We darted forward, as quickly as we could without breaking into a run, me following Kane, with Gareth behind. Never run, never run, never run. It had been drilled into me by Gareth before we set off. An elephant can run at twenty-five miles an hour, far outpacing any human.
‘Duck there,’ said Kane. ‘If he charges, we’ll be safe if you bury yourself under the log.’ I did as I was told, crouching down by the log. I didn’t fancy my chances, though; if the bull came at us, the tusks on the elephant could surely rip it apart in no time.
‘Don’t worry,’ said Gareth. ‘I’ll tell you if we need to run.’
‘But you said never run,’ I protested.
He shrugged. ‘Look, when I say never, I mean sometimes you don’t really have a choice. Usually an elephant will do only a mock charge, unless he’s really pissed off. Or if he’s been shot at, of course. Then he means business, especially if he sees my rifle.’
I thought back to my own close shaves, such as the time in Malawi when I’d been charged by a massive female elephant on the Shire river and my local guide had needed to fire a warning shot towards the rampaging beast. Then there was the time in Uganda, when a whole herd of elephants wandered straight through my camp at night, almost squashing me in my tent.
I remembered the story of a fellow paratrooper, who’d been gored by an elephant in the wilds of Kenya – ripping his arm in two – and how, a couple of months before I set off to Botswana, another soldier in the British army had been killed by an elephant whilst on an anti-poaching patrol. There was no doubting that elephants are dangerous wild animals, whose relationship with humans is, at best, turbulent.
So what on earth was I doing, travelling on foot through some of the most dangerous terrain in Africa, trying to research more about them?
It was a good question, and there’d been plenty of times when I’d been photographing them that I’d been forced to question my own sanity, but I always calmed myself with the thought that, in spite of their massive size and potential for causing damage, they were also highly intelligent, gentle beasts that were capable of great compassion, and needed to be understood.
We sat still, watching as more males arrived, grazing on the low-lying branches, seemingly unaware of our presence, apart from the ‘sniffer dog’, who never stopped wafting his trunk in our direction.
‘Right, I think it’s time to go,’ said Gareth, calmly. ‘There’s about ten of them, and if any more come we might find ourselves surrounded, and that would end badly.’
I agreed. We’d got very close, and I’d been lucky to get some great photographs and observe the herd up close and personal, but I didn’t want to push my luck.
As we tiptoed backwards, I noticed movement in the bushes right ahead. It was the ‘sniffer dog’ again, and he’d started to follow us; slowly at first, but he seemed determined not to lose us. Anyone not acquainted with elephant behaviour might have thought he was merely curious, but Gareth reminded me of the urgency.
‘Pick up the pace, Wood, get moving. He wants to let us know that he’s the boss.’
Kane led the way, jabbing his spear into the bushes to clear a way. ‘Faster, he’s coming.’
I turned around to see the young bull gaining on us.
‘Okay, move now!’ shouted Gareth, and this time there was no doubting the urgency in his voice. At the same time Gareth cocked his weapon and I shuddered at the familiar sound of metal clunking and hoped beyond anything that he wasn’t forced to use it. I picked up my pace and started to jog, checking over my shoulder every few paces.
Suddenly I heard the violent snort of the bull as he crashed through the thicket, at which point he couldn’t have been more than twenty feet away. There was a loud trumpet as the bull smashed against the side of a tree and the thud seemed to vibrate the earth.
Now he began to run properly, straight towards us.
‘Go, go, go!’ Kane pointed his spear towards the edge of the treeline, where a gnarled uprooted tree blocked the path. ‘Jump!’ he shouted, and with all my energy I launched myself over the natural barrier into the clearing beyond. Kane, who’d done the same, landed with a thump next to me, and meanwhile Gareth had the good sense to run around the side.
The rampaging bull skidded to a halt in front of us, violently shaking his head and screaming the most terrible noise, which seemed to split the atmosphere of the forest in two. He stamped his feet and waved his ears in a show of ferocious terror. Then with one final snort and whip of his trunk, he simply turned around and plodded away.
Gareth was still catching his breath, and I could feel my heart beating in my chest and the adrenaline searing through my gut. That was a close call.
Kane burst out laughing and shook his head. ‘Well, he was a show-off, wasn’t he?’
When we look at elephants, it is often through a photographer’s lens, or from the comfort of a safari vehicle, gazing at them through a pair of binoculars. It can sometimes feel voyeuristic and surreal. A caged human in an animal’s world, a sort of zoo reversed. Yet when I was walking in the footsteps of the herds, treading in the wake of their destruction, vulnerable and ever alert, nothing could have felt more natural.
There’s something exhilarating about being at the mercy of nature in its rawest form, of putting yourself into the mind of a wild animal. Perhaps it is some primal emotion taking us back to our prehistoric roots, when human and giants roamed together in constant communion, fear and understanding; back to a time of pure survival, when it was essential for us to know intimately the ways of the beasts.
Elephants have been around for far longer than human beings, and all throughout our own evolution and history we have been in their company on the plains and in the forests until very recently, all around the world. But before we go on to look at where these creatures came from, it’s important to think about why they are important, and how our relationship has intertwined.
You may have heard the parable of the elephant and the blind men. It tells a cautionary tale about six blind men who encountered this strange animal and decided they must learn what it was like by touching it. Each blind man felt a part of the elephant’s body, but only one part, such as its legs or ear or tusk. They then had to describe the beast to the audience based on their limited experience. Their descriptions of the elephant were, of course, wildly different from each other.
The first man, whose hand landed on the trunk, quite naturally remarked, ‘This being is like a thick snake.’ Another one, whose hand reached its ear, said it seemed like a kind of fan. As for the third person, whose hand was on its leg, he thought the elephant was a fat pillar, like a tree trunk. The blind man who placed his hand upon its side believed the animal was ‘a wall’. Another, who handled its tail, described it as a rope. The last one stroked its tusk, claiming that the elephant was hard, smooth and pointy, like a spear.
In some versions of the story, the blind commentators each suspect that the others are being dishonest and they come to blows. The moral of the parable is that humans have a tendency to claim absolute truth based on their own limited, subjective understanding and are prone to ignoring other people’s experiences, even though they may be equally true.
The nineteenth-century poet John Godfrey Saxe wrote:
It was six men of Indostan
To learning much inclined,
Who went to see the Elephant
(Though all of them were blind),
That each by observation
Might satisfy his mind
And so these men of Indostan
Disputed loud and long,
Each