Day 4 - Morning

Hey Patton! These posts are out of order! Yup, see the A Note on Method below.

The morning of the 4th, Mark said, "you guys haven't seen our river yet." So off we went, not so much to see the river (Nothing more than a dry channel with sand in the bottom. It probably gets water when the rains come).

Once there, we met this female elephant, the first of our trip. Mark says that she is very old. As elephants age, there temple glands tend to recede. Take a look at her and you can see that she has dents above the eyes. Elephants usually travel in family groups. This one being alone is another consequence of her age.

Elephants have six sets of molars. When they feed, they will eat both the woody parts of trees as well as the leaves. Their molars need to be able to grind it all up. When one set of molars is worn down, the next set is pressed into service. Since a set of molars lasts about 10 years, elephants have a life expectancy of about 60 years. Once all the molars are worn away, they can no longer eat enough.


Apparently this old girl is out of teeth and just doing the best she can. What you can't tell from this picture, but was apparent once pointed out to us, was that she was just stripping the leaves from the branches and not eating the branches themselves. She was not moving fast, and Mark said she seemed tired, not hungry and didn't really seem interested in her food, she was just feeding from habit. In his estimation, she only had weeks or a month to live and would have separated herself from the family group because they needed to cover more ground and find more food than she needed. Every now and then, though, she would stop and cock her head ever so slightly as if listening. Apparently elephants communicate in two frequencies. At close range, they "talk" in low but audible grunts and grumbles. Over longer distances, they communicate at a frequency that is inaudible to human hearing, but that caries over long distance. Mark assumed that even though separate, she would be talking with her family.

So, do elephant's cry? Some of the literature I have read says that it only looks that way. Elephants don't have tear ducts, so their tears run down their faces. But sitting there, watching her feed and listen, looking into that sensitive face, it is hard to believe that she does not miss her sisters and daughters; that she is not aware of her fate.

The rest of the herd, Mark says, will know where she is, will know when she falls silent and know that she has died. They will go to her, surround her, and one at a time each one, from youngest to oldest, will touch her with their trunks, paying their respects or perhaps convincing themselves that she had really died. Then they will mourn, and though they will not stand guard over her, they may cover her with brush to keep the predators away.

After leaving her, we found the family. They would not let us get too close, the adults were keeping their little one behind them and away from us. They tolerated us for a while, but eventually they disappeared down an impossibly steep bank into the dry river, hardly making a sound.




Since it was our last day at Ngala, we had heard that the rangers had been instructed to deliver us back to camp at a particular time. After the elephants left us, we made our way back in that direction, looking for nothing in particular - - when Solly spotted a male lion on the move. When tracking a lion, the tracker gets off of the jumpseat and into the benches so that the vehicle will have the correct profile. Then it was off the road and into the brush again.

The lion was completely unconcerned with us, though he did glare at us from time to time. But not enough that he would divert from his mission. In fact he did not even stop to consider the large kudu female not 50 yards away.
She, however was quite aware of him, barking alarm calls and looking all around. At first I wondered why, if she could smell the lion but not see it, she didn't just run away. Of course, if you don't know where it is, you could just as easily run into it as away. Once she spotted him, she kept her eyes to him and calmed down noticeably. Apparently the predator you see is not to be feared, especially if you are fast!

We learned that this male is one of a dominant coalition of brothers. The three will split up at night and patrol the boundaries of their territory. This morning he was moving to rejoin his two brothers. Mark and Solly could hear him calling, though I could not, and followed him through the dense brush to see if we could see them all.

(I made the mistake if trying to ward off a knob thorn branch with my arm. This particular shrub has thick cruel thorns the curl back into the center of the bush. Once hooked, an attempt to pull away just digs them in deeper. I was jabbed pretty well in the palm of my hand and the moving truck did the pulling. My jacket also got snagged in half a with half a dozen thorns and, unlike my hand, there's not a mark on it. I really must write to REI and let them know!)

In spite of the brush, we were able to get pretty close to the big guy. How close you ask? Well again a picture is worth . . . This is one I took from the back seat of our truck with fellow passengers in front. The other vehicle is some of our compatriots who joined in the chase. Notice how the vehicles are set up with strong doors, windows and cages to keep the animals away? It's good to have faith that they care more about other things than trying to eat an entire Land Rover. Eventually our friend crossed the road into Krueger where we could not follow, it was time to head for our normal morning coffee break and then back to breakfast.

This was a day of surprises though. Remember how "Day 1" was the first of July? We thought nothing of it since we were half a world away from the U.S. of A. We hadn't counted on the ingenuity of Paul and Christine. Somehow, in their luggage allotment, they brought all the trinkets and trappings of a July 4 celebration and then enlisted the camp staff to put on a bush breakfast. As we entered the clearing, there was the camp staff, tooting noise-makers and waving flags.
We were greeted with a place to wash up and mimosa's for breakfast, along with just about everything else you could possibly have wanted. Naturally someone lead us in patriotic songs, God Bless America and the National Anthem. I explained to Mark that the it is almost tradition to sing the latter poorly since the tune is so hard. His rejoinder, "yes, but at least yours is not in the country's 12 official languages!"


Mark and Solly rode back to camp wearing the red white and blue headgear to much amusement, well, Mark's amusement anyway. Solly had to be talked into it, but between the kids and Mark they prevailed on him and he seemed to have a bit of fun with it in the end.










Here's the Fourth of July toast of the day:
"He who goes forth on the fourth with a fifth, may have trouble coming forth on the fifth."
(We had to explain that one to the folks who measure their liquor in liters.)

By the time we got back to camp, our bags had been picked up and delivered to the airstrip. All we needed to do was settle accounts and head out for the next adventure.