray belly.

  Michael approached and said, “Isn’t it incredible?”

  “I’ve never seen anything like it.”

  “You’re riding Cathy today. That’s her over there.”

  “What’s her story?”

  “Captured in Uganda when her family was culled. She was sent to a zoo in Toronto. That’s where we got her from. She’s about fifty years old, the matriarch of the herd.”

  Another kneeling elephant snorted dust as a group of men fussed around her, fastening a wooden seating platform to her back.

  “This operation is amazing,” I said. “All these workers, all these animals, and just a few guests.”

  “That’s why we’re expensive,” Michael said. “But we have wonderful owners and great clients.” He was smoking a cigarette and admiring the activity. “A team created it. You can build whatever you want. But if you don’t have the human element, you’ve got nothing.”

  “How many elephants altogether?”

  “The ones we ride — about a dozen. But there are lots more, big and small, that are part of the herd. They’ll go out and follow. It’s a dysfunctional, put-together family of elephants.”

  “In what way dysfunctional?”

  “They’re from all over. We created the herd, so there’s all sorts of dynamics.” He was still looking across the compound. “Our plan is to release some of them back into the wild.”

  A little while later, speaking to the guests before the ride, he said, “The elephants embody so much of Africa …”

  This peroration about the glory of African elephants reminded me of the passion of Morel, the idealistic hero of Romain Gary’s The Roots of Heaven. In this early (1956) environmental-themed novel (later a John Huston film), Morel mounts a campaign in Africa to save elephants from the big guns of hunters, and fails.

  While the elephants knelt on the ground, we took turns getting onto the seats. There was no delicate way of climbing the elephant’s back and squirming into place, so this was another job for the mahouts and the trainers — easing the timid and top-heavy guests into position. Wealthy dignified clients, paying $4,000 a day, scrambled clumsily onto the elephants, their wide, khaki-clad buttocks raised for all to see.

  We set out in a long and straggling line, heading across the swamp water, looking for animals. Each mahout, seated on the elephant’s neck, talked much of the time to the elephant, urging it onward, cautioning it, mildly scolding it when — as frequently happened — the elephant took a hunger-determined detour from the route and, tearing at bunches of palm leaves, decided to eat a whole tree. We were aimed in a general direction, a long file of elephants, great and small, some of them with humans on their backs. We saw impalas, zebras, warthogs, and a profusion of birds, but the strongest impression I had of this outing was of a herd of elephants idly grazing.

  “Move up, move up. Come on, Cathy, move up,” Big Joe called out. And I could hear the other mahouts exhorting their elephants.

  But the elephants were hungry, and there was no way to dissuade a famished animal from its food — and in this glittering swamp, food was abundant as far as the eye could see. The elephants wrenched at leafy boughs and crammed palm fronds into their pink mouths. They twirled tall stands of grass with their trunks and uprooted whole sheaves of it to eat.

  “Move it up!”

  All along the file, the mahouts were calling out in English. Pet owners and trainers talk to their animals constantly. I am struck by these earnest appeals. Do animals understand English, and if so, how much? I suppose “Beg” and “Roll over” and “Heel” might elicit a response. What about “You’re a good boy” and “No, Nugget, whine all you like, you’re not getting any more munchies”?

  The cry “Move it up” did very little to provoke Cathy to move from her meal, and I could not see the point of trying to convince this snorting and masticating beast that it was a better idea to keep moving than to finish eating the tree she was stabbing with her tusks and tearing apart with her trunk.

  But the experience of riding an elephant past the wildlife on the grassy banks and the herons in the channels under the high blue sky was something unimaginable to me, and though objectively I could see that the elephant was enormous, and I had always felt elephants were dangerous, I felt safe from any predators. What animal would dare attack this big-tusked creature? Its only true enemy was a human, armed with an enormous gun.

  We proceeded to an island between two channels where there was a mud wallow, where we dismounted. The elephants, relieved of their riders and seats, rolled in the soft muck and sprayed water over themselves while we few guests sat in camp chairs, sipping mineral water, snapping pictures, or making notes in a journal or for a magazine piece. Close encounters of the herd kind! and Clamber onto an African elephant for the ultimate safari!

  I had been on safaris before. It is always a ticklish and often an infantilizing business. First come the detailed instructions — what to wear, how to move, how to talk, what to expect; all power and initiative are taken from you in the interest of safety. You are reduced to being a child on a school trip, reminded that you are very small and strange and vulnerable, that there are dangers all around. And this is demonstrably true. Look, a croc on the riverbank, the glimpse of a lion, a leopard up a tree, a buffalo pawing the dust, fresh bales of elephant dung littering the road — evidence of a nearby herd.

  So you put yourself in the hands of experienced guides who lead you from sight to sight, from animal to animal. As a child again, you are closely supervised by an adult, and you rediscover a child’s sense of wonder. But the Abu Camp safari was something new. I was in the care of a guide and on the back of an elephant, now being shown a zebra, now an eagle, and now taken home to have my lunch, then a nap in my sumptuous tent.

  Riding on a trained elephant, gazing on wild elephants — it was like nothing I had ever done or seen, and as far as I knew it had no parallel in Africa. Added to the fact that Abu Camp was an island of luxury in the bush was the novelty of elephants for transport and the staff working so hard to please the guests. I could understand the travel writer gushing for a magazine, writing pieces about Where pachyderms play and recalling the meals: Antelope steaks sizzled on the grill as we were plied with wild mushroom risotto, cauliflower gratin, tiramisù, Veuve Clicquot … And as we sat drinking and talking an enormous hyena appeared out of nowhere …

  A dreamy-bosomed woman in stylish khaki and a bush hat was tapping her pretty pouting lips with a blunt pen and preparing to write, We soon discovered that riding an elephant is not terribly comfortable — after sitting sideways on the saddle for an hour or two I felt restless and sticky. And then she added, The cheekiest of the herd, and our favorite, was Paseka, aged two.

  At the wallow, Nathan and Big Joe were drinking coffee and watching their elephants. I wandered over to them. Nathan had told me that he had an identical twin brother, Heath, who lived in Australia. Twins fascinate me for many reasons, especially the obvious literary examples in Mark Twain and Dickens, in The Comedy of Errors and Tweedledum and Tweedledee.

  “The Yoruba in Nigeria have an unusually high incidence of twins,” I said. “Twins figure in their belief system. Yoruba carve special twin images to represent them — they believe that twins share the same soul.”

  “I understand that. Heath and I get along great,” Nathan said. Then, “We were just talking about our trip,” he said. “Big Joe and Collet and I are going to the St
ates on a marketing trip pretty soon.”

  Big Joe laughed. “My first time in America!”

  “Where are you going?”

  “New York City?” Nathan said in a querying voice. “Toronto? A few other places. It’s mainly for Abu, but we’ll be visiting some elephant facilities too. What do you think?”

  “You’ll have the time of your life,” I said. “If you can get these elephants to behave, you can do anything.”

  I had seen elephants in Africa before. They are unmissable features of the landscape, visible from a mile away, and they are dauntless, never hurrying or circumspect or hunted-looking as most other African game seems. Elephants own the bush, where they are right at home, ambling in family groups, going wherever they wish. If they decide to eat a tree, they will do so, and are well known for tearing a baobab to pieces with their tusks to get at the juicy pulp. If you are in their way, they will trample you and keep going. They never give the impression that they need anyone or anything. Because of their size and their appetite they spend much of the day eating. The oddity of Abu was that these elephants, born in the wild, had been captured and dominated, taught to submit to humans climbing on them.

  Riding an Indian elephant (Elephas maximus indicus) in Rajasthan is not unusual. In India they are traditionally used as beasts of burden, as workers in the fields, and in combat; this has been the case for thousands of years. Alexander the Great used elephants in his campaign of conquest as he battled into India, and so did the armies opposing him, as did Hannibal later, crossing the Alps. But these were Asian or Syrian war elephants — smaller, tractable varieties.

  A big-eared African elephant (Loxodonta africana) is another matter altogether. For one thing, it is the largest land animal in the world, highly intelligent, independent, and family-minded. I easily understood the purpose of Abu Camp as a refuge for lost and orphaned elephants. But it was harder for me to grasp the hubristic intention of creating a program to bully elephants into obedience, to dominate them so thoroughly that they would allow themselves to be harnessed to a riding platform. Some of these heavy wooden platforms held two anxious people, and with the mahout loudly urging the creature along, that meant three vociferating adult humans balancing on the elephant’s bristly spine while it moved through the swamp among the other animals.

  I was thinking that Africa, which was losing its wildness by the day to urban encroachment and land grabbers, was also sacrificing the wildness of these powerful elephants as well, in the interest of tourism, and exploiting them as drudges, to be led back and forth like pack animals.

  When I mentioned this to Michael, he repeated that his ultimate intention was to reintroduce most of these elephants into the wild so they could join a herd and live as free creatures again. This seemed to me a worthy aim.

  On another day at Abu, we climbed onto the elephants and were taken for a picnic in a clearing by a backwater at the side of one of the wider river channels. This picnic by the lagoon stands out in my memory as the highest level of comfort one could find in the African bush while still retaining all the elements of the safari experience. The clearing was a lovely setting, in a grove of tall mopane and fig trees, well shaded but looking onto the water coursing through the thick reed beds of the Okavango. In all essentials we were outdoors in the heart of Africa, among small darting birds and tall fish-hunting herons. We were seated in camp chairs and served cold drinks by the Abu staff, and on an expanse of white linen, a buffet table had been laid — yellow curries, bowls of purple vegetables, a tureen of soup, platters of sliced fruit, and beer and wine in chests of ice.

  Nathan — his usual serene self, chatting with the other mahouts — told me that he had recently taken the mahouts and elephants out camping for the night. What fun they had swimming and playing soccer. “We were sleeping with the elephants in a circle around us.” He made it sound like Boy Scout camp. But one of the cautions in Randall Moore’s Back to Africa — the whole Abu Camp rationale — was that it was crucial that the trainer continually remind the elephant who was boss. “Dominance … must prevail,” Moore writes. The trainer “must make it known from the start who has the best means of domination at his disposal.”

  Nathan spoke of the elephants, and especially Sukiri, with a matey affection, but his tone also contained a note of reverential awe, granting them a sort of sacredness. I noticed that no one at Abu ever joked about the elephants.

  I said, “I’m trying to imagine what Big Joe and Collet will make of New York City.”

  Michael said, “They might fancy it. They’ve never been out of the Okavango, much less Botswana. They might decide to stay there for years.” And saying yeurs, he raised his glass to the three men sitting together.

  “Safe travels,” I said, toasting them.

  “And if the Americans don’t understand an Aussie accent, Big Joe can translate.” Tronslate.

  Sighing, Alexandra said, “Isn’t this magical? Look at us. It’s a living Manet, Déjeuner sur l’herbe.”

  It was a transcendent experience and an unexpected thrill. Such experiences are so exceptional in Africa that few people know them — and those people are nearly all outsiders who have flown at great expense from Europe or America to pay thousands a day for this. Five days at Abu must have cost in the tens of thousands — I didn’t know, since Michael was too tactful to tell me. These thrills will become rarer as the game diminishes and the wild places are overrun with camps and lodges, the rivers dammed, the savannas fenced, the land carved up and exploited, and the bush animals eaten to extinction. Peter Beard’s landmark book The End of the Game: The Last Word from Paradise was early (1965) but prophetic. The doom of the animals was inevitable: “Death is the patiently awaited, un-feared fact of delicately poised African life.”

  I admired the order of Abu Camp and the integrity of Michael’s wish to release the elephants, and hoped that he would prosper. I liked the harmony and found it funny that although the mahout might yell and cajole, the elephant stood its ground, yanking at trees, stuffing its mouth with leafy boughs, doing exactly what it wanted to do, taking its time, resuming its walk only when it had eaten its fill. So much for the trainer’s superiority or dominance.

  On my last evening, Michael asked where I was going next. I said back to Namibia, and north to Etosha.

  “Etosha’s another story.”

  For him, Etosha Pan was mass tourism in a large regulated game park: busloads of gawkers, herds of budget-minded tourists, sprawling hotel compounds.

  “I’m seeing a man who’s doling out American aid,” I said.

  Michael said that he would stay in touch, and he did. I got news of Nathan, Collet, and Big Joe in New York. The three friends, bonded by their months of working together, stayed at the elegant Pierre Hotel and were interviewed by awed journalists about their life in the bush and their elephant experiences with the herd at Abu. They visited zoos in Toronto, Indianapolis, Pittsburgh, and Baltimore, looking at elephants and studying the breeding programs. They were photographed and quoted as though they themselves were marvels from Africa. They were away for six weeks.

  On his return to Abu, Nathan Jamieson began working again with his elephant, Sukiri. A few days after he’d arrived back, he left her untethered, and when he walked a little distance to fetch her chains and manacles, turning his back on her, she followed him in the nodding and plodding way of an elephant on a mission, and knocked him flat, crushing him to death with her huge head. Nathan was thirty-two years old.

  There was a further shock. When his identical twin brother Heath showed up at the camp to take Nathan’s body away, the whole African staff stared in fascinated horror and then abject fear, scared rigid by the sight of what appeared to be an incarnation of Nathan, claiming his ghost.

  Later, Michael told me, “He died doing what he loved.” I remembered how happy Nathan had been at Abu Camp, how fond he was of the elephants, how much he knew of them. Perhaps it was true that he’d had a happy death.

  On hearing
of Nathan’s death, the Botswana government ordered that Sukiri be destroyed. Michael Lorentz vigorously opposed this, and thus began an imbroglio that ended with Michael quitting Abu for good, the camp resuming business under new management. Sukiri and the two elephants that had been orphaned with her were trucked to Johannesburg and flown in elephantine crates to the United States, where they are now housed together in a cage at the Pittsburgh Zoo.

  10

  The Hungry Herds at Etosha

  ICROSSED THE BORDER into Namibia again, got a lift, and descended to the crumbly yellow middle of the country, staying first at a bush camp and then at a hotel. It was one of those inevitable transitions of travel — not travel at all, but stringent captivity and enforced delay. Months later, I couldn’t help but think of what Michael had said of Nathan Jamieson: “He died doing what he loved.” I wondered — and who wouldn’t? — in what circumstances that hopeful consolation might be uttered of my death, and whether it would be true.

  The bush camp, north of Grootfontein, had only one other guest, except after dark when five large, well-formed eland crept through the thorn trees to drink at the waterhole near the lodge. The woman manager, who had seemed so taciturn, softened at the sight of them, as misanthropes often do in the presence of animals, saying, “Lovely, aren’t they?” The next day she brightened again, pointing out a golden oriole and a parrot-sized hornbill flitting through those same trees.

  An American in charge of an aid program had agreed to meet me in Otjiwarongo, take me to Etosha Pan, and drop me on the road to Angola. From there I would be on my own. I saw the thin and sad widow Helena (“No fun here. No life at all”) again at the Grootfontein supermarket, and in Otjiwarongo stopped in to see Mr. Khan and buy more minutes for my phone. And, welcomed by these friendly people, I was reminded that in much of Africa there are so few main roads that people’s lives continually converge, and there occurs a repeating experience of crossed paths and familiar faces.