Elephant Song - Smith Wilbur - Страница 3

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Johnny lit a cigarette.  Daniel had never been able to talk him out of the habit.  They sat in companionable silence as they had so often before and watched the dawn come on more swiftly now, until that religious moment when the sun thrust its burning rim above the dark mass of the forest.  The light changed and all their world was bright and glazed as a precious ceramic creation fresh from the firing oven.

The trackers came into camp ten minutes ago.  They have found a herd, Johnny broke the silence, and the mood.

Daniel stirred and glanced at him.  How many?  he asked.  About fifty.

That was a good number.  They would not be able to process more, for flesh and hide putrefy swiftly in the heat of the valley, and a lower number would not justify all this use of men and-expensive equipment.

Are you sure you want to film this?  Johnny asked.

Daniel nodded.  I have considered it carefully.  To attempt to conceal it would be dishonest.  People eat meat and wear leather, but they don't want to see inside the abattoir, Johnny pointed out.

This is a complex and emotional subject we are examining.

People have a right to know.  in anyone else I would suspect journalistic sensationalism, Johnny murmured, and Daniel frowned.  You are probably the only person I would allow to say that because you know better.  Yes, Danny, I know better, Johnny agreed.

You hate this as much as I do, and yet you first taught me the necessity of it.

Let's go to work, Daniel suggested gruffly, and they stood up and walked back in silence to where the trucks were parked.

The camp was astir, and coffee was brewing on the open fire.

The rangers were rolling their blankets and sleeping-bags and checking their rifles.

There were four of them, two black lads and two white, all of them in their twenties.  They wore the plain khaki uniform of the Parks Department with green shoulder flashes, and though they handled their weapons with the casual competence of veterans they kept up a cheerful high-spirited banter.  Black and white treated each other as comrades, although they were just old enough to have fought in the bush war and had probably been on opposing sides.  It always amazed Daniel that so little bitterness remained.

Jock, the cameraman, was already filming.  It often seemed to Daniel that the Sony camera was a natural excrescence of his body, like a hunchback.

I'm going to ask you some dumb questions for the camera, and I might needle you a little, Daniel warned Johnny.  We both know the answers to the questions, but we have to fake it, okay?  Go ahead.  Johnny looked good on film.  Daniel had studied the rushes the previous night.  One of the joys of working with modern video equipment was the instant replay of footage.  Johnny resembled the younger Cassius Clay before he became Mohammed Ali.

However, he was leaner in the face and his bone structure finer and more photogenic.  His expression was mobile and expressive and the tones of his skin were not so dark as to make too severe a contrast and render photography difficult.

They huddled over the smoky campfire and Jock brought the camera in close to them.  We are camped here on the banks of the Zambezi River with the sun just rising, and not far out there in the bush your trackers have come across a herd of fifty elephant, Warden, Daniel told Johnny, and he nodded.  You have explained to me that the Chiwewe Park cannot support such numbers of these huge animals, and that this year alone at least a thousand of them must be removed from the Park, not only for the good of the ecology, but for the very survival of the remaining elephant herds.  How do you intend removing them?  We will have to cull them, Johnny said curtly.  Cull them?  Daniel asked.  That means kill, doesn't it?  Yes.  My rangers and I will shoot them.  All of them, Warden?  You are going to kill fifty elephant today?  We will cull the entire herd.  What about the young calves and the pregnant cows? Won't you spare a single animal?  They all have to go, Johnny insisted. But why, Warden?  Couldn't you catch them, dart and drug them, and send them elsewhere?  The costs of transporting an animal the size of an elephant are staggering.  A big bull weighs six tons, an average cow around four.

Look at this terrain down here in the valley.  Johnny gestured towards the mountainous heights of the escarpment and the broken rocky kopjes; and wild forest.  We would require special trucks and we would have to build roads to get them in and out.  Even if that were possible, where would we take them?  I have told you that we have a surplus of almost twenty thousand elephant in Zimbabwe.  Where would we take these elephant?  There simply isn't space for them.  So, Warden, unlike the other countries to the north such as Kenya and Zambia who have allowed their elephant herds to be almost wiped out by poaching and unwise conservation policy, you are in a Catch 22 situation.  Your management of your herds of elephant has been too good.  Now you have to destroy and waste these marvelous animals.  No, Doctor Armstrong, we won't waste them.  We will recover a great deal of value from their carcasses, ivory and hides and meat which will be sold.  The proceeds will be ploughed back into conservation, to prevent poaching and to protect our National Parks.  The death of these animals will not be a complete abomination.

But why do you have to kill the mothers and the babies?

Daniel insisted.  You are cheating, Doctor, Johnny warned him.  You are using the emotive, slanted language of the animal rights groups, mothers and babies".  Let's rather call them cows and calves, and admit that a cow eats as much and takes up as much space as a bull, and that calves grow very swiftly into adults.  So you feel Daniel started, but despite his earlier warning, Johnny was becoming angry.  Hold on, he snapped.

There's more to it than that.  We have to take out the entire herd.

It is absolutely essential that we leave no survivors.  The elephant herd is a complex family group.  Nearly all its members are blood relatives, and there is a highly developed social structure within the herd.  The elephant is an intelligent animal, probably the most intelligent after the primates, certainly more intelligent than a cat or dog, or even a dolphin.  They know, I mean, they really understand.

. . he broke off, and cleared his throat.  His feelings had overcome him, and Daniel had never liked nor admired him more than he did at that moment.  The terrible truth is, Johnny's voice was husky as he went on, that if we allowed any of them to escape the cull, they would communicate their terror and panic to the other herds in the Park.

There would be a swift breakdown in the elephant-social behaviour.

Isn't that a little far-fetched, Warden?  Daniel asked softly.  No. It has happened before.

After the war there were ten thousand surplus elephant in the Wankie National Park.  At that time, we knew very little about the techniques or effects of massive culling operations.  We soon learned.  Those first clumsy efforts of ours almost destroyed the entire social structure of the herds.  By shooting the older animals, we wiped out their reservoir of experience and transferable wisdom.  We disrupted their migratory patterns, the hierarchy and discipline within the herds, even their breeding habits.  Almost as though they understood that the holocaust was upon them, the bulls began to cover the barely mature young cows before they were ready.

Like the human female, the elephant cow is ripe for breeding at fifteen or sixteen years of age at the very earliest.  Under the terrible stress of the culling the bulls in Wankie went to the cows when they were only ten or eleven years of age, still in puberty, and the calves born of these unions were stunted little runts.  Johnny shook his head.  No, we have to take out the whole herd at one stroke.

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