She would make her eyes see more today than they ever did before.
—JULIA MOOD PETERKIN
HIDING IN THE TALL dry grass, two poachers stalked noiselessly toward an elephant feeding not thirty yards away. Unaware of the danger, the big bull reached down with his trunk, tore off more grass stems, and lifted them to his mouth, his ropy tail flicking contentedly.
Ka-Boom! The elephant's knees buckled at the shot. He pitched forward, driving his tusks into the ground and balancing on them for a moment. Then he hauled himself upright, and charged. The poachers fired again, but the elephant seemed determined to kill before he died. He quickly gained on one of the fleeing poachers, but just as he was about to crush the man, he stopped. His massive body convulsed, and he rolled onto his side, shivering in his death throes. In seconds the poachers began hacking at his tusks with their machetes.
But the tusks were as limp as rags—because they were, in fact, made of twisted cloth bound up with strips of bark. The tail was indeed a rope, and the machetes were wood.
The elephant itself was propelled by two schoolchildren, bent over and swaying under a gray sheet, their black spindly legs poking out beneath the cloth. Three other classmates played the poachers in this wildlife drama, which had taken Hammer weeks to arrange. The prize for the most original, creative, and best-acted skit among various village schools would be a safari into the North Luangwa Park, where the winners would get a chance to see real elephants for the very first time in their lives—even though none lived more than thirty miles away.
The poachers separated the fake tusks from the cloth body and began stealing off with them. But suddenly a tall boy ran in from the grassy perimeter of the Mpika playground. He wore a radio headset made of plastic cups, and, with his right arm and hand held high over his head, he twirled a staff with a horizontal stick attached, its ends painted white to simulate a helicopter's main rotor. His billowing chitenje mimicked the chopper's fuselage, and close behind him were three "game scout" passengers dressed in bits of green khaki.
The chopper circled, swept in, and landed as its pilot squatted down. The game scouts, brandishing their wooden rifles, leaped out and gave chase, tackling the poachers, handcuffing them, and then marching them to the magistrate, who held court from a school desk on another part of the playground. After they were sentenced to two years at hard labor, the poachers were led to jail behind a bench in yet another corner of the yard. There students held a sign reading: POACHERS DON'T STEAL OUR ANIMALS!
With the criminals safely locked up, one of the game guards solemnly stepped to the center of the stage area, stood tall, and declared: "Our wildlife is our heritage! We must protect it for future generations!" The crowd of teachers, students, and villagers from more than fourteen communities—all once notorious for harboring poachers—rewarded the players with rousing applause. Hammer beamed like a proud father.
After the poacher had apparently served hard time, he was led out of jail by a chorus of singers chanting
"A dream of judgment!
Away with poaching!"
The singers covered him with a white sheet and took him to the mattress, where he lay down as though sleeping. Next an orator stalked to the bed, stood tall, and shouted to the gathering: "As you can see, our friend Shaka, the convicted poacher, is fast asleep, and he has a dream. In his dream people tell him of the importance of nature." A boy wearing a cardboard mask of a kindly face advanced and stood over the recumbent Shaka. "But he did not listen and instead continued poaching."
At this point the chorus again chanted:
"A dream of judgment!
Away with poaching!"
In the next scene Shaka was up to his old tricks. Carrying a toy homemade rifle, he stalked and shot three students who were crawling on their hands and knees, pulling up grass as they pretended to be grazing animals. He hacked at their carcasses with his hands, and the chorus sang:
"Every time,
I see the poachers
killing animals,
I do cry. [gesture of wiping tears from their eyes]
Up on the mountains
Up on the hills
Behind the rivers
Up in the sky.
Every time
I see the poachers
killing animals,
I do cry"
After several stanzas, the poacher went to sleep under his sheet again. This time in his dream he saw a stern vision of justice—portrayed by a boy wearing a cardboard mask. His knees knocked as the chorus chanted:
"A dream of judgment!
Away with poaching!"
Justice dragged Shaka, howling and still wrapped in his sheet, away for good.
Another skit showed tourists paying money at a gateway into the park, then seeing elephants, zebras, and puku likenesses as they walked on safari. The money was given to a schoolmaster, a doctor, and a merchant, to show how revenues from wildlife tourism would benefit the community. While this was going on, another student paraded with a sign that read: OUR WILD ANIMALS ARE WORTH MORE ALIVE THAN DEAD! DON'T POACH!
In still another performance, a player asked:
"Is it wrong for an elephant to be born just like you?
Tell me, is your mother died [dead] like an [poached] elephant?
No! She is born like you, she had a mother like you, she prays like you.
Tell me why her mother died.
Why? Because of you, you selfish you!
You want her ivory,
Understand my position and love it
For my mother's death.
What is wrong, selfish you?
Yes, selfish you!"
The chorus sang:
"Trees are important
Animals are rare,
Minerals are precious,
So look after them.
Zambia's our territory,
Zambia's our land.
Air is delicate,
Hold tight for life.
Minerals are precious,
So look after them"
After watching the skits from fourteen villages, a panel of judges chose Mwamfushi village primary school as the winner for their depiction of the helicopter and dreaming poacher. We were pleased, because for years Mwamfushi had harbored some of the worst poachers.
Early the following Saturday morning, the students, together with teachers and parent chaperones—more than twenty in all—piled into the open back of our Unimog truck for their safari trip into the park. Three hours later, covered with red dust from the track, they arrived at Marula-Puku, where Delia met them with cookies and orange squash.
From the camp, Hammer and I drove the students south through the plains along the Mwaleshi River, where a thundering herd of almost a thousand buffaloes stampeded across the track in front of us. Farther on, at the confluence of the Mwaleshi and Luangwa rivers, we crept quietly to the bank above the water to see more than four hundred hooting, honking hippos, which made the kids giggle. While we lunched with the hippos Hammer quietly huddled with the children, explaining that someone could shoot and kill one of these beautiful animals only one time and benefit from doing so only once before it was gone forever. By keeping the animal alive, the people would benefit from it many times during its life by showing it to paying tourists. In this way, he told them, the animal could be worth much more to them alive than dead.
After lunch we drove through the mopane woodlands, looking for elephants. Wart hogs, zebras, waterbuck, and even a pride of lions showed themselves. But when I climbed onto the back of the truck to give them a little lesson on the habits of these animals, a little girl in a blue dress looked up at me and pleaded: "May we please see an elephant?"
Sadly, I explained that since poachers had killed almost all of North Luangwa's elephants, we might not be able to see one that far from the sanctuary of Marula-Puku.
The sun was setting on the Muchinga Escarpment, so we turned around and began the long drive back to Mwamfushi village. As we drove north through mopane woodlands past the turnoff to Marula-Puku, I looked back through the cab's rear window into the Mog's bed. Most of the passengers were now wrapped up in their blankets against the relentless tsetse flies and billowing dust. But the girl in blue clutched the side of the lurching truck, her head sweeping back and forth, diligently scanning the landscape.
We were barreling around a turn in the track when suddenly he was directly in front of us, blocking out the mountains of the Muchinga and the setting sun. I slammed on the air brakes as Long Tail, the huge, tuskless bull elephant who often hung out in our camp, towered over our nine-foot-tall, eight-ton truck, shaking his head, flapping his ears, and blowing like a sounding whale.
I quickly switched off the Mog's diesel, leaned out my window, and warned my passengers: "Be perfectly quiet and still." And they were.
Long Tail shook his head and blew again, a cloud of dust snapping from his ears as he curled up his trunk to take our scent. And then, not fifteen feet from the little girl in blue, whose mouth hung open and whose eyes looked to be the size of billiard balls, he wrapped his trunk around the branch of a mopane tree, stripped its green leaves, and stuffed them into his mouth.
THE NEXT MORNING, as we stood up from the breakfast table, I said to Delia: "Today I'm taking you somewhere special."
We packed a picnic basket with a couple of bottles of Boschendal wine, some smelly cheese from the bottom of the fridge, camp bread, resolidified chocolate, and other goodies saved too long for a special occasion. We tied up our sleeping bags and drove to the airstrip. There we put everything in the back seat of the chopper, climbed into our seats, and buckled up. Just before lifting off, I pulled a bandanna from the pocket of my vest and blindfolded her.
We took off and flew west toward the Muchinga Escarpment. At the scarp wall I pulled up the collective lever, adding more power, and we climbed to more than three thousand feet. We flew for another ten minutes, and as we passed directly over a mountain peak I told her to take off her blindfold. Almost two thousand feet below us and slightly to the left of the chopper's nose, a pristine river flowed through the miombo woodland until it reached a great tear in the western wall of the Rift Valley. There it plunged over a series of waterfalls, each like a giant stairstep, dropping nearly two thousand feet in a mile. With no roads, no villages, no development of any kind, the scene looked the way much of Africa did not so very long ago.
At the base of the first major waterfall, at the downstream edge of its plunge pool, the river flowed around a large dome of rock before pouring over the next falls. I had wanted to land there for a long time, but the rock was usually inundated with raging whitewater. On a recent flight, I had seen that the river had ebbed, exposing a nub of the boulder.
I lowered the collective, and we began descending.
"I don't see where we can land." Delia sat tall in her seat, her head against the Plexiglas.
"See that little rock right below the upper waterfall?"
"We can't land there—it's tiny, and there's water swirling all around it!"
"Just wait a minute; it'll get larger."
"Mark Owens, if we crash, you had better be dead, or I will kill you myself."
"Trust me."
A hundred feet above the river, I circled the upper waterfall, checked the wind, and began the landing approach, coming in from downstream, flying directly into the turbulent air. We came to a fullpower hover over the rock, a dizzying cauldron of whitewater boiling and surging all around.
I slowly lowered the skids until they contacted the rock. But as I eased the helicopter down, it began to tilt back. I rose back up to a hover and tried landing in a slightly different place. This time the aircraft rolled to the left. Finally I turned the ship ninety degrees, held the controls off against the crosscurrents of air, and felt around with the skids until they nestled onto a dry, level spot. I slowly dropped the collective and cut the power. We popped the doors and stepped out into a cool, refreshing paradise.
The river thundered over the falls above us into the crystal-clear waters of the large pool at our feet, surged around the boulder, and then, a few feet downstream, plunged over the next falls, and the next, and the next. After the heat and tsetse flies of the valley, the refreshing breeze tinged with spray tingled on our cheeks and noses. Paradise flycatchers and Nysner lories flitted among the crowns of tall Uapaca kirkiana and Combretum imberbe trees standing along the banks of the pools, their lower branches draped with wisps and wigs of lichen. Thick, brilliant green mosses covered the rocks at their feet.
What had looked like a boulder from the air was really the back of a larger outcropping that had once formed a ledge across the river. Over time the rushing water had cut it down along both banks, so during the lowest flows of the dry season this small spot was left high and dry. In the rainy season the outcropping was submerged and hammered with a maelstrom of wild water that had augered deep, perfectly round hydraulic holes in the rock along the pool's edge. Those same floods had rounded the back of the outcropping so that it quickly dropped off on the downstream side. We walked hand in hand along its steepening back until we could see over it to the pool below the next falls.
Protected from crocodiles and hippos by the succession of waterfalls, we stripped at the edge of our pool and plunged into the cool, swirling water. For the rest of the day we swam, sunned, snacked, and swam again.
After the sun disappeared behind the peaks, I built a small fire. Its smoke, carried by a laminar flow of air over the rock, crawled like a white snake along the camber of the outcrop for about fifty feet, then plunged over the side to follow the river as it descended through the gorge.
Delia surprised me with a tin of the smoked oysters we kept for special occasions, or sometimes just to give us a sense of celebration.
As we sat back to back, she sighed.
"Mark, we can't go on keeping umpteen balls in the air and living on two to three hours of sleep every night. Let's let Hammer, Malcolm, and the rest of the guys handle the day-to-day running of the project so we can focus on our elephant research."
"That's a great idea. Why didn't you think of it before?"
"Really? Do you mean it?" She sat up and searched my eyes as though she could not really believe what I had said—because I had agreed to this so many times before. And always before, something, usually poachers, had gotten in the way. This time I was determined not to let that happen. We toasted our new direction with glasses of wine, and then, after the fire had died to coals, we spread out our sleeping bags and crawled inside. We lay on our backs listening to the sounds of the river and staring speechless at the full moon rising over the trees.
"Mark! I swear this rock is moving."
"You've had too much wine. Go to sleep." I pulled her close. And the rock really did move.