The Eye of the Elephant
Table of Contents
Title Page
Table of Contents
Copyright
Dedication
Authors' Note
Principal Characters
Mpika Districk
North Luangwa National Park
PART ONE
1. Flight to Deception
2. Home to the Dunes
3. Against the Wind
4. Beyond Deception
PART TWO
5. Into the Rift
6. Floods
7. A Valley of Life
8. The Heart of the Village
9. Survivor's Seasons
10. Eye of the Dragon
11. The Second Ivory Coast
12. A Zebra with No Stripes
13. Chikilinti Juju
14. The Eagle
15. Moon Shadow
16. One Tusk
17. The Eye of the Storm
18. Nyama Zamara
19. Close Encounters
20. The Last Season
21. Cherry Bombs
22. Scouts on the Prowl
23. Mwamfushi Village
24. Sharing the Same Season
Epilogue
Postscript
Appendix A
Appendix B
Appendix C
Notes
Acknowledgments
Index
The Owens Foundation for Wildlife Conservation
About the Authors
Footnotes
Copyright © 1992 by Delia and Mark Owens
All rights reserved
For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Company, 215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.
www.hmhbooks.com
The Library of Congress has cataloged the print version as follows:
Owens, Delia.
The eye of the elephant: an epic adventure in the African
wilderness / Delia and Mark Owens.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN-13: 978-0-395-42381-3 ISBN-13:978-0-395-68090-2 (pbk.)
ISBN-10: 0-395-42381-3 ISBN-10: 0-395-68090-5 (pbk.)
1. Wildlife conservation—Luangwa River Valley (Zambia and Mozambique) 2. Elephants—Luangwa River Valley (Zambia and Mozambique) 3. Owens, Delia. 4. Owens, Mark. 5. Wildlife conservationists—United States—Biography. I. Owens, Mark. II. Title
QL84.6.233084 1992
639.9'7961—dc20 92-17691 CIP
Maps by George Ward
eISBN 978-0-547-52466-5
v2.0912
To Helen and Fred,
Bobby and Mary,
and Mama—for doing so much.
And to Lee and Glenda, who keep us all smiling.
Authors' Note
This story is not meant to judge Zambia's past conservation practices so much as to project hope for the future. The events described in this book occurred under the previous one-party Marxist government in Zambia. In 1991 the Zambian people elected a truly democratic government, which has taken positive steps to address the conservation problems of the country. It is only because of this change in government that we have the freedom to tell our story. Scientists and conservationists have the responsibility and the right to report their findings. By telling the truth, no matter how controversial, they incur a measure of personal and professional risk; by not telling it, we all risk much, much more.
The names of the innocent in this book have been changed to protect them from the guilty; the names of the guilty have been changed to protect us. The rest of this story is true.
Principal Characters
PART ONE
The Dry Season
Prologue
DELIA
DAWN IN LUANGWA. I hear the elephant feeding on marula fruits just outside the cottage. Quietly pushing aside the mosquito net, I rise from the bed and tiptoe through the dark to the washroom, which has a tiny window high under the thatched roof. All I can see in the window is a large eye, like that of a whale, blinking at me through the pale morning light.
One step at a time, I ease closer to the window until I am just below it. Then, standing on an old tea-crate cupboard, I pull myself up to the sill and see Survivor's eye only a foot away. Long, straight lashes partially cover his pupil as he looks toward the ground searching for a fruit. Then, as he picks one up with his trunk and puts it into his mouth, he lifts his lashes and looks directly at me. He shows neither surprise nor concern, and I stare into the gray forever of an elephant's eye.
Such an incident may take place in other areas of Africa, but not in the northern Luangwa Valley of Zambia. In the last fifteen years, one hundred thousand elephants have been slaughtered by poachers in this valley. Here elephants usually run at the first sight or scent of man. I want to remember always the deep furrows of folded skin above Survivor's lashes, his moist and glistening eye, which now reflects the sunrise. Surely this will never happen to me again; the memory must last a lifetime. And I must never forget the way I feel, for at this moment I can see everything so clearly.
***
We first came to Africa in 1974 and settled in Deception Valley, a dry, fossilized river in the Kalahari Desert of Botswana. For seven years we lived in tents among the bush-covered dunes, the only people other than a few scattered bands of Bushmen in a wilderness the size of Ireland. The lions and brown hyenas there apparently had never seen humans before. They accepted us into their prides and clans, revealing previously unknown details of their natural history. Our tree-island camp was in the center of the Blue Pride's territory. These lions—Blue, Sassy, Happy, Bones, and later Muffin and Moffet—often sat beyond our campfire or raided our pantry. Once, when sleeping on the open savanna, we awoke to find ourselves surrounded by lions an arm's length away.
We left Deception at the end of 1980 to complete our graduate work and returned in 1985, when this story begins. Our greatest hope was to find whichever Blue Pride lions might still be alive, and to continue the research for another five years. We would search every dune slope, dried water hole, and acacia grove until we found them.
But we had another objective, too. The Central Kalahari Game Reserve—long forgotten and ignored by the outside world—was now the center of controversy. Powerful cattlemen and politicians wanted to dissolve the reserve and divide it into large private ranches, even though the sandy desert savannas could not sustain cattle for long. We had a quite different recommendation: that the area be conserved for the benefit of the local people through wildlife tourism.
Despite the pressures on the Kalahari, surely few places on earth had changed so little during the four years we were away. There was still no development of any kind in the reserve. At our camp we would still have to haul water in drums for fifty miles, live in the same faded tents, drive on the one bush track we had made years before. Once again our only visitors would be lions, brown hyenas, jackals, springbok, giraffes, hornbills, and lizards.
Lost again among those dunes, we failed to realize that even though the Kalahari had remained much the same, the rest of Africa had changed. We had survived drought and sandstorms. Now we would be caught in another kind of storm—one that would uproot us and blow us like tumbleweeds across the conti nent in search of another wilderness. And there the storm would continue.
***
Survivor lowers his lashes again as he feels around for another fruit, finds one, and raises it to his mouth, smacking loudly as he chews. He looks back at me again. I can see not only into his eye, but through it. Beyond are thousands of elephants in massive herds wending their way along mountain trails and down into the valley, there to stroll slow
ly across stilled savannas surrounded by thick, luxuriant forests. Giant, gentle mothers and playful youngsters romp and bathe in wide, sweeping rivers, unafraid. Powerful males push and shove for courtship rights, then stand back from each other, shaking their heads, their ears flapping in a cloud of dust. Through Survivor's eye I can see the wilderness as it once was. The storm continues, but a ray of hope shines through. Because of it, some of wild Africa may be saved.
Slowly Survivor curls his trunk to the windowsill and takes in my scent as he looks directly at me again. I wiggle my fingers forward until they are pressed against the flyscreen, only inches from his trunk. I want to whisper something, but what could I say?
The eye of the elephant is the eye of the storm.
1. Flight to Deception
MARK
Every time that I have gone up in an aeroplane and looking down have realized that I was free of the ground, I have had the consciousness of a great new discovery. "I see," I have thought. "This was the idea. And now I understand everything."
—ISAK DINESEN
AIRBORNE OVER THE KALAHARI for the first time in years, I felt as though I was meeting an old friend again in some secret corner of the earth known only to the two of us. During our seven years in this vast wilderness, I had got Kalahari sand in my shoes, and civilization with its fine hotels, its restaurants, its hot baths and other conveniences, had not been able to shake it out. The farther north I flew, the farther into the desert. Seeing the familiar pans, the fossil river valleys, the vast, undulating bush savannas with giraffes browsing flat-topped Acacia tortillas trees, I knew I was going back where I belonged. It was early April 1985.
While planning the flight to Botswana, I had been anxious that the six-year drought might have so changed the Kalahari's features that I would be unable to find our old camp. I was supposed to have met Delia there two days ago, but last-minute problems with the plane in Johannesburg had delayed me. During her long drive into the Kalahari by truck, and even after she reached camp, there was no way to alert her. If I didn't show up soon, she would think I had been forced down somewhere.
Scanning the plane's instruments, my eyes locked onto the gauge for my right tank. Halfway to Deception, its needle was already nudging the red. I was losing fuel—fast. I straightened up in my seat, looked along each wing for any sign of a leak, then checked my carburetor mixture again. Nothing wrong there. Wiping my forearm across my eyes, I tried to stay calm.
My right tank was virtually dry while the left one read completely full, but I had set the fuel selector to draw equally from both. The line from the left tank to the engine must be blocked. If so, I would run out of gas within the next few minutes. I had to land immediately.
I looked out of the window and down 4500 feet. Six years of drought had flayed the Kalahari, the dry, hot winds searing all signs of life until the terrain looked like ground zero at the Nevada nuclear test flats: sterile, forbidding, unfamiliar. I swallowed hard, leaned forward in my seat, and began urgently looking for a place to make a precautionary landing. If I flew on, the engine might quit over bush savanna or woodlands, where a forced landing would end in an outright crash. No one would ever find me.
A perfectly round, brilliantly white salt pan appeared off to the left about fifteen miles away. I banked left and headed straight for it, pulling back the throttle to conserve avgas (aviation gasoline). The gauge for the right tank was now rock solid red, and several times the engine seemed to miss strokes. When the pan was finally below me, I took a breath and began setting up the plane for a landing.
But at 500 feet above the ground I noticed deep animal tracks in the surface. If I put the plane down here, its wheels would sink into the salt and powder. Even if I could find and fix the fuel problem, I would never get airborne again.
It occurred to me that I couldn't be positive that the left tank was blocked until the right one was diy. I would switch to the right tank and deliberately run it out of fuel while circling over the pan. If the engine quit I could land there safely, even if I was not able to take off again.
I circled overhead, waiting for the engine to die. It never did. The left tank began feeding fuel, its gauge slowly drawing down. Later I would learn that the plane's mechanics had cross-connected the lines from the fuel tanks to the fuel selector console. "Right" drew from the left tank; "Left" was drawing from the right. Worse, higher air pressure from a bad vent in the right tank was forcing its avgas into the left tank, bloating it. The excess was being pumped out through a leaky fuel cap on top of the left wing, where I couldn't see it. It took forty precious minutes of flying—and fuel—to figure all this out. Now even if I made a beeline for camp, I might not make it.
And my problems were just beginning. Within five minutes of leaving the pan, I realized I was lost. Nothing below me looked even vaguely familiar. Surely the drought could not have wiped out all my old landmarks. Where were the Khutse Pans, the "mitochondria" pans, the squiggles of fossil river that used to tell me my position in the desert? They were subtle, but four years ago I had known the Kalahari so well from the air that they were like road signs to me. Even though haze had cut my visibility to about two miles, it seemed impossible that I had flown past each of these features without seeing any of them. I tightened my grip on the controls and held my compass heading. Something familiar had to come along.
Forty-five minutes after leaving the pan, I was totally disoriented; and a stiff head wind had reduced my ground speed from 150 mph to 120. It would take even more fuel to get to camp. Desperate to see something—anything—recognizable, I spent precious avgas climbing to 9500 feet, where I hoped I could see farther over the desert. The result was the same. All below me was a whiteout of haze. I had to be miles off course, but which way I couldn't tell. The same mechanics who crossed the fuel lines had put a steel—rather than a nonmagnetic brass—screw in the compass housing. It was off by thirty degrees. But of course I didn't know it at the time.
I fought off the urge to leave my flight path to chase after smudges in the bleak landscape, hoping to find something familiar. I couldn't afford to gamble away the avgas. So I flew on, not daring to look at the gauges anymore.
An hour later I still had no idea where I was—and I knew for certain that I would run out of fuel before reaching camp. I could only hope that I would be near a Bushman village where I could get water, or at least some wild melons, to keep me alive. But I had seen none of the settlements that I knew from years ago. I must be many miles off course.
I switched the radio to 125.5, Botswana's civil air traffic frequency, and picked up the microphone. "Any aircraft listening on this frequency, this is Foxtrot Zulu Sierra. Do you read me?" There was no response. I repeated my sign several times, but the only answer was the hiss of static in my earphones.
I changed to 121.5, the emergency frequency, and called again: "Any aircraft, this is Foxtrot Zulu Sierra. I am lost over the Kalahari somewhere between Gaborone and the northern sector of the Central Reserve. My fuel is critical ... Repeat, fuel critical. Forced landing imminent. Does anyone read me?" No one answered. I suddenly felt as though I were the last survivor of some apocalypse on earth, calling into outer space with a one-in-a-billion chance of being heard and rescued by some intelligence.
My ETA for Deception Valley had come and gone. Still there was only an anonymous void below me. The left fuel gauge was faltering in the red; the right one was completely empty. I flew on, scanning ahead for a place where I could crash land with the least amount of damage to the plane and to myself.
I spotted a hint of white off to the right of my track about thirty degrees. Lake Xau! But as I flew closer, the depression taking shape in the windshield became too round, too white, to be the Lake Xau I remembered. Sure, Xau had been dry for a couple of years, but this looked too small, too much like a permanent salt pan. I couldn't see the lake bed or the Botetile River that flows into it.
If it wasn't Lake Xau, it could be Quelea Pan—in which case I was fifty mil
es off course to the west, deeper into the desert. It had to be one or the other. If it was Xau, I needed to turn west and fly sixty miles to get to Deception Valley; if it was Quelea, I should head east for fifty-five.
I glanced at my fuel gauges. Now both were dead red. I rolled my wings up and down and the left needle wiggled, but only slightly. There was barely enough avgas in the tank to slop around. I had to find camp or a suitable place to land immediately. I couldn't afford to waste my fuel flying closer to the pan to identify it. If I couldn't make it to camp, I wanted to get as close as possible.
If I turned west and it wasn't Xau, I would fly away from camp into a more remote part of the desert, where my chances of ever being found were nil.
There was no time left for agonizing. I turned the plane.
2. Home to the Dunes
DELIA
What aimless dreaming! The drone of the plane, the steady sun, the long horizon, had all combined to make me forget for a while that time moved swifter than I.
—BERYL MARKHAM
SCANNING THE HORIZON, I wondered again why Mark hadn't flown out to look for me. I was two days late; if he'd made it safely to camp, he would have buzzed me by now. I searched once more for the white plane moving against the blue; but the Kalahari Desert sky, the largest sky on earth, was empty.
Endless, barren plains—the wasted remains of Lake Xau on the edge of the Kalahari—surrounded me. For sue days I had been driving the old Toyota Land Cruiser, burdened with supplies, from Johannesburg, across the Kalahari toward our old camp in Deception Valley.
Mark and I had arranged to meet at camp on April 4, my birthday. If he wasn't there when I arrived, I was to radio to the village of Maun for an aerial search. On the other hand, if I wasn't in camp, he was to fly along the track looking for me. My trip across the tired scrubland had taken much longer than expected. That Mark had not flown to look for me meant only one thing: he had not made it to camp.