The yell shook me rigid. What was he on about? The elephants were gone. I strained my eyes searching the headlight-illuminated track in front, unable to see anything.
‘Elephant!’ he shouted again, pointing to his side window.
It was Mnumzane, barely three yards away in the dark. Prompted by the loud noise he stepped forward and lowered his massive head right onto the window as if to see what all the shouting was about and with instant dread I saw his eyes. They were stone cold and there was malevolence in the air.
Mnumzane then prodded the window with his trunk, testing its resilience. Realizing that at any second he wasgoing to shatter through and in the process crush my passenger, I slammed the vehicle into reverse while desperately pleading with the two men to calm down. All I managed to do by reversing was to skid Mnumzane’s tusk across the glass, snagging it at the edge of the door with a jarring bang. He lifted his head and trumpeted in rage. With that I knew we were now in grave danger. As far as Mnumzane was concerned, the car had ‘attacked’ him. In retaliation, he swung in front of us and hammered the bull bar so hard my head smacked the windscreen as we shot forward like crash-test dummies. Then he put his huge head on the bull bar and violently bulldozed us back twenty yards into the bush only stopping when the rear wheels jammed against a fallen tree.
I opened my window and screamed at him, but it was tantamount to yelling at a tornado in the dark. I watched in horror as he backed off sideways to give himself space to build up speed then lost sight of him as he moved out of the headlights. At least the guests had stopped yelling. All three of us were now deathly silent.
There was only one way out. As he set himself up for the charge I revved until the engine was screaming and dropped the clutch, trying to wrench the Landy out of his way. Too late. He came at us out of nowhere in an enraged charge. The shock of the colossal impact jarred my teeth as he smashed his tusks into the side of the Landy just behind the back door and then heaved us up and over.
Ka-bang! The Landy smashed down, landed on its side, then flipped over onto its roof and into a thicket as he drove on with his relentless attack. Another almighty charge flipped us back onto our side.
My shoulder was lying on the grass through the broken side window and the guest in the passenger seat was practically on top of me. My head hurt terribly from the strike on the windscreen as I tried to gather my senses. I wasn’tinjured but my biggest concern was that this wasn’t over. In fact, our ordeal was in its infancy. Bull elephants have a terrifying reputation of finishing off what they start. To confirm this, just inches away Mnumzane stomped around the upturned vehicle in a rage.
I had to snap him out of his red mist and amid all the confusion I somehow remembered that elephants that have been exposed to gunfire sometimes freeze when they hear shots. I also knew that it could go the other way, that the gunfire could prompt a final lethal attack, but I had no choice.
Twisting around, I drew Françoise’s tiny .635 pistol from my pocket just as the Landy shuddered with another titanic blow. I pointed at the sky through the broken windscreen and fired … again and again and again. I fought the compulsion to fire all eight shots in the magazine. My last-ditch plan was that if he got to us I would shoot the final four slugs into his foot and hope like hell it hurt enough to divert his attention and we could somehow get out and run for our lives.
To my eternal relief he froze. It had worked. As he hesitated I called out to him but I was trembling so much my voice was way off-key. I gulped lungful after lungful of oxygen until everything steadied and tried speaking again. As my voice calmed, he recognized me and his ears dropped; the anger visibly melting from his body.
I then told him it was OK, that it was me, and he had frightened the hell out of me – that he didn’t need to be angry any more. Thankfully he recognized my voice and slowly came right up to where I lay on my side in the cab. His feet, practically the size of dustbin lids, were literally inches from my head. All he had to do was lift his foot onto the flimsy cab and that would be it. I aimed my puny gun at his foot and then watched entranced as he pulled out shards of the shattered windscreen, then gently reached in and puthis trunk onto my shoulder and head, touching me, smelling me all over. All the while I talked to him, telling him we were in terrible danger and that he must be careful.
He could not have been more gentle. Eventually he walked off and started browsing on a nearby tree as if nothing had happened.
‘The radio, the radio!’ whispered one of the guests. ‘Call for help!’
I reached for the mouthpiece only to find that the radio had been smashed off its hinges. In the darkness I found it and fumblingly reconnected the wires and got it going, whispering a Code Red, describing where we were and what had happened, and then turned the volume right down. I didn’t want any loud responses to unsettle our precarious situation with Mnumzane.
Françoise took the call and relayed the bush version of a Mayday to get to us fast. Luckily there were rangers on a night-time-viewing safari close by who had heard the shots and they were with us in minutes. But whenever they approached, Mnumzane started
