The Last Train to Zona Verde: My Ultimate African Safari

9. Riding an Elephant: The Ultimate Safari

THE ENORMOUS EMPTY SKY over the Kaokoveld Desert eased my mind with the prospect of freedom, and the flat land of grit and crumble was inspiring too — you could go anywhere under all this untroubled air and dazzling sunlight. Even on the worst day in the African bush the sky and the space offer relief.

At the end of a simple bumpy drive on a bad road east from Tsumkwe, just over the Namibia-Botswana border, the small stony town of Dobe baked like a biscuit in the sun — more hard-up Ju/’hoansi looking for a livelihood, anthropologists searching for subjects, and baboons with tragic faces picking through roadside garbage. Not far from Dobe, still easterly, in a channel of the Okavango Delta, there was a luxury camp for people who paid large sums of money to ride elephants across mushy ground, and through tall grass and swamps, to look at birds and big animals. No one else in Africa rode elephants. At Abu Camp all they rode were elephants.

I have a hatred of the taming of animals, especially large ones that are so contented in the wild. I abominate circus acts that involve big befooled beasts — cowed tigers or helplessly roaring lions pawing the air and teetering on small stools. I deplore zoos and anything to do with animal confinement or restraint. “A robin redbreast in a cage / Puts all heaven in a rage” — I agree, and canaries and parrots, pythons and panthers, too. Even drooling, needy, yappy dogs seem a bit sad to me. Early in the last century, Lord Rothschild broke four zebras and harnessed them to pull his carriage through London; Michael Jackson kept a demented orangutan in a barred cell at Neverland; a Chinese fruit vendor in my former neighborhood in Singapore trained his macaque to pick coconuts. Some people consider bull riding, or the sight of synchronized swimming of killer whales in a pool, a thrill.

There is a hint of sadism in all of this. But the notion of African elephants submitting to the conveying of tourists through the bush was something I felt I had to see, because it seemed overwhelmingly absurd, and besides, the man who ran the operation was a friend of mine. Knowing how I felt about domesticating wild animals, he had encouraged me to pay a visit to his safari operation, called Abu Camp.

After miles of gravel, upright spinning funnels of dust devils, the light brown scrub of the bush, and an immensity of woodland and camel thorns — after all that thirst, the Okavango Delta is unexpectedly drenched, as the desert deliquesces into a watery mirage, a deep green marvel that bubbles up and sprawls over the left shoulder of Botswana as a succession of swamps. Most river deltas — perhaps all of them in the world — occur at the edge of a land-mass, widening and dumping soil and water, enlarging the shore, pouring the river current into a body of water, the sea or a lake. The Okavango is unusual in being landlocked; the stream of the river, fed by numerous watercourses draining from a catchment area in the planalto of Angola, the wooded highlands of the far north, becomes a delta hundreds of miles wide. This river, lush and sodden and silted, empties its flow into the middle of the Kalahari Desert. The precise and pretty term for this natural wonder of watery interstices and spreading rivulets is an alluvial fan.

The results of the sprawling torrent of water are channels, flood zones, lagoons, islands of palms, and water so clean from percolating through the papyrus beds that it is drinkable. Also seasonal swamps, wide trenches called fossil rivers that once carried water, ephemeral rivers, and permanent rivers — it is a water world. This fertile habitat for animals, birds, and flowers, one of the glories of Africa, is without traditional villages; the Tswana people live almost entirely on the perimeter, entering the delta only to fish or hunt.

In Africa, animals large and small are found at waterholes. The Okavango Delta, teeming with wildlife and still pristine, might be considered one of the great waterholes of the continent.

Abu Camp (“Meet your inner elephant”) advertised itself as a “unique opportunity to bond with elephants firsthand,” and went on, “Situated in a vast private reserve of 400,000 acres, guests interact with the resident elephant herd, whether riding or walking with them through the bush. The ultimate elephant education safari!”

The camp had originally been conceived in the late 1980s as a refuge for “rescue elephants” — elephants that had survived a cull, or had been orphaned in the wild as a result of the mother being killed, or had suffered the torments and teasing of a circus, or had been confined in a zoo or wildlife park. The elephant refuge was the idea of Randall Moore, an American who had begun his working life shoveling great crumbly muffins of elephant dung at an animal training school in Oregon. By an odd set of circumstances he had come to possess three elephants.

It happened this way. A pair of animal trainers, a man and woman who were his mentors at the school, were killed separately, but in quick succession, a consequence of the bull elephants being in musth, a condition of high-testosterone aggression. The woman was gored and transfixed by the tusks of an enraged elephant — this occurred during a circus act, before a large crowd of horrified Québécois in a small Canadian town. Later, in Oregon, the man was stomped to death by his favorite elephant.

Since he was on the payroll and knew the ropes, Randall Moore inherited his trainers’ elephants, which — stigmatized and vilified as “killer elephants” — he resolved to save by relocating them to Africa, as he describes in his book, Back to Africa (1989). Failing to find a home for them in Kenya (red tape, obstinate officialdom, bush confusion), he was welcomed in Botswana, where as a wildlife entrepreneur he started a training program for rescue elephants and pioneered his unusual safaris. The idea for elephant-back safaris was initially that of the photographer, socialite, and Africa hand Peter Beard, who suggested to Moore in the 1980s that riding elephants through the bush was unprecedented and would be an incomparable safari.

Abu (“Father” in Arabic), for whom the camp was named, was one of the first rescued elephants, brought from a wildlife park in Texas. As the star of the camp and a natural performer, Abu had appeared in several feature films. Other elephants — enough to create a substantial herd — were added over the years, from distant parts of Africa and as far afield as Canada and Sri Lanka. They had names and pedigrees, they had distinct profiles and personalities; some were quite old, others were babies, either born at the camp within the motley herd or recently orphaned. They were attended to and trained by a large team of mahouts — they used this Hindi term for an elephant whisperer — mainly African, each one bonded to a particular elephant.

The appeal of Abu Camp was its remoteness in the delta, the uniqueness of an elephant-back safari, and the luxury of its accommodations. One of the boasts of the camp was that the purring refrigeration of its extensive wine cellar was inaudible outside the kitchen compound. The camp was also eco-friendly, depending on solar panels for electricity and reducing all its kitchen waste into compost to fertilize its extensive vegetable gardens. The staff quarters amounted to a rather prim village with its own dining hall and recreation room — nearly all the workers had permanent homes in Maun, the Okavango’s main town and only substantial airport, at the southeastern edge of the delta. Most guests were flown from Maun to bush airstrips in small planes over startled herds of zebra and wildebeest.

The camp had only six tents, but “tents” gives a mistaken impression. They were more like canvas bungalows on high platforms, with showers and tubs and double beds with mosquito nets like wedding veils. From your tent at the edge of the lagoon you could prop yourself up on one elbow in a big soft bed and watch the resident herd of hippos gasping and spewing in the water below.

Michael Lorentz, who ran Abu, was my friend. He called himself a safari guide — and he was an inspired one — but he was also the moving force behind a reconceived and upgraded Abu, and was a great lover of the wild, with a particular affection for elephants. I had met him ten years before in Johannesburg, at the end of my Dark Star Safari trip, and we had kept in touch. His fortunes had risen in that decade: he had become an entrepreneur with his own high-end safari company. He was now married, his wife was an academic, and they had two small boys. He was clearly prospering in a competitive business — he still conducted safaris of his own all over the wilds of South Africa and Botswana, as well as in Zambia, Kenya, and Ethiopia.

A stout, imposing figure in bush hat and khakis, Michael was a perfectionist with a strong work ethic who had grown up in a large family — his father a surgeon, his mother a landscape gardener. Abandoning a career in law to be a trainee guide in Kruger Park, in South Africa, he rose through the ranks, started his own company, and had worked among the elephants at Abu for twenty years. And he was not much older than forty.

“I intend Abu to be the premier safari lodge in Africa,” Michael said. “I want it to be like an English house party — a great house party — to eat together, sit around the fire together, five nights ideally, sharing experiences. Luxury without excess.”

Michael said he was drawn to the African elephant for what he called its deep level of emotional intelligence and its ability to elicit a wide range of responses in the people who encounter it — awe, excitement, happiness, fear, wonder, laughter, respect, humility.

“Abu is a complete immersion in a single species,” he said, “which also happens to be one of the most charismatic of all land mammals, the African elephant.” Complete immersion meant sharing five days of your life with a single herd — physically interacting with the elephants, riding them, walking with them, game viewing from atop their backs, even sleeping near them on a raised platform while the elephants browsed and snorted below. These creatures inspired fear in some people, Michael said, but it was his view that they were to be respected, not feared.

“I’ve been slapped by an elephant — by its trunk,” he told me. “It sent me flying! Why? I was probably being inappropriate.”

Michael was an enthusiast — intelligent, well read, congenial, physically strong, and happiest outdoors in the bush. He seemed to have a genuine gift for working with large mammals, and that extended to his ability to get on with people. I was delighted to see him again after so long.

“There’s something I want you to see. Just do exactly what I tell you to do,” he said minutes after my arrival, then checked his watch. “Want a beer? Go over to the platform at the front of the property. Have a beer and wait for me.”

This was the highest level of safari Africa, a day’s drive but a world away from the hard-up Ju/’hoansi, the squalor and drought and drunkards at Tsumkwe, the aid schemes and charities, the squabbling politicians and the shantytowns. Abu Camp was the Africa of the travel magazine article that promotes expensive holidays, the multicolored brochure brought to life in the form of an elegant lodge, with comfortable chairs, gourmet food, and “Would you care for a cold towel?” as you’re proffered a chilled and folded face cloth held with silver tongs. Abu Camp represented that rare thing in rural Africa, comfort and cleanliness. For most tourists it was the only Africa they knew; for most Africans it was something utterly unknown.

The platform at the edge of the lodge had been built around the tower of a high smooth termite mound, fat and cylindrical and so sculptural it could have been an artwork. The lodge itself was situated in a grove of trees — African ebony, sycamore fig, and jackal-berry. I was greeted by the staff and offered sushi — sushi! — from a tray, and I sat down to drink a cold bottle of St. Louis beer.

Past the cushions and the lounge chairs, beyond the rails of the wide platform, the lagoon on this reach of the Okavango was dark and depthless-seeming, in shadow as the sun dipped behind it. But the slanting sun gilded the reeds of the marsh and glittered on the boughs of the acacia trees on what looked like floating islands in the distance. Streaks of pink and purple had begun to appear low in the sky. Usually nightfall in rural Africa is the end of everything — nothing to do, time to sleep, to await the dawn. But I was confident in the comfort of this sumptuous camp, able to enjoy the growing dusk and the expectation of nightfall. Food! Wine! Lamps were lit, torches blazed, and then came an unusual noise from the marsh.

It was the sound of heavy footfalls plopping in water, squishing in mud, and kicking against thicknesses of dense grass. I looked up and saw a herd of elephants parting the reeds in front of them, trunks upraised. They were approaching the camp in the golden light, framed by dark trees and the pinky purple sky, kicking through the swamp water and the brush, some of them trumpeting. Each rounded, advancing creature was ridden by an upright man, sitting just behind its flapping ears, and though the men held a goad, a stick with a hook that Indians call an ankusha, none of them used it. Instead, to direct the elephants they called out commands in English — though not many commands were needed for elephants headed to the security of their enclosure and the expectation of cakes of food.

At sunset, the quietest time of day, the loud and sudden arrival of the elephants in a welter of splashing was an impressive display. The herd filed in front of the platform like disciplined troops past a reviewing stand.

I was witnessing this royal progress for the first time, but the other guests, who had seen it all the previous evening, were beaming with pleasure and expressing their renewed astonishment.

“They told me this would be the experience of a lifetime — and it is,” a woman near me said. She was a photographer, a New Yorker, her first time in Africa. “Africa is just amazing.”

I resisted telling her that this was an experience that only a handful of people knew. I said, truthfully, “I had no idea that anyone in Africa actually trained and rode elephants.”

“I rode one yesterday,” she said. “We’re going out again tomorrow. I can hardly wait.”

Her name was Alexandra, and she was taking pictures for a magazine article. Because she was a first-timer to Africa she was all nerves, hyperalert and intensely watchful.

“I can’t sleep I’m so excited,” she said. “And the noises from the swamp keep me awake.”

“Funny. I have that problem in New York.”

Of the arrival of the herd at dusk, she said, “The sounds are as interesting as the visual experience.” And that day, on the elephant, she had noticed a guide with a rifle just ahead of her. “It was a strange juxtaposition. I’m the elephant and I see the guy with the gun.” And she added, “You have no idea how much these mahouts adore the elephants.”

After drinks in front of a campfire, we gathered on the veranda for dinner, about ten of us around a long refectory table; four courses, with wine, Michael at the head of the table answering questions and calming the more anxious guests.

“Elephants are emotionally highly complex,” he said. “Never lose your respect and never assume too much, but don’t be afraid.”

“You must have had some amazing experiences,” someone said.

“Want to know one of the best ones?” Michael said. “It was lying on the ground for hours watching the antics of dung beetles as they battled over a pile of elephant dung, with the brood pairs frantically rolling away the nuptial ball.”

The strangeness of being in an open-sided room, around a linen-covered dining table, in the middle of an African swamp kept the conversation somewhat subdued. It was a situation daunting even to the much-traveled millionaires at the table, humbled by the surrounding darkness. The meal was delicious, but past the torches and lanterns at the edge of the platform we could hear the snorts and grumbles of hippos thrashing in the reeds, the squawking of birds, and the crackle of insects frying on the bug zapper.

After dinner, Michael took me aside and introduced me to Star, a young Tswana woman, all smiles, who was the chef, and to his managerial staff, his colleagues, the people who ran the operation in his absence. One, a man of about thirty, had been at dinner, listening intently but saying nothing. Because of his reticence I said hello.

“This is Nathan Jamieson,” Michael said. “He was traveling around Africa and visited us. He discovered he liked what we were doing. He found us, not the other way around.”

His friendly bluster made Nathan smile, but he still seemed rather shy. I introduced myself and we talked awhile. He said he’d been at Abu just a few months, and that his girlfriend, Jen, also worked here.

“Nathan’s one of our trainers,” Michael said, because Nathan had not yet said so.

His shyness showed in his faintly smiling downcast face, the sideways tilt of his head, his deferential posture, the way he planted his feet. This shy man trained five-ton elephants! But really, it wasn’t so odd. Shyness is not timidity; he was a confident, collected man. The rifle-toting safari guides, so bold and in their element in the bush, stalking lions or leopards, were often unforthcoming indoors, among the booming, well-heeled clients, whose natural element was the dinner table.

I said, “So, Nathan, how do you like it here at Abu?”

“It’s great, yes. It’s brilliant.”

I heard the slightest inflection, the nasal Australian haw and the short smiling vowel in the affirmative yiss.

“Where are you from in Australia?”

“Sydney, originally, but I was at a zoo at a place — you wouldn’t know it.”

“Try me.”

“Dubbo?” he said in that rising tone of Australians offering information.

“I’ve been there — half a day’s drive from Sydney.”

“I worked at the Western Plains Zoo.”

“God, I hate zoos.”

“This one isn’t like that. It’s open range. The animals have a lot of freedom.”

“I went to Dubbo because there’s a character in a novel with that name, Alf Dubbo, in Riders in the Chariot. I love that novel and I really like Alf Dubbo, the aboriginal painter.”

An airless awkward silence descended on us, the embarrassment of intelligent people when a book is mentioned that no one has read, as though you’ve suddenly lapsed into a foreign language. I never know in such circumstances whether to describe the book with an exhortation to read it or simply shut up.

I did neither. I said, “I never hear a good word about Patrick White from Australians, and he was one of your best writers.”

“I know who you mean,” Nathan said. “We read him at school.”

When the subject turned to elephants, Nathan brightened. He was like Michael, an enthusiast. He had worked with elephants in Thailand and Canada too, and seemed determined to know everything about elephant behavior. I realized that I was talking about them as large shadowy creatures seen at a distance, but for Nathan they were distinct and definable. He had strong opinions about their behavior, how teachable they were, how they responded. He reminded me of a horse owner who speaks of the subtlety of horses’ responses — how they’re smarter than their rider; or of the dog owner who says, “Nugget is always a little nervous around really selfish people.”

One by one, the guests were escorted to their tents by a guide holding a powerful flashlight, looking out for a snake or a scorpion or possibly a hippo — hippos leave the water every evening to climb ashore and feed on vegetation.

The night air crackled with the slapping of bats and the fit-fit-fit of insects and the hoots of herons and the thrashing of hippos browsing in the reeds under my sleeping platform.

Dawn is sudden in the water world of the Okavango, without any hills or heights to delay the sunrise, and the shimmering mirrors of the lagoons and channels intensified the light, which is all gold.

After breakfast, Michael showed me around the camp — the staff quarters, the composting field, the solar panels — and at the elephant compound he introduced me to the mahouts. Big Joe, George, Itaki, Collet, Frank, and Nathan — the one non-African — were leading the elephants from their stockade to an open area where each one, with an iron cuff shackling its foot, was chained to a large eyebolt. The clanking of the long heavy chains, the bang of the bolts, and the shouted orders of the mahouts as the elephants shuffled were at odds with the idyllic place — a courtyard with a canopy of high foliage, the sunlight filtered through the dust kicked up by the elephants. The mahouts were nimble in their task of chaining the huge animals — and it took two of them to drag the heavy chains. I had last seen the elephants the previous evening, splashing through the swamp in the failing light of day. How different they seemed in the glare of morning, bolted to the ground to receive their riders; they looked impatient and vexed.

I mentioned this to Nathan, who was securing his elephant, helped by Big Joe.

“She’s a good girl,” Nathan said, and he rested his head against the thick gray post of her leg. “Aren’t you, Sukiri?”

“How old is she?”

“Eighteen,” he said in the Australian way, ay-deen. “She was orphaned from a cull at Kruger with Thandi and Seeni. They were brought to Gaberone. That’s where we got them. Steady, girl!”

Now the seating platform — a howdah-like contraption — was lifted onto their backs and strapped around the elephant’s middle, and when this was done each elephant was verbally hectored until it knelt, its whole body flat to the ground. This was accomplished by a slow folding of the legs beneath it and a sagging collapse of the big gray belly.

Michael approached and said, “Isn’t it incredible?”

“I’ve never seen anything like it.”

“You’re riding Cathy today. That’s her over there.”

“What’s her story?”

“Captured in Uganda when her family was culled. She was sent to a zoo in Toronto. That’s where we got her from. She’s about fifty years old, the matriarch of the herd.”

Another kneeling elephant snorted dust as a group of men fussed around her, fastening a wooden seating platform to her back.

“This operation is amazing,” I said. “All these workers, all these animals, and just a few guests.”

“That’s why we’re expensive,” Michael said. “But we have wonderful owners and great clients.” He was smoking a cigarette and admiring the activity. “A team created it. You can build whatever you want. But if you don’t have the human element, you’ve got nothing.”

“How many elephants altogether?”

“The ones we ride — about a dozen. But there are lots more, big and small, that are part of the herd. They’ll go out and follow. It’s a dysfunctional, put-together family of elephants.”

“In what way dysfunctional?”

“They’re from all over. We created the herd, so there’s all sorts of dynamics.” He was still looking across the compound. “Our plan is to release some of them back into the wild.”

A little while later, speaking to the guests before the ride, he said, “The elephants embody so much of Africa …”

This peroration about the glory of African elephants reminded me of the passion of Morel, the idealistic hero of Romain Gary’s The Roots of Heaven. In this early (1956) environmental-themed novel (later a John Huston film), Morel mounts a campaign in Africa to save elephants from the big guns of hunters, and fails.

While the elephants knelt on the ground, we took turns getting onto the seats. There was no delicate way of climbing the elephant’s back and squirming into place, so this was another job for the mahouts and the trainers — easing the timid and top-heavy guests into position. Wealthy dignified clients, paying $4,000 a day, scrambled clumsily onto the elephants, their wide, khaki-clad buttocks raised for all to see.

We set out in a long and straggling line, heading across the swamp water, looking for animals. Each mahout, seated on the elephant’s neck, talked much of the time to the elephant, urging it onward, cautioning it, mildly scolding it when — as frequently happened — the elephant took a hunger-determined detour from the route and, tearing at bunches of palm leaves, decided to eat a whole tree. We were aimed in a general direction, a long file of elephants, great and small, some of them with humans on their backs. We saw impalas, zebras, warthogs, and a profusion of birds, but the strongest impression I had of this outing was of a herd of elephants idly grazing.

“Move up, move up. Come on, Cathy, move up,” Big Joe called out. And I could hear the other mahouts exhorting their elephants.

But the elephants were hungry, and there was no way to dissuade a famished animal from its food — and in this glittering swamp, food was abundant as far as the eye could see. The elephants wrenched at leafy boughs and crammed palm fronds into their pink mouths. They twirled tall stands of grass with their trunks and uprooted whole sheaves of it to eat.

“Move it up!”

All along the file, the mahouts were calling out in English. Pet owners and trainers talk to their animals constantly. I am struck by these earnest appeals. Do animals understand English, and if so, how much? I suppose “Beg” and “Roll over” and “Heel” might elicit a response. What about “You’re a good boy” and “No, Nugget, whine all you like, you’re not getting any more munchies”?

The cry “Move it up” did very little to provoke Cathy to move from her meal, and I could not see the point of trying to convince this snorting and masticating beast that it was a better idea to keep moving than to finish eating the tree she was stabbing with her tusks and tearing apart with her trunk.

But the experience of riding an elephant past the wildlife on the grassy banks and the herons in the channels under the high blue sky was something unimaginable to me, and though objectively I could see that the elephant was enormous, and I had always felt elephants were dangerous, I felt safe from any predators. What animal would dare attack this big-tusked creature? Its only true enemy was a human, armed with an enormous gun.

We proceeded to an island between two channels where there was a mud wallow, where we dismounted. The elephants, relieved of their riders and seats, rolled in the soft muck and sprayed water over themselves while we few guests sat in camp chairs, sipping mineral water, snapping pictures, or making notes in a journal or for a magazine piece. Close encounters of the herd kind! and Clamber onto an African elephant for the ultimate safari!

I had been on safaris before. It is always a ticklish and often an infantilizing business. First come the detailed instructions — what to wear, how to move, how to talk, what to expect; all power and initiative are taken from you in the interest of safety. You are reduced to being a child on a school trip, reminded that you are very small and strange and vulnerable, that there are dangers all around. And this is demonstrably true. Look, a croc on the riverbank, the glimpse of a lion, a leopard up a tree, a buffalo pawing the dust, fresh bales of elephant dung littering the road — evidence of a nearby herd.

So you put yourself in the hands of experienced guides who lead you from sight to sight, from animal to animal. As a child again, you are closely supervised by an adult, and you rediscover a child’s sense of wonder. But the Abu Camp safari was something new. I was in the care of a guide and on the back of an elephant, now being shown a zebra, now an eagle, and now taken home to have my lunch, then a nap in my sumptuous tent.

Riding on a trained elephant, gazing on wild elephants — it was like nothing I had ever done or seen, and as far as I knew it had no parallel in Africa. Added to the fact that Abu Camp was an island of luxury in the bush was the novelty of elephants for transport and the staff working so hard to please the guests. I could understand the travel writer gushing for a magazine, writing pieces about Where pachyderms play and recalling the meals: Antelope steaks sizzled on the grill as we were plied with wild mushroom risotto, cauliflower gratin, tiramisù, Veuve Clicquot … And as we sat drinking and talking an enormous hyena appeared out of nowhere …

A dreamy-bosomed woman in stylish khaki and a bush hat was tapping her pretty pouting lips with a blunt pen and preparing to write, We soon discovered that riding an elephant is not terribly comfortable — after sitting sideways on the saddle for an hour or two I felt restless and sticky. And then she added, The cheekiest of the herd, and our favorite, was Paseka, aged two.

At the wallow, Nathan and Big Joe were drinking coffee and watching their elephants. I wandered over to them. Nathan had told me that he had an identical twin brother, Heath, who lived in Australia. Twins fascinate me for many reasons, especially the obvious literary examples in Mark Twain and Dickens, in The Comedy of Errors and Tweedledum and Tweedledee.

“The Yoruba in Nigeria have an unusually high incidence of twins,” I said. “Twins figure in their belief system. Yoruba carve special twin images to represent them — they believe that twins share the same soul.”

“I understand that. Heath and I get along great,” Nathan said. Then, “We were just talking about our trip,” he said. “Big Joe and Collet and I are going to the States on a marketing trip pretty soon.”

Big Joe laughed. “My first time in America!”

“Where are you going?”

“New York City?” Nathan said in a querying voice. “Toronto? A few other places. It’s mainly for Abu, but we’ll be visiting some elephant facilities too. What do you think?”

“You’ll have the time of your life,” I said. “If you can get these elephants to behave, you can do anything.”

I had seen elephants in Africa before. They are unmissable features of the landscape, visible from a mile away, and they are dauntless, never hurrying or circumspect or hunted-looking as most other African game seems. Elephants own the bush, where they are right at home, ambling in family groups, going wherever they wish. If they decide to eat a tree, they will do so, and are well known for tearing a baobab to pieces with their tusks to get at the juicy pulp. If you are in their way, they will trample you and keep going. They never give the impression that they need anyone or anything. Because of their size and their appetite they spend much of the day eating. The oddity of Abu was that these elephants, born in the wild, had been captured and dominated, taught to submit to humans climbing on them.

Riding an Indian elephant (Elephas maximus indicus) in Rajasthan is not unusual. In India they are traditionally used as beasts of burden, as workers in the fields, and in combat; this has been the case for thousands of years. Alexander the Great used elephants in his campaign of conquest as he battled into India, and so did the armies opposing him, as did Hannibal later, crossing the Alps. But these were Asian or Syrian war elephants — smaller, tractable varieties.

A big-eared African elephant (Loxodonta africana) is another matter altogether. For one thing, it is the largest land animal in the world, highly intelligent, independent, and family-minded. I easily understood the purpose of Abu Camp as a refuge for lost and orphaned elephants. But it was harder for me to grasp the hubristic intention of creating a program to bully elephants into obedience, to dominate them so thoroughly that they would allow themselves to be harnessed to a riding platform. Some of these heavy wooden platforms held two anxious people, and with the mahout loudly urging the creature along, that meant three vociferating adult humans balancing on the elephant’s bristly spine while it moved through the swamp among the other animals.

I was thinking that Africa, which was losing its wildness by the day to urban encroachment and land grabbers, was also sacrificing the wildness of these powerful elephants as well, in the interest of tourism, and exploiting them as drudges, to be led back and forth like pack animals.

When I mentioned this to Michael, he repeated that his ultimate intention was to reintroduce most of these elephants into the wild so they could join a herd and live as free creatures again. This seemed to me a worthy aim.

On another day at Abu, we climbed onto the elephants and were taken for a picnic in a clearing by a backwater at the side of one of the wider river channels. This picnic by the lagoon stands out in my memory as the highest level of comfort one could find in the African bush while still retaining all the elements of the safari experience. The clearing was a lovely setting, in a grove of tall mopane and fig trees, well shaded but looking onto the water coursing through the thick reed beds of the Okavango. In all essentials we were outdoors in the heart of Africa, among small darting birds and tall fish-hunting herons. We were seated in camp chairs and served cold drinks by the Abu staff, and on an expanse of white linen, a buffet table had been laid — yellow curries, bowls of purple vegetables, a tureen of soup, platters of sliced fruit, and beer and wine in chests of ice.

Nathan — his usual serene self, chatting with the other mahouts — told me that he had recently taken the mahouts and elephants out camping for the night. What fun they had swimming and playing soccer. “We were sleeping with the elephants in a circle around us.” He made it sound like Boy Scout camp. But one of the cautions in Randall Moore’s Back to Africa — the whole Abu Camp rationale — was that it was crucial that the trainer continually remind the elephant who was boss. “Dominance … must prevail,” Moore writes. The trainer “must make it known from the start who has the best means of domination at his disposal.”

Nathan spoke of the elephants, and especially Sukiri, with a matey affection, but his tone also contained a note of reverential awe, granting them a sort of sacredness. I noticed that no one at Abu ever joked about the elephants.

I said, “I’m trying to imagine what Big Joe and Collet will make of New York City.”

Michael said, “They might fancy it. They’ve never been out of the Okavango, much less Botswana. They might decide to stay there for years.” And saying yeurs, he raised his glass to the three men sitting together.

“Safe travels,” I said, toasting them.

“And if the Americans don’t understand an Aussie accent, Big Joe can translate.” Tronslate.

Sighing, Alexandra said, “Isn’t this magical? Look at us. It’s a living Manet, Déjeuner sur l’herbe.”

It was a transcendent experience and an unexpected thrill. Such experiences are so exceptional in Africa that few people know them — and those people are nearly all outsiders who have flown at great expense from Europe or America to pay thousands a day for this. Five days at Abu must have cost in the tens of thousands — I didn’t know, since Michael was too tactful to tell me. These thrills will become rarer as the game diminishes and the wild places are overrun with camps and lodges, the rivers dammed, the savannas fenced, the land carved up and exploited, and the bush animals eaten to extinction. Peter Beard’s landmark book The End of the Game: The Last Word from Paradise was early (1965) but prophetic. The doom of the animals was inevitable: “Death is the patiently awaited, un-feared fact of delicately poised African life.”

I admired the order of Abu Camp and the integrity of Michael’s wish to release the elephants, and hoped that he would prosper. I liked the harmony and found it funny that although the mahout might yell and cajole, the elephant stood its ground, yanking at trees, stuffing its mouth with leafy boughs, doing exactly what it wanted to do, taking its time, resuming its walk only when it had eaten its fill. So much for the trainer’s superiority or dominance.

On my last evening, Michael asked where I was going next. I said back to Namibia, and north to Etosha.

“Etosha’s another story.”

For him, Etosha Pan was mass tourism in a large regulated game park: busloads of gawkers, herds of budget-minded tourists, sprawling hotel compounds.

“I’m seeing a man who’s doling out American aid,” I said.

Michael said that he would stay in touch, and he did. I got news of Nathan, Collet, and Big Joe in New York. The three friends, bonded by their months of working together, stayed at the elegant Pierre Hotel and were interviewed by awed journalists about their life in the bush and their elephant experiences with the herd at Abu. They visited zoos in Toronto, Indianapolis, Pittsburgh, and Baltimore, looking at elephants and studying the breeding programs. They were photographed and quoted as though they themselves were marvels from Africa. They were away for six weeks.

On his return to Abu, Nathan Jamieson began working again with his elephant, Sukiri. A few days after he’d arrived back, he left her untethered, and when he walked a little distance to fetch her chains and manacles, turning his back on her, she followed him in the nodding and plodding way of an elephant on a mission, and knocked him flat, crushing him to death with her huge head. Nathan was thirty-two years old.

There was a further shock. When his identical twin brother Heath showed up at the camp to take Nathan’s body away, the whole African staff stared in fascinated horror and then abject fear, scared rigid by the sight of what appeared to be an incarnation of Nathan, claiming his ghost.

Later, Michael told me, “He died doing what he loved.” I remembered how happy Nathan had been at Abu Camp, how fond he was of the elephants, how much he knew of them. Perhaps it was true that he’d had a happy death.

On hearing of Nathan’s death, the Botswana government ordered that Sukiri be destroyed. Michael Lorentz vigorously opposed this, and thus began an imbroglio that ended with Michael quitting Abu for good, the camp resuming business under new management. Sukiri and the two elephants that had been orphaned with her were trucked to Johannesburg and flown in elephantine crates to the United States, where they are now housed together in a cage at the Pittsburgh Zoo.