I sat on my porch and watched elephants pour out of the forest and onto the floodplain in the soft pink light of the late afternoon. I tried to enjoy the feeling of a lazy Sunday from the vantage of my barracks porch, despite what was happening to elephants just seven miles up the road over the border.
Young males let out a few deafening screams as they often did in the excitement of an impending reunion. I picked up my binoculars and started counting. After counting thirty elephants, I checked the time and went inside to get my field notebook from the bedroom. This was the perfect time to try out the night-vision goggles and Nikon digital camera that Craig had somehow arranged to have sitting on the porch steps for me when I returned from our radio conversation the night before, along with an iridium satellite phone, various connectors, and a small printer, the size of a 3-hole punch. He must have gotten one of the rangers to drop it off.
I put on long pants and socks to thwart the mosquitoes and then buckled on my holster, grabbed my backpack and the keys from the counter, and headed back outside. I picked up my binoculars again to shove them into the backpack and got into the car.
Not wanting to scare the elephants, I drove slowly downwind of them. The Beetle wallowed through the tall red and orange grass of the floodplain until I reached the water. I settled down at a backwater, one pool down from the action with the elephants still in view.
A large group of hippos objected to my presence on the bank by waving their open mouths at me from the middle of the pool, exposing their enormous canines in threat. A few belted out sharp bellows and loud bursts of air through their nostrils. After deciding that I didn’t pose any immediate danger, they quieted down with only a puff of air here and an ear twitch there and a territorial hum, hum, hum, hum, hum, snort. All was fairly quiet except for the whine of mosquitoes and the rumbling of elephants.
I grabbed my backpack and climbed up on my roof rack. I watched the elephants in the radiant light, taking pictures, counting them, and, out of habit, taking notes on their behavior. I spotted an older female that was pushing young males away from her drinking spot at a deep elbow in the river.
I drew the ear notches, tusk shape, and tail-hair pattern of the largest one that appeared to be the matriarch, and estimated ages and sexes of the others, eyeballing back heights relative to hers. I noted other distinctive characteristic features within the group until another much larger group showed up at sunset, making it impossible to keep track.
The new group burst onto the scene with jubilant fanfare silhouetted against a rapidly sinking red sun. I stopped taking pictures and picked up my low-light binoculars to watch as they proceeded to engage in an elaborate ceremony—the older females roaring, rumbling, urinating, and defecating, while standing in a rigid line. They held their heads high with their trunks on the ground and ears flapping in this mysterious primal ritual. After a few minutes, they relaxed their shoulders and proceeded to exchange tactile greetings by placing their trunks in one another’s mouths, akin to a handshake.
The dust rose from the commotion of even more arrivals, and more roaring and bellowing, the calls seeming to attract more and more extended families to join in the party. The smell of elephant permeated the air—a combination of tanned leather, dung, and something musty sweet.
It was getting hard to see now with the sun completely gone and the heaviness of dusk setting in. It was just getting dark enough to experiment with the night-vision goggles Craig sent up with the camera, so I dug them out of the backpack and turned them on. The waxing moon was just a sliver in the sky, but any bit of light helped improve the resolution of the image that was generated by gathering ambient light and intensifying it.
Light-intensifying technology in night-vision gear had improved since I had used it several years back to track moose in Yellowstone. Either that or Craig had invested a substantial portion of his budget to get me top-of-the-line technology. In Kruger someone had gotten permission to use the same technology our military used in the Iraq War for rhino patrols. This device seemed just as good. It worked like goggles and as an attachment to my camera so I could take pictures at night.
There was a sudden bellow as a couple of young bulls burst through the bush just next to me, one of them almost colliding with the Bug and practically knocking me off my observation post as they hurried to the water. They roared so loudly it sounded as if they were being attacked by lions, or at least pursued by them. I assumed they were just excited about their reunion, but nevertheless I scanned the tall grass behind me. No imminent sign of predators.
But lions were expert at sneaking up on the unsuspecting and, having had a lioness in my vicinity on the way in, I no longer felt comfortable so low to the ground. I moved back inside the car as soon as the elephants settled down.
Most of the best elephant socializing happens just after sunset, which I rarely got to see in Kruger. Things were so regulated there that it was only on special occasions that I got to be out in a remote place like this after dark. It was hard to justify being out late to measure how much of a particular tree species the elephants were consuming. And rarely did those observations coincide with a large elephant greeting ceremony.
When the opening tumult of greeting the new relatives was over, the elephants again relaxed and began the sequence of elephantine “handshakes” by placing their trunks in others’ mouths. Little ones to older ones, sisters, aunts, cousins—they were all getting in on the action. The young bulls then proceeded to engage in sparring matches up and down the river, mucking up the water for everyone else, but no one seemed to care. I enjoyed the sounds of drinking and the splashing of water escaping many thirsty trunks curling up to mouths in a row, looking like a giant sea monster in the night.
A blood-curdling scream emanated from the bank a little ways upstream. I tried to see between the elephant legs to the cause of the upset, when suddenly scores of elephants ran past me on either side, several of them looming over me through the windshield as they sidestepped the car in a hurried retreat, leaving a small group clustered in a panic on the far bank.
A few of the younger elephants in the group were running back and forth with their ears straight out, confused, reaching their trunks up in the air, as if searching for clues on the winds. Two larger females were trying to reach something in the river with their trunks. At first, I didn’t see anything in the water and couldn’t figure out what they were doing.
A small, black, snakelike object stuck up out of the water and went back under. The elephants were trying to grab it. There were splashes and more screams and bellows coming from the water. Then, I realized what was happening. A calf had fallen in and the bank was so steep that it wasn’t able to climb out.
Finally, the two females got down on their knees and were able to wrap their trunks around the backside of the baby and pulled it up onto the bank. The dripping wet baby stood silently, sucking its trunk as the others came over and touched it with their trunks as they rumbled and flapped their ears.
I was so engrossed in what was happening that I hadn’t realized how badly I was getting bitten by mosquitoes. The long pants and socks helped, but the effect of the DEET was wearing off my arms and neck. I needed to leave, but I waited until the elephants left before I packed up my things and made my way back to the barracks in the dark. It was too dark not to turn on my headlights, but I didn’t want to spoil the night, so I drove back using my night vision.
Through the night-vision screen, the bent grass I had driven on was lighter in color than that surrounding it, allowing me to follow my path exactly. I wanted to avoid driving into a warthog hole or over an acacia seedling, the thorns of which would have given me another flat tire. I wound through the tall grass and back to the main dirt road in the dark.
On the road, I could see fresh tire tracks going in the opposite direction, toward the Angolan border. I didn’t remember hearing a vehicle pass. The only thing up there was the border—and poachers.