Elephant Song

Joh

The trackers came into camp ten minutes ago.  They have found a herd, Joh

Daniel stirred and glanced at him.  How many?  he asked.  About fifty.

That was a good number.  They would not be able to process more, for flesh and hide putrefy swiftly in the heat of the valley, and a lower number would not justify all this use of men and-expensive equipment.

Are you sure you want to film this?  Joh

Daniel nodded.  I have considered it carefully.  To attempt to conceal it would be dishonest.  People eat meat and wear leather, but they don't want to see inside the abattoir, Joh

This is a complex and emotional subject we are examining.

People have a right to know.  in anyone else I would suspect journalistic sensationalism, Joh

You hate this as much as I do, and yet you first taught me the necessity of it.

Let's go to work, Daniel suggested gruffly, and they stood up and walked back in silence to where the trucks were parked.

The camp was astir, and coffee was brewing on the open fire.

The rangers were rolling their blankets and sleeping-bags and checking their rifles.

There were four of them, two black lads and two white, all of them in their twenties.  They wore the plain khaki uniform of the Parks Department with green shoulder flashes, and though they handled their weapons with the casual competence of veterans they kept up a cheerful high-spirited banter.  Black and white treated each other as comrades, although they were just old enough to have fought in the bush war and had probably been on opposing sides.  It always amazed Daniel that so little bitterness remained.

Jock, the cameraman, was already filming.  It often seemed to Daniel that the Sony camera was a natural excrescence of his body, like a hunchback.

I'm going to ask you some dumb questions for the camera, and I might needle you a little, Daniel warned Joh

However, he was leaner in the face and his bone structure finer and more photogenic.  His expression was mobile and expressive and the tones of his skin were not so dark as to make too severe a contrast and render photography difficult.

They huddled over the smoky campfire and Jock brought the camera in close to them.  We are camped here on the banks of the Zambezi River with the sun just rising, and not far out there in the bush your trackers have come across a herd of fifty elephant, Warden, Daniel told Joh

Look at this terrain down here in the valley.  Joh

But why do you have to kill the mothers and the babies?

Daniel insisted.  You are cheating, Doctor, Joh

There's more to it than that.  We have to take out the entire herd.

It is absolutely essential that we leave no survivors.  The elephant herd is a complex family group.  Nearly all its members are blood relatives, and there is a highly developed social structure within the herd.  The elephant is an intelligent animal, probably the most intelligent after the primates, certainly more intelligent than a cat or dog, or even a dolphin.  They know, I mean, they really understand.

. . he broke off, and cleared his throat.  His feelings had overcome him, and Daniel had never liked nor admired him more than he did at that moment.  The terrible truth is, Joh

There would be a swift breakdown in the elephant-social behaviour.

Isn't that a little far-fetched, Warden?  Daniel asked softly.  No. It has happened before.

After the war there were ten thousand surplus elephant in the Wankie National Park.  At that time, we knew very little about the techniques or effects of massive culling operations.  We soon learned.  Those first clumsy efforts of ours almost destroyed the entire social structure of the herds.  By shooting the older animals, we wiped out their reservoir of experience and transferable wisdom.  We disrupted their migratory patterns, the hierarchy and discipline within the herds, even their breeding habits.  Almost as though they understood that the holocaust was upon them, the bulls began to cover the barely mature young cows before they were ready.

Like the human female, the elephant cow is ripe for breeding at fifteen or sixteen years of age at the very earliest.  Under the terrible stress of the culling the bulls in Wankie went to the cows when they were only ten or eleven years of age, still in puberty, and the calves born of these unions were stunted little runts.  Joh