Table of Contents
Title Page
prologue
chapter one
chapter two
chapter three
chapter four
chapter five
chapter six
chapter seven
chapter eight
chapter nine
chapter ten
chapter eleven
chapter twelve
chapter thirteen
chapter fourteen
chapter fifteen
chapter sixteen
chapter seventeen
chapter eighteen
chapter nineteen
chapter twenty
chapter twenty-one
chapter twenty-two
chapter twenty-three
chapter twenty-four
chapter twenty-five
chapter twenty-six
chapter twenty-seven
chapter twenty-eight
chapter twenty-nine
chapter thirty
chapter thirty-one
chapter thirty-two
chapter thirty-three
chapter thirty-four
chapter thirty-five
chapter thirty-six
chapter thirty-seven
chapter thirty-eight
chapter thirty-nine
chapter forty
chapter forty-one
chapter forty-two
acknowledgements
ALSO BY LAWRENCE ANTHONY WITH GRAHAM SPENCE
Copyright Page
To my beautiful, caring Françoise,
for allowing me to be who I am.
prologue
In 1999, I was asked to accept a herd of troubled wild elephants on my game reserve. I had no inkling of the escapades and adventures I was about to embark upon. I had no idea how challenging it would be or how much my life would be enriched.
The adventure has been both physical and spiritual. Physical in the sense that it was action from the word go, as you will see in the following pages; spiritual because these giants of the planet took me deep into their world.
Make no mistake, the title of this book is not about me for I make no claim to any special abilities. It is about the elephants – it was they who whispered to me and taught me how to listen.
How this happened was purely at a personal level. I am no scientist, I am a conservationist. So when I describe how the elephants reacted to me, or I to them, it is purely the truth of my own experiences. There are no laboratory tests here, but through trial and error, I found out what worked best for me and my herd in our odyssey together.
Not only am I a conservationist, I am an extremely lucky one for I own a game reserve called Thula Thula. It consists of 5,000 acres of pristine bush in the heart of Zululand, South Africa, where elephants once roamed freely. No longer. Many rural Zulus have never seen an elephant. Myelephants were the first wild ones to be reintroduced into our area for more than a century.
Thula Thula is a natural home to much of the indigenous wildlife of Zululand, including the majestic white rhino, Cape buffalo, leopard, hyena, giraffe, zebra, wildebeest, crocodile, and many species of antelope, as well as lesserknown predators such as the lynx and serval. We have seen pythons as long as a truck and we have possibly the biggest breeding population of white-backed vultures in the province.
And, of course, we have elephants.
The elephants came to us out of the blue, as you will read. Today, I cannot visualize a life without them. I don’t want a life without them. To understand how they taught me so much, you have to understand that communication in the animal kingdom is as natural as a breeze. That in the beginning it was only self-imposed human limitations that impeded my understanding.
In our noisy cities we tend to forget the things our ancestors knew on a gut level: that the wilderness is alive, that its whispers are there for all to hear – and to respond to.
We also have to understand that there are things we cannot understand. Elephants possess qualities and abilities well beyond the means of science to decipher. Elephants cannot repair a computer, but they do have communication, physical and metaphysical, that would make Bill Gates’s mouth drop open. In some very important ways they are ahead of us.
Some unexplained occurrences are quite evident throughout the plant and animal kingdom and there is nothing like looking at what is actually going on around you, to turn a lot of what you always thought to be true on its head.
For instance, any game ranger will tell you that if you decide to dart rhino for relocation to other reserves, the dayyou go out to do so there will not be a rhino around for love or money. Yet the day before, you saw them all over the place. Somehow they knew you were after them and they simply vanished. The next week when you only want to dart buffalo, the rhino you couldn’t find will be standing by watching you.
Many years ago I watched a hunter stalking his prey. He had a permit to target only an impala ram from a bachelor herd. Yet the only males he encountered that day were those with breeding herds of females. And even more incredibly, these non-shootable studs stood nonchalantly within range, eyeing him without a care in the world, while in the background bachelor herds were running for their lives.
How is this so? None of us know. The more prosaic rangers among us just say it’s Murphy Law – that whatever can go wrong, will. When you want to shoot or dart an animal they are never around. Others, like me, are not so sure. Maybe it’s a bit more mystical. Maybe the message is in the wind.
This less conventional view is supported by a wise old Zulu tracker I know well. A vastly experienced man of the bush, he told me that whenever monkeys near his village got too brazen at stealing food, or threatening or biting children, they would decide to shoot one to scare the troop off.
‘But those monkeys are so clever,’ he said, tapping his temple. ‘The moment we decide to fetch the gun they disappear. We have learned not even to say the name “monkey” or “gun” out loud among ourselves because then they will not come out of the forest. When there is danger they can hear without ears.’
Indeed. But amazingly this transcends even to plant life. Our guest lodge on Thula Thula is about two miles from our home in a grove of indigenous acacias and hardwoods that have been there for centuries. Here in this ancient woodland, the acacia tree not only
