The Tree Where Man Was Born

by Peter Matthiessen

  Then six bulls loomed through the trees, lashing the air with their trunks, ears blowing, in a stiff-legged swinging stride; they forded a steep gully as the main herd, ahead of them, appeared on a wooded rise. Ranging up and down the gully, we found a place to lurch across, then took off eastward, hoping to find a point downwind of the herd where the elephants would pass. But their pace had slowed as the sun rose; we worked back to them, upwind. The elephants were destroying a low wood—this is not an exaggeration—with a terrible cracking of trees, but after a while they moved out onto open savanna. In a swampy stream they sprayed one another and rolled in the water and coated their hides with mud, filling the air with a thick sloughing sound like the wet meat sound made by predators on a kill. Even at rest the herd flowed in perpetual motion, the ears like delicate great petals, the ripple of the mud-caked flanks, the coiling trunks—a dream rhythm, a rhythm of wind and trees. “It’s a nice life,” Schaller said. “Long, and without fear.” A young one could be killed by a lion, but only a desperate lion would venture near a herd of elephants, which are among the few creatures that reach old age in the wild.

  There has been much testimony to the silence of the elephant, and all of it is true. At one point there came a cracking sound so small that had I not been alert for the stray elephants all around, I might never have seen the mighty bull that bore down on us from behind. A hundred yards away, it came through the scrub and deadwood like a cloud shadow, dwarfing the small trees of the open woodland. I raised binoculars to watch him turn when he got our scent, but the light wind had shifted and instead the bull was coming fast, looming higher and higher, filling the field of the binoculars, forehead, ears, and back agleam with wet mud dredged up from the donga. There was no time to reach the car, nothing to do but stand transfixed. A froggish voice said, “What do you think, George?” and got no answer.

  Then the bull scented us—the hot wind was shifting every moment—and the dark wings flared, filling the sky, and the air was split wide by that ultimate scream that the elephant gives in alarm or agitation, that primordial warped horn note out of oldest Africa. It altered course without missing a stride, not in flight but wary, wide-eared, passing man by. Where first aware of us, the bull had been less than one hundred feet away—I walked it off—and he was somewhat nearer where he passed. “He was pretty close,” I said finally to Schaller. George cleared his throat. “You don’t want them any closer than that,” he said. “Not when you’re on foot.” Schaller, who has no taste for exaggeration, had a very respectful look upon his face.

  Stalking the elephants, we were soon a half-mile from my Land Rover. What little wind there was continued shifting, and one old cow, getting our scent, flared her ears and lifted her trunk, holding it upraised for a long time like a question mark. There were new calves with the herd, and we went no closer. Then the cow lost the scent, and the sloughing sound resumed, a sound that this same animal has made for four hundred thousand years. Occasionally there came a brief scream of agitation, or the crack of a killed tree back in the wood, and always the thuck of mud and water, and a rumbling of elephantine guts, the deepest sound made by any animal on earth except the whale.

  Africa. Noon. The hot still waiting air. A hornbill, gnats, the green hills in the distance, wearing away west toward Lake Victoria.

  Until recent years, when the elephant herds have become concentrated in game reserves and parks, it has been difficult to study elephants, since one could not stay close enough to the herds to observe daily behavior. Even now, most students of the elephant are content to work with graphs, air surveys, dead animals, and the like, since behavioral studies are best done on foot, a job that few people have the heart for. An exception is Iain Douglas-Hamilton, a young Scots biologist who was doing his thesis on the elephants of Lake Manyara.

  Lake Manyara, like Lake Natron, is a soda lake or magadi that lies along the base of the Rift Escarpment. The east side of the lake lies in arid plain, but the west shore, where streams emerge from the porous volcanic rock of the Crater Highlands, supports high, dark groundwater forest. The thick trees have the atmosphere of jungle, but there are no epiphytes or mosses, for the air is dry. On the road south into Lake Manyara Park, this forest gives way to an open wood of that airiest of all acacias, the umbrella thorn, and beyond the Ndala River is a region of dense thicket and wet savanna. The strip of trees between lake and escarpment is so narrow, and the pressure on elephants in the surrounding farm country so great, that Manyara can claim the greatest elephant concentration in East Africa, an estimated twelve to the square mile. For this reason—and also because the Manyara animals are used to vehicles, and with good manners can be approached closely—it is the best place to watch elephants in the world.

  In the acacia wood that descends to the lake shore, elephants were everywhere in groves and thickets. Elephants travel in matriarchal groups led by a succession of mothers and daughters—female elephants stay with their mothers all their lives—and this group may include young males which have not yet been driven off. (Elephants not fully grown are difficult to sex—their genitals are well camouflaged in the cascade of slack and wrinkles—and unless their behavior has been studied for some time, the exact composition of a cow-calf group is very difficult to determine.) Ordinarily the leader is the oldest cow, who is related to every other animal; she may be fifty years old and past the breeding age, but her great memory and experience is the herd’s defense against drought and flood and man. She knows not only where good browse may be found in different seasons, but when to charge and when to flee, and it is to her that the herd turns in time of stress. When a cow is in season, bulls may join the cow-calf group; at other times, they live alone or in herds of bachelors. When I drove near, the bulls moved off after a perfunctory threat display—flared ears, brandished tusks, a swaying forefoot like a pendulum, the dismantling of the nearest tree, and perhaps a diffident scream; sometimes they ease their nervous strain by chasing a jackal or a bird. With cows, as well, aggressive behavior is usually mere threat display, though it is wiser not to count on it.

  The person best acquainted with these elephants is Iain Douglas-Hamilton, who had set up a small camp on the Ndala or Buffalo River, eight miles into Lake Manyara Park. The camp is perched above a gravel bend in the Ndala, a surface stream that courses down over ancient crystalline rock in a series of lovely waterfalls and pools and empties into the lake a mile below. Though the pools are cool, and deep enough to splash in, one swims at the risk of bilharzia, an extremely disagreeable intestinal invasion by trematode larvae passed into sluggish water via hominid feces: the larvae enter a small fresh-water snail that in turn releases the cercaria life stage into the water, and the cercaria enter the pores of baboons and men. Many people have contracted bilharzia in this pool, including Douglas-Hamilton, who is not the sort to be dismayed by such ill provenance, and will almost certainly risk and receive another dose of a disease which, without long and tiresome treatment, may be debilitating and even fatal.

  When I drove into camp, its proprietor was standing outside his modest research laboratory with his pretty mother, Prunella Power, who was here on a visit from England. He is a strong good-looking young man with blond hair and glasses, wearing faded green drill shorts and shirt and old black street shoes without laces or socks (he also has an excellent pair of field boots which he wears when they turn up). He took my note of introduction and stuffed it in his pocket, and I doubt if he has read it to this day. “You’ll stay with us, won’t you?” he said straight off. “Have you had tea? Well, do come along then, we’re just off elephant-watching.” I got out of my Land Rover and into his, and we set off with a turn of speed toward the lake, where Douglas-Hamilton drove straight up to an elephant herd and began taking notes. His approach was so abrupt, so lacking in finesse, that the whole herd was engaged in threat display, with much shrill screaming. “Silly old things,” said Iain, scarcely looking up. “Frightful cowards, really. Silly old elephants.” He gazed at them w
ith affection. “Oh, damn!” he said, as a big cow came blaring through the bushes. “That’s Big Boadicia—she’ll charge us, I expect.” But Boadicia, the matriarch, held back as a younger cow charged instead. I expected Iain to drop his notebook and go for the wheel, but he merely said, “This one doesn’t mean it.” The young cow stopped a few yards short of the hood. Her bluff called, she backed up, forefoot swinging, and began what is known to behaviorists as displacement feeding, by way of expending her chagrin. Forefoot still swinging sideways, she wrenched at a tussock of green grass, and we were close enough to observe a trick I had never heard about—as the elephant tugs on grass, it mows it with the sharp toenails of its heavy foot, which is swinging in the rhythm of a scythe.

  Iain and his mother had been asked to dinner by Jane and Hillary Hook, who were presently encamped with their safari clients in the groundwater forest near the entrance to the park; as I also knew the Hooks, I was taken along. Though not late, Iain drove like hell, slowing only to permit a puff adder to cross the road; in the headlights, the venomous thing, too fat to writhe, inched over the ground like a centipede. Rounding the bend a moment later, we found our way barred by a huge stinkbark, much too big to move, that wind had felled across the road at a point where the left side was steep uphill bank and the right a steep bank down. “I’m not missing dinner!” Iain cried, and forthwith gunned his car off the embankment into the jungle dark, in an attempt—I assume—to bypass the offending stinkbark. The undercarriage of the car struck one of several hidden stumps with an impact that drove the driver’s mother into the roof, and inevitably, within seconds, the car was hung up, both front wheels spinning in the air. Iain grabbed up a monstrous jack and hoisted the transmission and axle clear of the stump. “Now I’ll drive straight off the jack,” he called to me. “Do catch it, will you?” I jumped away from the spinning jack as he drove off it, staring in astonishment as this inspired youth, in a series of wild spurts and caroms, bashed his way back to the road.

  On the return trip, Mrs. Power was guided around the fallen tree on foot by Hillary’s flashlight. Down below, also on foot, I led Iain back over the stumps, then leapt into the open rear as the car made its lunge at the steep bank. At the last moment, it altered course and proceeded into the interior of a thornbush, emerging miraculously onto the road.

  “Fantastic!” said Hillary Hook. “I’d never have believed it!”

  On the way home, picking thorns out of my face, I was fairly whining in annoyance, and Mrs. Power, who is resigned to Iain through love and lack of choice, said, “I rather thought you’d intercede.”

  “I kept hoping you would intercede,” I told her crossly. “I have no experience of him, and anyway, you’re his mother.”

  Early next morning, we drove south to the Endobash River. In the shallows of the lake, near a great baobab, lay a dead buffalo, and in the spreading limbs of a nearby umbrella acacia lay a lion. The tree-climbing habit evolved by the lions of Manyara is said to be a defense against the stomoxys fly, which breeds along the water edge; in time of stomoxys infestations, the Ngorongoro lions are arboreal as well, and in the summer of 1970 I saw one climb a tree in tsetse woods of the western Serengeti. But at Manyara, where there is little shelter for lions against attacks by the numerous elephants and buffalo, protection from these animals may also be a factor.

  Impala, bright rust red in the early light, scampered prettily in antelope perfection, and buffalo in a herd of hundreds milled back and forth across the track. Near the Endobash were big elephants that Iain did not recognize, and these he approached with circumspection. They had come in from outside the park, where they might have been chivvied and possibly shot at by man; such elephants take offense in very short order. Also, they were browsing in the thick high brush, so that their numbers and whereabouts were still uncertain. And finally, they looked decidedly larger than the home elephants of Manyara, which tend to be small, no doubt because the population is a young one. “These are the baddies,” Iain said. He sat slumped behind the wheel of his idling Land Rover, hands in pockets. “Horrible wild uncouth elephants!” he cried suddenly, as if about to shake his fist. “Turn around, you bahstards, let’s have a look at you!” Here in the Endobash last year a band of strange elephants had dismantled his Land Rover around his ears while he and a girl companion cowered on the floor; the vehicle in which we rode, already battered, was its replacement.

  The back of Iain’s new Land Rover is open, like a short truck bed, and contained, besides spare wheel and jack, a park ranger named Mhoja whom Iain has trained to help him in his elephant surveys. Mhoja, a Nyamwezi from the great Bantu tribe of central Tanzania, was terrified at first, says Iain, but recently, for some unaccountable reason, had become more philosophical about his fate. Nevertheless, Mhoja was tapping urgently on the cab roof, for elephants were moving at us from both sides—we were caught in the middle. “They’ll charge us, I expect,” said Iain, and they did. He gunned his motor and we crashed between two bushes into the clear.

  We went down to the Endobash River, and from there worked west up the Endobash Valley, under the cliffs of the escarpment. Last year in this place, while poking about in the thick bush, Iain and his mother surprised a rhino. Iain, run down, spent three weeks in a hospital at Arusha with a fractured vertebra. Soon after, he was a participant in the crash of a small plane, and decided to take up flying. Iain’s father died in an air crash in World War II, and his mother is not happy about his new passion, but she knows better than to try to dissuade him.

  One afternoon I volunteered to try Mhoja’s position in the rear. As soon as possible, Iain had me surrounded with irate cows, which were menacing the car from all directions, and trying to see all ways at once, I shrank against the cab. Through his rear window, Iain said, “You’ll get hardened to it, never fear.” Soon a huge bull loomed alongside in threat display, and with his tusks demolished a small tree not fifteen feet from where I cowered, unable to imagine why Douglas-Hamilton was so loath to spare my life. Inching my head around to plead, I looked straight into Iain’s camera; he fancied the shot of a frightened face with a big bull elephant filling the entire background. “You’re going to want this picture,” Iain said.

  Annoyed by my annoyance, he said I had no faith: “I know these elephants,” he complained later, “I really do.” Iain was of two minds about his reputation for recklessness, which he had done nothing to discourage and which had returned to haunt him. “People seem to think I’m some sort of idiot, but I had to work close to elephants to do my research.” To study not only elephant behavior but the effect of high numbers on the ecology of Manyara required a close record of their movements; therefore he had to know each animal’s identity and position in its herd, as well as which herds were Manyara elephants and which were transient in the park. His solution was to photograph each animal with its ears flared, head-on, so that tusks and ear nicks could be used in identification, but the method demanded confrontations with four hundred and twenty agitated elephants. Iain learned the hard way which elephants were bad-tempered, and his confidence that he could distinguish a threat from an honest charge—which professional hunters who have gone out with him are unable to do—encouraged him to give visitors, as he says, “the same excitement, the same fun with elephants that I had when I didn’t know anything.” But the spreading tales of these adventures have tended to discredit the valuable research Douglas-Hamilton has done in the long days spent closer to wild elephants than anyone had ever gone before.

  The elephants at Manyara are presently destroying the umbrella thorn at such a rate that regeneration cannot keep pace with the destruction, and in Iain’s view, these lovely trees will be gone from the Manyara park within ten years. Those not knocked down are stripped so grievously of bark that they cannot recover; either their vascular system is destroyed or they fall prey to a boring beetle that penetrates the exposed wood. On the other hand, elephants have been destroying woodlands for thousands of years, and perhaps destruction is
a part of the natural cycle of this acacia, which represses the growth of its own seedlings in its shade. In season, elephants consume great quantities of the seed pods, and as they move continually in search of the varied browse that they require, the seeds are borne elsewhere and deposited—a most auspicious start in life—in an immense warm nutritious pile of dung.

  The mature umbrella thorns in the region of Ndala had been noted in transects on a chart, and as it was crucial to his studies to know what had become of them in the course of a year, Iain set out one morning to survey two transects in the forest between his camp and the lake. Since the transects were mostly covered in the kind of thick high bush favored by rhino and old solitary buffalo, he needed a gun to back him up. Mhoja carried a .470 Rigby elephant rifle and I carried a .12 gauge Greeners single shot, said to be useful in “turning” a rhino’s charge. “I shouldn’t load it until something happens if I were you,” said Iain. “It tends to go off by itself.” All morning I carried the gun broken with a shotgun shell in my right hand; if anything went right in an emergency, I thought, it would be pure dumb luck.

  The dawn had something ominous about it, or so it seemed to me, a tinge of gloom that haunted the African morning. The swift sun of the tropics, rising, spun on the white ivory of an elephant high on the slope of the escarpment; ahead, more elephants drifted away through woods that were still in shadow. Where they had forged tunnels through the brush, the brown woodland air spun with glittering webs of emerald spiders, and in a shaft of light between two trees stood a black-and-bamboo leopard tortoise, bright with dew. The sunrise fired a lizard’s head, emerged from the cobra shadows of a dead tree, and glinted on a file of driver ants on the way to raid a termite nest. Sun and shadow, light and death. Through an open glade down toward the lake, impala danced.