Wouldn’t it be nice if I could just spend all my days following the trials and tribulations of all the animals of Malilangwe, and although I do love the solitude, I also need to get to town to stock up on supplies and attend to business and take a short break. But I try to keep this to a minimum.
I can just hear you saying, like all my friends do, “but you’re on a permanent holiday just sitting there watching animals all day!” Sorry for you, but to some degree that is what I do. AND I get to town where some get harassed with my campfire stories.
I remember when I was in the South African Defence Force doing my compulsory 2 years National Service when I had my first hairy elephant encounter. Of course I had grown up in Kruger but always under the watchful eye of my father, he was a ranger in Kruger.
Now I was on my own and the time had come for me to see if all that bush knowledge he had taught to me would be enough for me to survive on my own. I was part of a specialist unit in the mounted infantry. I left camp one morning on my own, riding my horse Hokaai. I was riding bare back as I often did when not out on military operations. We travelled quite a distance from camp and I was enjoying the solitude riding quietly in this very wild country. Our base was on the border of Etosha National Park in Namibia, the fences of which were trashed by elephant in many places and there was as much wildlife in the park as there was outside.
It was a really dry time of year when the bush was very bare, all trees having lost their leaf providing me with extra visibility. I saw many animals. Springbok, zebra, wildebeest, kudu, steenbok and others, but they all bolted at the sight of me.
It was sad to see them run like this probably ‘cos of poaching pressures on the boundaries. But it also gave me a false sense of superiority, well for now at least. I’m sure if a wildebeest came running at me I would have been out of there in a flash.
Nearing midday it was getting hot and I had decided to head back to base when I came across this elephant bull. He was passed out lying on his side in the shade of a Jackal Berry tree, the only tree in the area still with any foliage.
When I say passed out, I mean passed out!!! He was flat-out on his side and I couldn’t see any movement. He had to be dead. But I wasn’t taking any chances. Hokaai hadn’t seen anything, as the bull looked a rock lying there. I stopped about 40m away and shouted, clapped my hands and caused as my disturbance I could. What Hokaai thought of his master gesticulating the way I was, I really can’t imagine.
The elephant remained dead. And from what I remembered from dad, was if an adult elephant lay on its side for too long it would die anyway. So it had to be dead. It wasn’t responding to my shouting and clapping and having died had passed out on its side?? I rode closer to about 10m, stopped Hokaai, and was just bringing my leg over the back of the horse to dismount, when this massive rock started moving in front of us.
For Hokaai, a huge rock like this on the move was not something to hang around for. And he didn’t. He took off with me hanging around his neck. There was no way I was going to let go as he dragged me through every thorn bush he could find and I was there to stay knowing what was waiting for me if I didn’t manage to hang on. Somehow in all this panic I managed to get my right leg back over his back, right myself and pull him to a stop and take stock of the situation.
This all happened in only a few seconds which obviously felt like forever.
The bull had managed to right himself and stand up and when I’d pulled Hokaai around I turned to see him turning tail on us and flattening every little bush in his path.
He’d probably got a bigger fright than us having woken to this apparition of horse and rider spewing up dust as it tore away from him. Luckily he headed off to his safer pastures and I rode briskly back to base to take up my position on the fighting front.
Which was the lesser of the 2 evils?
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