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

elephants were becoming more and more agitated.
    ‘We’ve got to sort this out quickly or we’re going to have to release them right here,’ said Kobus, his brow creased with worry. ‘They cannot stay in the truck any longer. Let’s just pray like hell the outer fence holds them.’
    We both knew that with this hair-trigger herd, it wouldn’t happen. We also both knew that if the elephants escaped they would be shot.
    Fortunately the driver, sick of all the pontificating, took matters into his own hands. Without a word he slammed the truck into reverse, and somehow skidded the huge rig out of the bog and veered off the greasy road into the savannah that had marginally more grip. Dodging tyreshredding thornbush and slithering past huge termite mounds he somehow kept momentum until he reached the boma .
    The crew cheered as though he had scored a touchdown at the Superbowl.
    Coaxing the animals from the truck was the next problem. Due to their massive size, elephants are the only animals that can’t jump at all, and so we had dug a trench for the semi to reverse into so the trailer’s floor would be level with the ground.
    However, the trench was now a soggy pit brimming with brown-frothed rainwater. If we backed into it, we would have a major problem extracting the vehicle. Mud is like ice; what it seizes it keeps. But with a herd of highly disturbed elephants inside, it was a risk we had to take.
    Disaster! Not because the truck got stuck – instead, the trench was too deep and the trailer’s sliding door jammed into the ground. To compound matters it was 2 a.m., dark as obsidian and the rain was still sluicing down thick as surf. I put out an emergency wake-up call to everyone on
the reserve and armed with shovels we slithered around in the sludge hacking a groove for the door. I was surprised that my staff didn’t mutiny.
    Finally the big moment arrived and we all stood well back, ready for the animals to be released into their new home.
    However, as it had been an extremely stressful few hours, Kobus decided first to inject the herd with a mild sedative, using a pole-sized syringe. He climbed onto the roof of the trailer, which had a large ventilation gap, and David jumped up to give him a hand.
    As David landed on the roof a trunk whipped through the slats as fast as a mamba and lashed at his ankle. David leapt back, dodging the grasping trunk with a heartbeat to spare. If the elephant had caught him he would have been yanked inside to a gruesome death. As simple as that. Kobus told me he had heard of it happening before; a person pulled into a confined space with seven angry elephants would soon be hamburger meat.
    Thankfully all went smoothly after this and as soon as the injections had been administered and they had calmed down the door slid open and the new matriarch emerged. With headlights throwing huge shadows on the trees behind, she tentatively stepped onto Thula Thula soil, the first wild elephant in the area for almost a century.
    The six others followed: the new matriarch’s baby bull, three females – of which one was an adult – and an eleven-year-old bull. The last out was the fifteen-year-old, three-and-a-half-ton, teenage son of the previous matriarch. He walked a few yards and even in his groggy state realized there were humans behind. He swivelled his head and stared at us, then flared his ears and with a high-pitched trumpet of rage turned and charged, pulling up just short of slamming into the fence in front of us. He instinctively knew, even at his tender age, that he must protect the herd.
I smiled with absolute admiration. His mother and baby sister had been shot before his eyes; he had been darted and confined in a trailer for eighteen hours; and here he was, just a teenager, defending his family. David immediately named him ‘Mnumzane’ (pronounced nom-zahn) which in Zulu means ‘Sir’.
    The new matriarch we christened ‘Nana’, which is what all Anthony grandchildren call