The Dumbest Move
Ever.
In the fervency of youth, one sometimes
does things of which one would later say “it
seemed a good idea at the time.” This was one of those. Big-time.
Hoepel, Cobus’ veterinary technician (you’ve met both of them in previous
postings – scroll down), was about to get married. As is the custom in South Africa, a bachelors
party was laid on for Hoepel. The venue
for this would be the dry riverbed of the Watinsaka spruit, some five
kilometres from Skukuza, the main rest camp in the Kruger National Park.
At the time Tom Yssel was the chief game
ranger of the Pretoriuskop division in the
Park.
He was still recovering from major surgery following a crocodile attack
which
nearly cost him his leg and his life (see earlier posting). With the long
steel shafts of a Hoffman apparatus protruding on either side of his thigh and
lower leg he resembled an ancient TV antenna, and could obviously not drive
himself. He couldn’t wear trousers
either, and shuffled around on his crutches dressed in an old grey dust coat. The attire, however, would be suitable for a
bachelors party.
I picked him up early on the Saturday
morning, en route to Skukuza. On the
backseat
of my Gelandewagen was my customary giant
coolbox, filled with beer and crushed
ice.
In his condition Tom couldn’t get out to
patrol his division of some 1000 square
Kilometres, so we used the opportunity to
travel to Skukuza via the numerous fire
breaks in his division, checking up on the
more remote watering points, windmills etc.
We arrived at Cobus’ house in the staff
village by about mid-afternoon. A sense
of
excited anticipation prevailed – the
upcoming event was the talk of the ‘town’.
Living in the staff village at Skukuza could at times be a little dreary
and boring. A party was always a big
event, even more so a bachelors party.
In retrospect I sometimes wonder if the
fact that everybody was pumped-up and
excited played a role in making us do what
we did. The excitement was contagious.
Late afternoon Cobus got a call from
Reception in Skukuza – a tourist had just
reported an elephant with a wire snare on
the Lower Sabi road, some ten kilometres
from the rest camp.
“I’ve been looking for that elephant since
Tuesday,” Cobus said. “Let’s go.”
“Forget it,” Tom said, “it’s too late in
the day – you’ll never get the chopper in the air
in time.”
“Then we do it on foot.”
“Are you crazy? You can’t do that.”
“’Course I can,” said Cobus, grabbing his
lab keys and heading for the vehicle.
“You
coming?”
“I’m in,” I said and joined him. Tom was having a hard time keeping up, and
was
protesting all the way.
“Are you out of your mind?” Tom
was pretty hot under the collar by now. “Besides, it’ll be dark in an
hour.”
“Exactly.
By morning that elephant will be twenty clicks away – he was near
Crocodile bridge on Tuesday. The snare hasn’t slowed him down much.”
At the veterinary lab Cobus hastily checked
his muti box and grabbed a dart gun.
“You’re going to get yourselves killed,”
Tom said.
Cobus handed him a .458 elephant gun from
the safe. “You’re the ranger – cover our
asses.”
Tom was furious, sputtering
indignantly. “I’m a bloody cripple on
crutches! How do
you expect me to handle the bloody
rifle? Get someone else who can shoot.”
“You’ll manage. We’re running out of time,” Cobus said and
headed out.
The argument was still raging by the time
we came across two tourist vehicles parked
on the road, hazard lights flashing. They pointed out the direction in which the
elephant had disappeared. By now the rest camp gates had closed, and
tourist were
confined to the camps for the night. Cobus suggested our tourists get to Skukuza
immediately – they should tell the guard at
the gate what had transpired – he would
sort things out in the morning.
It was dusk by the time Cobus had prepared
a dart, and the two of us trotted off into
the bush, armed with the dart gun and a
torch. Tom’s Hoffman apparatus and
crutches got tangled up in a thicket within
the first ten yards. In the distance we
could
still hear him ranting.
The Lower Sabi road runs parallel to the
Sabi river, at this point, about half a kilometre distant. That was the direction in which the elephant
had last been seen to be heading. We knew he couldn’t be far, so we proceeded
with caution.
Then, in the fast fading light we could
barely make out the animal, about forty yards ahead of us. The wind was strongly in our favour, and we
started stalking the animal.
By now it was getting too dark to be sure of our footing, and he must
have become aware of us when we were fifteen
yards away. He turned and stared in our direction myopically.
It was getting so dark that we had to
crouch down to see his silhouette clearly.
An
elephant cannot be darted with a frontal
shot, so we crept off to our left. We
crouched
down again, only to find that the elephant
had turned with us, and Cobus was still
stuck with a frontal shot. I motioned to him that I would veer further to
the left, and if
the elephant turned with me, he could get
his shot in.
When the dart gun popped, I froze. My bravado suddenly deserted me – this had
definitely been a dumb move. At that stage sanity returned and washed over
me like a
gigantic arctic wave.
I knew the elephant could not smell us, and
it could not see us. As long as we
remained motionless it could not hear us
either. It could, however, take up to
seven minutes to go down.
The animal now had two choices. It could come looking for the source of the
sudden
burning pain in its butt, find us in the
process and reduce us to something with the
consistency of fish paste. Or it could run.
Fortunately it chose the latter.
This left us with a further dilemma. If we were not present when it finally went
down, we had no hope of finding it in the
darkness. We did not have two
choices. At
top
speed we raced off into the darkness, following the sound of breaking trees and
branches. I could not switch on the
torch, as this would alert him to our presence.
It was the toughest hundred and fifty yards
I have ever run in my life. A fleeing
elephant moves fast. We had to do likewise, in the bush in
pitch-black darkness. We
ran holding our hands in front of our faces
and trying to protect our eyes, while thorns
and branches whipped at us. Both Cobus and I went down several times.
Suddenly all was quiet ahead of us. With the racket we were making, this fact
didn’t
penetrate immediately. By the time we skidded to a halt, the
elephant could be
anywhere.
We would have liked to be silent, but we were panting like police
dogs.
We went down on our haunches to scan for a
silhouette. Before we could spot it, the
elephant went down with a rumble and a
crash, not ten yards from us.
After a moment of silence Cobus let out a
wheezy “Jeeeezzzz…!”
“Yeah,” I said, “jeeezzzz. Now what?”
We inspected the wound. Fortunately it was a wire snare and not a
cable, and the elephant had managed to break the wire before it had done too
much damage. It had cut through the skin and was embedded about an inch into
the subdermal tissue. Infection had set
in, and the leg was stinking to high heaven.
We needed the muti box pronto – we still
had a party to go to. Once again, we had
only one option. Cobus would return to
the vehicle with the torch to fetch his stuff.
I would wait by the elephant to guide him back – otherwise he would never
find it again in the dark. Cobus headed
off to the road, and I watched the light of the torch disappear through the
bush. I climbed on top of the elephant
and sat there listening to the deafening silence, alone in the darkness.
I wasn’t alone for long. All around me there were suddenly things
moving around in the bush. A hyena
giggled questioningly. It dawned on me
that the elephant, laying down a trail of blood and pus, had probably built up
a considerable group of followers over the past couple of days. They had all been waiting for the moment the
elephant would go down, so the feast could begin. But something strange made them hesitate –
part of the elephant was very vocal, reciting Afrikaans poetry at the top of
its voice. If I could sing, I would
have. However, I know a lot of poems, so
I treated them to these, interspersed with all sorts of other language.
To this day I still have nightmares about
our headlong run in the darkness. We
must
have scattered dozens of hyenas, and
possibly a lion or two thrown in. Why we
hadn’t been taken down remains a mystery.
It was with great relief that I spotted the
torch in the distance. The decibels at
which I
was delivering my repertoire could probably
be heard all the way to the road, so
Cobus had no problem in finding me. We were literally surrounded by hyenas, so we
worked with feverish haste. We cut out the wire and cleaned and treated
the wound,
which proved to be fairly superficial. After a heavy dose of antibiotics Cobus
administered the antidote. We waited till the elephant was on its feet,
and headed for
the road.
The elephant was now smelling strongly of
bismuth impregnated petroleum paste and
iodine, and we were covered in blood and
pus up to our elbows. The hyenas
switched
menus, and started following us, giggling
excitedly. We were swinging the torch
every which way, and made it back to the
vehicle in one piece, to find Tom still
ranting.
The opening of the coolbox pacified him somewhat. When we used the first cold beers to wash our
hands and arms, he started ranting again – this time about wasteful sacrilege. The
next beers, however, went where they were supposed to.
The irony of this incident is that it
happened during the time that elephant culling was
in full swing in the Kruger Park. Chances are that our beneficiary promptly
ended up as hundreds of tins of canned meat on a shelf somewhere.
That night we didn’t enjoy the party with
as much gusto as we should have – I think we were suffering from adrenaline
depletion.
Dumb but very, very lucky.
It did, however, seem like a good idea at
the time.
Novels by the same author:
The Sam Jenkins trilogy:
Poacher
Cheetah in the rain
Fighting AIDS
Psychological thriller:
Show me a Reason
Available on Amazon, Apple, Sony etc.
Poacher is currently in the top 1% of the Amazon.com bestseller rankings.
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