Love, Life, and Elephants

by Dame Daphne Sheldrick

  I was coming to understand the contrasting characteristics of rhinos, having now hand-reared four orphans. Like the elephants, they were capable of extreme gentleness and affection in captivity and loved nothing more than a tummy rub, which invariably induced a state of collapse, falling over with their legs outstretched in a condition of comatose bliss. Yet, unlike the elephants, when confronted by strangers of their species unknown by scent, or whenever they felt threatened, they would instantly go into ‘auto-mode’, their subsequent reactions dictated not by thought processes but by instincts beyond their control. At such times they were definitely unpredictable and dangerous, earning them their fearsome reputation. Our orphan Reudi was now almost fully grown and not far off two tons in weight, sporting a sizeable horn that he had sharpened like a dagger. He was beginning to display warning signs that made us afraid he might skewer the two younger rhino orphans, Stroppie and Pushmi, or even put another orphan attendant at risk. David decided that the time had come to try and rehabilitate Reudi and return him back where he belonged, among his own wild kind.

  Since the rhino population had been seriously thinned out on the north bank of the Athi River during the 1960 drought, we decided this would be a good place for him, so a stout stockade was built near to the Tsavo Safari Camp in which to confine him for a week or two in order to become accustomed to his new home. Although Reudi seemed to settle well, his presence attracted an old cow rhino and her half-grown calf, who broke into the stockade one night and set about attacking him. The commotion was indescribable. Deafening rhino roars woke up all the tourists in the camp and brought the manager, who bravely managed to fling open the stockade gates, enabling poor Reudi to escape into the night, hotly pursued by the cow and her calf. He had been outmatched, and few expected to ever see him again. Fearing that he would die of injury out in the bush, David instructed a Field Force patrol based in the area to try to track him down, but the spoor became obliterated by rain. Astonishingly, two days later we heard via the radio network that Reudi had hobbled back into the lodge grounds, bruised and battered, with a deep wound in his side. He had apparently taken to lying in the soothing waters of the river to escape his attackers, a very sorry-looking rhino, obviously not finding independent living to his liking at all.

  Reudi’s convalescence was long and painful, during which time his wounds were treated on a daily basis. Rubbing his tummy meant he would lie down, so this was easily accomplished, after which he would take to the river again. Nothing anyone did could induce him to return to his stockade, as it clearly held sinister connotations. Instead he preferred to put water between himself and his opponents at night, wading in either to sleep in the river, or to lie right beside it on the opposite bank. Unfortunately, but probably unavoidably, visitors to the lodge lavished attention on him, the one thing we were hoping to avoid since he was supposed to be in training for a natural life, which meant severing his links with humans altogether. Instead, he was encouraged to come into the large bar tent, where he would rest his massive head on the counter, open his mouth to receive any contributions, then shuffle away to sleep off the effects in the grass outside.

  When his wounds had healed, Reudi plucked up the courage to venture further afield in order to browse, his enemies still very much in evidence but more accommodating to his presence, having initially forced him to retreat back to the lodge compound. It was Reudi who taught us most about how sensitive the reintegration of rhinos into an established rhino community was, and that the key to success lay in the communal dung piles and urinals and a lengthy introduction through chemistry and scent, something that even David had not fully appreciated.

  While at first the presence of a fully grown rhino at the camp, eating from the visitors’ hands, was an added attraction, invariably the tour operators became nervous, fearing litigation should a client be injured. Demands began to be made for Reudi’s removal. He had become so accustomed to the bar handouts that when they failed to materialize he would display irritation, snorting and tossing his head. Had he not been corrupted by the visitors, he might well have been able to live out his days in Tsavo, establishing a truce with the old cow and her calf as well as other rhinos resident in the area. We gave the matter of Reudi’s removal a great deal of thought, reluctant to have to put him through the same painful process again, so we approached the wealthy American owner of Solio Ranch, near Nanyuki, who was establishing a fenced wildlife sanctuary as a birthday present for his wife. A twenty-five-square-mile area within the ranch was being stocked with wild game animals. Reudi would be the first of some twelve other rhinos due to be brought in from elsewhere, and since none would be established territorially, he would be spared the inevitable battle for the right to belong. Instead he would be free to establish the boundaries of his own territory unhindered, secure from poachers, as well as from the privation of Tsavo’s droughts and floods. And so once again he was enticed into the travelling crate to face another long journey, this time to Solio Ranch, and as he passed through the Voi Park Headquarters I clambered aboard to wish him well in his new life. Gently, he accepted the Lucerne handout I had brought him and allowed me to rub the side of his face. By now he was a magnificent specimen in his prime, with a long sweeping horn. He did in fact settle down well at Solio, and in the fullness of time became the dominant breeding bull of the sanctuary and a prime player in the salvation of the species. In the years ahead, due to rampant poaching, rhinos in the wild came close to becoming entirely annihilated, but thanks to Solio Ranch, which ended up holding a population of ninety black rhinos – mostly sired by Reudi – the black rhino as a species was saved from extinction in Kenya.

  Meanwhile, back in Tsavo, my parents were anxious that David and I should bury the hatchet with Peter and Sarah and join them on a visit to Meru National Park. They were very proud of Peter’s achievements as Warden of Meru, and Peter was anxious that David, as his mentor, should also see what he had been able to accomplish. David decided to combine this family visit with a recruiting exercise in order to bring the Field Force back up to strength, particularly as Parliament was about to debate a Bill that proposed merging the National Parks Service with the Government Game Department under the Ministry of Tourism and Wildlife. Despite the fact that this would compromise the National Parks by removing them from the jurisdiction of an independent Board of Trustees, and instead subject them to the whims of politicians, the passage into law of the new Bill seemed a foregone conclusion. David saw the urgency of recruiting the right sort of raw material for an effective Field Force that would be capable of dealing with a new threat of poaching, this time by armed Somali rebels who were just beginning to make an appearance around the boundaries of Tsavo. Through past experience David knew where to look for the people he needed for the Field Force – they would be recruited not from the classrooms but from the wild nomadic tribes of the Northern Frontier, who had the necessary stamina and skills to operate under challenging hot and arid conditions, totally at ease walking on foot in harsh terrain among wild animals.

  Jill had by now completed her secondary schooling at the Loreto Convent in Nairobi, and in order to equip her to earn a good living, my parents urged Bill and me that she be sent to South Africa for a secretarial grounding, which after all had served me and both my sisters in such good stead later on in life. They felt also that she needed exposure to the urban sophistication of Cape Town, at that time a city much more akin to the capitals of Europe than Nairobi. And so David and I took Jill to South Africa and established her in a comfortable hostel in Cape Town, within easy walking through the gardens to her secretarial college in the city centre. Betty had some close friends who lived nearby who were happy to keep a close eye on my daughter and expose her to the attractions of South Africa in between her studies. David had inherited his mother’s love of clothes and astute sense of fashion, so he took great delight in taking Jill shopping in order to equip her for an urban life as opposed to one in the bush. Jill settled down well into city life,
but when she got wind of the recruiting safari she flew back home and surprised me by strolling in through the front door. At first I was convinced that I was dreaming and that she must be an illusion – it was soon to be her twenty-first birthday and I thought we would be apart for that – but I soon realized it was really her, that she would be coming along with us to Meru and beyond.

  It was the first time I had been to Meru National Park, which was a well-watered mini-replica of Tsavo, with streams fringed by rust-coloured raffia palms, plains of corn-coloured grass, giant baobabs, and, near the Tana River, the same old commiphora scrubland thicket, reminiscent of the southern section of Tsavo before the elephants undertook their handiwork. The Park roads were shipshape, the junctions marked by immaculate cedar signs similar to those that first graced Tsavo, while shallow concrete drifts spanned the many streams flowing through the Park from the Nyambeni Hills. Crossing one, we enjoyed the thrill of being roundly charged by a rhino that missed our truck by a whisker. We passed large groups of beautiful reticulated giraffe, beisa oryx and Grévy’s zebra as well as peaceful elephant herds, indicating that Peter had also managed to get control of poaching.

  Peter and Sarah’s home was a colonial-style bungalow with an open verandah and living area, fronted by a verdant grass lawn and a rustic birdbath well attended at all times by a vast assortment of feathered friends. Below, a tiny stream fed by a spring flowed through a wire enclosure protecting a flourishing vegetable garden and the beginnings of an orchard, planted with seedlings of mango, avocado and citrus germinated by my mother in Malindi. My parents were already there, and were, of course, delighted by the unexpected appearance of their granddaughter, so our welcome could not have been warmer. It felt like home from home, with waterbuck and impala grazing the open area below the house and an old giraffe casually strolling past. A special bond existed between Jill and my parents, going way back to the time they had spent together when I was a young and inexperienced mother of twenty-one, about the same age, in fact, that Jill was now. Sadly, Angela, who was twelve now, couldn’t be with us, for it was still term-time at her boarding school in Turi, situated about 150 miles west of Nairobi. My parents wanted to catch up on all her news too, and I was proud to tell them of her sporting achievements, riding skills and academic excellence – she really was a chip off her father’s block.

  Prior to our arrival, David had asked Peter to liaise with the local chief to arrange a gathering of nomadic Boran pastoral tribesmen for recruitment. David was keen to take on only the really raw warriors among them, and from these eight with the best physique were selected and asked to run two miles in a test of endurance, something they undertook with tremendous enthusiasm and laughter. The first five were then sent for a medical, and, having successfully passed this, the Field Force had five new Boran recruits who accompanied us during the rest of the recruiting exercise. This entailed a 2,000-mile adventure in which we journeyed through the colourful frontier town of Isiolo; endured the stifling heat and powdery dust of the Kaisut and Chalbi deserts; camped in the crater of the volcanic mountain of Marsabit at Lake Paradise; survived a stay in North Horr a few hours after a violent raid on the local people and livestock by the gun-toting Amakoki horsemen; got blown out of our tents during a night-time gale at Lake Turkana; and celebrated Jill’s twenty-first birthday at the relatively luxurious Loyangalani Lodge. On the way David was able to recruit men from the Rendille, Gabbra and Shangilla tribes, men who soon became part of our lives back at Voi. On the way home, the astonishment of the recruits was plain; they gazed with as much disbelief at the forested slopes and towering peaks of Mount Kenya as at the traffic and buses on the road.

  After four full days of travelling, it was good to be back in familiar surroundings and to catch up with all that had taken place in our absence. It was wonderful to be reunited with Eleanor, who welcomed us by lifting a huge foreleg for us to encircle with our arms. I was looking forward to having Angela back home from school again before Jill had to return to South Africa, so that our family could be intact.

  Now, intensive, relentless training of the recruits began in earnest under the eagle eye of Sergeant Kimwele, who had served with David in the 5th King’s African Rifles during the war years. For the next few weeks the recruits were drilled endlessly on the parade ground – the ostriches often in attendance. The new recruits became radio-proficient, were taught how to shoot and underwent target practice at the Lugard’s Falls firing range. They were also put through a tough battle course designed on military lines, and after three full months Tsavo East had a Field Force unit of disciplined and efficient men, of whom David was extremely proud.

  That was the last recruiting exercise undertaken in this way, and I remain honoured to have been able to be a part of it, to have seen at first hand how these proud tribesmen could be transformed into an extremely effective paramilitary force, enduring conditions that would undoubtedly have crushed the spirit of men softened by easy living. They had instinctive skills that could never be learned in a classroom, skills that were honed by hardship – the type of men that served Britain with such distinction in two World Wars. Deprived of rangers of this calibre in the future, Tsavo would never be the same again.

  12. Expansion

  ‘The world breaks everyone, and afterwards many are strong in the broken places.’

  – Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms

  Whenever I had to be elsewhere, I missed the orphans, but at that time none more so than Bunty, a beautiful impala to whom I had grown deeply attached. She had arrived as a tiny fawn from a neighbouring ranch, where her mother had been killed by a lion. Initially she had been difficult to feed, rejecting every teat that we tried, until Jill sat up through the night in her bedroom, stroking Bunty’s soft shiny russet fur, coaxing her to take milk from a bottle. She spent her initial nights in a cupboard in Jill’s room, and then more comfortably in a night stable at the side of the house until she resolutely refused to sleep inside. The girls and I were worried that a lion would devour her, but David reassured us that the art of basic survival was the most important lesson in life and that there was no other way to hone instinct other than exposure to a wild situation, especially in an animal that had known no natural mother. For the first few nights I was alert to the slightest of sounds, peering from the window on to a world lit by a pale moon, where every shadow took on the slinky shape of a predator. Sometimes Bunty’s alarm snort would sound in the stillness of the night and instantly I would be awake, knowing that she had been exposed to danger. David insisted that to have just been aware of the danger was half the battle and that our presence would simply put her further at risk by distracting her attention. So I had to wait impatiently for the morning to see if she was still alive, my imagination running riot in the meantime.

  Despite my fears, Bunty did survive and shared her life with ours for the time she was in Tsavo. Very early on she instinctively knew that by night the garden was not the safe place it was by day, so as soon as the sun sank below the horizon, as the Honk peacock family began to settle in the branches of the car park tree and the curtains were drawn for the night in the house, Bunty left the garden and set off for the open space beyond the offices. There, she was a changed animal, no longer calm and confident of safety. Instead, every muscle was tensed, poised for instant flight, while her ears moved restlessly, straining to catch the slightest sound that might warn of impending danger. Her large deep-black eyes scanned the darkness constantly, searching, seeking and analysing every movement to determine whether it was friend or foe. All those latent instincts with which she had been born now came to the fore. During the night she was no longer the impala we had raised from a newborn fawn but simply another wild creature preoccupied with the important business of survival in a world where the odds were evenly cast.

  I was so well attuned to Bunty’s alarm snorts that one evening, while David and I were walking back from the office to our house – a distance of some 200 yards – I heard her al
arm signal from far off, an urgent insistence in her warnings. I knew she was trying to alert us to the presence of danger, and sure enough, in the beam of our torch, we picked up four glowing red eyes and could make out the ominous shape of two crouching lions by the side of the path. Since lions rely on the element of surprise, it is not inconceivable that Bunty saved our lives, for the Tsavo lions were well known for their fondness of human flesh and were especially bold at night. In reality, lions are actually rather cowardly creatures, brave only when they are aggressors, so the best way to turn the tables on them is to rush towards them in a demonstration of aggression. Picking up some stones, David did just that, hastening their retreat with a hail of rocks. We were grateful for Bunty’s presence that night and I silently thanked her as I reached the steps of the verandah with a rapidly beating heart.

  Generally Bunty kept herself slightly aloof from the other garden orphans, particularly those that were a bit boisterous, but there was one she loved dearly and that was Jimmy, the kudu, who had come to the orphanage as a baby fawn. Since a kudu grows up more slowly than an impala, being a longer-lived species, he was small for a long time, and unusually, he would allow me to pick him up and carry him with his front legs dangling over my shoulder, right up until the time he became too heavy for me to lift and his long ivory-tipped horns were an obstacle to cuddles. He and Baby, a feisty eland – much larger than Bunty – were inseparable, but both accepted Bunty as their leader and deferred to all her wishes. It was at night that Bunty first met her own kind and came up against a male leader of over a dozen beautiful young impala ewes and their young. He was a magnificent specimen with sweeping lyre-shaped horns, and his nocturnal retreat happened to be the open area below the office. Each evening at dusk he ushered his wives out of the thickets to the safety of open ground, herding them along with a series a low grunting barks. To us, he became known as ‘Father Ram’ and he ruled his wives firmly – any that dared look to be straying from the fold were instantly rounded up and herded back in. However, he met his match in Bunty, whom he must have regarded as a particularly troublesome addition to his harem, for as soon as dawn broke and the sun painted the sky crimson and pink, she had only one thought in mind and that was to escape in order to return home and spend her days on the lawn near us. While Father Ram and his wives were excellent company at night, providing additional eyes and ears to detect danger, she looked upon us as her diurnal herd and her affection for us never wavered.