I fruitlessly tried to find justifications; anything to put off the inevitable but there was no way out. It was over and I knew it. He was completely out of control. In fact, in virtually any other reserve, he would have been put down immediately after killing the rhino never mind also flipping the Land Rover, and now it was a guest game-drive vehicle as well.
I took a slow lonely drive home and called a friend.
‘I need to borrow your .375,’ I asked, numbed by the words coming out of my mouth.
‘Sure, why?’ came the reply.
‘Nothing major, thanks. I’ll have it back by tomorrow.’
‘No problem.’ Then he paused, ‘Are you OK?’
‘I’m fine, I’ll see you later.’
I put the phone down, appalled at my decision but I knew in my heart we had reached the end of the road. If I left it any longer someone was going to die.
My .303 would probably suffice but the task was difficult enough as it was and I didn’t want to make any mistakes. I wanted maximum firepower so I drove into town, collected the rifle and eight rounds of 286 grain monolithic solid ammunition. Without telling anyone, I went out onto an adjacent property, marked a tree and fired three shots, sighting the rifle to make sure it was perfectly on target. An hour later I found my big boy grazing peacefully near the river.
At the sound of my car he looked up and came ambling over, pleased to see me as always. Feeling absolutely treacherous, I got out, readied the rifle on the open door and took aim, his familiar features looking completely out of place in the telescopic sight. As he arrived I was still standing there, wracked by emotion, unable to pull the trigger … tears flowing freely.
I couldn’t do it. I stuffed the rifle in the car as he stood by, warmly radiating greetings in that special way he had. I gathered myself and said goodbye to him for the last time, telling him we would see each other again one day. A few moments later I drove off leaving him standing there, palpably bewildered by my hasty departure.
The next morning two sharpshooters I had earlier phoned arrived. I watched as they sighted their rifles on a target in a riverbed. This is absolutely essential when hunting dangerousgame – you have to ensure your rifle is absolutely on target. These were retired professional hunters, now conservationists who knew exactly what they were doing.
‘So you’re not coming with us?’ asked one of them, an old friend of mine. ‘You sure you don’t want to do this yourself?’
‘I tried. I know him too well.’ My voice was dead.
‘Yeah, I heard about that. It’s amazing, what happened.’
‘He’s now completely lost the plot,’ I said, not wanting to go into the details.
‘I understand,’ he said, giving me a brief pat on the shoulder.
An hour later I was standing outside on the lawn looking over the reserve that I loved so much when I heard two distant shots. As the finality of it came crashing home I was seized by a terrible loneliness, both for my beautiful boy and for myself. After nine years of friendship I had failed. He had gone to join his mother whose violent death just before he came to Thula Thula he never really recovered from.
I forced myself to go to where Mnumzane’s immense body was lying, the hunters nearby. I was pleased he hadn’t fallen badly, lying on his side as if asleep.
‘It was painless. He was dead before he hit the ground,’ said Peter. ‘But we had a bit of a fright at the last moment as he suddenly came at us and it was touch and go. There’s something wrong with that elephant. You made the right decision.’
I looked at the magnificent body, the ground and sky still pulsing with his presence.
‘Goodbye, great one,’ I said and got back into the Landy and went to call the herd, to bring them, to let them see what I had done.
What I had had to do.
chapter forty-one
‘These things always seem to happen in threes,’ I thought mournfully a couple of days later, pondering over the deaths of baby Thula, Max and now Mnumzane in the space of little over a year. The bush, though, is a great place to regain perspective and I was comforted by the belief that although they were gone physically, they would always be part of this eternal piece of Africa. Their bones would always be in this soil.
With the exception of elephants and crocodiles which can live a man’s three score years and ten, animals generally do not live long. In the wild, everything is continuously regenerated. Lions only live about fifteen years, as do impala, nyala and kudu. Zebra and wildebeest can reach twenty and giraffe a little more. Many smaller animals and birds live very short lives indeed; insects sometimes only weeks.
Each spring the bush comes alive with pulsating new life as Thula Thula morphs into a giant nursery, tended by thousands of caring mothers of all shapes and sizes, all bringing a new generation into the world. And they need to, for regardless of its vitality, wildlife succumbs rapidly. Despite its infinite beauty, the wilderness is a hostile environment and only the fittest, wisest and luckiest reach old age. Death is an integral part of life. This is the dominant bush reality and I like it that way. It’s natural, uncluttered by materialism or artificial ethics and it helps me to maintain awholesome perspective of my own existence and that of my friends and family.
I was sitting on a termite mound near a grove of acacias, still deep in thought when a Land Rover
