He setteth up his tail like a cedar, the sinews of his testicles are wrapped together. His bones are like pipes of brass, his gristle like plates of iron. He sleepeth under the shadow in the cover of the reed. Behold! He will drink up a river and not wonder that the Jordan may run into his mouth.
—JOB 40:10–18
I SAT ON OUR PORCH AS THE CLOUDS came to a boil over the floodplain. A strong wind preceded the rain, rolling the grass down in waves, the tops of the reeds a deep gray, tickling the dark purple sky. The sleek gray of a leadwood carcass glistened in a distant tree island while all around it the light intensified the yellows and reds of the grasses. A chalky blue elephant herd hurried with heads bobbing in a train to reach the tree line before the storm broke.
A furious flash of energy escaped from the sluggish sky. Thunder broke deep and low with such palpable weight it seemed to crack open the earth to lay bare the fiery rock below. The ground shook as the battle over the floodplain continued until an all-encompassing torrent of rain smothered both thunder and lightning. The remnants of the battle steamed and hissed in the downpour.
In our first storm in the Caprivi, Tim had immersed himself completely in the earthly forces. Tearing off all of his clothing, he ran out into the downpour, yelling at the roaring sky, “Let slip the dogs of war!” Drenched and thoroughly exhilarated, his body silhouetted against the electric sky, he screamed at the top of his lungs. Yet his voice was so completely absorbed by the raging storm that I could barely hear him as I stood watching his primal display from the porch.
We were staying in the peeling, dilapidated Susuwe camouflage barracks at the time, the house slated for Jo. At first, we were hoping to build before the rain, but as soon as the rain started, momentum stopped. Time runs on a much slower clock in Africa, but living out of boxes was starting to get old. And I didn’t like being in that house by myself. When the second storm hit, Tim was stuck in Katima for the night, and I was forced to face the earthly forces on my own. In retrospect, it seems that I had no problem camping in the bush on my own, but there was something creepy about that military barracks. Too much history, too many failed politics and past haunts, such as the shotgun hole in the bathroom wall, allegedly from one of the rangers shooting at his wife. And the nightmares from mefloquine, an antimalarial drug, didn’t help.
Sitting under the tin roof, eardrums saturated with the roar, I stared unfocused into the wall of water that quickly accumulated and poured off the broken gutter, beating down on the orange sand. I sat in the downpour until it got dark. When the storm slowly let up, the noise of the torrent was replaced by dripping vegetation and the chaos of frog calls.
WE ADAPTED QUICKLY to our life in the Caprivi. The rain came and went, bringing plenty or drought, and the Zambezi swelled and shrunk accordingly. It was the only place I knew of where people measured their lives on meter sticks at the river’s edge, the rising river an indicator of local rainfall. The breadth of the great Zambezi during the wet season represented that year’s economic fate—riches or disaster. Cataclysmic and deadly encounters were ushered in by thunder and lightning, and the pestilence of the wet season meant that the place was abuzz with life, renewal, and parasites.
Sex was in the air, in the water, and all over the ground: toktok beetles banged their shiny, black abdomens against the earth to attract a mate; red velvet mites scurried about, the enormous females chased by scores of tiny males. The tall red and orange turpentine grasses were in bloom, too, a fragrant bouquet filled with all variety of grasshoppers and mantises. A great number of these ended up on our windshield during our patrols; the grass seed choked the radiator.
Emperor dragonflies cruised the riverbanks, dining on the latest mayfly emergence. Baby tortoises crawled across the road. Charaxes butterflies hatched out everywhere, lining the edges of the wet-season pans with orange and black brushstrokes. Bee flies came to show off their fuzzy, swollen bellies. Frogs were in a frenzy of calling, their foamy nests lining the ephemeral pans, their hooting, clinking, and chiming making for a deafening chorus. Mole crickets pierced the night with their high-pitched trill as the cicadas shook up the day with incessant maracas. The brilliant carmine bee eaters filled the clay banks of the Kwando with their new nests.
In Etosha, springbok lambs lay on the new grass, so green and fresh it looked like a golf course. Lightning illuminated the pan, now pink with nesting flamingos, the waters writhing with small fishes and giant bullfrogs poised to consume their siblings. Lions lay on their green carpets, exhausted by the antics of their cubs.
During this time of renewal, termites added extensions to their colonies with the rain-softened clay, and a frenzy of winged would-be royal newlyweds took to the skies, providing a banquet for the nesting bee eaters. The few survivors scrambled along the ground, found mates, and dropped their wings, committing to breaking ground for a new colony. Edible mushrooms that tasted like the earth’s ambrosia were the size of dinner plates and thick as a loaf of bread as they sprang through the sides of the termitaries.
The Linyanti swamps flooded, providing fertile soils for crops and grasses. But for those outside the flood zone, the local rainfall patterns explained why the farmers were so superstitious about their fortune or plight. The rain fell in such localized patterns that 2 inches could have fallen on one man’s field and absolutely nothing on his neighbor’s. Clearly, the witch doctor had carefully positioned a rain cloud over one field and not another, or perhaps on the whole village, barring one unlikable individual.
The baby elephants came among all this rebirth. In their little footy pajamas, they ran next to their mothers or after their siblings, desperate to keep up, their rubbery trunks flopping in front of them. As the wet season bloomed in its splendor, seeds were planted and crops flourished. But in the back of everyone’s mind lay anxiety over the elephants. We all knew it was inevitable, just a question of when they would get the first whiff of ripe corn.
Under cover of night, elephants would tiptoe across the floodplain into the farmlands, crossing the Kwando River, roaring their prebattle cries as if they knew they were about to commit a crime or even engage in all-out warfare. Then came the all-night drumming sessions, screams, fires, shotguns, trumpets, the fury of both human and elephant, summoned up from carnal urges, beast on beast, survival of the fittest.
In the beginning, I spent many weeks going with Matthew on his trips through the region, meeting with headmen and game guards, learning the lay of the land. Our entry into this world was not easy, and it took us a while to penetrate the villages, the tribes, the politics, and the suspicions. The nongovernmental organization (NGO) that Matthew worked for, IRDNC, had been operating in the region for several years, so I was able to ride on the shirttails of their good deeds, which simplified my introduction enormously.
The last introduction Matthew scheduled was in the Mfwe area, which was just across the river from Susuwe. On the day we were supposed to meet, Tim made a plan to take our truck to Katima for a vehicle service. We woke up early, ate breakfast, and as Tim left for Katima, I looked for the least wrinkled skirt I could wear for my day in the villages. A local woman could be fined for not wearing a skirt in the village, so I wore one out of respect. I turned on the short-wave radio. A BBC reporter droned on about violence escalating between the Hutus and Tutsis. Static, crackle, white noise. I turned it off.
Matthew arrived at our barracks just after 8:00. “How’s it, Caitlin?” He sat down on the porch and loaded his empty pipe. His shirt pocket was stuffed with tobacco, his brown cap rim stained with a band of perspiration. “How’s the new place coming?” He carelessly lit his pipe.
I explained the delays typical of the rainy season.
“Right.” He sucked. “That cottonseed soil is a bloody nuisance this time of year. Bet you’ll be glad to get out of this place. Hell, it’s like an oven in here.”
“It’s not that bad. I like the view.”
“Guess I’m spoiled living at Buffalo Lodge, right next to the river. Hell, it’s nice.”
“Some tea?”
“Cheers, thanks, but I had some just now. We’d better get going.”
I gulped down my tea, grabbed a notebook, measuring tape, and GPS, and we left the ranger camp, crossing the river toward the villages. Matthew planned to introduce me to the induna, or mayor, and a few of the game guards in the Choyi area. We first picked up Manias, the head game guard for the northern region of East Caprivi. He squeezed into the front seat next to me, smiling weakly, hesitantly, as if calculating the impact my position would have on him. Another man got in the back, barefoot, holding a pair of dress shoes to don at his destination.
When we got to the induna’s kraal, we found an old man waiting on a stool just outside the small reed-enclosed compound. He was frail, dusty, clothes tattered. “Musuhili Mudella.” Matthew knelt down and clapped one hand on top of the other using the reverent term for old man, Mudella, as the elderly man clapped weakly, mouthing his greeting in return.
“How is the induna today?”
Manias stood next to them, interpreting the Mfwe language for Matthew. “He is not feeling all right.”
“Malaria?”
The old man nodded.
“Oh, hell.”
He mumbled again and Manias reported, “He asks you to come back next week.”
Suddenly there was a commotion on the other side of the kraal. A young boy burst out of the bush, “Papa! Papa! Leto! Leto!” He saw us and stopped suddenly, staring at me. He then looked at the old man, who nodded and opened the door to the courtyard of the kraal.
The boy disappeared inside as two wailing women streamed out from the acacia thicket in faded native wraps, each with a watermelon perched on her head. They, too, stopped as soon as they saw me. They brought the watermelons down as they stared at me, half embarrassed, half angry. I felt I was invading their privacy and tried to supplicate to them by turning my eyes downward.
When they heard me mumble the greeting “Musuhili,” they burst out laughing. Rotten teeth, wrinkled faces, hands over mouths, watermelons pressed into their stomachs to prevent their sides from bursting from hilarity. They laughed and laughed, imitating how I pronounced their morning salutation. “Musuhili,” they mumbled mockingly and burst out laughing again. The old man spat a barely audible reproach at them, and they composed themselves, staring at me again. He motioned for them to go inside. As soon as they were inside the kraal, they returned to their original mission of reporting the previous night’s elephant mishap to the induna.
Matthew leaned over to me, “The induna’s wife.”
We stood there listening to the loud rapid-fire complaints from the women inside as Manias whispered an interpretation. “Leto!” they exclaimed, using the Lozi word for elephant. “The elephants have eaten everything last night. They banged drums, but the elephants chased them into the induna’s brother’s field. When Raymond ran out of shots, the elephants chased them again.” There was another moment of silence before the door slowly creaked open, held by the little boy. He spoke to the old man, who turned to Manias and relayed the message.
“The induna would like to speak to you now.”
We were led inside the courtyard, where the women helped a desiccated gray man out of his sleeping hut and onto a reed mat. He was bundled in blankets, sweating and shaking as they guided him into a sitting position, leaning up against his hut. The boy placed a long wooden bench at the other side of the reed mat. The women stepped away, sinking into the shadows. After a long silence, the induna collected himself enough to look up at Manias and point to the bench. We all knelt down and performed our greetings before taking a seat. The induna looked away from us.
“Musuhili Induna Maplancha.” Matthew reached over to shake the induna’s hand in between his hand-over-hand clapping. The induna weakly shook his hand, clapped, and then rebundled his blanket. “I understand you have malaria.” Matthew spoke loudly.
The induna nodded. “Do you have enough chloroquine?”
Manias interpreted and the induna spoke.
“Don’t you have any better medicines?”
“I’m afraid not.”
“There is too much itching with chloroquine.”
“Yes, it is a problem. Induna, I came here today to introduce you to Caitlin O’Connell. I can see this is not a good time, however.”
“Carry on.” He waved an imperious hand at us.
“Caitlin will be working with the farmers to help them keep the elephants away from their crops.”
The induna nodded.
“She will be working closely with the game guards to conduct different experiments with the farmers who are getting hassled by elephants.”
Manias translated and the induna then spoke to Manias quietly for a long time, gesticulating weakly as the women interjected here and there, trying to restrain themselves. Finally, the induna’s wife yelled, pointing at me, “The government must pay!”
The other woman hissed, “Nature Conservation’s ‘cattle’!”
I was surprised to hear English.
The induna hissed and shut them up as he continued his discussion with Manias. Finally, Manias turned and spoke to us.
“We would like her to work here with these farmers,” Manias reported.
I looked to Matthew for a response.
“Yes, we are deciding where she should spend her energy, and Choyi would be a good place to start.”
Manias explained and the induna nodded.
“The induna would like Caitlin to set up her experiment in his brother’s field.”
“As soon as we can get more supplies, we will do that.” I was nervous to commit to a specific date, not knowing how long it would take for our wire order to arrive in Katima.
The induna looked pleased.
“Clatius,” the induna whispered hoarsely. The boy approached, received his instructions, and then turned to Manias.
Manias explained, “The induna would like us to see the damaged field right now. Clatius will go find Raymond to show us the field. Ernest will take us there.” Ernest was the induna’s eldest son, the game guard for that section of Choyi.
Matthew looked at me and nodded in agreement as Clatius ran out of the kraal. Manias told us to follow him. We said our good-byes and followed Manias down a sandy path that led to a borehole where some women were washing clothing. They watched and clucked their tongues as we passed, apparently having heard the news of last night’s elephant raid. We passed a cement schoolhouse painted yellow and white with graffiti written on the side saying, “Subia out,” and another saying, “DTA.” I asked Matthew what the graffiti meant and he slowed down to explain.
The Subia were the tribe on the eastern floodplain who held the teaching positions in the Caprivi, and this was a Mfwe area. The Mfwe didn’t like the Subia, which occasionally spurred demonstrations, wherein a few people would be beaten and then the dust would settle.
“So the Subia teachers left?”
“No, not necessarily. Although one was shot in the leg last year and died of blood loss.” Someone had tied the blood-soaked pants from a flagpole, and that scared people. But now the conflict had quieted down.
“And DTA?”
“DTA is the political opposition to SWAPO. Means Democratic Turnhalle Alliance, but hell if I know what they stand for.”
As we caught up to Manias, we passed a long line outside the clinic. “All waiting for quinine,” Matthew explained. “And some for calamine to counter the itching.” Many shivering forms hovered under the blaring sun in heavy acrylic striped blankets. Some tsk-tsking emanated from the queue, and a surge of angry chatter emerged.
Manias whispered translations reluctantly. I wanted to know what I was up against.
“This year, the government must pay!” One man pointed at me, viewing me as the government incarnate.
“We should not have to work to feed Nature Conservation’s cattle so that our children can starve,” one of the women lamented aggressively, pointing toward the river where the elephants cross out of the reserve at night to raid crops in the village. She shifted the weight of the baby strapped to her back and retied the bundle, tightening the thin cotton patterned cloth across her shoulders. A sickly child clung to her leg with glossy eyes, having lost the reflex to brush away the flies that covered his lips.
“Chief Mamili told us that Nature Conservation will protect our fields this year, but where are they?” A man held out his hand to a neighbor, who filled it with snuff. He poured the contents into a vessel around his neck and weakly snuffed the rest into his nose. “If my neighbor’s cattle entered my field, they would have to pay.” He hacked from the rush of nicotine. “I should not have to build a fence to keep out someone else’s cattle.” He looked up and down the line for confirmation. “If the government says we are not allowed to shoot elephants, then they must keep them out of our field!”
“Yes!” agreed the woman next in line.
“Aha!” exclaimed another as the clinic opened its doors.
Matthew gave me a look, signaling that it was time to move on, and we went to the Khuka shop, where Manias had arranged to meet up with Ernest. The Khuka shops were often used as a meeting place. Ernest was just finishing a tombo, beer made from mahango, the local grain, costing 20 cents a cup.
Matthew rolled his eyes. “Morning, Ernest.”
“Morning, Mafews.” They all pronounced his name like that.
“How’s it?” Matthew knew Ernest was not going to be much help.
At that moment, a swarm of old women surrounded me, touching, pulling, pawing, singing, dancing, stumbling with rotting tobacco-stained teeth. They slurred greetings, laughing, holding my hand, and spitting into my palm. It was intimidating, but I tried to keep from panicking and let them have their fill. They clucked, whispered, and jeered the same mocking request into my ear, wanting me to give them tea and food, holding their bellies and putting fingers together in front of their lips. I looked at Matthew for guidance, but he simply shrugged.
Manias whispered to Ernest, who nodded in agreement, pressing down the lapels of his game guard uniform. It was considered an honor to have a job that required a uniform, but the honor did not necessarily beget sobriety. We left the Khuka shop, and Ernest led us down the main road, bringing us back to the vehicle. Ernest guided us down a little-used track that meandered, becoming a footpath before disappearing into the cornfields along the floodplain.
We met up with Raymond, who told us in English what had happened the previous night with the elephants and what had been happening all season and the previous seasons. One of the rangers tried to shoot an elephant in his field last year, but he missed and shot off a piece of his tusk instead. The man lost his entire crop that year.
Walking through the sparse dried stalks of corn, we followed the path of the “Dirty Seven,” the troublesome clan of bulls that had been marauding crops up and down the Kwando all last season. They always appeared together and were becoming progressively bolder. The ministry was sure that if it were to remove one of them, the rest would go away. But the plan proved to be harder to execute than expected. Orchestrating the meeting of the offending elephant and the ministry rifle in the same crop at the same time was almost impossible.
The elephant tracks were clear, coming from the reserve, then across the Kwando River, and straight through the middle of Raymond’s field. Broken cornstalks accompanied the footprints as the elephants ate their way through the field before locating the pile of corn at the edge. The tracks left the farm to the south toward the rest of the village crops that sprawled in patches down the floodplain.
We measured the length of the hind footprint of one of the offenders to get a sense of the animal, as the length of the foot scales with age. At about forty years old, this one was in his prime. We looked at some other prints. The soft sand made perfectly detailed casts of their feet, even showing the patterns of fine veinlike cracks. The smaller, oblong back feet stepped into the huge round disks from the front feet, almost like craters on the moon. There were small crescent imprints at the front edges of these disks where the toenails dug in, more if running, less if walking. Sometimes distinctive cracks in the feet gave certain individuals away; other times, there could be a limp or a dragging foot, betraying an injured offender.
A lot could be read from the tracks of elephants, and the more time I spent looking at them, the more I wondered about their makeup. It made sense that a twelve to fifteen thousand pound animal would have huge feet to help distribute its weight, but the feet seemed disproportionately large compared to those of other very large mammals such as the rhino. The dense fat pad that cushioned the foot made me wonder if it was used to distribute weight or if it served some other practical purpose as well.
An elephant’s fatty footpad looks like a platform shoe, adorned with cartilaginous nodes interspersed in the dense fat. A CT (computerized tomography) scan reveals that elephants really do stand on their toes, cushioned by this platform of fat. It is very dense fat, similar to the acoustic fat found in marine mammals, and, coincidentally, it was at one time prized by native cultures for candle oil, akin to whale blubber.
Acoustic fat such as the “melon” in a dolphin’s forehead serves as a sounding board to transmit acoustic vibrations into the water, facilitating sound transmission between two bodies of different densities, providing water–air impedance matching. Impedance matching is simply the matching of densities between two materials. This is needed because vibrations typically travel at different speeds depending on density—for example, the water, and the dolphin’s air-filled middle ear. Sounds travel from the water environment to the dolphin’s ear through fat-filled cavities of the lower jaw bones. Sounds received in the jaw are conducted to the middle ear and then the inner ear, thus eliminating the need for an ear canal and ear drum. So nature makes up for density differences by matching the impedance with fat and bones.
I later learned that elephants have this kind of fat not only in their footpads but also in their nasal cavity (like the dolphin melon) and cheeks (like the manatee). I wondered if this fat could facilitate the detection of ground vibrations by matching the difference in impedance between the ground and the elephant’s foot. Indeed, pressing down on these footpads would enhance the coupling of sounds between the ground and the foot and facilitate sound transmittal to the ear via the foot bones.
After following the footprints, I began to look more closely at the fields themselves. Given the random distribution of plants in the 12-acre plot, it was hard to imagine how farmers got much out of a crop, elephants aside. There were several farmers in the region who had the wherewithal to rent a tractor plow just after the first rain for ten Namibian dollars from the Ministry of Agriculture. Their fields had comparatively impressive yields. Most farmers, however, walked behind an ox plow, doing the planting themselves, sometimes even using a toe to insert the seed. Naturally, these fields were not as flush as those where the mechanized option had been used and thus were much more difficult to evaluate in terms of elephant damage.
In those early days, I tried to estimate how much an average elephant crop raid represented in terms of bags of ground grain (the price of replacing the stolen goods). But this was a difficult proposition, considering the patchy distribution of plants in many of the fields.
Standing over a pile of corn that had been harvested the day before, we estimated that the elephants had eaten more than half of it. I suggested that leaving the harvest in one big pile made it a lot easier for elephants to stand in one place and consume the whole crop with little effort—much like a buffet. Raymond laughed and agreed; however, it made no difference to the elephants whether the corn sat in the field or in the grain storehouse. They would come to raid either place.
“But weren’t elephants less likely to enter the village?”
“Yes,” Raymond agreed, “less likely.”
The pile had not been collected the evening before because it got too late and there was no transportation available to the women, so they decided to leave it for the night. The seven bulls had not yet been seen in the area this season, so the villagers had hoped the harvest would go undetected.
I asked Raymond if I could collect a sample of each of the grains that he was growing to compare the nutritional value of grain with preferred forage such as acacia pods, terminalia branches, and bark. He was growing three different varieties of grain: corn (a variety commonly called mealies, which could be plucked off the cob by the kernel and eaten or ground into a meal), mahango (to make the local beer or flour), and sorghum (dried and ground also into a type of flour).
After taking a small sample of each, an old woman appeared, Raymond’s mother, and handed me a roasted cob to eat that she had just made in the shade of her field lookout, the place where the women spent the wet season, shooing off the birds, baboons, and warthogs by day, and elephants and hippos by night, occasionally even a neighbor’s herd of cattle. But these days, many farmers were no longer sleeping in their fields (something I wanted to examine further). Traditionally, farmers migrated to small wet-season huts on the edge of their crops so that they could be there to protect the fields.
Neither elephants nor farmers were new to the area, of course, and in the past, the men had fended off elephants during the night by drumming, banging on pots, and lighting fires. Some farmers reported a greater number of elephants in the region these days, however, and most had become accustomed to the light and noise, to the point of charging the farmers and becoming dangerous. Others simply felt that the crop-raiding problem was the government’s fault, since the traditional hunter who would have dealt with elephant offenders was now outlawed. The situation was further complicated by the inevitable modernization of the Caprivian household, where ownership of material goods was becoming more and more common and farmers were no longer willing to risk leaving their possessions unattended to spend the wet season protecting their crops from elephants.
Raymond’s mother wanted me to know that elephants were smart and wouldn’t bother eating bark when there were much better things to eat in the wet season. She watched as I plucked off a smoky kernel and ate it. It was really good. She smiled and laughed at my hesitant fingers, pulling one kernel off at a time. She pulled out another cob and brushed her thumb forcefully across the surface, creating a handful of kernels. I smiled humbly, trying to repeat her action, and thanked her for sharing her harvest with me.
Taking my mealie cob with me, I began to measure the field with a GPS in order to estimate how much wire we would need to enclose it. I wanted to use something I knew would work. The trip alarms I was developing were still experimental, so electric fencing, though a lot more expensive, was less of a risk. We promised Raymond and his mother that we would come back with fencing materials as soon as we could.
Given all the potential deterrent schemes we considered, electric fencing seemed to hold the most promise. Other suggestions had been to plant border crops that would be offensive to elephants, such as euphorbia, which produced a stinging milky sap that elephants avoided, or capsicum (red chilies), which could also serve as a cash crop. Still another barrier possibility we discussed was the type of deep narrow trenching that farmers in India dug to keep elephants at bay. Elephants avoided these ditches because they were simply too deep to climb out of once they had fallen in. If maintained, they could be successful deterrents, but that was difficult in the wet season, when the mud slid to create sloped banks where an elephant could cross. And, of course, it was very labor intensive to trench many kilometers in order to protect large communal crop areas. Electric fencing also seemed easier to erect, and it was movable and ready to set up immediately, whereas all other options required more time, money, and labor, as well as profound adjustments in agricultural practices, such as planting border crops or plant barriers around permanent fields.
On our drive home, Matthew and I made a plan to set up a length of fencing the following day at Susuwe; we needed to practice, because neither of us had ever worked with it. Little did we know, we would soon become experts.
AFTER WE’D BUILT SEVERAL electric fences, slept many fitful nights in the fields, and spent countless days trying in vain to appease angry farmers, I was still determined to help them see what was necessary to take control of their situation. But it was a slow, frustrating process. They were a tough crowd, jaded by an ill-equipped ministry and a resignation to powerlessness. There were many arguments with uncooperative farmers and frustrated local officials. An angry farmer even tried to light my truck on fire while I was installing an alarm in his field along the eastern floodplain.
After a whole year of negotiations, we finally set up an electric fence at Lianshulu village. The two-strand steel fence, strands mounted high enough for cattle and farmers to pass underneath but the spacing narrow enough that an elephant would touch the two strands with the tip of its wet trunk, was powered by a solar panel.
The locals suspected that the ministry was trying to move the boundary of the park by putting up fences around the farms rather than the park itself. But was the park really big enough on its own to host the Mudumu elephant population, which also enjoyed free reign over the region and knew which territory was safe and which was not? If the fences were smaller and just around the fields, there would be less area of fence to manage and the farmers could maintain the fences more successfully. Given a choice between fencing the wildlife and fencing the farms, we tried to convince them of the benefits of the latter. Preventive measures were difficult to sell to a people who felt that elephants were the irresponsible government’s cattle.
The village had been moved out of the park twenty years prior. Many government promises had been broken, boreholes were never drilled, roads never made, clinics not delivered. The people had reasonable grounds for suspicion.
I felt powerless to help the farmers, yet also compelled to act. One of my preventive experiments would occasionally show promise, and I managed to escape the dog house, if only temporarily. These were the most rewarding times. A success meant more trust, leading to closer relationships with the women, which I especially appreciated.
Meanwhile, the elephant wars waged on, and I tried to visit as many farms as possible with my meager bag of tricks—a trip alarm here, a spotlight there—while saving the electric fences for larger areas. The solutions were life-sustaining to the farmers. Anything that I could offer was a glimmer of hope, an offer not to starve that year.