The Zulus who live close to the land have a saying that if it rains on an inaugural occasion, that event will be blessed. For those in step with the natural world, rain is life. That day it didn’t just rain, it bucketed. The bruised skies sprayed down torrents and I wasn’t too sure the Zulus had this ‘blessed’ story right. When the articulated truck arrived outside Thula Thula in thick darkness the deluge had turned the dirt tracks into streams of mud.
Barely had we opened the gates to the reserve when a tyre burst, the reinforced rubber cracking loud as a rifle shot. This panicked the elephants, who had just seen their leader gunned down and they started thumping the inside of the trailer like it was a gigantic drum, while the crews worked feverishly to change the wheel.
‘This is Jurassic Park!’ Françoise cried. We laughed, not necessarily in mirth.
Françoise and I first met some years back in London at the Cumberland Hotel. It was minus 17 degrees Celsius and I urgently needed to get to Earls Court for a meeting. There was a long queue snaking up to the taxi rank outside the hotel and the doorman, who knew I was in a hurry, said he would see if anyone would share a cab. As it happened, agorgeous woman right at the front was also going to Earls Court. The doorman asked if she would mind sharing and pointed at me. She leaned forward to get a better look, and then shook her head. It was the most emphatic ‘No’ I had seen.
Well, that’s life. Rather than hang around I decided to take the Underground and as I strode off, to my surprise, the same woman miraculously appeared next to me at the Tube station.
‘’Ello,’ she said in a thick French accent, ‘I am Françoise.’
She said she felt guilty about not agreeing to share a cab and to make amends offered to show me which train to take. To say I was smitten would be putting it blandly.
She knew London well and asked if I was interested in jazz. I wasn’t, but I also wasn’t stupid enough to say so. In fact, I professed undying love for the genre. Thank the stars she didn’t ask for proof – such as my favourite musician – and instead suggested that as jazz lovers we go to Ronnie Scott’s Jazz Club that night. I pondered this for a fraction of a nanosecond before answering ‘Yes’ with more enthusiasm than absolutely necessary.
Apart from wondering why I had never appreciated the bewitchment of jazz before, I spent much of that evening telling her of the magic of Africa – not hard in the middle of an English winter. Was there plenty of sun in Africa, she asked? I scoffed … was there sun? We invented the word.
Well, here we were twelve years later drenched to the marrow in the bush, wrestling with a gigantic wheel on a muddy rig loaded with elephants. I don’t recall mentioning this could happen while piling on the charm during our first date.
The spare wheel had scarcely been bolted on when to the surprise of no one the truck slid just a few yards before it sank into the glutinous mud, its tyres spinning impotently and spewing muck all over the place. No amount of cajoling,swearing, kicking or packing branches underneath worked. And even worse, the elephants were becoming more and more agitated.
‘We’ve got to sort this out quickly or we’re going to have to release them right here,’ said Kobus, his brow creased with worry. ‘They cannot stay in the truck any longer. Let’s just pray like hell the outer fence holds them.’
We both knew that with this hair-trigger herd, it wouldn’t happen. We also both knew that if the elephants escaped they would be shot.
Fortunately the driver, sick of all the pontificating, took matters into his own hands. Without a word he slammed the truck into reverse, and somehow skidded the huge rig out of the bog and veered off the greasy road into the savannah that had marginally more grip. Dodging tyreshredding thornbush and slithering past huge termite mounds he somehow kept momentum until he reached the boma.
The crew cheered as though he had scored a touchdown at the Superbowl.
Coaxing the animals from the truck was the next problem. Due to their massive size, elephants are the only animals that can’t jump at all, and so we had dug a trench for the semi to reverse into so the trailer’s floor would be level with the ground.
However, the trench was now a soggy pit brimming with brown-frothed rainwater. If we backed into it, we would have a major problem extracting the vehicle. Mud is like ice; what it seizes it keeps. But with a herd of highly disturbed elephants inside, it was a risk we had to take.
Disaster! Not because the truck got stuck – instead, the trench was too deep and the trailer’s sliding door jammed into the ground. To compound matters it was 2 a.m., dark as obsidian and the rain was still sluicing down thick as surf. I put out an emergency wake-up call to everyone onthe reserve and armed with shovels we slithered around in the sludge hacking a groove for the door. I was surprised that my staff didn’t mutiny.
Finally the big moment arrived and we all stood well back, ready for the animals to be released into their new home.
However, as it had been an extremely stressful few hours, Kobus decided first to inject the herd with a mild sedative, using a pole-sized syringe. He climbed onto the roof of the trailer, which had a large ventilation gap, and David jumped up to give him a hand.
As David landed on the roof a trunk
