The Elephant Whisperer: My Life With the Herd in the African Wild Read Online Free PDF Page A

would lead breakouts at Thula Thula as
well. We learnt this via a telephone call after the animals had left and I was as stunned as if I had been hit in the spleen. This was exactly what we at Thula Thula were fighting against. While I understood the conventional reasoning behind the choice to kill the matriarch, I felt that decision should have been mine. As elephants are so big and dangerous, if they create problems and pose a risk to lodges and tourists it is quite usual for them to be shot out of hand. However, I was convinced that I would be able to settle the herd in their new home. Consequently I was prepared to take the risk of accepting the escape-artist matriarch and her baby and work with her. Even so, this killing cemented my determination to save the rest of the herd.
    The Zulus who live close to the land have a saying that if it rains on an inaugural occasion, that event will be blessed. For those in step with the natural world, rain is life. That day it didn’t just rain, it bucketed. The bruised skies sprayed down torrents and I wasn’t too sure the Zulus had this ‘blessed’ story right. When the articulated truck arrived outside Thula Thula in thick darkness the deluge had turned the dirt tracks into streams of mud.
    Barely had we opened the gates to the reserve when a tyre burst, the reinforced rubber cracking loud as a rifle shot. This panicked the elephants, who had just seen their leader gunned down and they started thumping the inside of the trailer like it was a gigantic drum, while the crews worked feverishly to change the wheel.
    ‘This is Jurassic Park !’ Françoise cried. We laughed, not necessarily in mirth.
    Françoise and I first met some years back in London at the Cumberland Hotel. It was minus 17 degrees Celsius and I urgently needed to get to Earls Court for a meeting. There was a long queue snaking up to the taxi rank outside the hotel and the doorman, who knew I was in a hurry, said he would see if anyone would share a cab. As it happened, a
gorgeous woman right at the front was also going to Earls Court. The doorman asked if she would mind sharing and pointed at me. She leaned forward to get a better look, and then shook her head. It was the most emphatic ‘No’ I had seen.
    Well, that’s life. Rather than hang around I decided to take the Underground and as I strode off, to my surprise, the same woman miraculously appeared next to me at the Tube station.
    ‘’Ello,’ she said in a thick French accent, ‘I am Françoise.’
    She said she felt guilty about not agreeing to share a cab and to make amends offered to show me which train to take. To say I was smitten would be putting it blandly.
    She knew London well and asked if I was interested in jazz. I wasn’t, but I also wasn’t stupid enough to say so. In fact, I professed undying love for the genre. Thank the stars she didn’t ask for proof – such as my favourite musician – and instead suggested that as jazz lovers we go to Ronnie Scott’s Jazz Club that night. I pondered this for a fraction of a nanosecond before answering ‘Yes’ with more enthusiasm than absolutely necessary.
    Apart from wondering why I had never appreciated the bewitchment of jazz before, I spent much of that evening telling her of the magic of Africa – not hard in the middle of an English winter. Was there plenty of sun in Africa, she asked? I scoffed … was there sun? We invented the word.
    Well, here we were twelve years later drenched to the marrow in the bush, wrestling with a gigantic wheel on a muddy rig loaded with elephants. I don’t recall mentioning this could happen while piling on the charm during our first date.
    The spare wheel had scarcely been bolted on when to the surprise of no one the truck slid just a few yards before it sank into the glutinous mud, its tyres spinning impotently and spewing muck all over the place. No amount of cajoling,
swearing, kicking or packing branches underneath worked. And even worse, the