Fascinating Humanity

Wednesday, July 24, 2013

Elephant Scare

In 1992, at the end of a ten-day hike around the Samburu camps of Kenya’s Mathews Range with three Samburu morans and three pack camels, I needed someone to drive me back to Nairobi, the country’s capital. So at dawn the next day, with Leneemi, Lekerepes, and Lalaur, I walked to a lodge in the Kittchich National Park to use its radio. For a while we moved cross-country, then followed a dirt road. As we waded through a river a Samburu man caught up with us. He said he was a game warden, and he joined our march. Here is what I wrote in my diary that day.

On the other side of the river the road climbs out of the valley, littered every twenty meters or so with the dropping of elephants that came to drink earlier. They are so fresh that the urine in which some of them sit has not yet soaked into the dusty ground. The warden looks around warily.

"This is a dangerous time to walk this road," he tells me in English. "I cannot avoid it because last evening I got permission to spend the night home after work under the condition that I would be back to the lodge before eight, but you should not have come this early. Generally the elephants keep away from the road, but in the morning and evening they use it to go drink. Last evening, near here, I was charged by one. I had accidentally banged a can I was carrying, and the noise enraged him. Though I literally flew down the road, he was much faster. I threw myself into the underbrush, zigzagged for my life, and cut back to the road again. Looking back, I saw the elephant hesitate, and give up his pursuit. If we see elephants, do not speak, do not make noise, tread carefully, and they will keep quiet."

Worried by his words, I scan the bush around for a possible escape road. But there are no trees big enough to climb, and the bush is so closed and thorny that to try to run through it before an elephant would be offering myself to it on a silver platter. I have not resolved what to do in case of an emergency when, on our left, in a clearing not 20 paces away, stands a huge elephant.

Anguish silences us as if we had just heard a fatal verdict. Looking to the left, we walk as if on eggs--I, on shaky legs. The elephant is feeding. Though he eyes us suspiciously, he does not move. He would make a great picture, I think. And that reminds me of all the times I have had, in the face of danger, similar thoughts though not the courage to act upon them. I survived each time only to blame myself later for my timidity.

Thus I stop, and while the Samburu walk on, subtly shaking their heads at me in silent reproach, I slowly point my camera at the elephant. I click once, but even that minor sound irritates it, for it lifts his head, shakes its huge ears, and takes three steps in my direction. Horrified, I resume a cautious march. Trying to look immobile, I stretch my steps as much as I can. I try to hurry without haste. Fortunately, the elephant reverts to its browsing. As soon as I lose sight of it around a bend of the path, I run after my companions. Suddenly, perhaps to dampen any further wish to take elephant pictures, they have plenty of elephant stories to tell me.

"I knew a man," says the warden, "who fell asleep in the bush. An elephant came by, dragged him to a tree, and beat it against it to pulp."

"Many a Samburu," says Leneemi, "facing alone with his spear a pride of lions threatening his herd, has frightened it away, but those who have seen a single infuriated elephant trample to death twenty of their cows have had no alternative but to run for their own lives."

As predicted by the game warden, our return through the park much later is uneventful. We meet only three morans on a strenuous eight-day round trip to Marsabit, to the north-northeast, to buy spears from the famed local smiths. Like Leneemi and Lekerepes, they were circumcised and became moran only some months ago. The spears they are carrying were lent to them. Those spears are their only luggage. Their only food will be the milk they will get in Samburu camps, their only water that which they will find along the way, sometimes at great intervals. In the desert, where they will walk one exceptionally long day without either milk or water, they will risk their lives.