Thankfully all went smoothly after this and as soon as the injections had been administered and they had calmed down the door slid open and the new matriarch emerged. With headlights throwing huge shadows on the trees behind, she tentatively stepped onto Thula Thula soil, the first wild elephant in the area for almost a century.
The six others followed: the new matriarch’s baby bull, three females – of which one was an adult – and an eleven-year-old bull. The last out was the fifteen-year-old, three-and-a-half-ton, teenage son of the previous matriarch. He walked a few yards and even in his groggy state realized there were humans behind. He swivelled his head and stared at us, then flared his ears and with a high-pitched trumpet of rage turned and charged, pulling up just short of slamming into the fence in front of us. He instinctively knew, even at his tender age, that he must protect the herd.I smiled with absolute admiration. His mother and baby sister had been shot before his eyes; he had been darted and confined in a trailer for eighteen hours; and here he was, just a teenager, defending his family. David immediately named him ‘Mnumzane’ (pronounced nom-zahn) which in Zulu means ‘Sir’.
The new matriarch we christened ‘Nana’, which is what all Anthony grandchildren call my mum Regina Anthony, a respected matriarch in her own right.
The second female in command, the most feisty, we called ‘Frankie’ after Françoise. For equally obvious reasons. The other names would come later.
Nana gathered her clan, loped up to the fence and stretched out her trunk, touching the electric wires. The 8,000-volt wires sent a jolt shuddering through her hulk. Whoa … she hurriedly backed off. Then, with her family in tow she strode the entire perimeter of the boma, her trunk curled fractionally below the wire to sense the current’s pulse, checking for the weakest link as she must have seen her sister, the previous matriarch, do so often before.
I watched, barely breathing. She completed the check and smelling the waterhole, led her herd off to drink.
The crucial aspect of an electrified boma is fine-tuning how long you keep the animals inside. Too short, and they don’t learn enough to respect the mega-volt punch the fence packs. But if it’s too long, they somehow figure out that it’s possible to endure the convulsions for the few agonizing seconds it takes to snap the strand – like the previous matriarch did. Once that happens they will never fear electricity again.
Unfortunately no one knows exactly what that ‘perfect period’ is. Opinions vary from a few days for more docile elephants to three months for wilder ones. My new herd was anything but docile, so how long I should pen them was anybody’s guess. However, what the experts had toldme was that during the quarantine period the animals should have no contact with humans. So once the gates were bolted I instructed everyone to move off except for two game guards who would watch from a distance.
As we were leaving I noticed the elephants lining up at a corner of the fence. They were facing due north, the exact direction of their former home, as if their inner compasses were telling them something.
It looked ominous.
Soaked and freezing with my personal magnetic needle pointing unwaveringly towards a warm bed, I left with a deep sense of foreboding.
chapter four
Hammering echoed like a drum roll in my head. I wondered hazily where it was coming from.
My eyes flickered open. It was no dream. The banging stemmed from a shuddering door. Rat-a-tat. Rat-a-tat-a-tat.
Then I heard yelling. It was Ndonga. ‘The elephants have gone! They’ve broken out the boma! They’ve gone!’
I leapt out of bed, yanking on my trousers and stumbling like a pogo-dancer on one leg. Françoise, also awake and wide-eyed at the commotion, threw a nightgown over her shoulders.
‘I’m coming. Hang on!’ I shouted and shoved open the top half of the bedroom’s stable door that led directly to the farmhouse’s lush gardens.
An agitated Ndonga was standing outside, shivering in the pre-dawn chill.
‘The two big ones started shoving a tree,’ he said. ‘They worked as a team, pushing it until it just crashed down on the fence. The wires shorted and the elephants smashed through. Just like that.’
Dread slithered in my belly. ‘What tree?’
‘You know, that moersa tambotie. The one that KZN Wildlife oke said was too big to pull down.’
It took me a few moments to digest this. That tree must have weighed several tons and was thirty feet tall. Yet Nana and Frankie had figured out that by working in tandem theycould topple it. Despite my dismay, I felt a flicker of pride; these were some animals, all right.
The last foggy vestiges of sleep vaporized like steam. We had to get moving fast. One didn’t have to be a genius to grasp that we had a massive crisis on our hands as the herd was now stampeding towards the border fence. If they broke through that last barrier they would head straight into the patchwork of rural homesteads scattered outside Thula Thula. And as any game ranger will attest, a herd of wild elephants on the run in a populated area would be the conservation equivalent of the Chernobyl disaster.
I cursed long and hard, only stopping when I caught Françoise’s disapproving glance. I had believed the electric boma was escape-proof. The experts had told me exactly that, and it never occurred to me that they might be wrong.
David’s bedroom was across the lawn and I ran over. ‘Get everyone up. The elephants have broken
