An Elephant in My Kitchen: What the Herd Taught Me About Love, Courage, and Survival Read online

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  To my Thula Thula wild and human family,

  thank you for your love and support,

  and for giving me the strength

  to never give up.

  1

  The only walls between humans and elephants are the ones we put up ourselves

  Violent weather always unsettled our elephants, and the predicted gale-force winds meant there was a danger of trees blowing over and causing breaches in Thula Thula’s perimeter fence. The cyclone had threatened for days, and while we desperately needed water after a scorching summer, we definitely didn’t need a tropical storm. We were worried about the herd, but my husband Lawrence and I were confident that, somewhere in the vast expanse of our game reserve, they had been led to safety by their new matriarch, and my namesake, Frankie.

  We hadn’t seen them near the house in a while and I missed them.

  Whenever they visited, their trunks immediately curled up to ‘read’ our house. Were we home? Where were the dogs? Was that a whiff of new bougainvillea?

  Bijou, my Maltese poodle and sovereign princess of the reserve, hated losing her spot centre stage and always yapped indignantly at them. The adult elephants ignored her, but the babies were as cocky as she was, and would gleefully charge her along the length of the wire fence that bordered our garden, their bodies a gangly bundle of flapping ears and tiny swinging trunks.

  No matter how much we treasured their visits, we knew it wasn’t safe for them to be this comfortable around humans. The risk of poachers taking advantage of their trust was too high so we planned to slowly wean them off us, or to be more accurate, wean ourselves off them. Not that Lawrence would dream of giving up his beloved Nana, the herd’s original matriarch; theirs was a two-way love affair because Nana had no intention of giving him up either.

  They met in secret. Lawrence would park his battered Land Rover a good half kilometre away from the herd and wait. Nana would catch his scent in the air, quietly separate from the others and amble towards him through the dense scrubland, trunk high in delighted greeting. He would tell her about his day and she no doubt told him about hers with soft throaty rumbles and trunk-tip touches.

  What a difference to the distressed creature that had arrived at Thula Thula back in 1999! We had only just bought the game reserve – a beautiful mix of river, savannah and forest sprawled over the rolling hills of Zululand, KwaZulu-Natal, with an abundance of Cape buffalo, hyena, giraffe, zebra, wildebeest and antelope, as well as birds and snakes of every kind, four rhinos, one very shy leopard and three crocodiles.

  We were very disappointed when we discovered afterwards that the owner had sold off the rhinos. At that point, there weren’t any elephants either and they certainly weren’t part of our plan. Not yet; definitely not so soon.

  So when a representative of an animal welfare organization asked us to adopt a rogue herd of elephants, we were flabbergasted. We knew nothing about keeping elephants, nor did we have the required boma – secure enclosure – within the reserve where they could stay until they adjusted to their new life with us.

  ‘The woman must know we don’t have any experience,’ I said to Lawrence. ‘Why us?’

  ‘Probably because no one else is stupid enough; but Frankie, if we say no, they’re going to be shot, even the babies.’

  I was horrified. ‘Phone her and say yes. We’ll make a plan somehow. We always do.’

  Two weeks later, in the middle of a night of torrential rain, three huge articulated trucks brought them to us. When I saw the size of the vehicles, I was hit by the full impact of what was arriving. Two breeding adult females, two teenagers, and three little ones under the age of ten. We knew enough about elephants by then to know that if there were going to be problems, they’d come from the older ones. Lawrence and I exchanged glances. Let the boma hold.

  Just as the trucks pulled up at the game reserve, a tyre exploded and the vehicle tilted dangerously in the mud. My heart froze at the elephants’ terrified trumpeting and screeching. It was only at dawn that we managed to get them into the safety of the new enclosure.

  They weren’t there for long.

  By the next day, they had figured out a way to avoid the electric fence’s brutal 8,000 volts by pushing a nine-metre-high tambotie tree onto it. The wires shorted and off they went, heading northwards in the direction of their previous home. Hundreds of villages dot the hills and valleys around our game reserve so it was a code-red disaster.

  We struggled to find them. You’d think it would be easy to find a herd of elephants, but it isn’t. Animals big and small instinctively know how to make themselves disappear in the bush, and disappear they did. Trackers on foot, 4×4s and helicopters couldn’t find them. Frustrated with doing nothing, I jumped into my little Tazz and hit the dirt roads to look for them, with Penny, our feisty bull terrier, as my assistant.

  ‘Sawubona, have you seen seven elephants?’ I asked everyone I passed in my best Zulu.

  But with a French accent that butchered their language, they just stared at the gesticulating blonde in front of them and politely shook their heads.

  It took ten days to get the herd back to Thula Thula. Ten long, exhausting days. We survived on adrenalin, coffee and very little sleep. How Lawrence managed to prevent them from being shot was a miracle. The local wildlife authority had every right to demand that the elephants be put down. They had human safety issues to consider, and besides, they knew only too well that the chances of rehabilitating the group were close to zero. We were warned that if they escaped again, they would definitely be shot.

  The pressure to settle them down was terrible and my life changed overnight from worrying about cobras or scorpions in my bedroom to lying awake, waiting for Lawrence to come home, scared stiff he was being trampled to death in his desperation to persuade the elephants to accept their new home. Night after night, he stayed as close to the boma as he dared, singing to them, talking to them and telling them stories until he was hoarse. With tender determination and no shortage of madness, Lawrence breached Nana’s terror of man and gained her trust.

  One hot afternoon, he came home and literally bounced up the steps towards me.

  ‘You won’t believe what happened,’ he said, still awestruck. ‘Nana put her trunk through the fence and touched my hand.’

  My eyes widened in shock. Nana could have slung her trunk around his body and yanked him through the wires.

  ‘How did you know she wouldn’t hurt you?’

  ‘You know when you can sense someone’s mood without a word being spoken? That’s what it was like. She isn’
t angry any more and she isn’t frightened. In fact, I think she’s telling me they’re ready to explore their new home.’

  ‘Please get out of this alive,’ I begged.

  ‘We’re over the worst. I’m going to open the boma at daybreak.’

  That night, Lawrence and I sat on our veranda under a star-flung sky and clinked champagne glasses.

  ‘To Nana,’ I sighed.

  ‘To my baba,’ Lawrence grinned.

  * * *

  The herd had become family over the past thirteen years, so we were extremely worried when the storm warnings worsened and the risk of the cyclone smashing into us increased with every passing hour.

  Lawrence was away on business and I was on my own. He called me non-stop. How bad are the winds now? Has it started raining yet? Are the rangers patrolling the fence? It was the worst possible time for him to be away. Cyclones are rare in Zululand but when they strike, their devastation can be catastrophic. I found out afterwards that he’d called our insurance company from Johannesburg to double our weather-damage cover. That’s how alarmed he was. I couldn’t wait for him to get back.

  In the middle of this chaos, at seven o’clock on Friday morning, 2 March 2012, I received a call telling me that my indestructible husband had died of a heart attack during the night. I didn’t believe it. Lawrence had survived war-torn Baghdad and savage Congolese violence, and now I wouldn’t be fetching him from Durban International Airport and bringing him home. I sank onto the bed, numb with shock.

  The game reserve fell silent in disbelief.

  ‘It was as if somebody switched off the plugs of life,’ said Mabona, our lodge manageress.

  Like a robot, I kept going. The storm was still raging and the KwaZulu-Natal emergency services had warned us that it was heading our way. I made sure the guests were safe and instructed the rangers to secure the tented camp with extra ropes and wire. Then Mother Nature gave us an incredible reprieve and Cyclone Irena veered offshore. The crisis was over. We let out a collective groan of relief and prepared to stare grief in the face.

  How was I going to survive without Lawrence at Thula Thula? It felt impossible, for me and for our staff. Many thought I would take refuge in my native France. He and I had run the game reserve as a rock-solid team. Lawrence, or Lolo, as I called him, took on everything to do with the animals and their safety, and I handled hospitality, marketing and finance. We learned on the hop, adapted to things we knew nothing about and simply tackled each out-of-the-blue challenge that flew our way. Like adopting a herd of emotionally deranged elephants. What were we thinking?

  But we managed, more than managed, with courage and craziness and plenty of laughter. We loved each other and we loved the oasis we had built in the African bush. Protecting animals, especially elephant and rhino, was the focus of our life together.

  And now, from one day to the next, my partner in everything was gone. It was unthinkable, and because he’d been away when it happened, his death didn’t feel real. Word spread like bush fire, and emails, calls and messages poured in from around the world. It wasn’t just my grief, it was everyone’s grief. Still it didn’t sink in. I kept expecting a call from him.

  ‘Frankie, I’m at the airport! Where are you?’

  I stumbled through that first weekend in a daze. Very early on Sunday morning, I received a call informing me that the herd had surfaced and were on the move.

  ‘They’re heading south,’ crackled the radio. ‘Direction main house.’

  That was a surprise. The last sighting of them had been during the worst of the storm alerts, when they had been a good twelve hours’ walk from us – and remember, that’s twelve hours powered by mammoth muscles. Now they were a mere fifteen minutes away. But to be honest, I really didn’t give it any more thought. Life was a blur and I could hardly breathe for the things I had to do. Our guests didn’t know what had happened and somehow I had to keep the lodge running for them.

  Promise, a good-looking game ranger as skilled at rustling up a cocktail as tracking an elusive animal, was the first to see the herd and almost drove into them. They were right at the gate to the main house and reception compound, making it impossible for him to drive through. He immediately noticed something odd.

  ‘Even the bulls are here,’ he reported.

  Bachelor elephants tend to stay away from the others, or, if they are close by, they stay out of sight. But that morning, all twenty-one members of the herd jostled about at the gate, clearly agitated. This was highly unusual because their visits were normally so serene.

  Sometimes, if Lawrence had returned from being away, they would pop by, mill about and graze patiently while they waited for him to come out and say hello. Or if there was a baby to introduce, they would stand along the fence, radiating peace, and gently nudge the new arrival forward to meet him.

  The Sunday after he died was completely different. They were restless and pacing. They walked in a disorganized jumble to the front of the house, stayed there for a few minutes then shouldered their way to the back of the house again, never grazing, always moving.

  ‘They were disturbed but I had no idea why. I thought maybe they had had a run-in with poachers. When I got closer, I saw the telltale streaks of stress on the sides of their faces, even the babies’,’ Promise said afterwards, rubbing his own cheek in amazement.

  An elephant’s temporal gland sits between its eye and ear, and secretes liquid when the animal is stressed, which can create the mistaken impression that it is crying. The elephants at our entrance weren’t crying, but the dark moist lines running down their massive cheeks showed that something had deeply affected them. After about forty minutes, they lined up at the fence separating our home from the bush and their gentle communication started.

  Solemn rumbles rolled through the air, the same low-frequency language they always used with Lawrence. Mabula, the herd’s dominant bull, paced up and down with the others; just Nana stood by silently, as if waiting for Lawrence to appear but knowing he wasn’t going to.

  We hadn’t seen them in months. Why now? Why this exact weekend? And why were they so anxious? No science book can explain why our herd came to the house that weekend. But to me, it makes perfect sense. When my husband’s heart stopped, something stirred in theirs, and they crossed the miles and miles of wilderness to mourn with us, to pay their respects, just as they do when one of their own has died.

  * * *

  I grew up a city girl, a Parisian through and through, who could tell you the quickest way to Saint-Germain-des-Prés but who knew nothing at all about animals. Our family never kept pets, although we did once have a tortoise in our garden. Living and working in a city, even a beautiful one like Paris, there’s no time to notice nature as you do in the bush. It’s metro, boulot, dodo, as they say in France, when life is a relentless treadmill of commute, work, sleep. Yet even as I pounded the Parisian treadmill, somewhere deep inside me I always knew I would end up in a foreign country.

  But living in the sticks in Africa? Not that foreign.

  And yet there I was, in the sticks, alone, and burying my husband. I didn’t know where to begin. I asked Vusi and Promise, Lawrence’s trusted right-hand men, to come to the house to talk about the scattering of his ashes.

  ‘We should move Mnumzane’s bones to the dam. I want Lawrence and him to be together,’ I murmured.

  Mkhulu Dam was Lawrence’s favourite spot at Thula Thula. He and Vusi had built it themselves and it’s where he went to clear his mind, fill his soul. Mnumzane had been his favourite boy elephant who had come to us as part of the original group, a distraught youngster whose mother and sister had been shot before his eyes. Even though he was only a teenager when he arrived, just a kid really, and a troubled one too, he understood the responsibility of being the oldest male, and the very first thing he did was charge Lawrence to stop him from getting too close to his family. Lawrence admired his gutsiness so much, he named him Mnumzane, Zulu for ‘Sir’, and it became one of his favouri
te stories.

  ‘He must have been terrified,’ Lawrence loved to recount. ‘He’d just travelled eighteen hours in a rattling iron prison on wheels and, once out of it, everything was foreign. No familiar smells, no safe hiding place to run to, just a bunch of exhausted human beings who would have represented extreme danger to him, but he still bloody well charged us. If I’d been wearing a hat, I would have raised it to him.’

  Some months afterwards, Mnumzane was ousted from the herd. It’s how elephants bring up their boys – they separate them and their growing testosterone levels from the teenage girls. It stops inbreeding and makes sure genes are spread far and wide. In Mnumzane’s case, that didn’t apply because he was an orphan with no family links to any of the female youngsters, but rules are rules in the elephant kingdom and Nana was a strict matriarch who wouldn’t tolerate hanky-panky on her watch. It was heartbreaking how he suffered. He had already lost his mother and sister, and now he was losing his foster mum and siblings too. He barely ate and the only way to stop him from wasting away in misery was by tempting him with special snacks of alfalfa and thorny acacia branches, which he guzzled with the same relish a human teenager guzzles burgers.

  I’ll never forget the day Mnumzane decided to let Lawrence know exactly how he felt about him. This great big four-ton elephant lumbered up to his Land Rover and stood in front of him, stopping him from going further.

  ‘I got the fright of my life,’ Lawrence told me later, ‘but then he fixed me with those old-soul eyes of his and lolled his giant head from side to side, as if to say no need to be so jumpy, old man, and I just knew he was telling me that he loved being with me.’

  ‘He’s looking for a new papa,’ I teased.

  ‘You’re probably right, and it’s something we have to think about. He’s getting to the age where he’ll need to be kept in line by someone who can pack a bigger punch than me!’