The Tree Where Man Was Born (24 page)

The person best acquainted with these elephants is Iain Douglas-Hamilton, who had set up a small camp on the Ndala or Buffalo River, eight miles into Lake Manyara Park. The camp is perched above a gravel bend in the Ndala, a surface stream that courses down over ancient crystalline rock in a series of lovely waterfalls and pools and empties into the lake a mile below. Though the pools are cool, and deep enough to splash in, one swims at the risk of bilharzia, an extremely disagreeable intestinal invasion by trematode larvae passed into sluggish water via hominid feces: the larvae enter a small fresh-water snail that in turn releases the cercaria life stage into the water, and the cercaria enter the pores of baboons and men. Many people have contracted bilharzia in this pool, including Douglas-Hamilton, who is not the sort to be dismayed by such ill provenance, and will almost certainly risk and receive another dose of a disease which, without long and tiresome treatment, may be debilitating and even fatal.

When I drove into camp, its proprietor was standing outside his modest research laboratory with his pretty mother, Prunella Power, who was here on a visit from England. He is a strong good-looking young man with blond hair and glasses, wearing faded green drill shorts and shirt and old black street shoes without laces or socks (he also has an excellent pair of field boots which he wears when they turn up). He took my note of introduction and stuffed it in his pocket, and I doubt if he has read it to this day. “You’ll stay with us, won’t you?” he said straight off. “Have you had tea? Well, do come along then, we’re just off elephant-watching.” I got out of my Land Rover and into his, and we set off with a turn of speed toward the lake, where Douglas-Hamilton drove straight up to an elephant herd and began taking notes. His approach was so abrupt, so
lacking in finesse, that the whole herd was engaged in threat display, with much shrill screaming. “Silly old things,” said Iain, scarcely looking up. “Frightful cowards, really. Silly old elephants.” He gazed at them with affection. “Oh, damn!” he said, as a big cow came blaring through the bushes. “That’s Big Boadicia—she’ll charge us, I expect.” But Boadicia, the matriarch, held back as a younger cow charged instead. I expected Iain to drop his notebook and go for the wheel, but he merely said, “This one doesn’t mean it.” The young cow stopped a few yards short of the hood. Her bluff called, she backed up, forefoot swinging, and began what is known to behaviorists as displacement feeding, by way of expending her chagrin. Forefoot still swinging sideways, she wrenched at a tussock of green grass, and we were close enough to observe a trick I had never heard about—as the elephant tugs on grass, it mows it with the sharp toenails of its heavy foot, which is swinging in the rhythm of a scythe.

Iain and his mother had been asked to dinner by Jane and Hillary Hook, who were presently encamped with their safari clients in the groundwater forest near the entrance to the park; as I also knew the Hooks, I was taken along. Though not late, Iain drove like hell, slowing only to permit a puff adder to cross the road; in the headlights, the venomous thing, too fat to writhe, inched over the ground like a centipede. Rounding the bend a moment later, we found our way barred by a huge stinkbark, much too big to move, that wind had felled across the road at a point where the left side was steep uphill bank and the right a steep bank down. “I’m not missing dinner!” Iain cried, and forthwith gunned his car off the embankment into the jungle dark, in an attempt—I assume—to bypass the offending stinkbark. The undercarriage of the car struck one of several hidden stumps with an impact that drove the driver’s mother into the roof, and inevitably, within seconds, the car was hung up, both front wheels spinning in the air. Iain grabbed up a monstrous jack and hoisted the transmission and axle clear of the stump. “Now I’ll drive straight off the jack,” he called to me. “Do catch it, will you?” I jumped away from
the spinning jack as he drove off it, staring in astonishment as this inspired youth, in a series of wild spurts and caroms, bashed his way back to the road.

On the return trip, Mrs. Power was guided around the fallen tree on foot by Hillary’s flashlight. Down below, also on foot, I led Iain back over the stumps, then leapt into the open rear as the car made its lunge at the steep bank. At the last moment, it altered course and proceeded into the interior of a thornbush, emerging miraculously onto the road.

“Fantastic!” said Hillary Hook. “I’d never have believed it!”

On the way home, picking thorns out of my face, I was fairly whining in annoyance, and Mrs. Power, who is resigned to Iain through love and lack of choice, said, “I rather thought you’d intercede.”

“I kept hoping
you
would intercede,” I told her crossly. “I have no experience of him, and anyway, you’re his mother.”

Early next morning, we drove south to the Endobash River. In the shallows of the lake, near a great baobab, lay a dead buffalo, and in the spreading limbs of a nearby umbrella acacia lay a lion. The tree-climbing habit evolved by the lions of Manyara is said to be a defense against the stomoxys fly, which breeds along the water edge; in time of stomoxys infestations, the Ngorongoro lions are arboreal as well, and in the summer of 1970 I saw one climb a tree in tsetse woods of the western Serengeti. But at Manyara, where there is little shelter for lions against attacks by the numerous elephants and buffalo, protection from these animals may also be a factor.

Impala, bright rust red in the early light, scampered prettily in antelope perfection, and buffalo in a herd of hundreds milled back and forth across the track. Near the Endobash were big elephants that Iain did not recognize, and these he approached with circumspection. They had come in from outside the park, where they might have been chivvied and possibly shot at by man; such elephants take offense in very short order. Also, they were browsing in the thick high brush, so that their numbers and whereabouts were still uncertain. And finally, they looked decidedly larger than the home elephants of Manyara, which
tend to be small, no doubt because the population is a young one. “These are the baddies,” Iain said. He sat slumped behind the wheel of his idling Land Rover, hands in pockets. “Horrible wild uncouth elephants!” he cried suddenly, as if about to shake his fist. “Turn around, you bahstards, let’s have a look at you!” Here in the Endobash last year a band of strange elephants had dismantled his Land Rover around his ears while he and a girl companion cowered on the floor; the vehicle in which we rode, already battered, was its replacement.

The back of Iain’s new Land Rover is open, like a short truck bed, and contained, besides spare wheel and jack, a park ranger named Mhoja whom Iain has trained to help him in his elephant surveys. Mhoja, a Nyamwezi from the great Bantu tribe of central Tanzania, was terrified at first, says Iain, but recently, for some unaccountable reason, had become more philosophical about his fate. Nevertheless, Mhoja was tapping urgently on the cab roof, for elephants were moving at us from both sides—we were caught in the middle. “They’ll charge us, I expect,” said Iain, and they did. He gunned his motor and we crashed between two bushes into the clear.

We went down to the Endobash River, and from there worked west up the Endobash Valley, under the cliffs of the escarpment. Last year in this place, while poking about in the thick bush, Iain and his mother surprised a rhino. Iain, run down, spent three weeks in a hospital at Arusha with a fractured vertebra. Soon after, he was a participant in the crash of a small plane, and decided to take up flying. Iain’s father died in an air crash in World War II, and his mother is not happy about his new passion, but she knows better than to try to dissuade him.

One afternoon I volunteered to try Mhoja’s position in the rear. As soon as possible, Iain had me surrounded with irate cows, which were menacing the car from all directions, and trying to see all ways at once, I shrank against the cab. Through his rear window, Iain said, “You’ll get hardened to it, never fear.” Soon a huge bull loomed alongside in threat display, and with his tusks demolished a small tree not fifteen feet from where I cowered, unable to imagine why Douglas-Hamilton
was so loath to spare my life. Inching my head around to plead, I looked straight into Iain’s camera; he fancied the shot of a frightened face with a big bull elephant filling the entire background. “You’re going to want this picture,” Iain said.

Annoyed by my annoyance, he said I had no faith: “I
know
these elephants,” he complained later, “I really do.” Iain was of two minds about his reputation for recklessness, which he had done nothing to discourage and which had returned to haunt him. “People seem to think I’m some sort of idiot, but I
had
to work close to elephants to do my research.” To study not only elephant behavior but the effect of high numbers on the ecology of Manyara required a close record of their movements; therefore he had to know each animal’s identity and position in its herd, as well as which herds were Manyara elephants and which were transient in the park. His solution was to photograph each animal with its ears flared, head-on, so that tusks and ear nicks could be used in identification, but the method demanded confrontations with four hundred and twenty agitated elephants. Iain learned the hard way which elephants were bad-tempered, and his confidence that he could distinguish a threat from an honest charge—which professional hunters who have gone out with him are unable to do—encouraged him to give visitors, as he says, “the same excitement, the same fun with elephants that I had when
I
didn’t know anything.” But the spreading tales of these adventures have tended to discredit the valuable research Douglas-Hamilton has done in the long days spent closer to wild elephants than anyone had ever gone before.

The elephants at Manyara are presently destroying the umbrella thorn at such a rate that regeneration cannot keep pace with the destruction, and in Iain’s view, these lovely trees will be gone from the Manyara park within ten years. Those not knocked down are stripped so grievously of bark that they cannot recover; either their vascular system is destroyed or they fall prey to a boring beetle that penetrates the exposed wood. On the other hand, elephants have been destroying woodlands for thousands of years, and perhaps destruction is a part of the natural cycle of this acacia, which represses the growth of its
own seedlings in its shade. In season, elephants consume great quantities of the seed pods, and as they move continually in search of the varied browse that they require, the seeds are borne elsewhere and deposited—a most auspicious start in life—in an immense warm nutritious pile of dung.

The mature umbrella thorns in the region of Ndala had been noted in transects on a chart, and as it was crucial to his studies to know what had become of them in the course of a year, Iain set out one morning to survey two transects in the forest between his camp and the lake. Since the transects were mostly covered in the kind of thick high bush favored by rhino and old solitary buffalo, he needed a gun to back him up. Mhoja carried a .470 Rigby elephant rifle and I carried a .12 gauge Greeners single shot, said to be useful in “turning” a rhino’s charge. “I shouldn’t load it until something happens if I were you,” said Iain. “It tends to go off by itself.” All morning I carried the gun broken with a shotgun shell in my right hand; if
anything
went right in an emergency, I thought, it would be pure dumb luck.

The dawn had something ominous about it, or so it seemed to me, a tinge of gloom that haunted the African morning. The swift sun of the tropics, rising, spun on the white ivory of an elephant high on the slope of the escarpment; ahead, more elephants drifted away through woods that were still in shadow. Where they had forged tunnels through the brush, the brown woodland air spun with glittering webs of emerald spiders, and in a shaft of light between two trees stood a black-and-bamboo leopard tortoise, bright with dew. The sunrise fired a lizard’s head, emerged from the cobra shadows of a dead tree, and glinted on a file of driver ants on the way to raid a termite nest. Sun and shadow, light and death. Through an open glade down toward the lake, impala danced.

On foot, the pulse of Africa comes through your boot. You are an animal among others, chary of the shadowed places, of sudden quiet in the air. A fine walk in the early woods turned hour by hour into a wearing trek through head-high caper and toothbrush bush, and as the sun climbed, heat settled in the
woods, and colors faded, and dew dried. The thickened bush gave off coarse smells, the gun grew heavy, the step slowed. A humid pall had crossed the sun, and no bird sang. One had to concentrate to be aware, reminding oneself that this midday stillness, when dozing animals may be taken by surprise, is not the hour to walk carelessly in thickets. But a time comes when awareness goes, and one reels sweaty and heavy-legged under the sun, dulled to all signs and signals, like a laggard buffalo behind its herd. This time, for man as well as animals, is a time of danger.

“Like Endobash Plains, this,” said Iain, bashing through; even Iain seemed subdued. “Let’s have some gun support through here.” And when at last we were in the clear again, walking homeward through the woods, he said, “Pushing through bush like that . . . a bit dicey, you know. Doesn’t pay to think about it too much; you might not do it. People talk about going too near elephants, but walking these transects each month is a hell of a lot more dangerous.” I was happy that the walk was over, and looked with fresh eyes on the rest of the precious day. In the afternoon, in a quiet glade, I watched striped kingfishers sing in a trio. In the urgency of their song, these woodland birds lifted bright wings like butterflies, and trembled.