Safari Stories III: Invasion of the Pachyderms

For the start of our safari adventure, click here. The second installment is here. Links to all our pictures are here.

There were no fences around the private lodge where we stayed during our little adventure to the bush. Urban-dwelling South Africans seem to have a love affair with fences, but the rural ones... not so much.

This had a few unexpected repercusions. When we went to our fancy little personal lodge/hotel room at night, we sometimes got an escort from a ranger.

A ranger who walked jauntily alongside us with a rifle slung over his shoulder. Just in case.

And the lack of fences meant there were always little monkeys around in the trees, and warthogs strolling through the grounds, and antelope-y creatures eating the grass.

And it meant that when we got up one morning, they told us that a leopard had been spotted on the lawn in front of the reservations hut.

And elephants came by and munched on the trees one afternoon.

The elephants were a bit of a nuisance that day, actually. They snacked for a long while on what must have been a particularly yummy tree right outside the door to my brother's room. He was trapped inside for an hour or so while the rest of us sat on the deck chairs by the pool, ordered beers from Henri the omnipresent bartender, and snapped away with our cameras.

Have you ever gotten to the point where you were tired of looking at massive mammals in the wild? I didn't think such a point existed. But after staring at these guys for an hour or so, we eventually grew somewhat complacent to the fact that they were so close. And that was when Henri strolled down the hill and clapped and waved at them a bit so they would run off into the bush.

Henri wasn't a really big or intimidating guy. I don't know why the elephants listened to him. The last picture in this series is of him during the big showdown.

The manager and head ranger, John, actually spoke about the elephants as if they were a bit of an annoyance sometimes, the way people on Fire Island talk about the deer. The last morning, as we were leaving for our final game drive, we made a stop right outside the lodge grounds so that Richard, our tracker, could chase off another elephant that was exasperating John. This one was a gigantic bull elephant.

Poor Richard. Read this post for another tale involving Richard getting closer to an elephant than is strictly advised. Both stories of Richard being out there on the line for our sake bring back a great quote from an underappreciated Ivan Reitman movie called Evolution. The quote, uttered by Orlando Jones, was: "I've seen this movie. The black dude dies first."

Anyway, Richard dutifully hopped out and did a sort of circuitous approach toward the elephant, while John backed us all up in the safari truck to a safe(r) distance. Richard starts clapping, and the elephant backs away a little bit from the tree he'd been eating. But he doesn't want to give up his breakfast foliage just yet. So Richard picks up a fist-sized rock and bowls it toward him. The elephant doesn't like this. Richard does it again. The elephant hops back a bit--as much as an elephant can hop--while the rock skips toward him, and when it stops right near him, he takes an authoritative step forward and picks up the rock with his trunk. Then he sort of lobs it part of the way back to Richard.

They actually played this game a couple more times--once the elephant threw it to the side instead--while we sat in the truck and watched. My brother called it "bowling for elephant" and we tried to imagine a scoring system that might involve bonus points for rolling it between his legs. But then the elephant made a sort of false charge toward Richard. This set him running for a moment. But that was the last of it. When Richard clapped at him one more time, he turned and left his prized tree behind.