The Cowboy and his Elephant Read Online Free Page A

harvests. And now the elephants had the same devastating effect on their crops as any flood or plague of locusts.
    The sight of the cornstalks in the fields had emboldened the elephants behind the fence. They lined up each evening, waiting for the sun to set. A fence, even the elephants knew, was only as good as its repair, and nights ago the stronger bulls had pushed a younger one into the electrified wire, sparks flew, the circuit shorted out, and the fence had been worthless as an elephant barrier ever since. Most nights the elephants stepped out of their reserve onto the lands adjacentto Dingani’s village. Afraid to go out of their huts, the villagers listened to the feasting in their maize fields. At sunrise the raiders were gone again, and so too were several acres of the Tonga’s precious crops.
    Dingani had no idea what to do to save his people. The law forbade Tonga ownership of guns. Hunting with any kind of weapon was proscribed. Dingani had asked the officers in the Game Department for help. The last he had heard from them, they were ending their system of elephant control. With it would go the village’s last hope of salvation.
     
    I n the den of his split-level farmhouse in Zimbabwe’s Gwayi Valley, a white African rancher, Buck deVries, hung up the telephone. He walked into the dining room, where his family, already seated at the dinner table, waited for him to say the blessing. They held hands in a circle and bowed their heads, and in his native Afrikaans, deVries uttered thanks to God. As they passed around a tureen of steaming kudu stew, deVries turned to his wife, Rita. “They’ve just told me the Tonga have asked the Zimbabwe government for another cull”—a slaughter of all those elephants that had encroached on tribal lands—he told her, and mentioned where. He also told her it was going to be the last one.
    Rita deVries knew all too well that her husband had a secret commitment to keep.
    A superstitious sixty-eight-year-old, deVries had vowed long ago to rescue at least one elephant from the slaughter. Perhaps as a hunter, his commitment to this rescue wasmeant to atone for a lifetime of taking elephants’ lives, necessary as he believed that to be. He was to be a rescuer, not a savior. He could not release any elephant he was going to save back into the wild, or raise her to adulthood, or even keep her on his ranch for long. Sure, he could use the money (four thousand American dollars) an exotic animal broker would pay him for her. He had misgivings about that, but, knowing what he knew, anyplace would be better for this young elephant than the continent of her birth.
    “Why, Mother, is this a good place for her to stay,” he asked his wife, “if she needs me to rescue her from the guns?”
    DeVries wanted to leave Africa himself if he could, with his whole family. The bitterness, the war, the intertribal killings, the feeling of being unwanted, the politics—these had turned this beautiful country into a living nightmare for its white settlers.
    Buck knew that rescue meant more than saving a baby elephant for a day or from a single cull. It meant for as long as the elephant lived. Zimbabwe was a dangerous place for an elephant, with systematic culls almost certain to be revived again sometime in the future, with the poaching of elephants for their ivory tusks, with a lack of food for man and beast, and with the shootings of elephants by some tribesmen bent on their eradication. What lay ahead for Zimbabwe’s elephants was anyone’s guess. The elephant he would save would need an ultimate savior, someone other than himself to watch over her. But someone had to makethe first effort, and Buck was as close to the front lines of elephant survival as anyone could be.
     
    T wo days after deVries was told about the cull, a convoy of twelve Game Department diesel trucks rumbled through the morning mist carrying at least fifty Africans in shorts, overalls, and sweaters of forest green. Guns