Elephant Song Read online

  Jock, the cameraman, was already filming. It often seemed to Daniel that the Sony camera was a natural excrescence of his body, like a hunchback.

  I'm going to ask you some dumb questions for the camera, and I might needle you a little, Daniel warned Johnny. We both know the answers to the questions, but we have to fake it, okay? Go ahead. Johnny looked good on film. Daniel had studied the rushes the previous night. One of the joys of working with modern video equipment was the instant replay of footage. Johnny resembled the younger Cassius Clay before he became Mohammed Ali.

  However, he was leaner in the face and his bone structure finer and more photogenic. His expression was mobile and expressive and the tones of his skin were not so dark as to make too severe a contrast and render photography difficult.

  They huddled over the smoky campfire and Jock brought the camera in close to them. We are camped here on the banks of the Zambezi River with the sun just rising, and not far out there in the bush your trackers have come across a herd of fifty elephant, Warden, Daniel told Johnny, and he nodded. You have explained to me that the Chiwewe Park cannot support such numbers of these huge animals, and that this year alone at least a thousand of them must be removed from the Park, not only for the good of the ecology, but for the very survival of the remaining elephant herds. How do you intend removing them? We will have to cull them, Johnny said curtly. Cull them? Daniel asked. That means kill, doesn't it? Yes. My rangers and I will shoot them. All of them, Warden? You are going to kill fifty elephant today? We will cull the entire herd. What about the young calves and the pregnant cows? Won't you spare a single animal? They all have to go, Johnny insisted. But why, Warden? Couldn't you catch them, dart and drug them, and send them elsewhere? The costs of transporting an animal the size of an elephant are staggering. A big bull weighs six tons, an average cow around four.

  Look at this terrain down here in the valley. Johnny gestured towards the mountainous heights of the escarpment and the broken rocky kopjes; and wild forest. We would require special trucks and we would have to build roads to get them in and out. Even if that were possible, where would we take them? I have told you that we have a surplus of almost twenty thousand elephant in Zimbabwe. Where would we take these elephant? There simply isn't space for them. So, Warden, unlike the other countries to the north such as Kenya and Zambia who have allowed their elephant herds to be almost wiped out by poaching and unwise conservation policy, you are in a Catch 22 situation. Your management of your herds of elephant has been too good. Now you have to destroy and waste these marvelous animals. No, Doctor Armstrong, we won't waste them. We will recover a great deal of value from their carcasses, ivory and hides and meat which will be sold. The proceeds will be ploughed back into conservation, to prevent poaching and to protect our National Parks. The death of these animals will not be a complete abomination.

  But why do you have to kill the mothers and the babies?

  Daniel insisted. You are cheating, Doctor, Johnny warned him. You are using the emotive, slanted language of the animal rights groups, mothers and babies". Let's rather call them cows and calves, and admit that a cow eats as much and takes up as much space as a bull, and that calves grow very swiftly into adults. So you feel Daniel started, but despite his earlier warning, Johnny was becoming angry. Hold on, he snapped.

  There's more to it than that. We have to take out the entire herd.

  It is absolutely essential that we leave no survivors. The elephant herd is a complex family group. Nearly all its members are blood relatives, and there is a highly developed social structure within the herd. The elephant is an intelligent animal, probably the most intelligent after the primates, certainly more intelligent than a cat or dog, or even a dolphin. They know, I mean, they really understand.

  . . he broke off, and cleared his throat. His feelings had overcome him, and Daniel had never liked nor admired him more than he did at that moment. The terrible truth is, Johnny's voice was husky as he went on, that if we allowed any of them to escape the cull, they would communicate their terror and panic to the other herds in the Park.

  There would be a swift breakdown in the elephant-social behaviour.

  Isn't that a little far-fetched, Warden? Daniel asked softly. No. It has happened before.

  After the war there were ten thousand surplus elephant in the Wankie National Park. At that time, we knew very little about the techniques or effects of massive culling operations. We soon learned. Those first clumsy efforts of ours almost destroyed the entire social structure of the herds. By shooting the older animals, we wiped out their reservoir of experience and transferable wisdom. We disrupted their migratory patterns, the hierarchy and discipline within the herds, even their breeding habits. Almost as though they understood that the holocaust was upon them, the bulls began to cover the barely mature young cows before they were ready.

  Like the human female, the elephant cow is ripe for breeding at fifteen or sixteen years of age at the very earliest. Under the terrible stress of the culling the bulls in Wankie went to the cows when they were only ten or eleven years of age, still in puberty, and the calves born of these unions were stunted little runts. Johnny shook his head. No, we have to take out the whole herd at one stroke.

  Almost with relief, he looked up at the sky.

  They both picked up the distant insect drone of an aircraft engine beyond the towering cumulus clouds. Here comes the spotter plane, he said quietly, and reached for the microphone of the radio. Good morning, Sierra Mike. We have you visual due south of our position approximately four miles. I will give you yellow smoke. Johnny nodded at one of his rangers, who pulled the tab on a smoke marker.

  Sulphur-yellow smoke drifted in a heavy cloud across the treetops.

  Roger, Parks. I have your smoke. Give me an indication on the target, please.

  -" Johnny frowned at the word target and laid emphasis on the alternative word as he replied. At sunset yesterday evening the herd was moving north towards the river five miles southeast of this position. There are fifty-plus animals. Thank you, Parks. I will call again when we locate them. They watched the aircraft bank away eastwards. It was an ancient single-engined Cessna that had probably served on fireforce duties as a K-Car, or killer car, during the bush war.

  Fifteen minutes later the radio crackled to life again. Hello, Parks.

  I have your herd. Fifty-plus and eight miles from your present position. The herd was spread out down both banks of a dry river-course that was gouged through a low line of flinty hills. The forest was greener and more luxuriant here in the drainage where the deep roots had found subterranean water. The acacia trees were in heavy pod. The pods looked like long brown biscuits, clustered at the tips of the branches sixty feet above ground level.

  Two cows moved in on one of the heavily laden trees. They were the herd matriarchs, both of them over seventy years of age, gaunt old dowagers with tattered ears and rheumy eyes.

  The bond between them was over half a century strong. They were half-sisters, successive calves of the same mother. The elder had been weaned at the birth of her sibling and had helped to nursemaid her as tenderly as would a human elder sister. They had shared a long life, and had drawn from it a wealth of experience and wisdom to add to the deep ancestral instinct with which they had both been endowed at birth.

  They had seen each other through drought and famine and sickness.

  They had shared the joy of good rains and abundant food. They knew all the secret hideaways in the mountains and the water-holes in the desert places. They knew where the hunters lurked, and the boundaries of the sanctuaries within which they and the herd were secure. They had played midwife to each other, leaving the herd together when the time was come upon one of them, and by their presence had fortified each other in the tearing agony of birth. They had stripped the foetal sac from each other's newborn calves, and helped discipline them, instruct them and rear them to maturity.

  Their own breeding days were long past, but the herd and
its safety were still their duty and their main concern. Their pleasure and their responsibility were the younger cows and the new calves that carried their own blood-lines.

  Perhaps it was fanciful to endow brute animals with such human emotions as love and respect, or to believe that they understand blood relationships or the continuity of their line, but no one who had seen the old cows quieten the boisterous youngsters with raised ears and a sharp angry squeal, or watched the herd follow their lead with unquestioning obedience, could doubt their authority. No one who had seen them caress the younger calves with a gentle trunk or lift them over the steep and difficult places on the elephant roads could question their concern. When danger threatened they would push the young ones behind them and rush forward to the defence with ears spread wide and trunks rolled ready to fling out and strike down an enemy.

  The great bulls with towering frames and massive girth might overshadow them in size, but not in cunning and ferocity.

  The bulls tusks were longer and thicker, sometimes weighing well over one hundred pounds. The two old cows had spindly misshapen ivory, worn and cracked and discoloured with age, and the bones showed through the scarred grey skin, but they were constant in their duty to the herd.

  The bulls kept only a loose association with the breeding herd. As they grew older they often preferred to break away and form smaller bachelor groups of two or three males, visiting the cows only when the heady scent of oestrus drew them in. However, the old cows stayed with the herd.

  They formed the solid foundation on which the social structure of the herd was based. The tight-knit community of breeding cows and their calves relied heavily upon their wisdom and experience for its everyday needs and survival.

  Now the two sisters moved in perfect accord to the giant acacia laden with seed pods, and each took up her position on either side of the trunk. They laid their foreheads against the rough bark. The trunk was over four feet in diameter, unyielding as a column of marble. A hundred feet above the ground the high branches formed an intricate tracery and the pods and green leaves a cathedral dome against the sky.

  The two old cows began to rock back and forth in unison with the tree-trunk between their foreheads. At first the acacia was rigid, resisting even their great strength. The cows worked on doggedly, pushing and heaving, first one then the other throwing her weight in opposite directions, and a tiny shudder ran up the tree and, high above them, the top branches trembled as though a breeze had passed.

  Still they worked rhythmically and the trunk began to move.

  A single ripe pod came loose from its twig and fell a hundred feet to crack against the skull of one of the cows. She closed her watery old eyes tightly but never broke the rhythm of her heaves. Between them the tree-trunk swayed and shuddered, ponderously at first and then more briskly. Another pod and then another plopped down as heavily as the first drops of a thunderstorm.

  The young animals of the herd realised what they were up to, they flapped their ears with excitement and hurried forward. The acacia pods, rich in protein, were a favourite delicacy. They crowded gleefully around the two cows, snatching up the scattering of pods as they fell and stuffing them far down their throats with their trunks.

  By now the great tree was whipping back and forth, its branches waving wildly and its foliage thrashing. The pods and loose twigs showered down thick as hail, rattling and bouncing from the backs of the elephants crowded beneath.

  The two cows, still braced like a pair of book ends, kept doggedly at it until the shower of falling pods began to dry up.

  Only when the last one was shaken from the branches did they step back from the tree-trunk. Their backs were sprinkled with dead leaves and twigs, bits of dry bark and velvety pods, and they stood ankle-deep in the fallen debris. They reached down and delicately picked out the golden pods with the dextrous fleshy tips of their trunks and curled them up into their gaping mouths, their triangular bottom lips drooping open.

  The ooze from their facial glands wetting their cheeks like tears of pleasure, they began to feed.

  The herd was pressed closely around them at the feast that they had laid.

  As their long serpentine trunks swung and curled, and the pods were shovelled into their throats, there was a soft sound that seemed to reverberate through each of their great grey frames. It was a gentle rumbling in many different keys, and the sound was interspersed with tiny creaking gurgling squeaks barely audible to the human ear. it was a strangely contented chorus, in which even the youngest beasts joined.

  It was a sound that seemed to express joy of life and to confirm the deep bond that linked all the members of the herd.

  It was the song of the elephant.

  One of the old cows was the first to detect a threat to the herd.

  She transmitted her concern to them with a sound high above the register of the human ear and the entire herd froze into utter stillness. Even the very young calves responded instantly.

  The silence after the happy uproar of the feast was eerie, and the buzz of the distant spotter plane was loud in contrast.

  The old cows recognised the sound of the Cessna engine.

  They had heard it many times over the last few years and had come to associate it with the periods of increased human activity, of tension and of unexplained terror that they felt transmitted telepathically through the wilderness from the other groups of elephant in the Park.

  They knew that the sound in the air was the prelude to a popping chorus of distant gunfire and to the stench of elephant blood on the currents of heated air along the rim of the escarpment. Often after the sounds of aircraft and gunfire had faded, they had come across wide areas of the forest floor caked with dried blood, and they had smelt the odour of fear and pain and death exuded by members of their own race which still mingled with the reek of blood and of rotting entrails.

  One of the old cows backed away and shook her head angrily at the sound in the sky. Her tattered ears flapped loudly against her shoulders, a sound like the mainsail of a tall ship filling with wind.

  Then she wheeled and led the herd away at a run.

  There were two mature bulls with the herd, but at the first threat they peeled away and disappeared into the forest. Instinctively recognising that the herd was vulnerable, they sought safety in solitary flight. The younger cows and the calves bunched up behind the matriarchs and fled, the little ones racing to keep up with the longer stride of their dams; in different circumstances their haste might have been comical. Hello, Parks. The herd is breaking southwards towards the Imbelezi pass. Roger, Sierra Mike. Please head them towards the Maria Pools turn-off. The old cow was leading the herd towards the hills.

  She wanted to get off the valley bottom into the had ground where pursuit would be impeded by the rock and severe gradients, but the sound of the aircraft hummed across her front, cutting her off from the mouth of the pass.

  She pulled up uncertainly and lifted her head to the sky, where tall silvery mountains of cumulus cloud were piled up as high as the heavens.

  She spread wide her ears, riven and weathered by time and thorn, and turned her ancient head to follow that dreadful sound.

  Then she saw the aircraft. The early sunlight flashed from its windshield as it banked steeply across her front, and it dived back towards her, low over the tops of the forest trees, the sound of its engine rising to a roar.

  The two old cows spun together and started back towards the river.

  Behind them the herd wheeled like an untidy mass of cavalry, and as they ran the dust rose in a fine pale cloud even higher than the treetops. Parks, the herd is heading your way now.

  Five miles from the turn-off. Thank you, Sierra Mike; keep them coming nice and easy, Don't push them too hard. Will-do, Parks. All K-Units.

  Johnny Nzou changed his call-sign. All K-Units, converge on the Mana Pools turn-off. The K-Units, or kill teams, were the four Landrovers that were deployed along the main track that ran down from Chiwewe headquarters
on the escarpment to the river. Johnny had put them in as a stop line, to head off the herd if it broke awkwardly. It did not look as though that would be necessary now. The spotter plane was working the herd into position with professional expertise. Looks as though we'll make it on the first try, Johnny muttered as he reversed the Landrover and swung it in a full 180-degree turn, then sent it flying down the track. A ridge of grass grew between the sandy wheel-tracks, and the Landrover rocked and rattled over the bumps. The wind whipped around their heads and Daniel pulled his hat from his head and stuffed it into his pocket.

  Jock was filming over his shoulder as a herd of buffalo, disturbed.

  by the sound of the Landrover, came pouring out of the forest and crossed the track just ahead of them. Damn it! Johnny hit the brakes and glanced at his wristwatch. Stupid nyati are going to screw us up.

  Hundreds of the dark bovine shapes came in a solid phalanx, galloping heavily, raising white dust, grunting and lowing and splattering liquid green dung on the grass as they flattened it.

  Within minutes they had passed and Johnny accelerated into the standing dust-cloud and rattled over the loose earth that the herd had ploughed up with their great cloven hoofs. Around a bend in the track they saw the other vehicles parked at the crossroads. The four rangers were standing in a group beside them, rifles in their hands and faces turned back expectantly.

  Johnny skidded the Landrover to a halt and snatched up the microphone of his radio. Sierra Mike, give me a position report, please. Parks, the herd is two miles from you, just approaching Long Vlei. A vlei is a depression of open grassland, and Long Vlei ran for miles parallel to the river. In the rainy season it was a marsh, but now it made an ideal killing ground. They had used it before.

  Johnny jumped down from the driver's seat and lifted his rifle from the rack. He and all his rangers were armed with cheap mass-produced .