‘Go, go, go!’ I whispered into the radio. ‘I can’t see you so neither can she. Let me know as soon as you’ve done it.’
I continued talking to Nandi, calming her with my voice, keeping her distracted, and then for what it was worth I told her what we were doing. ‘Unless I take your baby, she’s going to die. You know that and I know that. So when you get back she won’t be there, but if we save her, I will bring her back to you. That I promise.’
I have no idea if she understood anything, but intonation and intention can communicate far more than mere words. At least I felt better that I had told her what we were doing.
A few minutes later, a breathless call came through. ‘We’ve got her. She’s alive – just – we’re moving off.’
‘Great! Well done, get her up to the house. I’m going to stay with Nandi for a while.’
Nandi drank every drop of water and then tucked into the alfalfa. When she finished, she looked at me in acknowledgement and walked back to where she had left the baby. I reversed, following her and watched as she started nosing the ground. With her superb sense of smell she would have immediately caught the scent of the rangers. After sniffing around for a few long minutes, she stopped for a while and turned and slowly moved off in the direction of the herd.
I know that if she had smelt hyena or jackal there was no way she would have reacted so calmly or left the scene so quickly. She would have followed the scent with a vengeance, never letting up.
I waited until she was out of sight and radioed the rangers. ‘How’s it going?’
‘She’s still alive. She’s on the lawn and we’ve been spraying water to cool her down. The vet is putting in the drip now.’
‘I’ll be there shortly. Well done, guys.’
My hands were still shaking. I couldn’t believe we had done it. Thanks to my intrepid rangers, we had taken a baby elephant from her mother.
Now all we had to do was save its life.
chapter thirty-six
When I arrived back at the house the baby was lying motionless in the shade on the grass and the vet was connecting the second drip sachet into a bulging vein behind her ear.
‘She’s barely alive and very dehydrated,’ he said. ‘The next few hours will tell if she makes it.’
I walked off and made a few phone calls querying what milk substitute a wild orphaned baby elephant would take. We needed the exact mixture, and having got the formula from Daphne Sheldrick’s famous animal orphanage in Kenya I sent a ranger into town to buy the ingredients as well as some jumbo-sized bottles and the largest teats on the market.
While I did that, Françoise started converting the spare bedroom, right next to ours, into an elephant nursery, scattering straw in bales on the floor and putting down a firm mattress for her to sleep on.
‘She’ll be comfortable here,’ she said with more confidence than I felt. ‘We will name her Thula.’
I nodded. It was a good name.
I went back to the baby and inspected her front feet crumpled in on themselves.
‘She’s huge,’ said the vet. ‘In fact, too big. That’s why her feet were squashed back, folded over in the womb. She was simply too big for the womb and her feet had nowherefurther to grow. But the bones aren’t broken and the muscles are intact and loose enough to manipulate into the correct position. Hopefully they’ll straighten out with some exercise. ’
He walked around her. ‘Her ears are also worrying me a touch. They’ve been burned raw by the sun and sand and she may lose the fringes. I’ll prescribe some ointment.’
Just then Thula lifted her head quite strongly. A drip is a wonderful thing with wildlife. Sometimes it works so powerfully it’s like watching a resurrection and so it was with Thula who was suddenly springing back from the dead.
‘She’s certainly feeling better,’ said the vet. ‘Let’s move her to her room and hopefully she’ll get some sleep. When she wakes, give her a bottle.’
Holding the drip we carried her to her new room. She instantly fell asleep on the mattress.
‘I’ll tell you what is amazing,’ said Johnny, coming over to Françoise and me. ‘It only took two of us to lift her on to the pickup. We were so scared of the mother coming back that we loaded her in seconds. But when we got back here she was so heavy we couldn’t get her off the truck at all. It eventually took four of us. That’s adrenalin for you.’
Johnny our new ranger stayed with her and would do so around the clock until she was healed. Orphaned elephant babies need the constant companionship of a surrogate mother otherwise they rapidly decline, both physically and emotionally. Johnny, who had only joined us a few months back, was going to be just that – a chore he accepted with relish.
The next morning Thula took her first giant-sized bottle from him and drank the lot.
The following day she was much stronger so Johnny fashioned a canvas sling and hung it from the towering marula tree on the lawn. We gently carried Thula out and she protested vigorously as we slipped the sling under herstomach, lifting her up while Johnny eased her deformed limbs forward. We then lowered her with her feet in the correct position.
Our plan was simple: we had to strengthen her front feet or else she would die. And there she stood, wobbling like a wino at first, but gradually gaining some balance.
