Elephant Dawn Read online

  Back on the Hwange Estate I continue to battle with thornbush roadblocks, and another order from the governor’s family that I am banned from ‘their’ land. Sightings of the Presidential Elephant families have reduced from an average of eight families in one day, to eight families in one month—if I’m lucky. For the past twelve months, the veld has been disturbingly quiet.

  These quiet spells have allowed me time to write my very first book, which I’ve named In An Elephant’s Rumble. It’s just a self-published, Zimbabwe-only edition, to try to raise some in-country awareness, and hopefully a few dollars that will go towards my fuel and vehicle expenses. With access to foreign currency, it’s cheap to produce and print a book in Zimbabwe right now, and so my profit margin is high. There is much fanfare over its launch in Bulawayo; a distraction that I’m grateful for. My Camera Centre friends and Shaynie (who is dressed as a zebra, while another friend is dressed as an elephant) help to make it a particularly memorable occasion, and I manage to put on a happy face. For safety’s sake, I’m forced to hold back on many facts in this book. Some things I leave out entirely. I end it with a variation of Hunter S. Thompson’s words:

  Life’s journey is not about arriving safely at the grave in a well preserved body—but rather let us skid in sideways, totally worn out, shouting triumphantly: ‘Damn, what a ride . . .’

  What a ride indeed.

  The battle with the governor’s family drags on for more long weeks, the days blurred with uncertainties. Finally, though still banned from the land, I climb determinedly into my 4x4 and drive to Kanondo. On the way I bat away unsettling images of possible ambushes and tyre spikes. A sixth sense has told me that something is very wrong and I need to find out what it is. And there, at Kanondo, I’m met with a huge tract of felled trees. With shaking hands, I quickly photograph this alarming scene of deforestation and get out of there. This is the final straw. I’m assured 2005 will commence with the governor’s family finally gone.

  Why do I still find this so difficult to believe?

  During this madness, what keeps me sane is Misty’s adorable new baby boy, who I’ve named Merlin. Misty lost her previous baby, also a boy, two years ago, when he was just a few weeks old. I’ll never know if he was caught in a snare, or if it was a natural death. She’s revelling in suckling a little one once again, and I love the slurping noises that go on right beside the door of my 4x4. If only I could spend time with them every day, but I’m still not seeing the elephant families as much as I once did.

  I find solace in keeping in touch with wildlife people who I trust. I email my British friend Karen, who lives for the hippos of the Turgwe River in the Savé Valley Conservancy in the south-east of the country, to see how she’s getting on with land grabs that are also going on around her, and to offload about my own problems. Karen and I first met in the late 1990s when I spent time with her at Hippo Haven doing a short-term voluntary stint. We’ve remained in touch ever since.

  I still can’t think of Karen without thinking of scorpions. While staying with her, I slept in a quaint little wooden cottage, quite open to the elements. Drying myself off after a steaming shower, I reached for my long black trousers and a sweater, and pulled them on. Then I started making my way towards her house.

  ‘Holllllllyy crap!’

  My hand instantly shot inside the back of my trousers and I flung whatever was in there onto the lawn. Karen came racing out at the sound of my bellows and took on the task of examining the burning cheek of my buttock. What I’d briefly held in my hand felt like a scorpion, although we couldn’t find the little bugger anywhere. I quickly pulled my underwear back up, hoping that scorpion venom wasn’t something that someone had to suck out of you!

  ‘What colour was it? Was it big or small?’ Karen probed.

  I had no idea what colour it was, nor its relative size, but judging by the degree of pain, it surely had to have been big. I was taking no chances.

  ‘It was big,’ I declared.

  ‘It’s the smaller ones with thin pincers and thick tail that are the most venomous,’ Karen explained (which taught me that there’s really no need to exaggerate), and thrust a generous helping of antihistamine tablets into the palm of my hand. She kept a close eye on my temperature. I couldn’t sit down properly for days and a hard red lump remained for months. Being bitten on the butt by a scorpion is definitely not something that I recommend.

  I went on to do my own wildlife work in Zimbabwe knowing that I could always count on Karen for kind and timely words of support, particularly now during the land invasions. Neither of us are interested in Africa’s animals as subjects for academic advancement or financial gain. She understands better than most why I stay on, and I’m grateful for her presence in my African life.

  NOTHING BAD LASTS FOREVER

  2004

  There is a saying: ‘The Earth is made round, so that we cannot see too far down the road’. If I’d been able to see further down my already bumpy path, perhaps I might have followed Val, John, Marion, Julia and Dinks, and left Zimbabwe at once. I am, though, still hopeful about what 2005 might bring, and I’m heartened by a visit from a stranger, who arrives on the doorstep of my rondavel wanting to talk. He tells me his name is Trymore Ndlovu.

  ‘I am trying harder to see an elephant,’ he jokes, making light of his name.

  He hasn’t seen an elephant for eight years, he says, and longs to see one during this visit to the Hwange Estate. We both know the chances of this happening have, since the land claims, been significantly reduced. We talk about the Presidential Elephants and the ongoing restricted access to their land. His dark, intelligent eyes express confusion and sadness.

  ‘Okungapheliyo kuyahlola,’ he says in isiNdebele. He translates as he leaves, his hand patting his heart in a gesture of respect, ‘Remember, Mandlovu, nothing bad lasts forever.’

  Soon afterwards my friend Eileen in Auckland emails me with just a few words: ‘Shaz, come home.’

  I am torn, but I can’t yet bring myself to abandon my elephant friends. I can’t yet give up.

  I haven’t ventured into neighbouring Hwange National Park for months, and the prospect of staying overnight there is invigorating. This trip is with another friend called Marion: a young French researcher who works inside the park. Her love of Africa is very real. She always manages to provide cheerful company and compassion. She’s also kind to the core; she once left pizza on my doorstep, which was somehow still intact when I arrived home, despite monkeys everywhere. Her handwriting on the box read, ‘A surprise for you’. Inside the national park—away from the troubled Hwange Estate—I’m hoping that things might be clearer. I need to rest the bones of the old year.

  Stunning two-tone red and yellow flame lilies, which flower for just a few weeks, are in bloom along the roadsides, as are the sickle bushes with their tiny Christmas lanterns in mauve-pink and yellow. They always radiate my hopes for the coming year. The sight of newborn impala and wildebeest babies, fragile and long limbed, also reminds us that Christmas is close. This is the wet season, a particularly beautiful time of year.

  What strikes me most about this excursion is how much I love it all, still. We make our way past Makwa pan, past the area where Andy is buried, towards Ngweshla pan. We stumble upon a white rhino bull along the way and stay with him for a while, admiring his ancient splendour. Had we known that poachers would soon wipe out all of his kind in this part of Hwange, perhaps we would have stayed longer.

  I recall an American visitor’s response to my question, posed earlier in the year, as to whether we were looking at the backside of a black or a white rhino. ‘This rhino is grey!’ she had exclaimed. Indeed, she had a good point: both the black and the white rhinos are certainly grey. It’s a wide mouth rather than a pointy one that distinguishes the white (grey) rhino from the black (grey) one.

  The many tortoises on the sandy road are a prelude to the spectacle awaiting us at Ngweshla pan at sunset: there are waterbucks, impalas, kudus, elephan
ts, zebras, giraffes and ostriches. And most spectacularly of all, a huge herd of more than eight hundred buffaloes, known to frequent this area. No sooner have we settled ourselves—G&T in hand and with other small luxuries of olives, smoked mussels and cheese to be savoured—than we are completely surrounded by the buffalo herd.

  It is as though no other humans exist in the world, and we respect this notion with our silence. Watchful and wise, the buffaloes seem to have intentionally made this wide, grand circle around us, before breaking off and moving further away.

  ‘Wow! Do you think they had a message for us?’ I ask Marion over the sound of their grunts.

  ‘Nothing bad lasts forever?’ she offers, with a smile.

  Carefully avoiding the many nightjars and the occasional springhares (Africa’s miniature equivalent of kangaroos) bouncing along the road, we find a place inside the national park to sleep for the night, to share our wine and our stories. Our incessant talking, now quite foreign to my increasingly solitary existence, doesn’t diminish the tranquillity. It is wonderful that, though we’ve both spent thousands of days and nights in the African veld, we both still truly treasure the sublime beauty that surrounds us, even under cover of darkness.

  But even so, I find myself envying her Hwange existence, safe and warm within the confines of the national park and with several months of each year spent in her homeland. I choose not to burden her with the latest land grab sagas.

  Back on the estate, it’s difficult to get excited about Christmas Day, but it turns out to be a special one in the field. I unexpectedly come across Lady and her family in an area where I’ve never seen them before. I haven’t encountered them for more than eight long weeks, so I’m thrilled to see them all again. Toddling among those so familiar to me are two new wee packages of pure pleasure: a dashing little boy for Leanne (later named Litchis, which is the Zimbabwean version of lychees) and another for Louise (later named Laurie).

  I can barely contain my excitement. Both youngsters are probably already six weeks old, and play together around a rainwater pan. Limp is there too, showing little interest in his new baby brother, his snare injury no longer bothering him too badly although there’s still a noticeable limp. The great matriarch, Lady, herself heavily pregnant, comes to share her mud with me. I’d seen her in oestrus twice during 2003, and assume that she conceived during her second session. So, I’m expecting her to give birth in early April of the new year, an event that I’m already looking forward to. She looks huge—but even when not pregnant, Lady always looks huge.

  ‘Thank you, my girl, for visiting me for Christmas,’ I tell her, as she rumbles contentedly beside me.

  Back at my rondavel, I think about my family celebrating Christmas in Australia. Christmas is a big deal for them; a time of too many presents, too much food and far too much noise. While enviously imagining their platters of succulent prawns, I watch the African children who live around me racing behind old car tyres, which they’re pushing along the sandy tracks. They play hopscotch, the outline for their game etched with a stick in the damp ground. I watch them throw balls that are nothing more than a plastic shopping bag, stuffed with more plastic bags, shaped round. And I know that with no material gifts, but endowed with a natural ability to create their own fun, they’re really not missing out on all that much this Christmas. As little banded mongoose friends follow me inside—to lie for a while on their bellies on my grass mat with their legs outstretched—I’m content in the knowledge that neither am I. This is still exactly where I want to be.

  Two days later I’m sitting on the rooftop of my 4x4, admiring a sizeable zebra herd, dramatic against a backdrop of green-topped acacias and bulbous grey storm clouds. The quiet beauty is abruptly broken when I spot yet another gruesome snare injury. The young zebra, the stripes on her rump not yet jet-black, wears the death trap around her neck. The ring of wire is digging in deeply, the wound so horrific that I fight the need to turn away. But having watched young Wholesome die, I know that I can now bear anything. Harder to stomach is the knowledge that the anti-poaching team is still not allowed to properly patrol this estate.

  Thankfully the zebra herd is still around when a darter comes the next morning. The wound is even more horrific than I first thought; it’s something you’d expect to see only on a dead animal. Her neck is very deeply sliced. The maggots are nauseating and the snare is particularly difficult to remove. The loop of wire is wrapped hideously around her windpipe, and I fear she will not survive the ordeal. Antiseptic washes, ointments and antibiotics are used liberally.

  Somewhat remarkably, after the reversal drug is administered she gets to her feet and rejoins her mother and the four others who had put their heads to hers, concerned, when she first fell to the ground under the effect of the immobilisation drug. Back together again, they all begin to feed.

  I always experience a great sense of relief, knowing that we’ve done what we can to treat these human-inflicted injuries. Nothing will ever make it right, but we can continue to try to make it better.

  When New Year’s Eve arrives, I have grand plans to toast the new year at three different times. Firstly at 1 p.m. when friends in New Zealand will be popping champagne corks; again at 4 p.m. when family and friends in Australia will be celebrating; and again at midnight Zimbabwe time. But yet another snared elephant sighting—another gruesome neck wound, this time on a youngster in Misty’s extended family—means that 1 p.m. and 4 p.m. pass without me even noticing.

  There is, disappointingly, no one available to provide immediate darting assistance, and I ask myself again why I don’t just go and do the dangerous drugs course myself and become a qualified darter. In Zimbabwe you don’t have to be a vet in order to complete this course. I am, though, too closely connected to these elephants to take on the responsibility of darting them. I could never successfully load the deadly immobilisation drug while I’m feeling so distraught about the injuries. And besides, the courses (and required follow-ups), and a dart gun, are expensive and I don’t have that kind of extra money to spare. It’s also not possible to dart an elephant alone, so I’d still be reliant on others. I’m better placed being a key spotter and coordinator.

  I know that police are now based around the clock on the Hwange Estate, at both Kanondo and Khatshana. I can’t yet be certain this is a good thing, although my fervent New Year’s wish is that they’re on the right side. Here you can never tell. But their presence does seem to be a sign that the governor’s family has finally been displaced, at least for now. I’m once again driving in all estate areas.

  While there’s still some light, I grab the opportunity to take three of the policemen to see the snared elephant. Frustratingly, I can’t work out who he is. He is wandering alone, and there are so many elephants from the extended M family in the vicinity that I need more time to determine who he belongs to. For now it’s more important to give these policemen a first-hand glimpse at what’s happening here.

  ‘We don’t need to get too close,’ one of them says to me anxiously, clearly afraid of these imposing creatures. ‘They are too big.’

  The sun is setting and so there’s no time for me to help them feel more at ease. Instead, I pass my binoculars around so that they can properly see the snare injury for themselves.

  ‘But this is terrible,’ one of the men declares—and I hope this is genuinely how he feels. We can hear my little grey friend struggling to breathe. It’s a horrifying sound that I’ve heard before, too often.

  When I arrive home from the field, feeling weary and despondent, I check my emails and receive more upsetting news: the Boxing Day tsunami has claimed several hundred thousand lives, among them a Zimbabwean who was in Thailand and was a close friend of folk I’ve stayed with in Bulawayo. It’s another reminder of the fragility of life. ‘This is just getting too much now,’ I say to no one, feeling like somebody has cast a hex on the entire world.

  I decide that it’s time to rest my weary head—well before midnight—so I’
m going to miss the last of my three New Year toasts as well. Before climbing into my bed on the floor of my rondavel I light a candle, and take a moment for a quiet chat with the man upstairs. I admit that I find this a little ridiculous, since I haven’t had very much to say to him for a couple of decades.

  I think about Australian billionaire Kerry Packer and the heart attack he suffered in 1990, which left him clinically dead for six long minutes. Later, he famously declared, ‘There’s nothing there.’ No tunnel of bright light, no one waiting for you, no one to judge you, so you might as well ‘do what you bloody well like!’ I’ve often wondered if he might be right.

  While President Mugabe and his henchmen make public declarations about their devotion to God, I’m more and more convinced that if there are angels out there, some of these men would be among the first to rip their wings off. With the increasing levels of violence, corruption, revenge and insatiable greed going on around the country, surely the Ruling Party elite must actually believe, too, that there’s nothing actually out there.

  I light my candle anyway, not really knowing what I believe anymore. Singing ‘Amazing Grace’ to the elephants still gives me goosebumps regardless.

  I never see the little M family elephant again. Later, I manage to work out that the snare victim was the five-year-old son of the elephant named Monty. His name was Manu.

  THE ELEPHANTS WILL SPEAK TO YOU

  2005

  Unless it’s raining, I always have the roof of my 4x4 wide open to the great expanse of African sky. Seeking shade in the middle of the day, I decide to park under the sprawling branches of a tall Acacia erioloba, laden with the scruffy nests of sparrow weavers and the large communal nests of red-billed buffalo weavers. I’m whiling away the heat of the day, working on my laptop, waiting to see if any elephant families arrive. Sightings of them are as important as ever, especially since I’m still working out various family trees.