by Clay Wilson
Either my aim was a little off or the buffalo moved at the moment I fired, because the dart glanced off his thick hide and flew into the bush. I had another dart at the ready, just in case, but the buffalo was not about to give me a second chance. He lowered his head and charged me. I ran for it. When a buffalo charges there is no point in standing still; it’s best to find the nearest tree and climb for dear life. I was running for mine. I threw the dart gun on the ground.
My .416 was bouncing on my back, hanging from its sling, and as I ran I clawed behind me and over my shoulder to try to get to it. I looked every which way around me, but couldn’t see a tree that would support my weight. I then lost my footing on some loose gravel as I was running downhill and fell on my back, facing the buffalo, trying to lift the rifle I had freed in midair and take off the safety catch. The snorting, charging buffalo was almost on me. I’ve often said that I would be happy to die in the bush, doing what I was meant to do, treating animals, but all of a sudden an untimely death did not seem like something I wanted.
Time slowed as I saw the buffalo’s huge, horned head bearing down on me. I realised then I had no chance of getting the .416 up in time and braced myself for the impact. I remember thinking to myself that this was going to hurt badly. Then there was the boom of a heavy-calibre rifle ahead of me and the buffalo dropped to its chest and raised a cloud of dust as it skidded to a halt only inches from my outstretched legs. Looking over the sites of his rifle was Mr Khan. I could have kissed him at that moment.
It was a shame the buffalo had to be taken down, but this was the reality of working with dangerous game. Sometimes all did not go according to plan. When Mr Khan and I examined the buffalo I took some comfort from the discovery that one of its rear legs was badly broken. Despite its injury, it had been able to chase me at a scary pace, and had probably been in great pain. It had also suffered cuts from what appeared to be a run-in with a razor-wire fence, and while I could have treated those, there was no way its broken leg would have healed properly as a result of any treatment I could have given it in the field. The fractures were the cause of its ornery behaviour and I knew that even if I had darted it successfully I would have had no choice but to euthanise it there and then.
The other often irascible giant of the bush, the African elephant, is my all-time favourite animal. I love their intelligence and their sensitivity and their loyalty to each other. I don’t know if they never forget, but they do remember things.
Whenever I’ve darted an elephant, the main concern for me has been the rest of the herd, if they were present. Their initial reaction is not to run away from the downed member, but to try to help it. They will circle protectively around the sedated one and try to raise it to its feet with their trunks and tusks. You can hear their distress in their pained callings and see their confusion and concern.
Sadly, the only way to disperse a herd at a time like this, in order to get to the sedated member of the family, is to show them a rifle, held high over your head, and, if need be, to fire a shot. These animals know what a gun is and they remember its danger. Even in parks where poaching is not much of a problem, this knowledge is passed on, and a matriarch in charge of a herd will, sadly, usually be old enough and well-travelled enough to have come across man’s killing power and his weapons some time in her life.
When you’re being charged by an elephant you learn how fast you can run. There’s an old adage in the African bush, “Whatever you do, don’t run,” and that’s generally the best attitude to take. If you’re bailed up by a lion, it’s suicide to try to run for it, because that’s exactly what it wants you to do. Like a house cat toying with a mouse or a lizard, lions hunt by sight and sound; they prefer their prey to be moving and squealing and generally panicking, and if it stops still, they lose interest. They watch herd animals and target the weak, and man is the weakest and slowest of all a lion’s potential prey, so it will happily give chase and bring you down and eat you if you try to run.
All animals have what is known as a flight-or-fight zone. Most creatures, even the super predators, will move away from man if he gets too close to them – that is, if man enters their “flight” zone. If you think of the flight zone as an invisible circle drawn around an animal, a kind of force field, then within that zone is an inner circle, closer to the animal, which represents the “fight” zone. Cross that line and the animal will decide it can’t escape you, so its only option is to kill you.
The zones vary from animal to animal, but I found the critical distance from an elephant is about 10 metres. That doesn’t sound far, and it’s not. I have had elephants flare their ears out and raise their trunks and trumpet at me from that 10-metre mark, but that’s usually just blustering. Sometimes they will mock charge for effect, taking a few steps from further away and then pulling up at that 10-metre line and displaying a bit more. But if it crosses that line, or if you come closer to it, then panic sets in. The elephant will pin back its big ears, curl its trunk up between its tusks and under its mouth, and come after you with intent to kill. It’s at that point I’d start running.
Generally I’d try to make it to the nearest stout tree and hide behind it. Once an elephant has you cornered, but you’re out of sight, there’s a good chance it will lose interest in you and then back off – or at least that is the theory. If you give him a chance to calm down and an easy means of escape, you might be okay.
Even a seriously injured elephant that has collapsed can still be a danger. A lying elephant can use its trunk to knock you off your feet or grab you and slam you into the ground, but I’ve found that these amazing creatures are actually intelligent enough to be able to differentiate between friend and foe. When I came across a recumbent elephant in pain, I would stop still a short distance from it, just out of reach, and let it see me clearly, so that it knew I was not coming in to cause it more pain. Sometimes, once it got used to me and my calm, reassuring words – the way I always talk to these animals – it would reach out to me with its trunk, as if beseeching me for help. I could see the pleading, sometimes, in its eyes. I would move a fraction closer, just enough for it to touch me with the tip of the trunk, and it would sniff me. A temporary bond would be established and I could then go about my work.
Most of the bullet wounds I dealt with in elephants had been inflicted by AK47S. Africa is awash with these cheap, lethal, Russian-designed military assault weapons. It is a robust rifle that needs little maintenance and therefore lasts a long time, which is part of the problem; these instruments of death are not going to rust away to nothing anytime soon.
The 7.62-millimetre copper-jacketed bullet the AK fires tumbles as soon as it hits something, disrupting and shredding organs and generally leaving a mess inside. If the animal is small enough, the bullet will pass through it, leaving a gaping exit wound on the opposite side of a small entrance wound. With a creature as large as an elephant, the bullet will usually stay in the animal and it’s pointless trying to remove it. As with a human, it is not the physical presence of a bullet inside the body that kills; it’s the damage done by the bullet as it passes into and through the body. This is why bullets are sometimes left inside people too.
The first thing I did when treating a bullet wound was draw up a syringe of hydrogen peroxide and squirt that into the entry wound. Hydrogen peroxide is very good at eating up dead material. I would follow that by flushing the wound with iodine or chlorihexidine. Next I would pack the wound with antibiotic powder or squeeze in a tube of antibiotic ointment until it was overflowing out of the entry wound. Finally I would administer an anti-inflammatory and an injectable antibiotic.
It’s impractical to do a full surgical procedure in the bush, although if a wound needed closing I would use a staple gun. Elephants are tough animals and in most cases they can carry a bullet, or more, inside them and still make a good recovery, as long as no vital organs have been damaged.
Sometimes, if the damage from a gunshot wound did not look too bad, I would not both
er sedating the animal, as that in itself poses an element of risk, but I was still able to treat it in what I considered an innovative way. I once came across an elephant that had been wounded in the face with buckshot from a shotgun, and while its injuries from the pellets were not immediately life threatening, they had become infected. I could imagine how this had happened; it would have been an angry farmer trying to scare the elephant away from his crops. Instead of loading his shotgun with birdshot, which is made up of tiny lead pellets that would give the animal a fright but not penetrate its hide, he had used lead buckshot, and the fewer, heavier pellets had caused a nasty wound.
I knew it would be pointless sedating this guy and trying to pick out the score or more of tiny pellets still lodged in his skin, and too time-consuming to clean every wound, so I took out a dart and instead of loading it with M99, which would have knocked him down, I filled the projectile with antibiotics. I loaded the dart in the gas-powered gun, took aim and fired it at the elephant, hitting him in the rump. The dart, with its fluffy pink tail, designed in that colour so that it’s visible to the shooter, discharged the medicine into the pachyderm. I knew that even though the dart had a barbed tip, he would eventually remove it by rubbing himself against a tree. I immediately followed up with another antibiotic and an anti-inflammatory dart that I had preloaded. These were only 10 cc darts, but on more than one occasion they had made a huge difference, even though you would think you were under-dosing the animal.
I was able to use this technique of administering antibiotics and other drugs on other animals, but learnt some valuable lessons on the way. If I were going to shoot a lion, I would always aim for the neck rather than the rump. Although the rump is usually an easier target, I observed that a lion’s initial reaction was often to reach around with its mouth and try to pull the dart out with its teeth and eat it. This wasn’t too much of a problem with fast-acting M99, but if a lion was going to carry around a dart full of medication for a while, I didn’t want it chewing on the delivery system and potentially injuring itself by swallowing the metal components. By aiming for the neck, it was impossible for a lion to get to the dart with its mouth.
The sound of gunfire at night was an all-too-common occurrence in Kasane and it usually meant someone was trying to deter – or worse, kill – big game such as buffalos or elephants. I was at home watching a movie on my laptop on a Saturday night when I received a call from a man I knew in Kazungula, telling me he had heard shots fired.
It was probably some farmer, I thought, firing to scare off an elephant or taking the law into his own hands and killing a crop raider. There had been a presidential edict issued, forbidding citizens to shoot elephants without permission, and my campaign to rein in PAC was slowly having the desired effect, but that still didn’t stop people shooting elephants. Some of the local residents of Kasane and Kazungula were starting to get justifiably concerned that a stray bullet might hit a person one of these days; there had already been the ruckus about the near misses at the school.
I got in my truck and headed down the road that runs from the airport to the Kazungula turn-off. As I neared the border town I saw a van driving down the sand road that leads to the Kazungula Snake Park. There were five men sitting on the roof of the van, and a couple of them were swinging handheld spotlights, checking the bush on either side of the road.
Pulling up alongside them, I motioned for them to stop. When I came to a halt I asked them if they had heard any shooting.
“We shot an elephant,” one of the men said.
“I’m an honorary game warden,” I said. “Don’t you know it’s illegal to shoot elephants without permission?”
“We have permission from National Parks to shoot whenever and whatever we want,” the man said.
“I doubt that.”
The men started to get antsy, asking me what a white man was doing in their country and why they should listen to me. One man said he could do anything he wanted to. They were armed and I was becoming alarmed at their tone. The government of Botswana had seen fit to appoint me as an honorary game warden and I thought that these men had gone too far, in their actions and their words.
“I’m placing you under arrest,” I said to the ringleader.
“What?” said the man.
When I asked for their names they refused to give them to me, and became even more aggressive. I wasn’t going to get into a fight with these guys, so I backed off, which is not in my nature, but it was the only sensible thing to do. When they set off, however, I followed them back to the farm where one of them lived. My gut instinct that this had been a farmer taking the law into his own hands seemed correct.
Rather than risk another solo confrontation with the gang, I waited outside the entrance to the farm, but parked to block the entrance gate. I called Kazungula Police Station and various National Parks officers I knew. About 50 minutes later the cops arrived and a short time afterwards a game warden, Mr Sededuma, showed up, along with Jack and three other rangers.
A rapid-fire conversation ensued in Setswana, and I chided myself again for not having taken the time to learn the local language. From what I could gather from the translation, the men had called National Parks to report an elephant in the field where they had planted their crops. The men claimed they had been told they could shoot the elephant. I followed the police and rangers and the farmers, and they led us to the carcass of an elephant, a cow aged about 15 years. She had been shot within the farm’s boundary, but I pointed out to the investigators that I had come across the men spotlighting, armed and on a public road. The dead elephant had been killed with one clean shot – a small mercy, as so often farmers only wounded elephants – but I also said that the man who called me told me he had heard five shots.
It seemed the killing of the elephant fell into a grey area. On one hand there was the presidential edict against killing wildlife without permission, and on the other was the men’s claim that someone had given them permission. Then and there, we couldn’t ascertain if this was true. Apparently there was also a provision in the law for people to shoot wildlife on their own property if they were under threat or if their unfenced crops were being eaten. When all was said and done, however, I had busted these men on a public road clearly looking for something else to shoot. Nothing ever came of it except possibly a headache that I had caused Thuto for trying to sort it out.
I attended four more elephant killings on this farm over the course of the next year. The loophole they were using to get away with this was wearing pretty thin. Typically, the poor innocent elephant was shot because it was looking for green, juicy vegetation that was not available during the dry season. The victim was then shot and slaughtered in a matter of hours by a crowd of local residents arriving like ants to a sugar cube. The meat was undoubtedly sold to game-hungry truckers waiting to cross via the Kazungula Ferry to Zambia. Then the government would reimburse the farmer for damage to his crops, so killing elephants was a win-win arrangement for the landowner. I found out that in this instance P18 000 was awarded, and of course this money did not go into construction of an elephant-proof fence, which should have been the government mandate. As long as the tusks were ceremoniously handed over to the DWNP, everything was in order.
After the last elephant was shot I showed up on a Monday morning to pick up the tusks. I was in a disgruntled mood and did not feel like exchanging the customary greetings.
“I’m here to pick up the tusks,” I said to the farmer without preamble. Once again he went into a tirade as to who I was, and that I had no authority here. Instead of arguing I left and returned with two wardens in uniform. During a heated discussion in Setswana, the warden interpreted for me that I had apparently threatened the farmer with my shotgun.
“You are talking absolute rubbish,” I replied in English. One would think I’d said something derogatory about their mothers when various heated voices, especially from some women standing behind us, started shouting abuse. Bemused and not understanding
their rabid insults, I retreated with the tusks and left the area. To my surprise I learnt later from the wardens that if you used the word “rubbish”, this was an unforgivable insult. When I told Mogau he laughed and said he understood the situation. He also told me never to speak of someone’s mother’s shoes, and I filed that piece of information away for future reference.
The underlying problem here was that where elephants had once roamed the wild bushland there were now lush, productive farms. The fence on that farm – I subsequently learnt the farmer’s name was Mr Aupiti – was not elephant proof, and to my mind it should have been. Putting electrified fencing around crops would not be cheap, but farmers and the local authorities had to start realising that wildlife was valuable and investment was needed to ensure its protection.
Clearly we didn’t want fences as super-charged as the one around the Mowana Lodge, which had nearly electrocuted the waterbuck, but there were ways and means of protecting crops and animals at the same time. Such measures should be required and government-subsidised in areas where humans and elephants tried to coexist. I later caught up with Mr Aupiti and we buried the hatchet. I actually found him to be a decent guy and I tried to see the predicament from his point of view. We had a long discussion about him planting chilli bushes around his existing crops, as I’d heard that this technique had been used to good effect in India and other parts of Africa – elephants hate the smell of chilli.
The problem, however, was bigger than Mr Aupiti. Development is not a bad thing, but it had been taking place in Kasane with little or no regard to the wildlife that had traditionally ruled here, and that was, ironically, the area’s biggest source of revenue for the government. The riverfront was being increasingly denied to game through more housing and farms, and I wondered whether establishing a series of man-made water holes along the back of town, on a path leading to Chobe National Park (where elephants could access the river), might be a solution to the problem.