6 - Excitement

5 May 2010

Well there’s been quite some excitement in the last couple of days. Our last day alone on the ranch Albert, one of the black workers here, came in and announced that he needed some diesel for the land rover to go and pick up a dead bull. The bull, apparently, had been caught in a snare, but the story was beginning to sound a little sketchy so I told David he must go with the guys in the Land Rover and document the scene for Tokkie to see when he came home.

A couple of hours later he came back with a sad story and footage of one of Tokkie’s commercial-grade bulls caught by the back leg in a wire snare. Obviously it had to have been lost and caught in the snare for some 4 or 5 days before it finally expired from dehydration, and it was apparently dead for 2 days before the guys even found it. It was not one of Tokkie’s breeding bulls, but was still a big loss, as even a lower-grade bull can fetch a good amount of money just for the meat.

Just as we got that whole mess sorted out, Roy (in charge of the game scouts and sundry other things. . . . really Tokkie’s right-hand man) came back from a short trip to the concession to check on his scouts. He brought with him some rotten news. A man had been killed by an elephant and the Council wanted us to go and find and kill it. The problem was that by the time the news reached us through Roy, and through us to Tokkie, it had already been 5 days since the incident, and there was no guarantee of us finding the beast even if we went and searched for it for another week. The real problem at hand, though, was that the Council was threatening to cancel their contract with Tokkie on the grounds that he wasn’t holding up his end of the bargain to take care of any problem animals. In addition to that, Tokkie had come back from South Africa with the new hunting clients (the Galke’s) who were excited to go and blow away all the plains game they could find, but were not really prepared to be schlepping through the bush after a problem elephant. This would not have been a problem, as either Tokkie or Quinn could have stayed at the ranch with the clients, and the other one go to the concession after the elephant, but Quinn happened to come back from South Africa feeling very sick, so he was confined to his bed for the next few days.

It seemed that there was really nothing we could do about it, and plans were made for Tokkie to take the clients out plains-game hunting the next day. However, when I came up to the house the next morning to collect my cameras to be ready for the action, Tokkie informed me that he had had an unexpected visitor show up at about 4am with more bad tidings. Two more people had been killed by the elephant the previous evening. The guy had apparently traveled all night to reach Tokkie and let him know right away. So plans were changed and we packed into the Cruiser with 6 black guys, David, myself, Tokkie, the client and his son, leaving his wife behind. For anyone who’s wondering, yes I did have some reservations about plunging into thick bush with intentions of getting as close as possible to an animal many times my size with a track record of goring people, with nothing but a camera in my hand. However, my reservations were not enough to keep me from actually going. I think everyone has an internal scale inside them. On one side of the scale rests our fears, reservations, worries, etc. On the other is our curiosity and desire for the thrill of a new experience, and I think some people are just born with their scales not perfectly balanced to begin with.

We drove for something like 4 hours, stopping many times for the guys to get out and hack with machetes at the thorn brush crowding in on the dirt road. We made it to our destination, the scene of the most recent killings, and heard the sad story. A woman and her two children had been out in their donkey cart at dusk. They had spotted the elephant and the woman sent her oldest child running to find help. The elephant, for whatever reason, became aggressive and went after the woman. She had the other child on her back and did not have much of a chance. She ran a short distance and then the elephant grabbed and mangled her and the child. The villagers had left the bodies where they lay for us to come and inspect, as though they were expecting us to call them liars. I felt somewhat disrespectful going in there with my video camera, but permission had been asked and nobody seemed too bothered by it. Mostly they were just interested in getting a closer look at my camera.

The scene was brutal and graphic. The woman lay on her back with one ruined arm thrown across her chest. The tusk had gone through her rib cage and left a gaping hole. The young child, maybe 5 or 6 years old, lay 15 feet away from her, also on his back. His face was a mask of dust, and a large piece of his skull was missing, the brain drying on the ground beside him. A group of women was waiting there in the bushes with blankets to cover and remove the bodies. They had evidently been waiting there for hours and seemed understandably anxious to have done with their work. Although it stirred feelings of sadness and compassion within me, there was no revulsion or fear or anything like that when I looked upon the bodies, and it was actually fascinating to see the damage caused by this animal.

We spent a couple of hours resting and eating lunch and then we followed the elephant tracks in the Cruiser until they veered off into the bush. Then we walked. There was an air of tension and apprehensiveness about the trackers which I’ve not sensed on other hunts. Their movements were cautious and furtive as we followed the spoor, each footprint the size of a large round serving platter. The edges of the tracks were not sharply defined, the centers of the pads leaving crackle-marks in the soft ground, and leaving no marks at all on rocky ground, except for broken branches, stripped bark and shining piles of fresh dung.

We followed the killer bull for about 2 hours as he meandered in and out of a small herd of females until we came to a particularly thick area of bush. The trackers motioned for us to stand still and for a few moments all I could hear was my own heart beating. And then, there was a the snapping crash of a branch being ripped off a tree, and I could see the bush moving in front of me. I could hear the huge jaws grinding the leaves and bark, and the deep rumbling of a massive stomach digesting leaves and bark. As everyone was quietly stalking away I caught a glimpse of the huge, grey body through the trees and was breathless.

It was nearly 5:30 and the light was getting bad for shooting. I knew if we did not find and kill the elephant within the next 15 minutes or so we were done for the day. We circled around the group, and then one of the trackers began pointing toward something in the bush. The three men with the guns (David, Tokkie, and Mr Galke) bunched together in a line, aiming through the trees. I immediately dropped into a crouch where I was, and did my best not to shake the camera. I thought briefly about shifting my position to get a better view, but then the beast broke the whole top off a nearby tree and I had a brief flashback of the broken bodies lying on the ground and decided it wasn’t worth alerting the animal to my presence.

The elephant was something like 35 yards away and I could just make out his massive head, trunk reaching up to get the tender leaves, ears flapping around, when David let off his first shot. It startled me, but my ears were protected and there was minimal camera shake. The elephant collapsed heavily to the ground and began weakly thrashing around, trying to regain his feet. The three guys quickly closed the distance and David shot him again, this time between the eyebrows, and the elephant’s attempts to stand up turned into purposeless twitching. The client got off a shot in the elephant’s throat, and then came up and shot him once more in the head. We closed in and it was obvious the elephant was dead. The trackers climbed up on top of his huge body for the pictures. The blood was still spraying up out of the head wound in a small fountain, and a river of it was flowing from the lifeless trunk.

The trackers began inspecting the feet of the elephant, his tusks and trunk, and they were all certain that this was the murderer. An atmosphere of celebration and relief descended on us all as the sun began to set. As we drove out, the guys on the back of the Cruiser shouted the good news to everyone we passed, and even Tokkie was in a jovial mood. He told us he usually doesn’t like elephant hunting, but that this time was exciting and fun. He may have had a drastically different attitude towards the whole thing had it not gone as well and smoothly as it did. To be honest, the whole affair took much less time and was much easier than I expected. To be sure, not all elephant hunts go as well, even without the added risk of the elephant having the track record this one did. I said many thankful prayers on the way out and held David’s hand the whole way home.

Well, except for when we nearly ran over an 8-foot long rock python. Tokkie turned the vehicle around and David caught the feisty guy and made sure he was not damaged. He was obviously not damaged, but was certainly not thrilled with being held by the tail in the headlights. David let him go, and we made the long journey back to Threeways. We had the customary toast to the hunt, a nice dinner, and I slept like a rock, a very clingy rock.

Today I stayed at the ranch to look after things at the house, as Quinn is still sick and Dirkie was feeling peaky. David has been out all day with our hunting client and Tokkie went back to skin and butcher the elephant. It has been a somewhat boring day, but I took Tokkie’s not-so-subtle hint and had a good long look at his new cattle computer program. This new version of it seems much easier to figure out than the version he had back in 2007, and to make matters even better there is actually an instruction manual. Sorting out the cattle and getting his herd all set up on the program is the next big project in the works. Assuming, that is, that another killer elephant doesn’t crop up in the meantime.

Tokkie just walked in the door as I’m writing this, finished with a hard day’s work of skinning the elephant. Apparently when they had a closer look inside the animal’s head there was an infected, abscessed tooth which was probably causing him considerable pain. Tokkie told me this is often what they find with problem elephants: underlying, painful conditions that are not usually visible from the outside. This apparently makes them overly aggressive and angry, often driving them to the point of becoming man-killers.