Camp management was a job I rarely enjoyed. Most days were spent repairing things the tourists had complained about, and any spare time was spent patching up stuff on the verge of falling to pieces.
But Linyanti Tented Camp, or LTC as we usually called it, was different. It was old-fashioned in style, with plain A-frame tents pitched on the ground, no raised walkways, no elevated dining area, just dirt paths linking the accommodation in one of Botswana’s wildest places. People relaxed more in these informal surrounds, and demanded less. Normally I protested when told I had to take a sabbatical from guiding and manage a camp for a while, but not when it was LTC.
I liked it here. My pulse stayed a few beats higher at LTC. The dense bush could—and often did—hide large animals that would appear in the beam of my flashlight as I cautiously escorted tourists to their tents at night.
The blood positively throbbed in my ears though when Conrad, one of the overland guides, came tearing back into camp in his four-wheel drive only a few minutes after he had left. He was ashen behind the wheel, and the tourists sitting in the back were all clinging to their armrests, their faces set in a communal rictus.
‘Oh my God!’ Conrad exclaimed, flapping his hands at me. ‘There was a great big ellie, she came out of the fever berry bushes, flattened one, and then just tusked the car—again and again!’ Conrad had a flamboyance that would not have been out of place in musical theatre, but I could see he wasn’t exaggerating this time. Bubbling water tinged a sickly green by anti-corrosives dribbled from two brutal holes in the radiator, and the bonnet had deep gouges where tusks had slid along it.
Conrad’s guests were persuaded that such an incident was unlikely to happen again, and after I’d given them a less fractured vehicle to ride in they ventured once more into the bush. Many times in my career I had persuaded guests their fears were unfounded, and done so with conviction. This time I almost crossed my fingers as I said that the elephants here were safe.
This camp was not in the Okavango, but beside a river in the far north of Botswana. If I threw an apple from the main area it would hit Namibia on the opposite bank. It was rare for me to throw anything though, as I spent so much time here in a good mood.
Beyond the thin strip of Namibia to the north of us lay Angola, where elephants had been poached for years, their ivory funding the purchase of weapons for their long-running civil war. Elephants fled from the area, returning only in desperation to feed their families. They took this risk because the Linyanti area was running out of food. In the dry winter months the river becomes the only source of water for many miles around, and each year as many as 60,000 elephants gathered along its banks to drink, stripping the vegetation until the landscape was barren, creating terrible times for every living thing in the region.
Some of our elephants were stressed through hunger; some had also experienced the deaths of their family members at the hand of humans, and I imagined it was one of these that had done the damage to Conrad’s front end. There was no malice in her actions, just a desire to protect her family. But a lack of malice didn’t make the elephants any less dangerous.
It was only the middle of the dry season and I knew that this could become a very rough year. The river was low, the vegetation sparse, the elephants stressed. The following day Conrad would leave and I would be taking guests into this environment. I wasn’t sure how well it would go.
I had an uneventful trip the next day as I drove to the camp’s distant airstrip, and hoped my luck would hold. ‘We’ve just come from Xigera,’ the English guests replied when I asked where they had just been. ‘Spent lots of time on the water—we’re looking forward to spending some time on terra firma and seeing some big animals.’ The Americans who had been on the same flight, from the same camp, nodded their assent.
‘Oh good,’ I thought, but giggled nervously. ‘Sure,’ I said, just as an elephant charged out of the bushes. It barrelled past, head held high, doing the sideways quickstep ellies do when they wish to intimidate but have no desire for conflict.
The tourists all squeaked in unison. I calmed them by explaining the situation with our elephants, and why some of them were a little testy, and warned them we might see a few more cranky elephants on our drive back to camp.
‘But it’s safe to be here, right?’ the American man asked.
‘Sure,’ I answered, as another elephant trumpeted nearby, a high peal that made us all jump. ‘Hopefully there won’t be too much more ruckus before we get you there,’ I said.
But there was. LTC is at least forty minutes from the airstrip, if you drive at a speed that lets the bumps loosen your kidneys. At the pace used with tourists, it takes an hour, and half that again when elephants appear from behind every bush with intent to squash you. Five times on the trip back elephants came tearing at us, mainly mock charges but at least one charge that had me planting my foot flat to the mat to rattle our way out.
In camp after offering drinks and a cool cloth to wipe the dust from their brows I suggested to the tourists that we might skip the drive that afternoon. As walking was definitely not an option I asked if they would be keen on yet another boat ride.
‘Very sensible idea that!’ said the English lady, clearly terrified of our terrestrial beasts. ‘Lovely birds, I imagine,’ her husband added. Again the Americans concurred so I topped up the tank on the little tin boat, wiped down its seats, packed a cooler box with drinks and we set out, upriver towards King’s Pool camp.
It was a sedentary putter, far more relaxing than the airstrip transfer had been. Zebras picked their way nervously to the water, choosing a place with open ground to escape to if a predator appeared, while the leaf-eating kudus chose spots with concealing vegetation. Elephants were less selective, not worried about lions or anything in the water, and were calmer here by the cool river than in the dry bush. Occasionally a crocodile’s eyes would appear at the surface before sinking with a sinister slowness, allowing our boat to pass overhead.
I sped up only occasionally, to skirt pods of hippos that might see our journey as an invasion into their territory. Sometimes in the forest to our left an ellie would trumpet, and many made their way to drink from the water that we drifted upon. Overall it was peaceful and from my position at the back of the boat I could observe the tension draining from the tourists.
‘Put your cameras down now please,’ I instructed everyone, ‘or we’ll all get arrested.’ I saw the tension slam back into their postures at my cruel trick, so I calmed them again by explaining that the Botswana Defence Force had a small base on the river to stop poachers coming across from Namibia. They didn’t like photos being taken of their military encampment. I was an admirer of their efforts to combat the ivory trade, and we all waved to the soldiers as we passed their camp. The khaki tents blended well with the bush, although a soccer field with bright yellow nets at either end stuck out enough to blow any chance of meaningful camouflage.
Well before dark we stopped at a sandy bank, with a clear vantage point in all directions. While the tourists sucked at their gin and tonics before the ice could melt and dilute their potency I downed water and sugary drinks, needing hydration and energy for the trip back.
I was about to begin expounding the glory of our surroundings and its splendid isolation when the sound of a diesel engine crept into hearing range, then rapidly intruded. Being generally unable to locate noise I peered in the wrong direction until I realised the tourists were all watching across the river. Two military vehicles were in a high-speed convoy on the Namibian side of the river, not pursuing anything that I could see, but clearly in a hurry.
Spotting us, the lead vehicle slid to a halt. The Linyanti is not a wide river in many places, and this was one of its narrower channels. If we turned our little boat side-on it would almost straddle the border entirely. We were doing nothing wrong, and were out of their jurisdiction, but I suddenly understood how an impala must feel when all eyes turn towards it.
‘Is there normally this much military activity around here?’ the American man asked.
‘Nope,’ I said. ‘They might be looking for poachers,’ I explained, realising that I was probably making this area sound like a hotbed of vice when moments before I’d been ready to start extolling its virtues. ‘And stopping fires,’ I added, ‘which is a good thing.’ I didn’t like the way the convoy were looking at us though, so I packed up the cooler box and put it in the boat. Firearms make me nervous at the best of times, and two truckloads of men brandishing them with no witnesses about did little to improve my confidence.
I set us off on a slow putter again and the vehicles shadowed us. We had broken no laws, I knew, and they were just young men in uniform having fun with the power they wielded, but unlike with animals I have little confidence in assessing human motivations. The tourists sensed my apprehension and sat with eyes left, watching the soldiers, as if they had been ordered to do so.
With no fanfare the vehicles shot off, one driver giving us a lazy wave as they sped away, as if they had someone important to catch.
I poked my tongue out at them, a juvenile gesture to counter the subordinance they had made me feel. I twisted my wrist a little tighter, giving the motor some more power. The sun was dipping lower, and I wanted to be back in camp well before it set.
‘You get lots of fires here?’ the American asked. I explained how they were often lit on the opposite bank by pastoralists. They burnt the grass in the hope of fresh green growth for their livestock, but the fires often escaped into the reserve opposite us, then jumped the river, fanned by strong, hot October winds.
‘Last year I actually got caught in one,’ I began. ‘The fire had just hopped across, and any staff we could spare from all our camps formed a front to fight it. The army guys pitched in to help.’
In that fire, I was manning a point with Kevin, the overseer of all the camps in this region. He was apoplectic, sure human failure had allowed the fire to encroach and threaten our camp, the area’s largest and most expensive. We spoke with our mouths twisted sideways as the air was thick with insects, pelting us in their helter-skelter escape from the flames. If your mouth was open they’d fly straight in. Winged termites tasted nutty, but wasps were no fun on the palate. Just then we heard the ‘phffft’ of ignition behind us. We were facing a wall of flame, still far enough away that we couldn’t see any embers but close enough to tauten the skin and suck all the moisture from the air. Somehow, though, the fire was now also behind us, and I swatted at the small burning patch with a rake that was covered in palm leaves, a jerry-rigged fire beater.
‘Turd!’ I shouted at Kevin. He just ignored me, as most of the time I called him Fat Guy so a lack of respect was not unusual. He wasn’t fat, but our mutual friend Devlin had insisted that he was before we met, and the name had stuck. (Devlin also told me once that a friend of his was so ugly that he had to be drunk just to look at him. His descriptions of people he doesn’t like are even stronger.)
‘Turds!’ I shouted again, and swung my beater at another patch of flame that spontaneously erupted near my ankles. ‘It’s the ellie turds!’ I explained, ‘they’re combusting!’ An elephant defecates as much as 180 kilos of barely digested material each day—loaf-sized lumps that generate heat as they decompose. With the dry air and ambient heat, the droppings near the fire front were erupting into flames and triggering greater and greater conflagrations. Kevin realised what I meant—no great intellectual leap, as the lumps were burning all around us. We scanned our surrounds, and all I could think of was how many turds 60,000 elephants spending six months of every year in this area would generate.
‘Crap,’ shouted Kevin, quite appropriately. ‘Let’s just protect the camp.’
It was a near thing. The fire kept jumping across the tracks we’d hoped would act as fire breaks and it took all of our efforts to beat out every ember that crossed and every dung ball that burst into flames. I’d never imagined that the most dangerous thing about an elephant could be its droppings, but we almost lost a camp that day, only saved by a wind that turned the fire just before it hit the highly flammable thatched roofs. Not one of us came out unsinged.
‘Do your parents mind what you do for a living?’ the American lady asked when I’d finished telling them the story.
‘Don’t know,’ I answered, giving an ambiguous answer about my family as I always did, ‘but it’s a safe job . . .’ I was about to explain that guides didn’t get hit by cars, weren’t faced with violent crime and only got stressed when leopards wouldn’t show themselves, but stopped mid-sentence.
There was a herd of elephants on the riverbank ahead, and I didn’t like the look of them. ‘More ellies?’ the American man asked, ‘I can’t believe it after this morning, but I think I’m getting a bit bored with them.’
Normally I’d be offended by this comment, but in our short trip we had passed hundreds of elephants drinking by the river. This herd was twitchy at our approach.
‘Those elephants don’t look boring. We’ll just stand down a bit to let them finish, then get back to camp.’ There was a definite shade of red in the sky, and once it seeped to grey we would be facing not just elephants but hippos as they became more active.
The elephants didn’t like my plan and hung back in some thick bluebush, huffing nervously. They had young ones with them and I didn’t want them to turn away from the river because of us. They may have been Angolan elephants, and I thought it would be nice if for once a human showed them some respect. So I let the motor push us further away, spinning it lightly every time the current pushed us towards them, but still they wouldn’t come down.
‘Okay, I’m just going to cruise by as gently as we can, in the hope they stay around and drink when we pass,’ I said. I throttled up and the herd’s trunks raised as one, sniffing the air.
The motor seemed far louder now that I wanted it quiet. It impelled us along at a gentle pace, the current with us, allowing me to barely twitch the throttle.
Despite my best intentions the herd wheeled, clustering protectively around the young, and swiftly retreated further into the bush, some trumpeting their concern. I hated upsetting them, hated compounding any distress that humans had ever caused them, and was proud of the female that stood her ground and raised her head high, ears flared, sheltering the family. This was a common position taken by an ‘auntie’ within a herd, holding the attention of a perceived threat while the family went for safety, so I wasn’t worried about her.
I should have been. She broke her pose and came right for us.
I expected her to stop at the water’s edge, but she didn’t.
I thought the water would be deep enough to reach her belly and would slow her down, but it wasn’t. This was the wrong elephant to try to sneak past.
The water was barely above her ankles and didn’t slow her down at all. This was no mock charge: everything about her body language screamed that she intended to destroy us. I twisted the throttle in my hand like it was a very bad chicken and I needed to kill it.
The boat shot forwards, putting a little distance between us and the furious elephant. All four tourists had turned in their seats, facing me at the rear of the boat, the fear in their faces informing me I wouldn’t have to tell them to hold on tight and not ask for a photo. Then I felt spray on my back and glanced over my shoulder.
She was right there! Her tusks arcing, her bulk impossibly large. I felt like a fly when the swatter is coming down, and cranked my wrist further, which at this speed pushed the tiller, which at this speed swerved the boat closer to the bank.
‘Don’t look behind you!’ one of the tourists shouted at me over the whine of the motor and the storm of four huge legs ploughing through water right behind me. ‘Just go!’
I wanted to do just that, but I will never understand why full speed on a boat motor can’t be achieved within the normal limits of a human wrist. To get that last burst of speed I had to briefly undo my twisted arm and hold the tiller with my other arm, before putting my dominant hand back and twisting again until I hit maximum revolutions. The motor bit and we cut through spray, veering away from the bank.
I looked back again, and couldn’t believe it: she was still coming! Further back, but her determination undiminished. She was really scaring me now. How far would she take this?
The motor on the little tin boat bit again, but this time not into water. The river was low here, and I had stupidly not taken us along the deeper part of the channel. The tiller bucked in my hand like a living thing, jarring my shoulder and making my teeth clack against my tongue. Blood spurted inside my mouth, coppery and fresh.
There was no time to consider the longevity of the besieged propeller as it ground through mud and sunken hippo droppings, spitting them into a murky spray at the ever-pursuing elephant.
‘Come on!’ I screamed at the motor as we slowed to a near halt. I looked back again and yelped as the elephant took the last few steps she needed before she could crush us at will. This wasn’t fun at all.
The now-battered propeller gave us a shove and we popped into deeper water, immediately gaining some distance from our pursuer. The tourists still sat like owls, eyes wide and heads twisted backwards.
The river ahead performed a graceful turn, curving around a low peninsula, before carrying on the near-straight course it would follow all the way back to camp. The turn was deep, and we could easily get past the elephant if she decided to swim after us, which I desperately hoped she would.
But she displayed the intelligence I usually admired so much in elephants and stopped at the turn. I cut the motor and let us float with the current. Now I resented how smart she was: when the boat rounded the peninsula she could cut across it and would be there in a few short strides, right behind us again. Bugger. Why did she have to be so bloody smart? It was getting hard not to resent her persistence.
The first stars were beginning to appear, and hippos started calling to each other up and down the river. Soon they would want to get out of the water and feed, many of them cruising the channel to find a suitable bank to lumber out onto. We would be in their way, and a hippo’s method of dealing with speed bumps is not a gentle one. So I powered up again and started around the bend, the elephant giving a trumpet at the sound of the motor that made me jump and lose my grip on the throttle for a moment.
The brief respite in engine noise allowed me to hear an exhalation, too hefty to have come from any of the tourists. ‘Is that a hippo?’ the American man asked.
‘Yep,’ I said nervously. It was dark enough now that I couldn’t see it; maybe it had gone under. Every ripple, every reflection of a reed or bobbing papyrus head was menacing. We were stuck. I briefly looked at the Namibian bank, just as a set of headlights came on. The army. If I decided to stop on that bank for a while they would see this as a threat, and no reasonable argument would work if they felt a bribe could be had. I had nothing to offer them except the tourists, and doubted I’d get much for them.
My options were between bad, worse and worst. I made a decision based on mass. I pushed the little tin boat to its meagre top speed, hunching low in the hope of offering less wind resistance and giving us a fraction more pace. The hippo reared ahead of us, gaping mouth showing large teeth, and splashed back down. The boat swerved around him and I looked behind to see the elephant still in the same place, a front leg raised, as if ready to swing into action.
If she put that foot down we were done for. I watched her intently, holding the throttle in a death grip. I was a great believer that in any crisis the wrong action can be better than none at all, but could be proved wrong if this elephant had enough anger to take a few more steps.
She planted her foot. I braced myself for the worst, but she wheeled and ran back to her herd, turning once to make sure we were still on our way. We were, and within moments we were back in the safety of camp.
‘How did you all enjoy your boat trip?’ asked the manager as she walked towards us bearing drinks and flashlights. ‘Nice and relaxing?’
No one seemed to know what to say, until the American spoke. ‘Never tell this guy,’ he pointed at me, ‘you think elephants are boring. He kinda overreacts . . .’