Death in the Long Grass

by Peter Hathaway Capstick

  Although more man-biting than man-eating, another incident was reported some years back from the grounds of a Transvaal, South Africa, circus. A drunk had been showing off for the crowd, and, as a grand finale to his antics, he stuck his head into the mouth of a smallish jumbo who proceeded to chew it to the consistency of a second-hand plug of tobacco.

  * * *

  I have always enjoyed the tale of the Irishman who, upon seeing his first elephant in the Dublin Zoo, stared for a moment, shook his head, and stalked off muttering, “I don’t believe it.” It is not the object of this book to become bogged down in such technical considerations as gestation periods, parasite types, or vertebrae counts of any species, but anything as wonderfully weird looking as the elephant deserves more than a perfunctory physical exam.

  One form or another of elephant has been scaring the bejeesus out of man since his debut on this earth. Jumbo’s remote ancestors date back some 60 million years that we know of, infinitely predating the unwashed forebears we all share. Over this period there have been more than 300 different brands of elephant-related critters that have been distilled by natural selection factors such as climate, competition, and a hundred other pressures down to two basic remaining production models, the African and the Asian or Indian families. To spare you a lecture in comparative proboscidean anatomy, and since we are not concerned with hunting the Asian variety, let it suffice to say that the Indian elephant is smaller in body height and weight, has a distinctive skull conformation, different numbers of toenails, a single-fingered trunk tip, and much smaller ears than his Afro cousin. The Asian species is largely employed as a work animal, particularly in the timber industry. If you think you have a boss that is less than considerate of your working conditions, ponder the fascinating fact that until very recent times and possibly even now, the value of a trained working elephant was so great that he would be permitted to kill up to five human handlers before being destroyed in the name of labor relations.

  A common belief, because of its long use to man, is that the Asian elephant is more intelligent and tractable than the African. But contrary to general supposition, African elephants have been trained to work, or inspanned, to steal the old Boer term. The Belgian Congo in the 1930s carried out a plan that proved that African elephants could be handled with the same ease as the Asians.

  You will find as many breakdowns of the African elephant by subspecies and race as you will find people who write books about elephants. No exception here. I am not a zoologist, nor do I want to tell you more about elephants than you wish to know. However, I believe that there are only two general classes of African elephants, albeit many family and race differences. The first is the largest, Loxodonta Africana, the bush or savanna elephant.

  From a hunter’s viewpoint the simplest method of subspecies segregation is that of general physical appearance, especially the tusk type, body proportions, size, and weight. Even a person who had never seen elephants before could, with little difficulty, determine that a bull elephant from Kenya’s Tana River area, traditional home of many of the best tuskers, is quite different looking from a bull of the Botswana-Rhodesia-Angola regions. The eastern African race, loosely found north of the Zambezi, is not quite so bulky as a comparable member of the southern African tribe, has longer, less stumpy ivory, and, from my observations, is not so meaty and broad at the point where the massive trunk muscles meet the face. In body type the southerners are considerably heavier and taller, as much as several inches on the average height, and will sometimes weigh a ton more.

  The body size of an elephant is measured by both body weight and shoulder height, both partially imprecise calculations for obvious reasons: bull elephants are rarely agreeable to stepping onto scales, and the taped distance from shoulder to foot of a dead specimen is not representative of live height since the compression of body weight is not present. The tallest and heaviest African elephant ever recorded was the whopper shot by J. J. Fenykovi in the Cuando River area of Angola in 1955. It is now a full mount in the Smithsonian Institution’s Natural History Building in Washington, D.C., and scales an unbelievable thirteen feet, two inches at the shoulder. The scientifically accepted weight at death of the behemoth was twelve tons, or 24,000 pounds, although the ivory was only in the eighty-pound-per-tusk class. Figuring that the top of the bull’s head had to be at least a couple of feet above the level of the shoulder, this means that the old boy would have had to duck to fit under an average highway overpass! A normal, large bull would weigh from five to seven tons and stand between ten feet, six inches and twelve feet at the shoulder, still quite a handful.

  Loxodonta cyclotis, the so called forest elephant, is the second category of African jumbos. Smaller than the bush variety, the forest type is easily identified by its thinner, down-pointing tusks, smaller ears, and reduced bulk. The species is composed of a bewildering pseudoscientific hodgepodge of presumed subspecies and types. Cyclotis is generally found in equatorial regions, typically in the Congo, Niger, and the Guinea coast forest block. The subclasses include the “pygmy” elephant, “water” elephant, “dwarf” elephant, and so forth. Since most elephant hunting today is confined to the larger bush elephant, it is safe to leave the discussion of forest elephants there.

  * * *

  Ivory, from earliest times, has been one of man’s most valued commodities. Historically, it is probably the oldest form of barter material besides food and female favors. Both sexes of African elephant grow tusks normally, although a few do not because of genetic mutation. Although rare, some elephants have grown multiple tusks sometimes numbering five or more. Elephant ivory is composed of dentine, the same material that lies beneath the enamel of human teeth, and varies widely in color from very white to dark amber, depending upon age and place of origin. The semitranslucent quality of the best ivory permits a fascinating play of light over and through the cross-laminations of the material found in no other mammal substance. As a commodity, elephant ivory was as much responsible for the exploration and opening of Africa as was slaving. For many years it was valued at the rate of 1 Sterling per pound although now, coveted as a hedge against inflation, its value has risen astronomically in recent years.

  Elephant tusks rank among the most impressive trophies of the hunt. Elephants, like people, tend to be right or left handed (or tusked), favoring the use of one tooth over another for bark stripping and other food-gathering functions. Therefore, a pair of tusks from the same animal are almost never the same weight and length. Frequently, the “working” tusk will be shorter and more worn, although it can be thicker and heavier. This tusk usually has one or more smooth, shallow grooves worn into the ivory near the tip, where the animal beats grass and roots over the tusk to clean his food of dirt. Customarily, the size of an elephant in hunting jargon refers to the weight of his heaviest tusk. It follows, therefore, that a “fifty pounder” would have tusks of about fifty and forty-eight pounds respectively, if undamaged. A hundred pounder will cause your name to be forever enshrined in the musty tomes of Rowland Ward, Ltd., of London, keepers of the records of African trophies. It will count just the same if your bull has only one tusk, not rare in aging jumbos, since the weight of the heaviest is the only consideration besides length and circumference. These days, if you are prepared to take off for six months, walk a couple of thousand thirsty, hungry, footsore, tsetse-bitten miles, spend money like there’s no next Tuesday, and pray yourself hoarse, then you might—just might—cut the spoor of a hundred pounder. In all my years of elephant hunting, I have only seen three tuskers outside of parks that surpassed this mark and have had just one client actually collect one.

  What are the all-time world’s record tusks? It is an interesting question but the answer depends upon the source you investigate.

  It is generally accepted that the heaviest pair of tusks are those that now reside in the British Museum of Natural History in London, weighing, at the present time, according to recent information obtained through the courtesy of C
arey Yeates of Holland & Holland Ltd., the prestigious arms manufacturers, in the region of 210 pounds each. This is a rough estimate, considerably lower than the original weights of 214 and 226 pounds each at the time they were acquired separately from cutlery firms. They were reportedly killed by an Arab hunter on the slopes of Mt. Kilimanjaro, although other legends say that the Arab found the great bull dead or that the origin of the teeth is not known.

  Part of the confusion about the weight of the tusks stems from the fact that ivory tends to dry out quite a bit, losing considerable weight with the passage of time. Different sources list the pair of tusks, acquired in Zanzibar in 1898, as, variously, 235 and 226 pounds, 236 and 225 pounds, and the generally accepted original weight of 226 and 214. They are not well-matched tusks, as are few, one clearly more worn, identifying it as the working tusk. They have, however, not shrunk visibly in length and are the amazing lengths of 10 feet, 2½ inches, and 10 feet, 4 inches, with girths of 24¼ inches and 23½ inches, as thick as a girl’s waist. I have been privileged to inspect these greatest of all hunting trophies in their vault at the British Museum, and their very presence is awe-inspiring.

  Although the traditional criterion for “size,” because of the fact that ivory is commercially reckoned by weight, is heaviness, this is not necessarily the fairest way to rate the relative trophy value of elephant tusks. The longest recorded pair, those in the United States National Collection, measure 11 feet, 5½ inches and 11 feet even. They are, however, thin in relation to their length and average only about 140 pounds per tusk.

  One of the most overdone aspects of the African elephant, as he appears in pulp magazines, is that of the madness or “musth” that overcomes bulls in the mating season. This phenomenon of musth is said to be the product of overactivity of the temple gland which produces instant rogues, insane with lust, trampling and goring every hero in sight. It may be that the Asian elephant suffers from this peculiarity, but I have never seen nor heard of such shenanigans on the part of an African elephant. The temple gland seems to be always slightly trickling, marking the sides of the upper face with damp blotches, yet we have no idea of the actual purpose of this gland. Some erudite elephant books tell of the small stick or stem of grass usually found embedded in the orifice of the gland, presumably placed there by the elephant for some odd reason. In actuality, this stick is usually a dried core of secretion moulded by the shape of the gland channel itself and is not present in every elephant.

  Probably because we tend to associate wrinkles and rheumy eyes with extreme age in humans, it is assumed that elephants are very long lived. It’s likely that the average person would venture a jumbo’s lifespan as up to a century or more. I don’t believe this to be true for two reasons.

  First, the elephant has a system of tooth shedding and regeneration that permits a finite number of sets of nine-pound molars to wear down and be replaced from the rear of the jaw, pushed out much as a child loses his first teeth by the upward thrust of the permanents, although, in the instance of elephants, when a tooth is lost, the replacement is already in position. There has been some controversy as to how many sets of molars an elephant may produce in a lifetime, educated guesstimates running to between five and seven sets, not counting the two-inch milk tusks that are shed shortly after birth. When an elephant wears down his last set of chewers, he’s really had it. Without the great, flat-iron, corrugated grinders to process his coarse food, he soon weakens and dies of starvation.

  The second reason is based upon my experience while hunting in central Africa, both as a safari guide and an elephant cropper for the government. The lower mandibles of most elephants killed were turned in to the research team at Mfuwe, on the Luangwa River, for analysis. As I recall, the oldest elephant ever examined, out of literally thousands, was an ancient cow of fifty-four years, giving my memory a year’s cushion either way. These specimens represented some very big and obviously old cows and bulls, yet through actual investigation, the conclusion was that it is the exceptional elephant that ever sees the far side of fifty.

  A classic confirmation of the overestimation of elephant age came from the famous tusker, “Ahmed,” who ranged through the Marsabit Park in Kenya carrying what was believed to be the longest and heaviest ivory of any living elephant. A glance at his deeply sunken temples showed that Ahmed was a very old bull when he died of natural causes in 1974, after four years of personal protection from poachers by his own bodyguard of rangers. At his death he was reported in the world press as having been 75 years old and carrying 200 pounds of ivory in each tusk. But since then scientific investigation has clearly established that Ahmed was only 55 and his tusks weighed just 148 pounds per side. Phenomenal ivory, make no invision, but hardly in the league of the Kilimanjaro elephant.

  * * *

  As in all big game hunting, the greatest risk to man comes from the unpredictable behavior of dangerous animals. An elephant that, on a given day, would turn tail at the first whiff of human scent might, the next day and for no obvious reason, carry through a deadly charge. It is therefore not only inaccurate but suicidally perilous to regard elephant charges as the elemental bluffs that some armchair experts would have you believe. I would estimate that approximately 8 to 10 percent of all charges, including obvious, bluff-threat demonstrations, are genuine. It follows that if you confront enough elephants with impunity, you are sure to have to kill some that would not have been necessary had you left them alone. That, or get yourself hammered as dead as free lunch.

  Distance is the critical factor in judging the seriousness of charges. Just as every human has a “personal” area or territory about him which he considers inviolate by strangers, so do animals. If you permit a threatening elephant to get within ten yards of you, then the odds have quintupled that the threat will change from bluff to deadly earnest, the results of which you may not like. The best rule I know of is to stand your ground, wave your hands, and shout, trying to outbluff the animal. Pick a stick or rock about ten yards from you, and if the animal comes past that point, put him down—no questions asked.

  Incredible as it may sound, contempt-bred familiarity is the factor that probably kills more good professionals than any other. The case of Johnny Uys, an ex-hunter and ex-chief game warden turned conductor of photographic safaris, is a pathetic example. Uys, who had spent much of his life with and around elephants, had some clients in a game reserve armed with nothing but their trusty 35mm Nikons. Uys walked them up to a cow elephant, which charged flat out, grinding Johnny’s life out in a long, bloody furrow in the hard earth. I did not see the body, but from what I was told, it was a particularly thorough example of death by elephant.

  Having shot between 750 and 800 jumbos, mostly for ecological reasons I’ll explain later, I am always amazed at how anybody could ever lose their respect for elephants. If you are not afraid of elephants, then you’ve either had no experience with them or you’re not especially bright. I have twice the respect for them I had when I started hunting, probably because I have seen what they can do. In the everyday life of an African hunter there are just too many potential close calls for me to fathom how a man without a kamikaze complex could ever be lulled into a sense of security around the big, gray mountains of mayhem.

  One of the most interesting and widespread legends about elephants is that of their supposed graveyard, a vast, hidden storehouse of ivory somewhere in the deep bush. The tale probably got its kickoff from the observations of early travelers, who reasoned that since the plains were not littered with the skeletons of expired jumbos, then they must surely go to some secret place to die. Actually, a fair amount of ivory is picked up each year lying around the bush, provided it hasn’t lain there too long. Porcupines, mice, and other small rodents eat ivory for its minerals. The great African sanitary squad of hyenas, vultures, maribou storks, kites, jackals, and ants do an admirable job on the rest of the carcass, and before too long even the largest bones are gone. Additionally, when an elephant is ill, old, or weak, h
e frequently will bog down in soft river or pond bottoms that he could normally free himself of and drowns. I have three times found decomposing elephant corpses in water.

  Genuine, certifiable “rogues” are fairly rare items in Africa. There are many areas, though, that harbor kali herds (from the KiSwahili meaning “fierce”) that will charge on sight or scent of man. Their extreme aggressive behavior is usually caused by constant harassment by poachers and they are definitely elephants to avoid.

  Over the years, a bull with decent ivory can collect an amazing amount of scrap metal in his body, particularly if he lives around an area of heavy tribal poaching activity. Most of this junk is from the muzzles of muskets which shoot a variety of missiles, ranging from chopped wire, nails, melted bottle caps, and iron pyrite to chunks of reinforcing rod and cold-rolled lead slugs. In many parts of Africa, it is impossible to leave an empty fifty-five-gallon oil drum lying about because of the lead alloy or solder used to make the cap and seal the seams. I don’t know how many African poachers meet their makers trying to melt the lead from the joints of a gasoline vapor-filled drum, but I have heard of two cases, both spectacular. One old Masarwa Bushman I knew in Botswana, who had apparently mastered the process, had killed six buffalo, all with the same bullet, which he would dig out and reroll into rough shape between small sheets of flat iron.

  Most nonvital wounds inflicted by poachers, other than with wire snares, will heal in the almost bacteria-free dry air of the southern African winter. But, if a slug becomes lodged in the huge root of the tusk, a conical cavity extending about a third of the length into the tusk from the jaw, that elephant may well become, in his constant and terrible pain, a rogue in the classic sense. Some of these jumbos have killed over thirty people before being hunted down and destroyed.

  A condition often mistaken for that of true roguehood may occur when elephants, especially bulls, become rip-roaring drunk on the fermenting fruit of several trees, particularly marula, which is somewhat plumlike. Because of the vastness of the elephantine digestive system, even grain like millet may ferment in the digestive process, causing the elephant to become quite out of hand, quarrelsome, staggering—and, if crossed, deadly dangerous, unlike other animals that become fumbling, good-natured oafs. I once had to follow up a quartet of bulls, out of their skulls on marula fruit, after they had raided a village in Zambia in which they killed three people. It was quite an adventure that ended with a multiple charge in thick cover, although I was able to drop all four bulls before they reached me. Later, when the local people were butchering the tons of meat, the pervading odor of alcohol was enough to make a man giddy.