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.
