Smelly ellies in the cloud forest

I must be crazy because running into these elephants in the cloud forest at Lake Paradise didn’t scare me. In fact, what I wanted to do was just stand there and look at them and wait for them to decide what to do. But Calvin has been charged by elephants. Calvin has had a client stomped by an elephant. And Calvin was not going to let us stay where we were.

Using hand signals, he motioned for us to get off the elephant trail and slowly go back the way we came. We stepped as lightly as we could, aware of every crunch and snap, listening like dogs on alert for the crack of a split tree that would be our signal that an elephant was coming after us. And if we had heard a trumpet and the smashing of trees, what were we to do? I had no idea.

We got off the elephant trail and back to where the Land Cruiser was stuck behind the log and Calvin signaled for us to get down on the ground and silently wait. The elephant trail was maybe twenty feet to our right and he figured that eventually they’d come down that way. He had the safety off his Rigby .500 and had the gun sitting on his lap. And so we waited.

It’s amazing how much better your hearing is in a situation like this. All your senses really. I could smell the elephants and hear the buzz of forest bees and then I saw just the slightest movement, deep in the woods to my right, and my heart raced, the blood pounding in my ears. But it wasn’t an elephant. It was a young baboon, sitting on the root of an old fig tree, watching us. He looked like a child sitting on a fence by the side of the road where an accident has just occurred, not quite part of the activity but not completely outside of it either. No doubt he knew where the elephants were and he had a good view of us sitting in the forest and now he was just going to hang around to see what happened next.

We sat there for quite some time and then Calvin went off on his own into the forest. We could see him slowly moving up the elephant trail, crouched over, his loaded Rigby pointed in front of him. He got almost up to where we had first seen the elephants and then he stopped and just stood still in the forest, listening. When he came back he told us that the elephants had either gone back the way they came or, more likely, had detoured around us.

“They’re wary of humans up here,” he said. “Probably they chose to escape rather than confront us. Just as well.”

We waited another few minutes, just to make sure, but there were no more sounds in the forest. Even the baboon had moved on. So we did as well.