It’s difficult, if not impossible, to sex a crocodile from a distance but I took him for a male, an old one from the dark colouring on his back. And judging by his hunting technique,he certainly was a cunning old fellow. He was a new arrival on the reserve and must have come down the river, perhaps during the recent floods, and walked the two miles to claim Gwala Gwala dam for his home. As such he had joined the extended Thula Thula family and was now entitled to protection and to be left alone to live out his natural life. There were plenty of barbel in the dam to support him between the occasional bigger meals – though hopefully not Max or me. He would be happy here.
chapter thirty-three
‘Boss! Boss come in, come in!’
It was David on the two-way radio.
‘Standing by. What’s up?’
‘There’s a big mistake here,’ said David, using the word ‘mistake’ in the Zulu context to mean a major problem. ‘I’m up from the Kudu River crossing. You better get here quickly.’
‘Why?’
He paused.
‘We have another dead rhino.’
‘Shit! What the hell happened?’
‘Rather come and see for yourself. You’re not going to like this at all.’
Puzzled, I picked up my .303 half expecting an encounter with poachers – as had happened after our first dead rhino – and ran for the Land Rover with Max at my heels. What was it that David wouldn’t tell me over the radio?
The crossing was about twenty minutes away and driving along my focus was snapped by Mnumzane loping off across the veldt to the left of me. Despite my haste I stopped. Something was wrong; I could sense it from where I was sitting.
I called out, but instead of coming to me he lifted his head, spread his ears and deliberately moved off. Every new elephant reaction intrigues me and normally I would havetrailed him to find out what was going on, but David was sitting on a crisis.
Ten minutes later I reached David. He was squatting on his haunches in the shade of a young umbrella thorn tree, staring sombrely at the ground. I pulled up next to him and got out.
‘What happened?’ I asked, looking around. ‘Where’s the rhino?’
He stood up slowly. Then without a word he led the way down an old game path and into a clearing. In the middle lay the gray carcass. It was a female. From the look of it, her death was recent.
Her horns were still intact. That surprised me, for I had expected them to be butchered off, the first thing poachers do. I walked up to the immense motionless body, automatically looking for bullet wounds. There were none.
I then scrutinized the corpse for signs of disease or other causes of death, while David stood by silently. Except for some nasty fresh gashes on her armour-plated hide, she had been strong and healthy. In fact, even in death she was so imposing that I half expected her to suddenly rise up.
I was so transfixed by the grim scenario that I hadn’t taken in my wider surroundings, and as I looked up I was shocked. A tornado could not have done more damage. Bushes were crushed and trees lay sprawled and splintered all over the place. The earth itself had been gouged up, as if a bulldozer had lost its driver and careered around recklessly flattening everything. Nothing made sense; no rhino could cause such havoc. What the hell was going on?
I instinctively looked to the ground for answers. Rhino spoor was everywhere, heavy and mobile in its tread, yet unnatural in its twisting and turning patterns. Then elephant tracks jumped out at me; big heavy pachyderm spoor, the aggressive earth-wrenching footprints of an enraged bull in full cry.
Mnumzane!
I tried to suppress the dawning realization, hoping against hope I was wrong.
‘He killed her, boss.’ David’s words whispered into my thoughts. ‘She put up a helluva fight but she was no match for him – never could be.’
I nodded, not wanting to believe it. But the tracks told the story as clearly as if they were on celluloid.
‘I once saw an elephant kill a black rhino at a waterhole in Namibia,’ David continued, almost as if speaking to himself. ‘He hammered the rhino so hard it shot back thirty feet and went down and died right there, its ribs smashed in, collapsed over the heart. And then the elephant put his front foot on the body and stood over it rolling it over back and forth as if it was a plaything. The power was just unbelievable.’
He stared at the corpse in front of us. ‘I know she is a white, and nearly twice the size of a black rhino. But still, she stood no chance.’
A slight flicker in the bush to my left caught my eye. Max had also seen it and following his gaze through the foliage I caught sight of a camouflaged rhino calf silently watching from a nearby thicket. It was Heidi, the dead animal’s two-year-old daughter. A rhino will fight to the death under most circumstances – but with a youngster, that’s an absolute given.
‘What a mess up!’ I fumed, my words echoing harshly through the bush. ‘What the hell did he do that for? The bloody idiot!’
‘We … we’re not going to shoot him, are we?’ said David and for the first time I realized why he had been so downcast.
Shoot Mnumzane? The words shocked me rigid.
In most South African reserves, aggressive young male elephants, orphaned by earlier culls and reared without sagesupervision of adult bulls, have gratuitously killed rhino before. And when they did, retribution by reserve owners was swift and harsh. Rhinos in South Africa are rare and very expensive. Elephants, on the other hand, are more plentiful and comparatively cheap. Past records indicated that elephants which killed rhino before would do so again. Thus to protect valuable rhino,
