The Eye of the Elephant Read online

  Up before dawn the next morning, I send a truck for the paramilitary scouts at Kanona, as planned. On their way through Mpika they will pick up Bwalya and Musakanya, who will guide the patrol and tell me how well the scouts conduct themselves. This crack unit will be armed with their AKs, so going after one of these bands of poachers should be no big deal; they'll give a fitting reception to Chikilinti's group.

  Then, knowing it is probably useless but determined to do everything I can, I fly to all the camps around the park, dropping powdered-milk tins with notes telling the scouts to intercept any poachers fleeing from our operation on the Loukokwa River. All of this flitting about the countryside dropping tin cans is still necessary only because National Parks has not, in more than eighteen months, arranged licenses for the radios we bought for the camps. And the same is true for the sixty-one guns that were ready to be shipped from the States two years ago.

  Late the next afternoon, squatting on its axles, our truck returns from Kanona loaded with scouts. The next morning I airlift them to an emergency airstrip an hour's walk from the poachers' camp. When they are assembled and ready to go, I tell them how happy we are to have their help, and that it should be easy to find at least one of the several poaching bands that have splintered off from the large group I spotted two nights ago. Shaking their hands, I give the group a small radio and send them off. Bwalya and Musakanya, eager as two young hunting dogs, are in the lead.

  As the scouts begin moving toward the poachers' camp, I take off, flying in the same direction to show them the way. They need only follow the plane. I am hoping that we will be in time to stop the poachers before they kill any elephants. But I have flown only three miles when I run into three thick spirals of vultures, and looking down I can see the carcass of a freshly killed elephant at the base of each. Tucked up under the trees near the carcasses are clusters of big racks covered with slabs of smoking meat. The cabin of the plane is immediately saturated with the familiar sweet smell that hangs cloyingly in the back of my throat.

  Dodging vultures, I take the plane down and discover two more slaughtered elephants lying within a few yards of each other. Three tents and four flysheets are set up under a tree surrounded by a thicket, and scattered around the camp are jerry cans, pots, pans, axes, ropes, and other gear. Ten to fifteen men are hiding in the thicket with a mountain of red meat at least five feet high and six feet in diameter.

  "Chikilinti, Simu Chimba, Bernard Mutondo, and Mpundu Katongo." I grind the names of the worst poachers in the district between my teeth. This time the scouts, real scouts, are right here!

  Some of the poachers begin running when they see the plane. I circle over them, very low, pinning them to the ground. After a few passes I break off and fly back to where we have just left the scouts, not a minute and a half away. Over and over I call on the radio, but they do not answer me. I scribble a note on a pad: "Found poachers with five freshly killed elephants approximately three and a half miles southwest of you. Will pin them down with airplane and continue circling with wing down to show you their position until you arrive. Come as fast as you can." I tear off the sheet, tie a white mutton-cloth streamer to it, and drop it to the scouts. When they pick it up and wave to me, I head back to the poachers' camp.

  Once again I come in low and slow, trying to see details of the camping equipment or anything that might lead us to these poachers if they escape back to Mpika. The encampment is concealed well, in a small forest of stunted mopane trees. Except for the smoke and the vultures, I might never have found it.

  I am passing over the last elephant when a man in a red shirt steps out from behind a tree and shoulders a stubby AK-47. I kick hard left rudder, and the plane skids sideways through the air. Looking out my window, I see his shoulder jerk from the recoil and a puff of gray smoke bursts from the muzzle. Suddenly I am very aware that he is shooting bullets with steel jackets—at my flying biscuit tin with its thin aluminum skin.

  I am over him and gone before he can fire more than a couple of rounds. For a minute or more I circle away from the poachers, dizzy with the blood pounding in my ears. The scouts should be there in about an hour, but if the poachers start pulling out now, the scouts will have a hard time tracking them in the thick brush. I have to keep them pinned down. My hands damp on the control wheel, I bank for the camp again, skimming the treetops so Red Shirt will have no more than a second to see me and get off a shot. I keep my speed low, so that if I hit one of the vultures turning above the carcasses there may be enough left of the plane to try a forced landing. I once saw the remains of a twin-engine Aerocom-mander that had run into a vulture. The big bird had blasted through the windshield like a cannonball of feathers, killing the pilot and copilot instantly, then continued through the cabin, destroying its interior. The remains of the vulture, a blob of red meat the size of a baseball, were later found in the tail cone of what had been an aircraft.

  I kick the rudder pedals left and right, zigzagging as I head into the vultures and smoke. A bird is coming straight at me, craning its head and flapping furiously to get out of the way. I pull off power and jink to the right. As the roar of the engine subsides, I hear the pop-pop-pop of gunshots through my open side window.

  I circle back and this time fall in with the glide pattern of the wheeling vultures, spiraling with them, holding a steep left turn thirty feet above the main camp. But there is Red Shirt behind a tree, pointing his rifle at me again. To put some distance between us, I spiral up high with the vultures. At fifteen hundred feet, with my wing-tip strobe lights flashing, I circle, waiting for the game guards. It has been more than an hour since I dropped my note to them. They surely can see the plane, and they must hear the shooting.

  Another hour passes, two, two and a half. Still no sign of the scouts. I fly back in their direction but I can't spot them. Dodging vultures, aching with fatigue, I continue circling over the poachers until my fuel gauges nudge empty. And then I head back to Marula-Puku, certain that the scouts will arrive soon.

  They never do, of course. They never come. Days later they show up at Marula-Puku, asking to be taken back to Kanona. They found only one dead elephant, they say, did not see the airplane, heard no shots, and did not find poachers or any signs of them.

  The next morning, after the scouts have gone back to Kanona, Bwalya and Musakanya tell me a different story. The scouts joined the poachers, whom they know well, and spent an enjoyable evening eating elephant meat around the fire.

  I write yet another report to the National Parks and Wildlife Services, but do not receive a reply, and again nothing is done.

  14. The Eagle

  MARK

  I am the eagle

  I live in high places

  In rocky cathedrals

  Way up in the sky.

  I am the hawk

  There's blood on my feathers

  But time is still turning

  They soon will be dry.

  — JOHN DENVER

  MWAMFUSHI VILLAGE: eleven-thirty at night, a week after the busted operation with the Kanona scouts. Musakanya and his wife have been asleep on the floor of their mud and thatch home since about nine. Gunshots shatter the darkness outside. Chips of mud and splinters of wood rain down on them. Throwing his body across his wife to protect her, Musakanya holds her down as she screams. More shots. Bullets punch through the walls, kicking out puffs of dust and clods of dry dirt. Musakanya crawls to the door in time to hear angry shouts and receding footsteps.

  Neither Musakanya nor his wife is killed, fortunately, but sooner or later someone will be. The poachers have also shot up the home of the Mwamfushi headman, who is encouraging his villagers to stop poaching; and they have poisoned, not fatally, Jealous Mvula and two of our other men. Clearly, they are upping the ante. If they can do it, so can I. But I will have to do it alone. I've had it with scouts.

  At dawn I lift off from the camp strip and fly along the Mulandashi River, following one of the poachers' footpaths that Musa kanya and Bwa
lya sketched for me. The poachers have hit this area hard, because it is miles from our camp. In this poachers' shooting gallery, nearly all the elephants and buffalo have been wiped out in the previous four or five years.

  Several times lately, when I have discovered poachers from the air, I have chased them with the airplane until they ran away, abandoning their meat and ivory to vultures and hyenas. It is expensive for a hunter to mount a three-week expedition into the park, and if operating in North Luangwa becomes unprofitable, the poachers will give it up. If I can't get them locked up, maybe I can at least bankrupt them.

  Staying low so that any poachers in the valley ahead will not hear the plane, I follow the broad footpath. Banking left and right—watching for vultures, smoke, and meat racks—I fly along the trail through the hills to the large baobab at the confluence of the Kabale and Mulandashi.

  Just as I begin to turn away from the tree, something on a broad sandbar along the Mulandashi catches my eye. Leveling the plane, I see two men run across the bar, each carrying an elephant's tusks on his shoulder. Other men sprint beside them, lugging baskets of meat.

  I point the nose of the Cessna at the two men with the tusks as they dash across the dry riverbed, heading for thick bushes along the shore. They drop the tusks, turn, and race for a stand of tall grass. I put the plane down "on the deck," my wheels skimming just above the sand.

  The poachers glance over their shoulders at the plane bearing down on them, their legs pumping hard, sand skipping from their feet. When my left main wheel is just behind one of them, he looks right at me, and I can see him wondering desperately, and much too slowly, which way to dive. At the last instant I nick back on the controls and the wheel misses his head by inches. I look back to see him plunge headlong into a devil's thornbush at the river's edge.

  The other men have wriggled into the tall grass patch on the sandbar. I think it needs mowing. On this pass my Hartzell propeller from Piqua, Ohio, chops the tall stems into confetti. The prop blasts it over the poachers, who are lying face down, hands over their heads. As I pull up and away, I switch the plane's ignition quickly off and on. A tremendous backfire explodes from the exhaust pipe. I haul Zulu Sierra around for another pass, and another, burping her again and again.

  For half an hour I make repeated passes over the poachers, reinforcing their terror, extracting from them a price for killing in the park. Then I make a show of landing, rolling the plane's wheels along the sandbar, to make them think I am going to stop and try to arrest them. But if I drop too much speed in this loose sand, I will indeed land—without a hope of taking off again. I will be stuck on this sandbar, unarmed in the midst of a gang of poachers who hate me now even more than they did before. So I abandon my pretense at law enforcement and head back to camp.

  Even without any arrests, my air patrols begin to have an impact on the poachers. For several weeks I fly almost every day, diving on poachers along the Mulandashi, Luangwa, Mwaleshi, and other rivers. Musakanya tells me that many of the men from Mwamfushi are refusing to work as carriers, so the hunters are forced to hire from villages farther from their base around Mpika. More often now they have to wait until late afternoon to shoot, drying their meat at night to avoid being discovered from the air. And whenever they hear the sound of the airplane, they quickly cover their fires or put them out with buckets of river water. Other poachers are setting up their meat racks in the cover of hills where I haven't been flying. These air patrols are the only thing protecting the park, so often I fly until midnight and then get up at three to fly again.

  Delia is more supportive of these antipoaching flights than of my "suicide runs" to pin down poachers for scouts who never show up. "Finally, something is working," she says, "even if just a little." Still, the park is losing elephants at the rate of five hundred a year—too many, too fast. We don't have long to save the rest. And Zulu Sierra and I aren't going to be able to work our juju on the poachers for much longer. Soon they will realize that the plane can't really harm them. We need help. And at last we are going to get it.

  In October 1989, in a warm room in a snowy land far from the shimmering savannas of Africa, seventy-six nations of CITES (the United Nations Convention for International Trade in Endangered Species) vote to list the African elephant as an endangered species (see Appendix B). In so doing they forbid trade in ivory and all other elephant parts, and provide the last hope for earth's largest land mammal.

  15. Moon Shadow

  DELIA

  The only paradise we ever need—if only we had the eyes to see.

  —EDWARD ABBEY, speaking of the earth

  I AM ALONE IN CAMP. Mark is flying an antipoaching patrol and all the Bembas are working on the track between camp and the airstrip. In our stone and thatch office cottage, I analyze more survey data—calculating how many buffalo, impalas, kudu still remain in North Luangwa. I can hear the Lillian lovebirds whistling as they fly from tree to tree, feasting on the ripe marula fruits.

  Weary of numbers, I walk to the river's edge and sit cross-legged with Nature for a while. Across the water, far away at the next bend, I see a tall gray bush moving. Then an elephant, also tall and gray, steps from behind it. It is the first elephant I have seen from Marula-Puku. In exactly four seconds he disappears in the tall grass. We have worked three and a half years for those four seconds. It has been worth it.

  When Mark returns, we walk to riverbank and I point out where the elephant had been. To our astonishment two others appear at that moment, in the same spot, and wander along the river. All at once it seems that there are elephants everywhere. The next morning Mwamba runs to the office cottage to show us five elephants feeding on the high bank behind the workshop. They are the surviving members of Camp Group—and at last they have accepted us enough to feed within sight of camp. When the Bembas walk to the airstrip, they see three other elephants feeding on the tall grass of the distant hills. They have finally come home to the Lubonga.

  A few days later I am alone in the office cottage again, still working on the game census figures. At first I am only faintly aware of the sound. Then I lift my head and listen. It is an odd noise—whaap, whaap, whaap—like someone beating a blanket. I try to work again. Whaap, whaap! I look out of the window but see nothing unusual. Too curious to work, I step out of the cottage and look around. The sound is coming from the other side of the river. I look toward the tall grass some forty yards from camp, and I gasp.

  There, standing in full view, is Survivor, the elephant with the hole in his left ear. Apparently relaxed and unafraid, he wraps his trunk around the base of a thick clump of grass, pulls it up by the roots, swings it high over his back, and pounds it on the ground. Whaap, whaap, whaap! Dirt falls from the roots; he sticks the cleaned grass into his mouth and chomps.

  I do not budge, sure that if he sees me he will run away. I have been watching him feed for twenty minutes when I hear the truck coming. If Mark races into camp the way he usually does, it will frighten Survivor. I ease along the wall of the cottage and creep toward the road, watching the elephant carefully. Surely he can see me, but he shows no sign of alarm. Once I am around the corner and out of his sight, I race through the grass toward the approaching truck.

  When Mark sees me running toward him, waving my arms, he stops the truck and leaps out, shouting, "What's wrong?"

  "You're not going to believe it! Follow me." We tiptoe behind the cottage, around the corner, and into the open doorway. Standing just inside the cottage, we watch Survivor feed. He is not a large elephant, but at this moment he seems enormous—he represents hope, success, and a glimpse of Luangwa as it should be.

  Eventually, confident that the elephant does not feel threatened, we walk slowly to the riverbank and stand near a marula tree. After some time, Survivor lifts his trunk and walks directly toward us on the far bank. He stops at the river's edge, only twenty yards away, and raises his trunk, taking in our scent. It is an elephant hand shake—a welcome, across an invisible line, into the natur
al world. I feel the honor of the moment deep in my heart.

  We long to follow lions across moonlit savannas, to rise at dawn to see where zebras feed, to count infant elephants standing beneath their mothers' bellies. But the antipoaching battle has devoured our time, energy, resources, even our spirit, since we arrived in North Luangwa. We know that even important scientific observations are a luxury in this place at this time. How can we observe the social behavior of lions when elephants are literally dying at our feet?

  Yet at this moment there is a respite; elephant poaching has declined. It is now April 1990, and in the last seven months Mark has seen only five dead elephants from the air. We are convinced that his antipoaching flights and the CITES ban on ivory are working. The price of ivory has plummeted from one hundred fifty to five dollars per pound, and 90 percent of the world's legal ivory markets (plus some illegal routes) have dried up.

  Six African nations, however—Botswana, Zimbabwe, Mozambique, South Africa, Malawi, and Zambia—have filed reservations against the ban, and this allows them to export ivory legally or to sell it within their borders. It is appalling to us that Zambia, where in only fifteen years poachers have killed 115,000 of 160,000 elephants, has refused to join the ban. Since there is no legal elephant hunting or culling in Zambia, all of the ivory in this country is from poached elephants. The southern African nations have formed their own cartel for trading ivory, and we are afraid that soon new local markets within this region will replace the international ones that disappeared with the ban. But at least for the moment there is a strange peace in the field.

  So we feel that we can steal a few days to go lion watching. Soaring over the valley, we search for the big cats.

  The lion glares into the eyes of his unlikely opponent—a Nile crocodile, whose pupils are as thin and cold as an ice pick. The giant jaws and ragged teeth of the two animals are locked into opposite ends of the glistening raw flesh of a dead waterbuck. The massive tail of the croc, plated with dragon armor, is coiled to launch the reptile forward in a flash. The leg and shoulder muscles of the lion ripple. Each of them has the strength and power of a small truck. Neither moves. The rest of the Serendipity Pride—three females, four large cubs, and another male—watch nearby, their ears turned back in apparent annoyance at this reptilian intrusion.