The Elephant Whisperer: My Life With the Herd in the African Wild

by Lawrence Anthony

  She stood up. ‘I will be waiting outside.’

  As she closed the door Françoise put her arms around me and squeezed for a moment. Then she too left.

  I sat down next to my beautiful boy, lifted his rugged spade-shaped head onto my knee and he looked up, licking my hand as he always did. Even in his dotage he was still a superb creature.

  He and I sat for about ten minutes, just us together. I told him how much I loved him, how much I had learned from his courage and loyalty and that the life in him was eternal. He knew exactly what was happening, we were too close for him not to, and I braced myself and called out to Leotti.

  She came in. The syringe was ready and she administered that loneliest of all injections as I held him.

  I was inconsolable.

  chapter thirty-eight

  About a month later I woke at 6 a.m. with something shaking my shoulder. It was Françoise.

  ‘So,’ she said in that delightful way the French have of being as direct as an arrow, ‘exactly when are we are going to get married … mon chérie?’

  I rubbed the sleep out of my eyes. This was serious talk at this time of the morning and I had to engage my brain quickly.

  ‘Married? We are married. We’re married under common law. In fact we’ve been married longer and happier than most people I know. Almost two decades – a lifetime,’ I added with a yawning grin to rob any unintended offence.

  ‘Well, I don’t understand this common-law business you always talk about. You just say that to do me out of a real wedding,’ she replied, throwing a cushion at me with a laugh that didn’t fully disguise her intent.

  ‘I know. That’s because you turned me down.’

  ‘Turned you down? When, exactly?’

  ‘So you don’t remember? That shows just how important it was to you.’

  She looked baffled. I moved in for the kill.

  ‘It was years ago when I first asked you to marry me. You didn’t even reply.’

  ‘Rubbish! I must have been asleep and you’ve made up all this incredible nonsense.’

  Despite the easy banter we both knew that the eternal battle of the sexes was in full cry and I was thankful when the two-way radio blared at that moment, giving me a pretext to rush off into the reserve. We’d been together for eighteen years and all of a sudden the marriage ‘thing’ was rearing its head. It wasn’t that we weren’t happy. Françoise was absolutely fantastic, and we had been crazily in love since the moment we met, but my theory in life is that if things ain’t broke, why fix them?

  I kissed her as I left. She responded cheerfully … and I breathed a sigh of relief. Once again, all was quiet on the Western front.

  A month later I had to go to England and while away my mother called, asking when I would be returning as she wanted me to meet some government officials that would be visiting Zululand. I gave her the date and she phoned back to say the meeting was confirmed. I let Françoise know and a few days later caught the flight home.

  I arrived on a Saturday morning and after greeting the herd, who came as always to meet me at the fence, walked up to the house.

  Françoise went off to prepare the lodge for the VIPs and I dressed in my best khakis … well, OK the ones with the least holes in them, a little disgruntled that I had to put on a smiling face for some officials barely hours after returning from an exhausting trip.

  I walked to the front entrance of lodge, battered bush cap in hand, and peeked inside. It was packed to the rafters. There was a wedding going on. This was nothing unusual as we often do functions for overseas couples wanting a romantic Zulu wedding in the bush. I turned and walked out, bumping into my mum. I kissed her hello.

  ‘Where are your VIPs? We can’t meet them here. There’s a wedding going on.’

  She nodded, with a strange smile on her face. Something was up.

  ‘Hang on … who is getting married? Anyone we know?’

  ‘You are.’

  There must be some innate male defence mechanism that kicks in at moments like this. I heard the two words she said, but neither registered.

  ‘OK, well let’s take the government people to the conference centre, out of the way of all this stuff.’

  She shook her head, still with that strange smile. There were no government officials. My mum linked her arm through mine and we walked into the thatched lounge. Everyone stood and started clapping.

  I had plenty of time to register what was happening because it unfolded before me as abstractly as an elephant charge, taking place in surreal slow motion despite its thundering reality. This was an ambush, a joint operation planned by both Françoise’s family and my own. I recognized her best friend from Paris sitting with the Anthonys in pride of place. They must have been in on this for some time; you don’t fly out from Europe just like that.

  My staff were also dressed in their Sunday best standing in rows facing the minister at the podium, smiling and clapping. They too had been co-conspirators. The only person surprised was me – although stunned would be a more apt description.

  Now my mother is the dearest person in the world to me. If it was anyone else I would have at least put up an argument. But she had me firmly by the arm, only surrendering her grip when I was at the podium and shaking hands with the minister.

  There I stood, smiling and nodding at guests, feeling like an absolute idiot, knowing that they knew I had been utterly outmanoeuvred. I looked down at my shoes which gleamed back at me. Even they had been shined in a way I had never seen before. I then looked up to see Ngwenya and Bheki in their finery nudging each other and grinning hugely.

  For the polygamous Zulus, what was taking place was contrary to their way of life and they were never going to let me live this down. Indeed, my Zulu friends are genuinely mystified why I don’t have multiple wives. You white men are so stupid, they would say. Everybody knows one woman is too strong for one man. Two are even worse as they will gang up against you. You must have three, as one will always be fighting with the other two to take the pressure off you.

  Chauvinism? Sure, but then every woman I’ve told this story to has battled to hide a knowing smile. Well, at least for the first proviso.

  My train of thought was broken by appreciative murmurs from the crowd as Françoise walked in. I turned as she came up the aisle looking absolutely gorgeous and as her beautiful eyes fixed on me everything came together and made perfect sense. I was willingly caught up in her magic and totally agreed to the surprise proceedings. It was all just so right.

  ‘Look,’ she said as she arrived at the podium and pointed across the river. Mnumzane was there browsing quietly.

  ‘He loves weddings,’ she said, smiling. ‘He seems to arrive for so many of them. Now he’s at ours.’

  A ring magically appeared and when asked if I took this woman to be my wife, a chorus rang to the rafters: ‘He does!’

  And I did.

  We never have loud music at the lodge, but that night the bold rhythms of Africa throbbed across the reserve in celebrations that went on until the early morning.

  chapter thirty-nine

  Something strange was going on with Mnumzane. It happened out of the blue. A young ranger was on a game drive with two guests, a married couple, when they rounded a sharp corner and unexpectedly ran into him coming in the opposite direction.

  He started ambling over. The ranger panicked and reversed too fast, smashing into a tree. They were stuck with Mnumzane coming straight for them. To the frightened ranger’s credit he didn’t reach for the rifle. Instead he told his passengers to sit tight and make no sound as Mnumzane strode up to the vehicle. I know first-hand that this is one of the most frightening sights imaginable. A six-ton bull literally breathing down your spine is something else all right. Then he lightly bumped the Land Rover and his tusk actually grazed one of the guest’s arms. Somehow the man didn’t scream.

  Showing great presence of mind, the Zulu tracker jumped off his seat on the front of the vehicle and sneaked
around to the other side, surreptitiously helping the guests off the vehicle. They all fled into the bush. Mnumzane fiddled around the Land Rover for a bit without causing any damage, and then moved off. Once they were sure he was gone, they crept out of their hiding places and drove at speed back to the lodge.

  From initial accounts, Mnumzane was just being inquisitive rather than aggressive. The ranger also played the incident down, so I didn’t take it too seriously. I only got the full story months later when I was phoned by the couple.

  After that encounter, Mnumzane started on occasion approaching our open guest game-drive vehicles. But again, the reports I got was that he was never angry, just curious. It was not dangerous as the rangers would merely drive away as soon as he approached. The bigger problem was that this was totally out of character; he simply was not behaving as an elephant should. Elephants automatically ignore us humans as long as we don’t move into their space.

  Then I discovered the reason for his sudden interest in game-drive vehicles. Prompted by a few pointed questions, a staff member told me that two of our young rangers had been teasing the bull, driving up and playing ‘chicken’ with him, daring each other to see who could get nearest then speeding away when he approached. They had seen me with Mnumzane before – totally without my knowledge as my interactions with him were deliberately kept private – and thought that they would also try to get up close. It never occurred to these two idiots that taunting the ultimate alpha male from a game-drive vehicle that normally carried guests on viewing safaris was teaching him a terribly bad habit. Both rangers had resigned before I found this out and hopefully they have since embarked on careers far removed from wildlife.

  The most non-negotiable rule on the reserve was that no one was allowed to have any self-initiated contact with the elephants. Anyone who disobeyed that law would be instantly dismissed. Perhaps my biggest failure was to trust that all my carefully chosen staff had the same ingrained ethics and common sense that David and Brendan had shown. Sadly, that does not always hold true.

  A little later a trainee lodge manager left without notice. The dust had barely settled as he sped from the reserve when I heard that he too had been using a game-drive Land Rover to approach Mnumzane, trying to imitate my call. These were the worst possible scenarios. Mnumzane had always been a very special case and the continuous teasing by strangers was dangerously altering his attitude to humans. He considered the shouting and revving of engines as a direct challenge and as a result game drives were forced to move off whenever they saw him. My concern was mounting.

  I had also just bought a brand-new white Land Rover station wagon. The faithful old battered bush-green Landy had now gone around the clock a good few times and had to be retired, her innards due to be cannibalized for other vehicles. It was a sad day for me. The well-weathered seat, the simplistic dashboard, the worn-smooth gear stick, the bush-smell of the cabin … I loved her.

  Taking delivery of this spanking new vehicle, I decided to do a test drive in really rough terrain to see if she was as rugged as my old Landy. She performed beautifully off-road, but eventually a tight copse of trees forced me to make an extremely tight 360-degree turn. I had just about completed this when suddenly I felt unaccountably apprehensive.

  An instant later Mnumzane towered next to me. He had appeared silently from the shadows as only an elephant can and was just standing there. I looked up into his eyes and my heart skipped a beat. His pupils were cold as stones and I quickly called out his name, repeatedly greeting him. It took ten chilling seconds before he started relaxing. I completed the turn, talking continuously to him as he gradually settled down and let me go.

  I drove off with a heavy heart. Things were not the same any more. Perhaps his aggression had been because he had not recognized the new vehicle. I fervently hoped so. But he shouldn’t be approaching any of our vehicles, let alone acting aggressively towards them. My entire interaction with Mnumzane was based on an intensely private, personal interplay between us, whereas now for the first time since arriving at Thula Thula he was being teased by rogue rangers.

  Then in another incident our lodge manager Mabona was driving up to the house when Mnumzane appeared from nowhere and blocked her path. Doing exactly as she had been trained, she cut the engine and sat motionless. Mnumzane moved to the back and leaned on the car, shattering the rear window. The crackling glass surprised him and he backed off, giving Mabona enough time to turn the key and accelerate away.

  After this we hacked out a dozen or so outlets on the road to the lodge where vehicles could rapidly reverse and turn if necessary. I also had all encroaching bush on the track cleared so we could see Mnumzane before he got too close.

  This worked. The game drivers were avoiding him and the road to the lodge – the reserve’s most travelled route – had easy escape routes. Mnumzane now had no contact whatsoever with any human except me. Best of all, any idiotic ranger activity had now been completely rooted out.

  In short, everything started returning to normal.

  But I was still worried. I began spending more time with him again, trying to reassure him and get him to settle down. With me he was always the same friendly accommodating giant that I loved. He seemed OK.

  However, my senior rangers remained unhappy and shook their heads when I told them this. ‘That’s only with you,’ they would say. ‘He trusts you, but it’s very different for the rest of us.’ They wouldn’t go near him and all walking safaris were stopped if he was anywhere in the area.

  A few weeks later a journalist and good friend asked to film me interacting with Mnumzane. I very rarely do this and eventually agreed only on condition that the camera crew’s vehicle was out of Mnumzane’s sight and no one spoke during the entire episode.

  We found him and I drove forward and got out of my new Land Rover leaving a young ranger in the back of the vehicle. I called out and Mnumzane started ambling over. I had some slices of bread in my pocket to throw to the side when I wanted to leave. I had recently taken to doing this with Mnumzane … much as I dearly love him, when on foot I would only turn my back on him if he’s distracted.

  As he approached I studied his demeanour and decided he was fine. We had a wonderful ten minutes or so interacting, chatting about life – well, me doing that while Mnumzane contentedly browsed – and as I decided to leave I put my hand in my pocket for the bread. However, it had hooked in the material of my trousers and I looked down trying to yank the slices out.

  At that moment it was me, not Mnumzane, who was distracted. He suddenly moved right up against me and I got the fright of my life. For not only was he almost on top of me, his entire mood had changed. Something behind me had disturbed him, possibly the young ranger in the Landy and he wanted to get at him. There was malevolence in the air.

  I hastily threw the bread on the ground and thankfully he moved over to snuffle it up as I retreated.

  By the time I got back to the film crew my heart was pounding like a bongo drum. I knew his temper was on a knife edge; something had changed with him.

  I would soon realize by how much.

  A few weeks later I was taking some VIP visitors on a game drive in my Landy as the sun was setting and we spotted Heidi, the rhino orphaned as a calf by Mnumzane years ago, slinking into the bush. We were crawling along at five miles per hour when out of the twilight the herd appeared, crossing the road fifty yards ahead.

  ‘Elephant,’ I said, switching on the spotlights.

  It was the first time my two passengers had seen an elephant, let alone a herd, and their excitement attested, as always, to the ancient bewitchment of Africa. I switched off the engine to let them savour the moment, perhaps one they would not experience again.

  Then I saw Mnumzane bringing up the rear. I knew he was now in musth, a sexual condition where a bull elephant’s testosterone levels shoot up by an incredible fifty times and this is when bulls can become dangerously unpredictable, especially when following females as he was doing now.
I never dared interact with any bull in musth. It was just too volatile. Anyway I was with guests, so it was out of the question.

  Nana was leading her family towards Croc Pools and I waited for about five minutes to make sure they were well off the road before I started the Land Rover and again moved forwards.

  Suddenly the man in the passenger seat started shouting: ‘Elephant! Elephant!’

  The yell shook me rigid. What was he on about? The elephants were gone. I strained my eyes searching the headlight-illuminated track in front, unable to see anything.

  ‘Elephant!’ he shouted again, pointing to his side window.

  It was Mnumzane, barely three yards away in the dark. Prompted by the loud noise he stepped forward and lowered his massive head right onto the window as if to see what all the shouting was about and with instant dread I saw his eyes. They were stone cold and there was malevolence in the air.

  Mnumzane then prodded the window with his trunk, testing its resilience. Realizing that at any second he was going to shatter through and in the process crush my passenger, I slammed the vehicle into reverse while desperately pleading with the two men to calm down. All I managed to do by reversing was to skid Mnumzane’s tusk across the glass, snagging it at the edge of the door with a jarring bang. He lifted his head and trumpeted in rage. With that I knew we were now in grave danger. As far as Mnumzane was concerned, the car had ‘attacked’ him. In retaliation, he swung in front of us and hammered the bull bar so hard my head smacked the windscreen as we shot forward like crash-test dummies. Then he put his huge head on the bull bar and violently bulldozed us back twenty yards into the bush only stopping when the rear wheels jammed against a fallen tree.

  I opened my window and screamed at him, but it was tantamount to yelling at a tornado in the dark. I watched in horror as he backed off sideways to give himself space to build up speed then lost sight of him as he moved out of the headlights. At least the guests had stopped yelling. All three of us were now deathly silent.