And I Am Dreaming of Them on the Plains

Everyone has favourite animals – though it wasn’t until I was at the zoo in Perth back in 2011 that I realised that my mother is fond of elephants. It’s a bit shameful, given I was somewhere around thirty years old at the time, though I’ve never been particularly observant (and I’m sure there are more than a few people in this world who will gladly tell you I am a self-absorbed little shit). 

We probably have a few things in common, this fuzzy little dude and me.

 Still, I always knew at least one of my aunts had a thing for elephants; she has some lovely wall hangings I remember well from childhood, bought during the time she and her family lived in Rhodesia. And I do remember my mother telling me once she read a lot of Wilbur Smith’s African-based novels after my aunt moved to Africa, in order to get closer to that world and experience. This came about, ironically enough, when I bitched to her about an Egyptian novel by the same author; I became so disgusted with it I actually abandoned the damned thing in a hotel in Mexico somewhere – probably Mérida, come to think of it. Man, I loved that hotel room; it was like a cross between a sauna and a batcave and my roommate woke up more than once screaming that she didn’t know where she was.

Still, I got to thinking about elephants because I recently read Lawrence Anthony’s The Elephant Whisperer, and it evoked a lot of memories of my two weeks in South Africa. Admittedly I spent my time in a different part of the country; I was up in Limpopo, and Anthony owned Thula Thula down in KwaZulu-Natal. I thought of my mother while reading the book, however, and suggested she ask my father to take her there. Apparently his time in Richards Bay hasn’t invoked any great desire to return to the area, however, so I may end up being the one to do it. Which I won’t complain about, being such a dutiful daughter and all (OMG MORE ANIMALS).

Elephants have never been really high on my list of favourite animals, mind you. It’s not that I have anything against them, but I’ve known since roughly the age of eight that my ultimate destiny is to become a crazy cat lady. To that end, it’s probably unsurprising that the animals usually topping my lists are tigers and cheetahs. (Generally cheetahs win out, because while I can’t resist a tiger face and paws, truth is any decent tiger wouldn’t be able to resist the meat meal I offer, fat-riddled or not. Still, who could resist that face?)

Or those fingers.

I spent two weeks in South Africa with GVI on a private game reserve as a volunteer – my poor excuse for “help” mostly involved aiding in data collection and collation. And I say “poor” in the sense that no matter how well I am trained to do anything, I am a derp and therefore probably create more problems than I solve. Most of the data collection at the reserve revolved around the carnivores: the leopards, lions, and cheetahs. And I’m a cat person, as I said, so this was fine by me.

But as we careened about the reserve looking for kitties, we often heard the game drives calling in the location of the “ndlopfu,” the breeding herd of elephants, around the upper rivers. (Note: I am uncertain of the spelling; I was told the language for the animals over the radio was Shangaan, and that’s the spelling I get from ye olde Google, though I obviously do not understand the rules of pronunciation at all!) Being that we were generally based at the other end of the reserve we wouldn’t generally run into them by accident, so the day we finished up fairly early on a morning drive and Kaggie said: “They called in the elephants by an acacia grove nearby, who wants to see elephants?” we were naturally pretty down with that.

We were the only research truck out that morning, mostly populated with the infamous two-weekers – those of us who, for whatever reason, could only come to the reserve for a period of two weeks. The others were staying for periods ranging from four weeks to as much as six months. And believe you me, while I was concerned I might not cope with two weeks I was utterly miserable about leaving when I did; I would firmly tell anyone else wanting the full experience to do the four weeks at a bare minimum. And then beg to be allowed to stay longer. I suspect offering to bake a lot might be a worthy act of bribery.

Still, we two-weekers were the major suspects on this trip because the other new recruits were obliged to stay back at base and do a first aid course. I contemplated doing it myself, just because I still haven’t updated the one I’m required to hold as a health professional, but in the end the call of the wild won out. Not even the assertion that this course would involve: “…bush first aid, like snake bites, or what to do if an elephant flips a truck!” could keep me back. I’m not Australian, after all.

I am, however, a lousy photographer, and therefore I only had with me a little point and shoot thing that slipped into a trouser pocket easily enough (or perhaps not easily enough, given the sheer number of times I missed said pocket and then would panic and have to ask the poor driver to stop the truck so I could make sure I hadn’t left it half a kilometre back or something; it’s not so stupid, seeing as one day I did manage to leave my ridiculous Peruvian alpaca-knit hat in a low-hanging tree). This camera of mine has a terrible zoom, though I did swipe some very nice binoculars from my father. Our first sighting of the elephants, you see, came at a distance.

WHERE'S WALLY?

 It might seem almost disappointing at first, but I sure didn't think so. Actually, I think the most incredible thing about being on this reserve was having nothing between you and the animals. My first drive involved sitting perhaps twenty feet from a full-grown male lion feeding on a wildebeest, and believe me, I will never forget the sound of ripping sinew and crunching bone. He also obliged us greatly by calling to the two females of his pride; talk about great African soundtracks. 

The old man soon went back to Business As Usual, mind you.

 So, even though we were just glimpsing great shapes moving in the distance between the criss-cross of leaf and tree-trunk, it was pretty damned amazing. It’s kind of like whale-watching, in a way: you stand on the edge of a world that is not your own, and you watch as if through an ever-shifting veil the movement of those who are masters of that place. That is, in itself, an experience of awe.

Kaggie, however, decided we would go on a bit and follow their trail to see if we couldn’t get a better look at them. And while elephants can be surprisingly quiet and stealthy, they are what you call a keystone species – they change their environment quite drastically as they go about their lives, and therefore it’s…kind of obvious where the herd has been. So, we drove along their bushwhacked path until we heard the unmistakable snap and crash of elephants feeding. Kaggie then killed the engine and there we sat, all craning over one another to get what was, for most of us, our first good look at African elephants.

 I believe I’ve only ever seen Asian elephants, before. Certainly I’ve only ever seen them in zoos, and I always tend to remember them as having rather small ears, so I suspect this must be true. So, to see full grown African elephants browsing so close, and so clear? To have no boundaries, no barriers, except the respect of one animal for another and your basic common sense? Absolutely incredible.

As the breeding herd moved off, I sat back in my seat between two other vols on the front of the truck, feeling quite overwhelmed. Lions and cheetahs, it seemed, were one thing; elephants are something else entirely. The cats seemed quite content to ignore us, by and large; I had a far greater sense of awareness, from the elephants. Which isn’t to say they seemed actively interested in us, but they did seem to spare us more thought than the cats did. Then I figured it was probably just my imagination.

Pretty sweet imagination, though.

Which was when Mister M showed up.

But you, you may call me Sir.

 He came meandering in from the left – and the nonchalant confidence of these great animals is what amazes me the most. Oh, I saw youngsters scrambling along the road after their elders, quite intent on running past the many-headed creature that belched smoke and noise, but the adults knew damn well that they were the ones letting us alone, and not the other way around. Though Mister M, it seems, had decided that today was the day for introductions. 

On a later drive I was told Mister M has a habit of trailing along after the breeding herd, a bit of a loner – because the matriarchal structure of elephant herds means that once they’re past adolescence, the boys tend to get kicked to the curb. They then form their own bachelor herds, hopefully under the guidance of a wise old bull, and then just wait for the ladies to take notice of their big tusks and manly stride and fifth legs, I guess. Mister M apparently likes to wander after the girls, and he did his wandering that day right in front of our truck.

He then decided to turn about and make friends.

Oh, I can count your wrinkles! ...um, did I say wrinkles? Er, I meant...personality lines!

 I think it is impossible to convey in words the sheer size of a full-grown African bull elephant. I do not have any pictures of what came next, as shortly after this picture was taken Kaggie called back: “SIT STILL AND DON’T TAKE ANY MORE PICTURES.” Because Mister M stood right beside the truck, facing the six vols, taking us in as we stared back with wide eyes and trembling hands. Although even then, we didn’t really stare; I know that I kept my eyes away from his, for most of the duration of this curious little meeting. Because the two or three times I dared to glance up, I found he stared straight into my soul. And I do mean that. His gaze could only be called searching, and he matched it with the progress of his trunk. In fact, I could see right down said trunk as he moved it all about us in overt investigation – and if ever I want a reference for Lovecraftian tentacles, I think I got it that day.

I was also told another day that it’s amusing as heck, to watch a very young elephant try to utilise its trunk. It is an exquisite piece of biomechanical engineering, immensely strong, and capable of surprisingly delicate work. Apparently it takes a bit to master, considering baby elephants flail it about like a wet noodle. Seeing Mister M’s up close was therefore an amazing experience, though somewhat sobering after you’ve seen other elephants snap branches thicker than your arm like toothpicks with those same appendages.

Thanks, Flippy, for the visual. I'll just go cry in a corner for a while now, 'kay?

 We sat in absolute silence as Mister M investigated us -- though not strict stillness. Marion, who sat between me and said elephant, in fact executed a subtle and graceful lean until she was perhaps at a forty-five degree angle, while I went for some thirty degrees myself. She had the dignity to apologise afterwards, to which I could only say: “Er, I wasn’t exactly going to say GET OUT OF MY LAP before shoving you back into an elephant’s face!” Such is the camaraderie of those who live and work closely together in the great outdoors.

But after Mister M took his leave, we sat in stunned silence for a long moment. And then it escaped: our outburst of relieved, half-hysterical laughter surprised a few birds from the trees. “I thought we were going to have to call base!” someone said. “Yeah, ask how to the elephant-truck-flipping-scenario work was going…because dammit it’s time for the practical exam!”

Yet I didn’t feel any malice from Mister M. Sure, I felt the urge to dip my head and call him Mister M Sir, but I think more than anything else, it was about realising how very small we are. And not even in a physical sense, for all he could have squished me flat with one well-aimed tread of his foot.

As people, we humans tend to think we have the jump on all other animals when it comes to intelligence and communication. Yet I felt Mister M was talking to us, and it wasn’t his fault we couldn’t understand, couldn’t answer. It felt like he spoke to us in the simplest of all languages, and yet my mind overcomplicated things so much I had no chance in hell of replying to him in turn. In a lot of ways, that was the only time I was genuinely afraid of anything on the reserve, and not because I thought he would hurt us. It was more that I was afraid of realising how very ignorant we can be, building our little empires on the pyres of theirs and forgetting that the world belongs to them as much as it does to us.

 I saw the elephants several more times, before I left. We even had a lovely experience where our battery died amongst the herd and we had to radio for assistance; there was much hilarity when the cavalry almost arrived only to find the elephants blocking the road, necessitating an alternative go-round route and the theory that perhaps they knew we were stalled and therefore easy pickings (!). But in that forty-five minutes of waiting, I sat my chin on my palm and watched Mister M, far from the herd over the river, going about his day, and felt quite content.

Although we're kind of playing Where's Wally here again, aren't we.

 Life, for many of us, seems to be about control. I wonder if that is why humans have come to be where we are: this need to master our surroundings, to defeat enemies we conjure up out of our own wild imaginings. We fancy ourselves the superior species because we are the ones who allow others to survive by dint of our generousness, by sharing dwindling resources and space. And it’s ironic, really, when you realise these animals live with a grace that we can only imagine. We are at war with our world. They simply exist within it, day by day. They do not feel any need to look at the chaos of the natural world and rail against it. Instead, they fit themselves amongst its weave, move with every stretch and tear – and so their story goes on, woven upon a loom I sometimes think remains ever invisible to us.

Maybe I’m just being too poetic. Maybe it’s just sentiment, or foolishness. But I watched those elephants from the truck on those African winter days, so far from my own home (though still under the same southern skies), and realised how very far we’ve strayed from the world we often imagine to be long gone. It’s not, you know. I think we’ve just forgotten how to live there.

There are those that always remember, though. And we need to work to ensure that they will always be there to do so: for themselves, and for us too.

...I think I took the thematic thing too seriously in high school English, I'm sorry.