Safari Stories

Imagine this: a herd of mother elephants and their clumsy kids is picking their way through the scrub, munching and playing and munching some more, and you're there parked right in the middle of them...



...You're sitting in an open-top four-wheel drive Range Rover. There are nine or ten other people there, including the ranger and the tracker.

The elephants just go on about their business, munching and strolling and munching, until they are literally eating a bush that is within inches of where you are sitting. And the elephant--a wild animal, not some semi-tame creature at the circus or the zoo--is just flat out ignoring you while you alternate between staring in awe and snapping away furiously with your camera.

It was repeated experiences just like those that led me to the conclusion that the people who run the game lodges around South Africa's Kruger National Park have to be using some sort of ancient dark magic.

I mean, there's no other explanation for how they are able to get so close to the wildest of the creatures in the animal kingdom so often, and have then look straight through you without ever seeming to notice.

Nearly all the animals--the lions, the buffalo, the zebras, the giraffes, the antelope--pretty much ignored us entirely, or treated us as a mild annoyance. Apparently, the animals see the vehicle as one big entity, without picking out the people inside. They're used to the Range Rover and know it poses no threat, so as we sat on the benches of this thing without doors or windows, we were at times just a few feet away from lions on the hunt, leopards devouring their dinner and elephants wrestling in a water hole.

The very first day that my parents, my brother, Katie and I got there, we were out on a game drive within an hour of arriving at our lodge. Katie and I pretty much dropped our bags, washed our faces and slapped on our herbal insect repellent we'd gotten from a South African doctor, and hopped in the Ranger Rover. Almost immediately, we saw a male and female lion napping on an open savannah. We looked at them for awhile while our guide told us about the male, who was trying to lay claim to the female's pride while already being the dominant male of another pride in another part of the game park. Then we drove off to see some other stuff, and when we came back to look at them again right after sunset, they were still napping away. Our ranger said something like: "They look like they're out cold, but just the slightest thing can snap them awake in a second."

And on cue, the male lion sits straight up and starts blinking. We've got a spotlight on him, but he acts like he can't even see us, which is a very fortunate thing, because we were probably 10 yards away. He looks around, and suddenly lets out a deafening roar at nothing in particular. It was so loud, the sound of it rattled in our chests. We could feel it reverberating even as he let out another roar, and then another, and then another....

And then he quiets down, blinks some more, and yawns. Without any further pretense, this massive animal gets up and strolls off into the night right past the Range Rover--close enough that we can see his muscles on his haunches--without ever glancing our way. We were left there with our hearts thumping, watching his tail as it swished back and forth just before he disappeared.

This was our first game drive. We had five more after that.

There were just a few times when the animals seemed to realize that we were of interest. The one that made me hold my breath happened the next morning.

We had all slapped on the mosquito spray again and piled into the Range Rover at 5:30 am and set off in a different direction from the night before. This time, we found a herd of elephants eating their way through the scrub. One young-ish elephant, who was about 10 feet tall, strolled right in front of the truck.

Then he stopped, and seemed to look at us again.

This was bad news for the tracker, who is a staff member from the game lodge who accompanied us on ever game drive. In addition to a ranger, each truck has one of these trackers who sits on a seat that's bolted to the hood of the car, right at the front. He literally rides above the front bumper and looks for evidence of where to find our next sighting.

So this young elephant turned, and looked at him. This was no longer the case of an elephant giving a casual glance to a big four-by-four. Now he was looking at the khaki-clad guy sitting in the bumper. The poor guy--Richard was his name--sat with his elbow propped on his knee, and his fist holding up his chin, while the elephant stood and studied him from no more than two feet away.

And all of us, of course, are sitting no more than a few feet further away than Richard is. We'd already seen enough demolished trees to know that this elephant, if he wanted, could lift any of us out of the Range Rover with his trunk. And we are entirely in the hands of our ranger, John, who is behind the wheel of the Ranger Rover and seems to fancy himself as some sort of elephant whisperer, and our tracker, Richard, who is rather compromised at the moment.

It got tenser. The elephant lifted up his trunk to within inches of where Richard was sitting.

It seemed like he was sniffing around, trying to figure out if this big metal lump he'd probably seen every day of his life was actually worth a closer look.

Richard, to his credit, seemed entirely unperturbed by this turn of events. He continued to sit there, with his chin on his fist, as the elephant held the end of his trunk right near his face.

The rest of us were somewhat less sanguine about this development. We all gasped, and then held our collective breath.

But then the moment was past, and he put his trunk down, sauntered off a bit, and began eating a little tree right next to us.

The ranger and the tracker said they'd never seen anything like that before. The ranger, John, said that the elephant might have smelled something new.

Katie and I blamed our herbal insect repellent, or "hippie bug spray," as we called it.

For every game drive after that, we slapped on twice as much.

See the post directly below this one for links to our photo albums. I'll have more stories from our later game drives in the coming days--and the tale of how Katie faced down a speeding snake--so be sure to check back. After that, we'll get back to our regularly scheduled programming, including some stories from the Daily Voice and a harrowing epic involving my brother and the dreaded N2 highway.