The Cowboy and his Elephant (3 page)

The whole family played in the wallow—any shallow pan of water mixed with dirt or any riverbank or any watering hole. Glorious mud was all that was needed. On hot days the mud soothed skin that was neither thick nor coarse. To rid themselves of a mosquito, fly, or bee the elephants gyrated, leaped, rolled, ran, and crashed into mud with bellows that sounded very much like those of relief. (If hunger did not take them away constantly in search of food, elephants would probably bathe all day, every day.) A bath in the early afternoon suited Amy’s family, and another in the evening. A long drink in the morning and a splash and wade
gave the day its start. Water was a luxury as precious as new life to elephants. At its sight, or its scent nearby, they trumpeted and bellowed, and the younger elephants raced ahead and crashed in up to their knees, headless of what creatures had arrived before them. The older females held back, drank and pounded holes in the mudbank with their heels, and splashed mud over their backs and bellies, waiting until the youngsters were ready to eat again.

At the river’s edge Amy timidly rolled over in a slippery bowl of muddy water. It was cool and smelled musty, of decayed vegetation. Her skin glistened with slick mud. It was a world she clearly wished never to leave. But soon she was ready to feed, and when she tried to stand up, her legs slipped, and she fell and slid to the bottom of the pan. With a complete loss of dignity, she finally crawled out and ran to her mother for reassurance.

The older elephants stayed in the middle of the river and filled their stomachs with enough water to overcome their natural buoyancy. They walked along the bottom as hippos do, breathing through trunks held aloft like snorkels. Trunks waved above the water like black snakes on glass.

The teenage elephants bathed somewhat closer to the riverbank. They held their heads above the water, braided their trunks in twos and threes, and bobbed like huge black corks. In this weightless world they danced impromptu ballets with sinewy grace. They swam by instinct and could cover great distances in water when the need arose. One family was once observed swimming one hundred miles
without a rest, the stronger females giving the weaker ones a lift with their trunks. Their matriarch, it seemed, had led her family on a migration route that had been flooded in the family’s long absence by the construction of the Kariba Dam and the subsequent formation of the artificial Lake Kariba.

Amy—now in her tenth month—still needed her mother to nurture her, but she was found more and more in the company of the family’s other females, the aunties and older cousins and sisters, who raised her, protected her, taught her, and played with her. On tree-shaded riverbanks Amy looked at her aunties as if to say,
Now this would be a good place for me to roll over, and maybe you could tickle me.

All elephants clearly loved being tickled, no matter what their ages. Amy was as ticklish as any child. Even the old matriarch enjoyed a tickle now and then. Quick to find playmates, Amy rolled in the grass and split the air with trumpeting sounds of elephant laughter as older cousins played the fingers of their trunks down her ribs and in her armpits and the soft crannies under her chin. At these times the family could lose sight of one another, discovering with a sudden fright that they were being left behind, and they caught up to the other elephants in a hurry.

When the family met its bond group—the elephants with whom they shared common ancestors—the reunions were extravagant displays of pure elephant emotion. As they came within sight and sound of one another, the families ran and touched and stomped and defecated and twined trunks and bumped foreheads and dusted and clicked
ivories. It did not seem to matter if they had met and celebrated like this only an hour before. Elephants could never say hello too often.

T
heir dead were greeted with a show of respect. When they came upon the bones of a blood relative, they always lingered to caress the bones with their trunks. Did they plan their route to intersect with the graves of their fallen family members? Amy watched her mother touch a sun-bleached elephant skull on the ground. She snaked her trunk in the eyehole and brushed over its surface, almost as though she were grieving for the dead relative, remembering her in life.

Even at her young age, Amy rolled the bones and picked them up and dropped them with a different, even solemn, behavior.

N
ow almost a year had gone by. After plentiful spring rains, Amy’s family was reminded of the fields at the bottom of their migration route. Last season while the bulls had eaten the crops of the humans, the females stood at the boundary fence without daring to cross into the forbidden territory. Perhaps this year would be different, and they would feast in the cornfields too.

A
s time went by, Amy was adding one hundred pounds to her weight every couple of months. Everything was happening faster now. She had to use her trunk with greater dexterity to feed herself the foods that she saw her aunties and
cousins eat. Sometimes a bouquet of green grass grasped in her trunk ended on the top of her head or draped over her ears. At other times she snatched a leaf or grass directly from her mother’s mouth. Eating on her own, she identified the grass by sniffing it: then she pulled it up or broke it off, and brought it up to her mouth and ground it with her molars.

Drinking frustrated her. Water was hard to hold. She siphoned it into her trunk by breathing in, but
not
inhaling too hard lest the water go to her head. Then she would sneeze loudly, spraying the air with a fine mist. She practiced sucking water up in her trunk. She learned to raise her head and reach the tip of her trunk up to her lips. The older elephants, who drank without effort, forced the water into their mouths by gently blowing. Amy let gravity work for her. The water drained out of her trunk and dribbled into her mouth. And as she repeated this exercise, she gained proficiency and could be said to drink on her own.

She was rapidly acquiring social skills as well. Again, as in everything else, she learned by observation, example, and trial and error. She noticed those males in the herd that from time to time came around to check for females in estrous. In comparison to her family members, these males were huge and overbearing, their behavior direct and single-minded. The presence of the males intrigued all the family’s females, no matter what their ages. By watching her aunties and older cousins with the males, Amy learned lessons for use later in life.

She was communicating with her family more often now, learning the basic elephant language by listening and entering the “discussions.” And from the leadership of the matriarch she was gaining useful knowledge of her habitat. Indeed, she was reaching a time when she would start to show the other elephants what she was to become—strong, resourceful, and prepared to contribute in important ways to the family’s future.

Then more time passed, and the females finally approached the boundary of their reserve. The whole herd at last was together again. As the sun set, the air around the southern edge of the Sengwa filled with elephant sounds. The long-awaited feast was soon to begin. This was the moment they had all waited for. Majestic and sublime, they were the greatest creatures to walk the land.

T
he headman of the Tonga, a skinny old great-grandfather with crooked teeth, was the enemy of the elephants. He hated them.
Vermin,
Siwelo Bvathlomoy Dingani said. N
o better than rats!

At that moment Dingani was leaning on the gnarled stick that he used as a cane. Even this early in the morning Dingani despaired as he limped past the village’s cinder block shed, where the corn was ground into meal. Its gas engine had lain idle for days with nothing to mill from the fields. Roosters crowed, the hens scratched the dirt, and a black pig burrowed its nose into a heap of garbage. Villagers emerged from their thatch-roofed huts for the first time
since sundown. Out early before school began, Dingani’s great-grandsons started to play a game of soccer in the dirt lot in back of the huts, kicking an object that rolled but was not an inflatable ball.

Dingani did not have to walk far to come within view of the southern edge of the Sengwa Wildlife Research Area. He saw the fence that was supposed to keep the elephants out of the village’s cropland. Then he turned to look at that land. The evidence of the elephants’ damage from the previous night was strewn everywhere. Soon nothing would be left of the spring planting.

Necessity had taught the Tonga tribe, which numbered around a million, how to survive. As refugees in a foreign land, they were ignored by Zimbabwe’s ruling tribe. Forty years earlier colonial Britain had forced the Tonga on Zimbabwe (then Southern Rhodesia) to make way for the opening of the Kariba Dam. Poor soil since then had given them paltry, bitter harvests. And now the elephants had the same devastating effect on their crops as any flood or plague of locusts.

The sight of the cornstalks in the fields had emboldened the elephants behind the fence. They lined up each evening, waiting for the sun to set. A fence, even the elephants knew, was only as good as its repair, and nights ago the stronger bulls had pushed a younger one into the electrified wire, sparks flew, the circuit shorted out, and the fence had been worthless as an elephant barrier ever since. Most nights the elephants stepped out of their reserve onto the lands adjacent
to Dingani’s village. Afraid to go out of their huts, the villagers listened to the feasting in their maize fields. At sunrise the raiders were gone again, and so too were several acres of the Tonga’s precious crops.

Dingani had no idea what to do to save his people. The law forbade Tonga ownership of guns. Hunting with any kind of weapon was proscribed. Dingani had asked the officers in the Game Department for help. The last he had heard from them, they were ending their system of elephant control. With it would go the village’s last hope of salvation.

I
n the den of his split-level farmhouse in Zimbabwe’s Gwayi Valley, a white African rancher, Buck deVries, hung up the telephone. He walked into the dining room, where his family, already seated at the dinner table, waited for him to say the blessing. They held hands in a circle and bowed their heads, and in his native Afrikaans, deVries uttered thanks to God. As they passed around a tureen of steaming kudu stew, deVries turned to his wife, Rita. “They’ve just told me the Tonga have asked the Zimbabwe government for another cull”—a slaughter of all those elephants that had encroached on tribal lands—he told her, and mentioned where. He also told her it was going to be the last one.

Rita deVries knew all too well that her husband had a secret commitment to keep.

A superstitious sixty-eight-year-old, deVries had vowed long ago to rescue at least one elephant from the slaughter. Perhaps as a hunter, his commitment to this rescue was
meant to atone for a lifetime of taking elephants’ lives, necessary as he believed that to be. He was to be a rescuer, not a savior. He could not release any elephant he was going to save back into the wild, or raise her to adulthood, or even keep her on his ranch for long. Sure, he could use the money (four thousand American dollars) an exotic animal broker would pay him for her. He had misgivings about that, but, knowing what he knew, anyplace would be better for this young elephant than the continent of her birth.

“Why, Mother, is this a good place for her to stay,” he asked his wife, “if she needs me to rescue her from the guns?”

DeVries wanted to leave Africa himself if he could, with his whole family. The bitterness, the war, the intertribal killings, the feeling of being unwanted, the politics—these had turned this beautiful country into a living nightmare for its white settlers.

Buck knew that rescue meant more than saving a baby elephant for a day or from a single cull. It meant for as long as the elephant lived. Zimbabwe was a dangerous place for an elephant, with systematic culls almost certain to be revived again sometime in the future, with the poaching of elephants for their ivory tusks, with a lack of food for man and beast, and with the shootings of elephants by some tribesmen bent on their eradication. What lay ahead for Zimbabwe’s elephants was anyone’s guess. The elephant he would save would need an ultimate savior, someone other than himself to watch over her. But someone had to make
the first effort, and Buck was as close to the front lines of elephant survival as anyone could be.

T
wo days after deVries was told about the cull, a convoy of twelve Game Department diesel trucks rumbled through the morning mist carrying at least fifty Africans in shorts, overalls, and sweaters of forest green. Guns wrapped in soft blankets lay under seats. On their hemp belts the men carried scabbards made of elephant tails, which held sharpening steels. Around their necks they tied kerchiefs to cover their mouths and noses against the stench of death.

DeVries bounced along through the dust at the end of the convoy in his Ford pickup, which he had customized with wooden sides and an awning over the truck bed. His kidneys ached, and his back throbbed from the jolting ride over the open terrain of the research area. Alone with his thoughts, he reflected on what his oldest son, Johannes Jacobus deVries, would have been like now. Buck missed him dearly; he and Rita had called the boy Zoon. Big for his age, he had worn an adult shoe when he was only twelve. Zoon loved to hunt springboks and fish for tilapia and tigerfish. One day shortly after his twelfth birthday, while he was out angling alone on the brush-cluttered banks of the Zambezi River, Zoon was attacked by a large crocodile that suddenly rose out of the murky waters and killed him. Some twenty years later, age and time had cooled Buck’s rage over this terrible death as they sustained the grief over his loss.

Now the sight of a light airplane flying over the convoy
distracted him from his thoughts. The evening before, the airplane had crossed the area to locate the elephant herds; it had returned to assist in the cull.