Elephant Crossing

We have a group of 10 odd bull elephants that forms an all-male herd. Elephants live in huge ranges but we often find this herd hanging out near our camp. Over time we’ve got to know them a bit better and I guess, they’ve come to understand us. At night we can often hear them munching away at branches just a few metres from our tents and in the mornings we sometimes see elephant droppings close by. But if we do come out with torches, on to the tent-porches in the dead of the night, the giant shadows melt away, not wishing to be lit up. Increasingly we find them on the White Rock adjoining the camp and we’ve become quite comfortable with it, as if it were the most natural thing in the world to see an African Elephant 15m above you, not far away.

There is a corridor, past our camp, the elephants take to go to a stream about a kilometre northward. So a few days ago when we saw the elephants walking in that direction we jumped into a vehicle to wait for them on the other side so we could watch them cross the watercourse and come up to our side. Big elephants never find it easy to walk down or up steep slopes. I’ve left the clip long- at a bit over ten minutes- so you can see how calm the elephants are and the deliberateness with which they approach the difficult task of walking down and up the banks.