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.
