Eyeball to Eyeball
Namibia. Driving down a sand river, a camera tour, with our guide, Andreas. Dennis and I have been seeing elephants for much of the day: nearby boreholes have helped nurture wildlife, but can also sometimes concentrate the animals too close together. It's a delicate tampering. We spy an old bull elephant so large it seems he could somehow change the world: shoving aside huge masses of earth, shifting the flow and gravity of things, rearranging constellations; fashioning new life, and new stories, out of dust and clay.
The old elephant beholds us and, unlike the others, he displays no suspension of judgment, no wait-and-see immobility; from the very beginning, he evinces a hostility, if not aggression, that is smoldering. Andreas pauses, knowing that we will want photos, but looks stricken and gestures toward the elephant's ears, both of which are flapping slowly, steadily, like the wings of the largest butterfly in the world. One of the ears has a neatly drilled bullet hole in it, perhaps from yesterday, or perhaps from half a century ago, we don't know.
Six gemsbok surround the elephant like courtiers -- Andreas has told us that these oryx follow the elephants from one acacia to the next, to eat the seeds that the elephants knock from the trees while browsing (a high wind will also stir the gemsbok into foraging, traveling from one tree to the next for this same purpose, and I have the thought that the elephant is a kind of wind, made visible) -- and the elephant leaves the gemsbok then and begins advancing upon us, walking carefully, deliberately, but with his ears still flapping, and Andreas lets out on the clutch, eases forward the same distance, then stops again while Dennis's camera shutters and clicks.
As if hypnotizing us, the elephant continues to approach, and we recognize that even though he's trying to appear casual, he is still traveling in a direct line toward us, and that despite the appearance of ambling, the distance is closing, and Andreas grows even more agitated as Dennis fiddles with his camera. Watching through the binoculars, I can see that now the elephant is doing something funny with his feet: not ha-ha funny, but disturbing funny.
Although it seems impossible for this to be so, the elephant appears now to be trying to shrink, almost crouch, and his feet are coming down softer and sneakier, like those of a cat approaching a thicket of grass in which a mouse or vole is hiding. It's ridiculous: this six-ton beast is out in the broad middle of the day, out in the middle of the sand river, bigger than life -- does he think we don't see him? -- and yet the secret of his blood is betrayed, he does have damage on his mind, and as he prepares to close that final distance, his body cannot help but obey the old habits and instincts of countless other stalks. The elephant knows there is no tall grass between him and his quarry, this time, but the parts of his body that are wired to both his memory and his intent do not care.
It's just a little thing, this crouching and sneak-footing, but the elephant is much closer now, almost close enough that, should he choose suddenly to charge, he might be upon us before we can act -- but he will not find Andreas napping, and we are already lurching forward, and the elephant stops his approach as soon as we drive off. For long moments afterward, the linings of our hearts tingle and sizzle with the delightful electrified cleanliness of survival.
Giraffes, ostriches, and baboons stride and trot and scurry across the dry riverbed before us, coming and going at cross-purposes. It is of course the borehole that has concentrated them in such density. They remind me of patrons at a bar awaiting happy hour. We have reached the last borehole; from here on out, it is just heat and sand and light. The river itself disappears farther underground, so that even the bankside vegetation thins and then vanishes, as does the multitude of life that we've been witnessing thus far. We turn around and head back, passing many of the same lingering individuals (the old sneaky-footed elephant is gone, fortunately), and we return to our comfortable lives, where nothing -- and certainly not the most necessary thing, water -- is yet in short supply.