Brief Encounter On The Savanna

Whether our empathy for other species is sufficient to motivate the level of care that the damaged world requires remains an open question.

Oh, we are stuck. We are really stuck," lamented John Mtalo, our safari driver, slapping his hands against the sides of his head. He was disgusted with himself and with the mud that had mired us in the rain-flooded savanna. Surely it is very bad form to strand tourists in the African bush at sunset as the lions, leopards, and hyenas are waking from their afternoon naps. It was a moment that might have turned perilous but did not. John rocked the vehicle ferociously back and forth, gaining a few inches with each pull of the diesel engine. Then we were free and rolling toward the comforts of roast lamb and rhubarb pie at the park's lodge.

Being stuck is how any earth cel­ebrant might feel these days, con­fronted by the habitat-hogging reign of human culture over the planet.  But one of nature's little tricks is that our better intentions can be fueled by the simple contemplation of natural beauty.  Whether our empathy for other spe­cies is sufficient to motivate the level of care that the damaged world requires remains an open question.  But to feed one's wonder and love for the varieties of earth's self-expression is one of our better desires.

I visited Tanzania's Lake Manyara National Park late last year, not a ce­lebrity location on the safari circuit but a site nonetheless bountiful with sa­vanna elephants, baboons, hippos, lions, zebras, and those varieties of antelope whose names alone can make a poet's heart soar: dik-dik, klipspringer, bushbuck, impala, and gazelle. 

I watched a solitary bull elephant, a huge old veteran, amble across the grassy plain. Behind him lay a soda lake, its flamingos dissolving in the hazy equatorial heat. And beyond them rose the escarpment of the Great Rift Valley, that long gouge running from Syria to Mozambique that has opened secrets of the deeply layered evolutionary past as it has rent the land. The old bull at first strode slowly, head bent low, lumbering along so slowly he looked like a billboard. Then his inter­est picked up, the head rose, ears flapped back as if opening to hear, knees bent high with a purposeful gait. Some appetite had called him forward. Can an elephant trot? Perhaps not. But he did speed-walk across the low weeds and barren dirt, land grazed to the nub and beginning to flourish anew after recent rains.

When the bull arrived at the wallow, he dug his tusks down into the mud, bent onto one knee, lower and lower until the great head fell into the sloppy wallow, then rose, spraying, slathering, and washing. He sat in the mud, he reared like a horse in the mud. He shot water droplets in glorious arcs over his shoulder. It was impossible not to see the joy in his movements.

By this time another bull had ap­peared, wandering out from behind the scrub near where we were parked, at the head of a small bachelor herd -- maybe six or eight elephants in all -- that had trailed the great bull. This one looked younger, perhaps an adolescent still learning the ropes of male society af­ter recently leaving the refuge of the matriarchal herd. If this was the case, he might have been 12 years old. He might have spent the first eight years of his life never more than 15 feet from his mother. He might have followed the rumbling calls of the great bull, but kept his distance in deference to his elder. 

But now he was distracted by the white Range Rover with four human heads sticking out through its roof. He stared. He stepped closer. He looked away, his trunk lazily plucking yellow flowers out of the grass. He looked again at us, focused a dead-straight gaze into our eyes. His head was high, ears wide, an alert stance. Did he mean to challenge or only to match our desire for encounter? He stared. He stepped closer. He looked away, the two-fingered trunk plucking again at tiny weeds, such delicate motion a surprise in an organ than can rip down a tree or dig a wallow out of dry dirt. After this dance of approach and avoid­ance continued for long enough that John had started the car's engine and turned it off two or three times -- should we flee or stay calm? -- the young bull lost interest in us and walked off to join his comrades.

Several of the beasts met with trunk caresses, others with tusk locking. It did not look hostile, but it was clear to me that my ability to read elephant behavior was very limited. One of the young bulls carried his own trunk draped on one of his tusks, as if carrying the appendage was just plain tiring.