The boys smoke a farewell cigar at Lake Paradise. Photo and video by David Lansing.

It’s interesting that Lake Paradise is so close to the 3-million-year-old Koobi Fora paleontological site first discovered by Richard Leakey and his team in 1972 and now thought of as the “Cradle of Mankind” and the most likely site of the biblical Garden of Eden. Koobi Fora may be the cradle of mankind but to me Lake Paradise feels like the Garden of Eden.

Which, frankly, came as a bit of a surprise to all of us. The purpose of this expedition was to see if any sort of Paradise, literally and figuratively, still existed in Kenya. And the short answer is, yes, it does.

On this trip we’ve visited several different types of African paradise, the first being the pristine environment near Cottar’s 1920s Safari Camp in a corner of the Mara-Serengeti and even that was unexpected. When we’d first discussed going on this expedition there was a certain resistance, particularly by the photographer Pete McBride, to visiting the Mara. Pete was worried there wouldn’t be much to see (or, for him, to photograph) in the Mara and that Calvin’s camp would treat us, as he wrote me, like “elderly British folk who are more interested in tea time and china than seeing an elephant up close during musk.” He also warned me that there would be a million mini-vans running around chasing animals up one ridge and down another.

But that wasn’t the case. What we got instead was a close-up view of thousands of animals, from elephants to wildebeests to cheetahs, and never once came across another game-viewing vehicle. Paradise indeed. Even Pete the Cynic was shocked by how pristine Calvin’s little corner of the Mara was and how much game life we saw.

From there we traveled to Sarara, in the Mathews Range of Central Kenya, and found a different sort of paradise. As a friend of mine who was there before us wrote, “The highest parts of the range are behind the camp, covered in lush tropical forest, but looking the other way the countryside is quite dry and covered in acacia trees. The contrast is amazing. It really is stunningly beautiful.”

The focus here for us wasn’t so much on the animals (although we did see elephants and giraffes and various members of the antelope family such as gerenuks) but on the setting and the Samburu people. To visit the Singing Wells and to watch the young Samburu warriors dance in a sand river at sunset was to confuse time and suddenly find yourself swept back into a world that existed hundreds of years ago.

Then we got to Lake Paradise, a place very few people knew about and no one we met had visited within the last ten years. As Martin Johnson said, “It is Paradise, literally as well as figuratively, and if it were charted it would appear on the maps as Lake Paradise. And I know of no place in all the world that better deserves the name.”

Some 80 years later, I can echo Martin’s words.

Is it like it was when Osa and Martin first came here in 1921? No. There are not nearly as many elephants and the ones that are here are not the famous ancient beasts with tusks so large that, for at least two of them, they had armed game wardens protecting them from poachers. The rhinos that used to drive Osa Johnson crazy because they seemed to be everywhere have disappeared completely and the large herds of buffalo have diminished greatly as well.

And the lake, with its “unsurpassable beauty” has mostly disappeared and probably will never return.

Still. The ancient forest of old cedars and figs and African brown olive trees are still here. The great number of birds and waterfowl that made such an impression on Osa are still here, perhaps in even greater number. As are the clouds of butterflies she wrote about. Calvin estimates that there are hundreds of different species of butterflies here, many of them unidentified, and that there are probably some unique species of plants and trees that have evolved over millions of years that are no place else in the world.

“It’s an island of species development,” he says.

It is, in fact, Paradise. One I hope I get back to one day.

Here’s a short video of Calvin Cottar discussing our discoveries of paradise in Kenya.

Our final look at Lake Paradise. Photos by Chris Fletcher.

When I got up, Eddie and Kurani were already breaking camp. It was very sad to sit around the smoldering campfire knowing this was our last morning at Lake Paradise.

While Julius was making a final breakfast, cooking up the last of the sausages and bacon, we all packed. Even while I was stuffing clothes in my duffel bag on my cot, Kurani was pulling up the tent stakes. By the time I was done, the tent, which had felt like home, was sagging around my head.

The plan was for Calvin to drive us into Marsabit where a small plane from Tropic Air would, we hope, be waiting for us, and then the four of us—Hardy, Fletch, Pedro and myself—would fly to Samburu where Pete and I would get off and spend some time at the Elephant Watch Camp and Hardy and Fletch would continue on to Nairobi. Calvin and his crew would then drive the two vehicles down to Elephant Watch Camp and join us for an evening before continuing on.

We headed out of camp with the dew still bright on the grasses and the sun having just risen over the rim of the crater. The woods were alive with baboons and birds and all the little dudus that hum and whir in the first heat of day. Clouds of waterfowl were coming in from their evening roosts in the trees and guinea fowl ran across the road in front of us, cackling in their indignity of our disturbing their pecking of insects in the short grass over the road.

Me in front of our plane at the Marsabit airport.

It was just a gorgeous morning;  so gorgeous my heart felt heavy and I could hardly breath. Once we were off the mountain, Calvin was in a hurry to get us to the Marsabit airstrip. He’d coordinated the time of our arrival with Tropic Air and his thought was that he wanted to be pulling up with us two or three minutes after the plane had landed. He didn’t like the idea of us or the pilot having to wait around. As I’ve said before, this is a very troubled area what with the shiftas and all and there’s no need to invite trouble. When we got to the airstrip the little 6-passenger Cessna was waiting for us. The wind was blowing sharply and it was cold enough that all of us were wearing jackets. We quickly loaded our gear and took off, waving at Calvin.

I was in the co-pilot seat and Pedro was in the back where he could lower one of the rear windows and stick his head out to do some aerial photography. He asked the pilot to fly north over Lake Paradise. The wind was blowing so hard that the pilot was nervous about slowing the plane too much, afraid it might stall, but he dipped his wing and we came in low over the extinct crater, low enough so that we could see the elephants drinking from the shallow pools one last time. We circled all the way round the caldera, slowly, slowly, with Pete hanging out the window and the rest of us with our faces pressed against the glass trying to get one last view. And then the pilot straightened out the plane and turned it south, towards Samburu and Lake Paradise was behind us.

In December of 1926, Osa and Martin Johnson closed down their camp at Lake Paradise and began the long journey home over the Kaisut Desert. They went first to Nairobi and Mombasa before sailing to London and New York where they began working on their film together and arranging a world lecture tour. But they never forgot about Lake Paradise.

Martin Johnson wrote, “I have been home just four months, and as soon as I can, I am going back. I know exactly the spot I will make for. It lies away out in the blue, a good thousand-mile trek from Nairobi, in British East Africa. It is Paradise, literally as well as figuratively, and if it were charted it would appear on the maps as Lake Paradise. And I know of no place in the world that better deserves the name.”

The Maasai have a saying: Epwo m-baa poking in-gitin’got, which means basically “Everything has an end.” Martin Johnson never made it back to Lake Paradise. He died in a plane crash on January 12, 1937.

Pedro, left, takes on Calvin in tug-of-war game. Photo and video by David Lansing.

It’s late in the afternoon. A little too early for cocktails,  a little too late for a nap. We’re all just lazing around. Pedro is taking some photos of Calvin holding his elephant gun (Calvin tells us that each bullet for his rifle costs $40). I’m reading a scrapbook Calvin’s mother has put together about the Cottar men—Bwana Charles (his great grandfather), Mike (his father), and Bud (his great uncle). Some interesting stuff here. (From a 50’s sporting magazine story Bud Cottar wrote about his father’s death from a wounded rhino in 1940: “The lions will grunt at night, the hyenas laugh and sob, the vultures watch from on high, and the wild elephants drift on silent feet through the vast forests…but Bwana Cottar has gone away, and we will not see his like again.”)

When Pedro gets done with his photo shoot, he challenges Calvin, eight years his senior, to a sort of tug-of-war camp game. He gets a length of rope about 25- or 30-feet long and the two stand facing each other on camp stools, each having about ten feet of rope behind them. The goal is to either pull your opponent off the stool or have them run out of rope. It’s more mental than physical. The game is as much about feints and quick reactions as anything. You’re trying to figure out if your opponent is going to try and jerk you off your stool or just take little tugs at the rope trying to get you off balance. Calvin seems immediately at a disadvantage but then he starts to figure out what Pete is doing and almost topples him before losing.

Then Hardy takes on Pedro. Now, the thing is that winning this game once doesn’t give you much of an  advantage against your next opponent. You’re winded, your opponent has been watching your moves, plus, you’ve got a bit of rope burn already. So not too surprisingly, Hardy knocks off Pedro. And then takes on Fletcher, who now has the advantage of having watched the tactics of three different contestants in two matches. Fletcher easily conquers Hardy. And now takes on Calvin. Who, not too surprisingly, defeats Fletcher, knocking him back against a log so he scrapes up his leg. So now all the boys have rope burns and a couple of them have twisted an ankle or scraped a leg, and all of them are sweating and winded.

Meanwhile, I read my book and finish my cold beer.

Here’s a short video of Pedro taking on Calvin.

A lodge employee and our armed askari playing checkers with beer caps. Photo by David Lansing.

Lake Paradise is actually an extinct volcanic crater known as a gof (the named given to them by the local Borana people) and it’s not the only gof on Mount Marsabit. In looking at my map of the area I count at least a dozen others. One, called Gof Sokorta Diko, is about a 45-minute drive away on the windy road that goes through the forest. The thing that’s interesting about this gof is that there’s a lodge there. Or so we think.

When I was first researching this story and trying to figure out where we were going to stay, I came across this lodge which was variously described as either “refurbished” or “grungy.” Some sites even suggested that the lodge was now closed. So on Saturday we decided to go on an outing to the lodge to see what was there.

The short answer is, not much. In fact, when we first pulled up to the lodge, which is just a simple rectangular structure with a corrugated tin roof, we thought it was closed. But the front door wasn’t locked so we walked in and started yelling “Hello!” which must have scared to death the two caretakers who were sitting on the veranda outside playing a game of checkers on a home-made board using beer bottle caps for pieces.

There was a little bar in the lobby of the lodge and a seating area around a low table covered with a yellow check tablecloth atop which were four or five magazines that were at least three or four years old. Most of the other furniture in the lobby was covered with green sheets. We asked the caretaker if he had beer and he said he had Tusker lager or Tusker premium lager (which accounted for the two different types of beer caps being used in the checkers game).

We ordered a couple bottles of each and went and sat on the veranda that overlooks a meadow that, like Paradise, used to be a lake. We knew that because there were old B&W photos in the bar of the lake with water going almost all the way up to the lodge. Still, it was a pleasant setting. When the caretaker brought our beers, they were warm. We asked him if he had any cold ones and he said he didn’t. “No electricity.” He told us that the lodge had a generator and when they had guests, they turned the generator on, but right now they had no guests.

“Have you had guests recently?” I asked him.

“Oh, yes sir.”

“This week?”

“No, sir.”

“Last week?”

“No, sir.” He said he couldn’t remember exactly when they last had guests but he was pretty sure it was sometime this year. Or maybe last year.

Hardy trying his best to annoy me. Photo by Chris Fletcher.

There was a small TV on a table in the bar and Hardy asked him if it worked. The caretaker said they could get one or two channels—when the generator was on. Since it was Saturday, Hardy joked that perhaps we should pay to have the generator fired up and see if we could catch a football game. He was only joking, I think, but it irritated me and I told him that we had not come all the way to Lake Paradise so that we could watch a Saturday afternoon football game at the Marsabit Lodge.

This was a mistake on my part. Whenever I get indignant, Hardy gets amused. So he started to make a big deal out of it. He talked to Fletcher and Pedro and asked them if they were willing to chip in on the cost of the fuel for the generator so they could get the TV fired up. I said we needed to get going. Hardy said that was fine. They’d stay and watch a game and walk back to camp. Of course there was no way they were going to walk back to camp. It had taken us almost an hour to drive here through the forest and it was already late in the afternoon and there was no way Calvin would ever let them walk back to Lake Paradise at twilight which is when all the big game starts moving towards the water. I knew that and Hardy knew I knew it, but I was annoyed none-the-less, which gave him great satisfaction.

Eventually we paid our bar bill and got back into the Land Cruiser and headed back through the forest to Lake Paradise, but even then Hardy wouldn’t let it go. He was having too much fun. Maybe when we get back to camp, Hardy said, we could drop Lansing off and then go back to the lodge and watch a game. What do you think Calvin?

At this point, even Calvin could see how annoyed I was so he played along and said, Sure, great idea.

“Goddamnit,” I said angrily, “nobody is going to watch football at Lake Paradise. Nobody.”

And that was the end of it. Except for the barely suppressed chortling in the back seat from Hardy and Fletcher and Pedro.

Calvin leads the boys in search of a leopard at Lake Paradise. Photo and video by David Lansing.

To see a cheetah or a lion from the open roof of a Land Cruiser or some other safari vehicle is a wonderful thing but after the first encounter you lose any sense of fear you might have correctly brought with you into the bush and, after awhile, you even start to feel a bit blasé about the whole thing. Oh, look, another herd of elephants…shall we head back to camp for cocktails?

It can’t be helped. Viewing wildlife from a minivan is really very much like going to the zoo. You know the elephant isn’t going to charge your Toyota. You know the lion is unconcerned with your minivan.

But get out on foot in the bundu or the forest and it’s a very different thing. The elephant and the lion and the other masters of the wilderness are habituated to vehicles; they know what they smell like and look like and they aren’t afraid of them. A man on foot is a different thing. A man stalking them on foot is a predator to be feared; or perhaps a meal.

Last night camp was particularly noisy. The baboons and the leopards cursed at each other all night long. Robert Ruark in his fabulous description of a safari in the ‘50s, does this bit about an imagined conversation between baboons and leopards:

A baboon barked somewhere down the donga and followed it with an outraged squawk. A little later the leopard which had outraged him sawed at the foot of the tree, from which the nugu undoubtedly was swaying from a limber branch. “Bastard,” the baboon said “Spotted, evil, ugly bastard.” The leopard replied: “Just wait, nugu. I’ll have indigestion over you yet.”

Yes, this is exactly how you imagine the conversation to go between a baboon and a leopard, they are such mortal enemies.

Since we had been in camp now for quite some time, Calvin figured the leopard that lived in the caves above our camp might be getting used to us and becoming less cautious. Perhaps we could lure him into the open. So this morning after breakfast we bundled up in forest-green fleece and set off into the woods in search of the leopard that has been keeping us up most nights.

The plan was to find a spot in the forest above the camp and hunker down while Calvin made odd noises to imitate an injured bushbuck, a small, rather elegant member of the antelope family that is a favorite meal of the leopard (in our walk, we came across the lower jaw bone of a bushbuck, giving further credence to Calvin’s idea that our leopard friend might be enticed to come out of his lair if he thought there was a wounded animal so near to him).

Hunker down on the ground, Calvin whispered. Do not move; do not make any noise. Then Calvin found a perch on the rocks above us and, with the Rigby .500 in his lap, began to make his dying-bushbuck call which, to me, sounded more like a dying duck. In any case, the leopard wasn’t enticed to come and take a look. But we did get a response from an old lion somewhere further off in the woods. Which was a bit disconcerting.

Anyway, here’s a short video of Calvin making his bushbuck noises in the woods of Lake Paradise.

The Lake Paradise bar and sunset cocktails. Photos by David Lansing.

In the late afternoon, after everyone has cleaned up a bit and maybe even taken a bucket shower, we drive up to the summit above Lake Paradise, maybe two hundred feet of sheer drop over our campground, and set up a little bar over a spot that looks out across the caldera and all the way out to the Kaisut Desert. It’s a spectacular view. We build a little bonfire and pull up canvas chairs right over the edge of the cliff so that you can almost dangle your feet in midair and the wind blows and it feels like you are in a hot air balloon riding the thermals.

In the fading light you can just make out the dusty gray shape of elephants moving out of the meadow and back into the forest and usually there are several birds of prey—bateleur eagles, goshawks, African fish eagles—soaring almost at eye-level.

Me looking over Paradise. Photo by Chris Fletcher.

Yesterday when we were up there, sipping our whisky, smoking cigars, the fire roaring behind us, we watched as two fish eagles mated, dropped precipitously through the pale blue sky as if they’d both been shot and then, at the last minute, disengaged, stretched their wings, and, screaming, glided back up into the thermals. What an incredible way to make love.

“My god,” said Calvin to no one in particular, “have you ever seen anything like that?”

I got up to take a leak and wandered down the trail atop the escarpment, headed for a dead Brown olive tree where a pygmy falcon, with white breast and gray back, sat perched on a dead limb. Just as I got to the edge of the cliff to do my thing, I heard the distinctive cough of a leopard nearby. Probably he was perched on one of the outcroppings just below where I stood, just stirring from a late afternoon nap and getting ready to go out on the town for supper.

The wind was behind my back and no doubt he smelled me. I assumed that the cough was his polite way of letting me know that he was there and would prefer it if I went away. But, you know, here you are standing on top of the world looking down on the Garden of Eden and what you really want to do is be like St. Francis and commune with the animals, as crazy as that may be. So I just stood there and after a minute or two, there was another cough, this one seeming a little closer, a little more insistent. And while I didn’t feel any fear being this close to a leopard, even one I couldn’t see, I kept thinking how annoyed Calvin would be if I was attacked and he had to come running over here with his .500 Rigby and make a mess of the poor leopard and then stitch me up. No doubt it would put an end to the cocktail hour and delay dinner considerably.

So I coughed back, just to let the leopard know that two could play this game, and then I slowly backed down the trail. Before I even got to where the others were sitting around the fire, one of the armed askaris appeared magically out of the forest. It is always a little disconcerting when one of these ghosts appears out of nowhere. He walked beside me, his gun held in front of him.

I nodded towards the cliff. “Chui,” I said.

He smiled. “Ndiyo. Chui kubwa.” A big leopard.

So he’d seen the whole thing. Watched me go to the edge of the escarpment to do my business, knowing full well, no doubt, that I was pissing over the home of an old leopard. He probably thought it was rather amusing—a mzungu peeing over the home of a leopard. I just wonder what he would have done had the leopard come after me. I’m sure he would have shot it. At least, I think he would have.

We take cover after running into some elephants. Photos by David Lansing.

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.

This baboon was waiting to see what happened when the elephants found us.

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.

This is what happens when you look for a shortcut through the woods at Lake Paradise. Photo by Chris Fletcher.

The plan was to drive down off the mountain and into one of the villages around Marsabit to check out the local culture. When we’d met the head warden of Marsabit, Robert Obrien, he’d told us that the tribes in this area—Rendille, Borana, Gabbra, Turkana—are fascinating and worth a visit.

“When the road comes (the one the Chinese are building) it will bring tourism to this area for the first time,” he told us. “I don’t want tourists to come for the animals. I want them to come for the culture. The culture is unique. The thing is the cultures of the people.”

And then he told us of a couple of villages that we might go to. So that was the plan. But in Kenya plans are meaningless. We planned for the KW (Kenya Wildlife) to bring us water because we were running low and they did; but they brought the water in used petrol barrels and we couldn’t use it. We planned to restock on Tusker in Marsabit but there was none to be had. That’s the way it is in Africa.

Rather than take the same road down the mountain that we’d taken to get here, Calvin decided that it would be quicker to try the trail to the north. You would think by now that we would know better than to look for shortcuts (particularly considering that it was Martin Johnson looking for a shortcut to Lake Paradise that started all the problems with Calvin’s great-uncle Bud), but we have not learned that lesson.

The track was narrow and overgrown. Hardy and Fletch and Pedro sat on the roof of the Land Cruiser, giving Calvin instructions on how to avoid a fallen log or a large bush that seemed to block the trail. Sometimes we’d stop the car and all get out and evaluate the situation and Pedro would take his Swiss Army knife which had a 3-inch serrated blade on it and hack away at some sapling or a branch. Then Calvin would push into the growth like a rhino charging through the bundu and miraculously make it through. It was cool and moist in the forest and smelled of decay and greenery and, once in awhile, of fresh dung. The webs of golden orb spiders were everywhere and every few minutes one of the boys sitting on the roof of the vehicle would shout and Calvin would stop the car and we’d all watch Fletcher or Hardy try to brush away the long-legged creepy crawly that had fallen on their hat or their shirt.

It wasn’t long before we came to a spot in the forest where a good-sized tree had fallen across the road, probably pushed over by an elephant, and it was impossible to go on. The log was fresh and wet and too heavy to move. After surveying the situation, we determined that by moving a few fallen branches to the side of the road and knocking over some of the smaller inch-thick saplings it might be possible to go around the fallen tree through the forest. We did this once and then we did it again, taking a good half-hour every time, and then we came to another tree across the road, this one several feet in diameter, and it looked like it would be impossible to go any further.

We all got out and walked through the forest, looking for some possible access, following the line of least resistance, going deeper and deeper into the woods, which is when we stumbled across a small herd of elephants making their way down the forest path to the meadow. There are three situations in which animals like the elephant are dangerous: when they are with their young, when you surprise them, and when you are between where they are coming from and where they are going.

We’d hit the jackpot.

Below our veranda is a natural clearing with great brown olive trees standing about. We have named this Paradise Park. Practically all the trees have had their bark rubbed off by elephants. And since they are bare for as high as fifty feet, I suppose that elephants have scratched their backs here for fifty to a hundred years.

–Osa Johnson

–Martin Johnson

Osa Johnson in front of their house at Lake Paradise.

We were all anxious to see if anything remained of Martin and Osa Johnson’s 1924 camp. According to one book I’d read, they’d set up camp on a low sloping ridge on the southwest of the crater and here they built a small house with a fireplace in the center and a porch overlooking the lake as well as a separate kitchen, storehouse, garage, workshop, guest room, tool house, carpenter house, a building for the generator, an underground vault and, “the skyscraper of the village,” Martin’s film laboratory. Osa had also put in a 4-acre vegetable and flower garden.

She wrote that in the garden she grew “nasturtiums, cosmos, baby’s breath, cannas, carnations and roses. Cannas grew so profusely that I constantly had to thin them out and plant them farther and farther apart. Elephants often trod them down. I even planted canna bulbs out in the forest and there they throve, and I suppose are still thriving.

“I suppose that the winds and the birds have now carried the seeds of my garden throughout the forest, and I hope the crater is abloom with the flowers on which I spent so much care, and with which we left a part of our hearts.”

There was an obvious spot where we all agreed the Johnsons must have built their camp. It was just off the narrow road coming into Lake Paradise, a flat spot, dotted with old brown olive trees, where you had a magnificent view of most of the meadow. And it was on the southwest end of the shore.

Hardy and Fletcher searching for remnants of the Johnson camp. Photo by David Lansing.

We went over there early one morning and tromped around. The dry grass was knee high. Several areas, shaded by trees, looked like they’d been cleared and leveled. But there wasn’t any obvious signs of old foundations or the remnants of a chimney, which is what we were hoping to find. At one point I thought that perhaps we were looking on the wrong side of the road so I crossed over and started wandering off into the forest. I came over a rise and there before me where three elephants on their way to the meadow. I stood still and just looked at them, knowing that Calvin would have a cow if he knew what I was doing but so mesmerized that I didn’t do the logical thing which would have been to slowly back up and retreat.

Back in 1996, Calvin was leading the photographer and writer Peter Beard on a photo safari near his camp in the Mara when they were charged by an elephant. The whole thing was filmed (except when the cameraman dropped the camera and ran for his life) and is a popular video on YouTube. If you’re curious, I’ve included the video at the bottom of this post.

What you realize in looking at that video is how quickly things can go bad when you’re dealing with large animals like elephants. One minute they’re just standing there twitching their ears and the next minute they’re running you down and stomping on your chest. It’s amazing Beard survived the attack.

So I had all that on my mind as I stood there looking at the three cows. Like in the Beard attack, I was on foot and in the open. And, probably like Beard, I didn’t really feel like I was in imminent danger. But I’d seen the video; I knew better. So very, very slowly, while still facing the elephants, I began to back up, first getting off the elephant’s path to the meadow, and then just moving sideways, away from them, into the woods.

When I got back to where the others were still kicking around in the grass, Calvin asked me if I’d seen anything interesting on the other side of the road.

“Just a few elephants,” I said.

“Ah, good,” said Calvin. “Smelly ellies.”

I’m not sure he believed me. But that was fine with me.