Читать книгу The Last Giants - Levison Wood - Страница 10
ОглавлениеA Brief History of the African Elephant
The path was littered with dead branches and twigs, and the skeletal spines of acacia scrub poked into our sides like needles. Every step forward had to be done with the utmost care not to make a sound, and we crept forward like hunters sneaking towards their prey. Kane, my local bushman guide, led the way, his rusty old spear pointing forward in the direction of our quarry. I watched as he delicately tiptoed over the litter of foliage as quiet as a mouse. I tried my best to follow in his footsteps, but his stride, though silent, was fast and deliberate.
‘Keep up, and be quiet,’ he halted briefly and whispered, staring intently into my eyes with a passion I hadn’t seen before. ‘One noise, one false move and they’ll trample you to pieces.’
I nodded without a peep and looked around. I couldn’t see anything except the surrounding trees. We were in the middle of a dense thicket of palms and thorny undergrowth, trying our best to get towards a cluster of baobab trees where the herd were browsing.
‘This way, shhh,’ whispered Kane. He held his hand up motioning for me to move. But I was half-balanced on one leg, and before I could take another step, I stumbled and put a foot straight down on a twig that snapped with a clear, crisp crack.
Kane whipped his head around and grimaced. ‘Shhhh!’ putting a finger to his lips and screwing up his face, which made him look like an angry warthog.
I pursed my lips and shrugged. I couldn’t even see where the herd was.
‘Let’s get closer,’ he said. ‘But be quiet.’
Closer we got, padding forward until I could hear the rustle of bushes up ahead. ‘There!’
Kane pointed into a small clearing at the base of the fat baobab tree. A huge bull elephant was ripping a branch to shreds with his trunk and feeding the mulch into his mouth. There was another crunch to my right and I looked over. Not twenty feet away was another bull, even bigger that the first, except this one wasn’t eating. He had his trunk waving around in the air pointing in our direction.
‘We call him a sniffer dog,’ said Gareth, who’d been trailing behind me. Gareth was a professional hunter and was keeping watch to the rear, gripping with both hands the bolt-action rifle that was loaded with high-calibre ammunition. ‘He sniffs out the air for danger while the rest of the boys eat.’
‘Has he seen us?’
‘They have bad eyes,’ interrupted Kane, ‘but he knows we’re here for sure.’
‘Come on, see that fallen tree up ahead, let’s get there.’
We darted forward, as quickly as we could without breaking into a run, me following Kane, with Gareth behind. Never run, never run, never run. It had been drilled into me by Gareth before we set off. An elephant can run at twenty-five miles an hour, far outpacing any human.
‘Duck there,’ said Kane. ‘If he charges, we’ll be safe if you bury yourself under the log.’ I did as I was told, crouching down by the log. I didn’t fancy my chances, though; if the bull came at us, the tusks on the elephant could surely rip it apart in no time.
‘Don’t worry,’ said Gareth. ‘I’ll tell you if we need to run.’
‘But you said never run,’ I protested.
He shrugged. ‘Look, when I say never, I mean sometimes you don’t really have a choice. Usually an elephant will do only a mock charge, unless he’s really pissed off. Or if he’s been shot at, of course. Then he means business, especially if he sees my rifle.’
I thought back to my own close shaves, such as the time in Malawi when I’d been charged by a massive female elephant on the Shire river and my local guide had needed to fire a warning shot towards the rampaging beast. Then there was the time in Uganda, when a whole herd of elephants wandered straight through my camp at night, almost squashing me in my tent.
I remembered the story of a fellow paratrooper, who’d been gored by an elephant in the wilds of Kenya – ripping his arm in two – and how, a couple of months before I set off to Botswana, another soldier in the British army had been killed by an elephant whilst on an anti-poaching patrol. There was no doubting that elephants are dangerous wild animals, whose relationship with humans is, at best, turbulent.
So what on earth was I doing, travelling on foot through some of the most dangerous terrain in Africa, trying to research more about them?
It was a good question, and there’d been plenty of times when I’d been photographing them that I’d been forced to question my own sanity, but I always calmed myself with the thought that, in spite of their massive size and potential for causing damage, they were also highly intelligent, gentle beasts that were capable of great compassion, and needed to be understood.
We sat still, watching as more males arrived, grazing on the low-lying branches, seemingly unaware of our presence, apart from the ‘sniffer dog’, who never stopped wafting his trunk in our direction.
‘Right, I think it’s time to go,’ said Gareth, calmly. ‘There’s about ten of them, and if any more come we might find ourselves surrounded, and that would end badly.’
I agreed. We’d got very close, and I’d been lucky to get some great photographs and observe the herd up close and personal, but I didn’t want to push my luck.
As we tiptoed backwards, I noticed movement in the bushes right ahead. It was the ‘sniffer dog’ again, and he’d started to follow us; slowly at first, but he seemed determined not to lose us. Anyone not acquainted with elephant behaviour might have thought he was merely curious, but Gareth reminded me of the urgency.
‘Pick up the pace, Wood, get moving. He wants to let us know that he’s the boss.’
Kane led the way, jabbing his spear into the bushes to clear a way. ‘Faster, he’s coming.’
I turned around to see the young bull gaining on us.
‘Okay, move now!’ shouted Gareth, and this time there was no doubting the urgency in his voice. At the same time Gareth cocked his weapon and I shuddered at the familiar sound of metal clunking and hoped beyond anything that he wasn’t forced to use it. I picked up my pace and started to jog, checking over my shoulder every few paces.
Suddenly I heard the violent snort of the bull as he crashed through the thicket, at which point he couldn’t have been more than twenty feet away. There was a loud trumpet as the bull smashed against the side of a tree and the thud seemed to vibrate the earth.
Now he began to run properly, straight towards us.
‘Go, go, go!’ Kane pointed his spear towards the edge of the treeline, where a gnarled uprooted tree blocked the path. ‘Jump!’ he shouted, and with all my energy I launched myself over the natural barrier into the clearing beyond. Kane, who’d done the same, landed with a thump next to me, and meanwhile Gareth had the good sense to run around the side.
The rampaging bull skidded to a halt in front of us, violently shaking his head and screaming the most terrible noise, which seemed to split the atmosphere of the forest in two. He stamped his feet and waved his ears in a show of ferocious terror. Then with one final snort and whip of his trunk, he simply turned around and plodded away.
Gareth was still catching his breath, and I could feel my heart beating in my chest and the adrenaline searing through my gut. That was a close call.
Kane burst out laughing and shook his head. ‘Well, he was a show-off, wasn’t he?’
When we look at elephants, it is often through a photographer’s lens, or from the comfort of a safari vehicle, gazing at them through a pair of binoculars. It can sometimes feel voyeuristic and surreal. A caged human in an animal’s world, a sort of zoo reversed. Yet when I was walking in the footsteps of the herds, treading in the wake of their destruction, vulnerable and ever alert, nothing could have felt more natural.
There’s something exhilarating about being at the mercy of nature in its rawest form, of putting yourself into the mind of a wild animal. Perhaps it is some primal emotion taking us back to our prehistoric roots, when human and giants roamed together in constant communion, fear and understanding; back to a time of pure survival, when it was essential for us to know intimately the ways of the beasts.
Elephants have been around for far longer than human beings, and all throughout our own evolution and history we have been in their company on the plains and in the forests until very recently, all around the world. But before we go on to look at where these creatures came from, it’s important to think about why they are important, and how our relationship has intertwined.
You may have heard the parable of the elephant and the blind men. It tells a cautionary tale about six blind men who encountered this strange animal and decided they must learn what it was like by touching it. Each blind man felt a part of the elephant’s body, but only one part, such as its legs or ear or tusk. They then had to describe the beast to the audience based on their limited experience. Their descriptions of the elephant were, of course, wildly different from each other.
The first man, whose hand landed on the trunk, quite naturally remarked, ‘This being is like a thick snake.’ Another one, whose hand reached its ear, said it seemed like a kind of fan. As for the third person, whose hand was on its leg, he thought the elephant was a fat pillar, like a tree trunk. The blind man who placed his hand upon its side believed the animal was ‘a wall’. Another, who handled its tail, described it as a rope. The last one stroked its tusk, claiming that the elephant was hard, smooth and pointy, like a spear.
In some versions of the story, the blind commentators each suspect that the others are being dishonest and they come to blows. The moral of the parable is that humans have a tendency to claim absolute truth based on their own limited, subjective understanding and are prone to ignoring other people’s experiences, even though they may be equally true.
The nineteenth-century poet John Godfrey Saxe wrote:
It was six men of Indostan
To learning much inclined,
Who went to see the Elephant
(Though all of them were blind),
That each by observation
Might satisfy his mind
And so these men of Indostan
Disputed loud and long,
Each in his own opinion
Exceeding stiff and strong,
Though each was partly in the right
And all were in the wrong!
He concludes:
So oft in theologic wars,
The disputants, I ween,
Rail on in utter ignorance
Of what each other mean,
And prate about an Elephant
Not one of them has seen!
In the modern era of polarised politics, antagonistic populism and fake news, perhaps it’s worth taking a moment to learn something from the humble elephant.
When I was little, I was treated to my own particular version of the parable, when I used to visit my Grandad Curzon. The ‘elephant graveyard’ became my favourite childhood game. It was a particularly gruesome bit of child’s play that involved my grandfather blindfolding me and telling me the story of a blind explorer who got lost in the jungles of the Congo, sightless perhaps after having caught malaria or some other nasty tropical disease.
I would revel in excitement as he walked me hand in hand around the garden, and through the ‘jungle’ (rhododendron hedge), past the lethal acacia (rose bushes) and taking care not to wake up the sleeping hyena (the neighbour’s dog). When we passed through the caves of doom (the porch), I knew we were almost reaching the secret destination of our mission, because, despite my blindness, I could feel the warmth of the volcano (the hearth fire).
This was the infamous elephant graveyard, where all the African elephants go to die. It was here that I’d be put through a series of ordeals to test my manhood. I would hold out my hand and be guided by my grandfather to reach out and grasp an inanimate object and have to guess which part of the rotting elephant carcass it was. There were the bones (rack of lamb), the eyeballs (a squishy tomato), the guts (long party balloons), brains (a wet sponge), teeth (his false teeth), and of course, the tusks, in the form of a sharpened cucumber.
If I guessed correctly, then I was able to navigate my way out of the dreaded place, claim my treasure from the grotto (a shiny new 50 pence piece), and regain my sight before bedtime . . .
Elephants have existed in our collective consciousness for as long as we humans have been roaming the African plains and living alongside them. Even in the cities and towns of Europe and the Americas, where elephants were hunted to extinction long ago, the beasts still survive in the form of hearsay, myths and legends.
In many African cultures, the elephant is revered as a creature that embodies the human virtues of intelligence, wisdom and physical strength. The Kamba tribe in Kenya believe that elephants were once human beings. As an old myth goes, there was a poor fellow who set off to find a wealthy and generous man known for his wisdom. The poor man desperately wanted to discover the secret to being rich. After a long journey, the poor man arrived at a beautiful house surrounded by fertile pastures with abundant herds of cattle and sheep.
Here, the wise and rich man generously offered the poor man a hundred sheep and a hundred cows, but the poor man refused, demanding not charity, but the rich man’s secret to success. So instead, the rich man gave the poor man an ointment and told him to rub it on his wife’s front teeth.
The poor man left and somehow convinced his wife to participate, because it would make them very wealthy. Soon after, her teeth began to grow and grow and toughened into ivory tusks the length of a man’s arm. On seeing the incredible spectacle, the poor man imagined untold riches and pulled the tusks out of his wife’s mouth and sold them for a lot of money.
After that, emboldened and excited, he began rubbing the ointment on his wife’s teeth again. But this time when his wife grew tusks, she understandably refused to let her husband touch them, and then, before either of them knew what was happening, her entire body started to change. She became fatter and fatter, and her skin became wrinkled and baggy and grey, and, as if to add insult to injury, her nose got longer and longer until she became a fully fledged elephant. Her husband was so alarmed by her that she ran away deep into the forest where, after a period of lonely sadness, she gave birth to their sons and daughters – the first line of elephants.
Elephants and humans have coexisted in Africa for hundreds of thousands of years, and elephant wisdom is seen as sacred. In Gabon in West Africa, the three great animal chiefs are the leopard, deemed powerful and cunning; the monkey – malicious and agile; and of course, the elephant – wise and strong. People from Ghana and Sierra Leone regarded elephants as past human chiefs and deceased ancestors. One Zulu legend from South Africa tells of a young girl, outcast from her tribe, who in her wanderings, finds a kind and hospitable elephant and marries him; their children, who benefitted from the magic of the beasts, in turn gave birth to a line of powerful chiefs and eventually the forerunners to the royal family.
But not all myths are so reverent: in Namibia, the story goes that the elephant got its long trunk because it was so slow and clumsy that it couldn’t fend off a crocodile, which bit the docile animal and stretched its nose into the now trademark trunk.
In the Congo, legends have persisted for centuries that witchcraft can turn people into animals, and even today many villagers will blame their neighbours when elephants run amok and raid crops or kill people, saying that it was down to voodoo or magic, which is often a convenient way to bad-mouth an enemy or have an excuse to plunder a nearby village.
Whether good or bad though, elephants have featured heavily in cultural symbolism, art and storytelling around the world since ancient times. I remember being rather surprised when walking across the Sahara Desert in Sudan to discover prehistoric etchings on a rocky outcrop depicting all sorts of animals, including elephants. They date back thousands of years to a time when North Africa was a lush, green savannah, like much of the rest of Africa. In the Tadrart mountains, on the border of Libya and Algeria, lies some of the best-preserved rock art in Africa, including a remarkably well-proportioned picture of an elephant that’s 12,000 years old.
North African elephants have been extinct for 1,500 years, but their legacy lives on in Mediterranean culture. The Biblical behemoth that features in the Book of Job is described as a fantastical monster, which sounds suspiciously like a pachyderm:
Behold now behemoth, which I made with thee; he eateth grass as an ox.
Lo now, his strength is in his loins, and his force is in the navel of his belly.
He moveth his tail like a cedar: the sinews of his stones are wrapped together.
His bones are as strong pieces of brass; his bones are like bars of iron.
He is the chief of the ways of God: he that made him can make his sword to approach unto him.
Surely the mountains bring him forth food, where all the beasts of the field play.
He lieth under the shady trees, in the covert of the reed, and fens.
The shady trees cover him with their shadow; the willows of the brook compass him about.
Behold, he drinketh up a river, and hasteth not: he trusteth that he can draw up Jordan into his mouth.
He taketh it with his eyes: his nose pierceth through snares.
In Ancient Egypt, elephants were prized as both war machines and status symbols, dead and alive. Elephants featured in hieroglyphics as a testament to a time when their range was on a global scale.
In Ancient Greece, too, the elephant found its way into popular culture after Alexander the Great encountered war elephants on his travels to India, and subsequently incorporated them into his own army. When the ancient sailors dug up the skulls of prehistoric dwarf elephants on the island of Cyprus, it’s easy to forgive them for thinking that they must have belonged to the remains of the mythical one-eyed Cyclops.
Then, of course, Ancient Rome had its own encounters with the beasts when the North African leader Hannibal brought an army of war elephants halfway across Europe, and famously over the Alps, to invade Italy. At least one elephant was used in Caesar’s invasion of Ancient Britain, ‘which was equipped with armour and carried archers and slingers in its tower. When this unknown creature entered the river, the Britons and their horses fled and the Roman army crossed over.’
Over the centuries, elephants have variously been revered, feared and worshipped – their image being used to symbolise all that is great and powerful.
In 1255, the King of France gave an elephant to the English monarch King Henry III as a unique gift. It was kept in the gardens of the Tower of London, and medieval Londoners flocked to see the mysterious beast. While confined to the lawns of the metropolitan fortress, it was said that the elephant was fed prime cuts of beef and rather enjoyed a bucket of red wine. It’s no wonder he is reputed to have died from obesity. Nowadays the tower hosts a sculpture of the poor creature, peering down from its haunted walls.
Napoleon commissioned an artist to design an elephant monument to be built outside the Bastille. It was meant to be an enormous bronze sculpture demonstrating the emperor’s power in Africa, but it never got past the plaster-cast model stage, which ended up being abandoned, and the project eventually came to symbolise futility and folly in Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables.
Many African nations, including South Africa, use elephant tusks in their coats of arms to represent wisdom, strength, moderation and eternity. The elephant is symbolically important to the nation of Ivory Coast, whose heraldry features an elephant head as its focal point, and in the western African Kingdom of Dahomey (now part of Benin), the elephant was associated with the nineteenth-century rulers of the Fon people, whose flag depicted an elephant wearing a royal crown.
In Denmark, there is a chivalric order called ‘Order of the Elephant’, which is the country’s highest honour, usually bestowed only upon monarchs and heads of state. Indeed, Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II is herself a ‘Knight of the Elephant’.
Even across the pond, the elephant is still visible in everyday politics, having become the symbol of the Republican Party – a throwback to Aesop’s Fables and the story of the Rat and the Elephant.
Elephants feature in our thoughts and our language. If someone says, ‘Think of a big grey animal,’ you are most likely to think of an elephant, rather than a hippo or rhino, wolf, tapir, gorilla or seal. Elephants have become their own idioms: a ‘white elephant’ being a burdensome thing that’s difficult to get rid of; whilst an ‘elephant in the room’ is the inconvenient truth that nobody wants to speak about.
Elephants have been written about, painted, mocked and allegorised for millennia. Elephants have featured alternately as a symbol of natural might, of fearsome magnitude, peaceful coexistence and utilitarian commercialism.
They have been background extras and leading characters in books for over 2,000 years. Elephants represent nature at its biggest: they symbolise wilderness but also danger, fear as well as courage; they personify war and peace; brute force and the height of intellect. Children love elephants, and adults love them too, because elephants, for as long as we can remember, represent us.
Over 100 million years have passed since the common ancestor of humans and elephants – a small, shrew-like animal – walked the earth. We diverged at a time when dinosaurs still ruled the world, yet we maintain a fascination with elephants that is hard to define, our fates seemingly intertwined throughout history.
From their huge size and strange appearance to their extraordinary senses and incredible brains, it appears that everything about them is unusual, extreme, or unique, and yet in so many ways they are more like us than we would care to admit. They are without a doubt one of the most remarkable and fascinating creatures on earth.
