The Elephant Whisperer

The young calf, named Thula, is extremely weak and dehydrated and is put on a drip by the vet. Lawrence procures elephant formula and bottles while Franćoise sets up an elephant nursery in a spare room. The vet explains that Thula is too big, hence her feet folded over in the womb with not enough room to grow. However, her bones and muscles are intact and hopefully can be straightened out with exercise.

Johnny, the new ranger who discovered Thula’s birth, stays with her around the clock until she heals. As she gets stronger, the staff help strengthen her front feet by supporting her body with a sling. Within a week, she is hobbling around the garden, albeit limping. Thula proves to be a generally happy elephant and, despite being in pain from her feet straightening out, seems to be always shining—she is constantly surrounded by people and love at the reserve.

One late afternoon when walking Thula in the bush outside the garden, the herd approaches. Lawrence is worried about being caught with the calf in the open and quickly hurries Thula back inside. However, Nana catches her scent and approaches the garden fence, waiting. Lawrence realizes he cannot put them off; he takes his shirt and rubs it over Thula to capture her scent and then takes it out to the elephants while explaining everything that has happened. After sniffing the shirt and deliberating for a while, the elephants leave, unconcerned. Lawrence is thrilled that they trust him.

Thula appears to be doing well, until one morning she refuses to get up. She is in acute pain, and the vet theorizes that her joints are inflamed because of the way she walks. An x-ray is the only thing that can give an accurate picture of her condition, but that is impossible to do for an elephant. He prescribes anti-inflammatories, but the pain persists over the next few days. A week later, Thula refuses to drink anymore and has to be put on a drip. She soon passes away.

Thula’s death affects everyone on the reserve, as they have all come to love her. Her body is taken out into the wild to allow nature to do its work. Lawrence finds the herd and leads them to the carcass, feeling miserable for letting them down. However, Nana and Nandi approach Lawrence’s Land Rover, raising their trunks in greeting before the herd moves off. The remnants of Thula’s skeleton are left in the same place, and the herd occasionally still passes by to stop and pay remembrance.

After a long wait, Lawrence finally gets a chance to introduce cape buffalo into the reserve. However, while the buffalo are being loaded off into the reserve, one of the buffalo charges out of the trailer and straight at Hennie, the vet. Hennie is chased around the trailer and manages to scramble inside the driver’s cab in the nick of time. The bull runs off into the bush, and the rest of the herd follows shortly after.

Witnessing Hennie’s close brush with death gets Lawrence thinking about death in general. He reflects on how Max, now 14 years old, is old and in pain from arthritis; he cannot last much longer. He has recently stopped eating as well. Lawrence finally accepts the inevitable, and later that morning, the vet puts Max down, rendering Lawrence “inconsolable.”

Françoise asks Lawrence when they are finally going to be married. Lawrence deflects the question, as they have been together 18 years and he already considers them as “married” as possible. A month later, however, Lawrence is ambushed into a wedding at the reserve by Françoise’s family in concert with his own. His mother arrives under the pretext of having him meet some government officials, and when Lawrence arrives at the lodge dressed up for the occasion, he finds his own wedding in process instead. Françoise and Lawrence are married at an event packed with guests, and the celebrations go on until early next morning.

Mnumzane begins acting strangely, approaching vehicles and blocking their paths on multiple occasions, even showing malevolence toward the vehicles. Lawrence himself has a close call with Mnumzane on one occasion where he takes out a new Land Rover for a drive on the reserve: He is able to snap Mnumzane out of his cold mood only by repeatedly calling his name. Lawrence eventually learns that some rangers, who had by then resigned, had been playing “chicken” with Mnumzane, using the car. These interactions seem to have altered Mnumzane’s attitudes toward humans and cars.

A few weeks later, Lawrence takes some visitors out on a game drive and accidentally approaches too close to Mnumzane, who approaches the car and begins prodding the window with his tusk. Lawrence tries reversing, but Mnumzane’s tusk skids across the glass, and the elephant immediately turns violent. He hammers the bull bar and bulldozes the car back into a tree before charging at it multiple times and flipping it over. Lawrence is forced to fire shots into the air as a last-ditch attempt. Mnumzane freezes, and Lawrence manages to call out to him, snapping him out of his rage. The elephant walks over to Lawrence, pulling out shards of the shattered windscreen and checking Lawrence all over with his trunk, before proceeding to browse nearby.

Lawrence manages to radio for help, but Mnumzane doesn’t allow the approaching vehicle to draw near. Suddenly, the herd arrives and surrounds Mnumzane, jostling him away from Lawrence and the car. Mnumzane finally leaves with them, and Lawrence is sure Nana and Frankie intervened to save everyone’s lives. However, some distance away, Mnumzane stops and take some final, angry steps toward the car before disappearing. Lawrence and his guests eventually make it back to the lodge. Miraculously, everyone is unharmed, but the car is completely totaled.

Lawrence wonders what to do about Mnumzane. He refuses to shoot him, putting other safety measures in place instead, such as clearing large pathways between the house and the lodge for the staff to drive back safely. However, one morning, Lawrence is radioed by a safari range driver that a broken-down Land Rover he had left in the open to get spare parts for has been smashed and overturned. Lawrence recognizes Mnumzane’s spoor all over the place. He realizes that if the elephant will attack an empty vehicle with no people in it, he will definitely do so to one with people.

Accepting that there is no other way out, Lawrence borrows his friend’s rifle and heads down to find Mnumzane. However, he is overcome with emotion and unable to carry out the act. Instead, he meets with Mnumzane one last time and says goodbye. Lawrence employs two sharpshooters to carry out the deed the next day. When he hears the final shots ring out, Lawrence feels a terrible sense of loneliness and grief that after nine years of friendship, he failed Mnumzane.

When Lawrence goes down to see the body, the shooters assure Lawrence that the death was painless: Mnumzane was dead before he hit the ground. However, they affirm that something was wrong with the elephant, as he charged at them at the last minute. Lawrence made the right decision. Lawrence goes to find the herd and show them what he had to do.

Lawrence once again muses over how things always happen in threes, as Thula, Max, and Mnumzane’s deaths all happened within a year. As he sits reflecting on how death is an integral part of life, Lawrence is approached by a ranger who says that one of Mnumzane’s tusks has been stolen. Ngwneya brings the second one, which has a bad crack—the inside is completely rotten and infected.

Lawrence realizes Mnumzane had been in pain for a long time, possibly causing his ill temper. He went berserk and flipped over the car because when Lawrence reversed, the car had hit his infected tusk, causing him pain. For a moment, Lawrence feels terrible, as all it would have taken was a shot of antibiotics for Mnumzane to heal and go back to normal. He now sets out to search for Mnumzane’s missing tusk; although it is never found, Lawrence continues to look for it.

That afternoon, Lawrence receives a call from Nkosi Biyela who wants to visit the reserve and talk about the conservation project. He surveys the surrounding lands and promises to join all that he has control over with Lawrence for the Royal Zulu project. This agreement is a fundamental breakthrough for something that has been in the works for 12 years. Although there is plenty of work to be done, Lawrence feels the gloom of Mnumzane’s death lift, as he realizes that the animal’s spirit will forever be a part of the reserve that will come to be.

On the news the next day, Lawrence learns about how a lion has been blinded in the Kabul Zoo by a grenade thrown by Taliban soldiers. The war against Saddam Hussein is looming, and Lawrence wants to get to Baghdad before a similar fate befalls the animals at Baghdad Zoo, the largest menagerie in the Middle East. Ten days later, Lawrence arrives in Baghdad, where he is joined by Brendan a few weeks later. They work to save the remaining animals in the zoo, and Brendan stays for more than a year after Lawrence leaves, before moving to Kabul to do similar work. In the process, Brendan leaves Thula Thula; however, Lawrence is proud of the role Brendan played in the reserve’s journey: “Like David, he was integral to what we achieved. He still comes ‘home’ to us for regular visits” (361).

Lawrence returns to Thula Thula six months later. His time spent in Baghdad’s war zone helping the animals was the most intense period of his life, working alongside a small but diverse group of people, from American soldiers to South African mercenaries. His experiences are chronicled in the book Babylon’s Ark, and he draws from them to also create The Earth Organization, “an organization of common people that targets practical projects to reverse the downward spiral of the dwindling plant and animal kingdoms” (363).

When Lawrence arrives, the herd is waiting for him at the reserve gate. They have now doubled in number, standing at 14 strong. Lawrence reflects on the different lessons he has learned from each individual member of the herd, the most important and overarching one being that the only walls that exist between humans and elephants are the ones humans put up themselves. In the herd’s presence, Lawrence feels truly at home again.

Anticipating that Mandla and Mabula, the young bulls, will go through the same heartache and ostracism that Mnumzane went through, Lawrence puts word out for an older bull to serve as a father figure for them. He knows that once the bull arrives, the younger elephants will grow up to be fine young males.

Although the original members of the herd still know and acknowledge Lawrence, he will have no interaction with the newer generations. The only reason Lawrence spent time with the elephants was to get them to trust him, thus easing their bitterness toward the entire human species. The younger elephants will grow up wild, just the way he wanted the original herd to. The one thing that Lawrence disapproves of is the taming of wild animals: “To me, the only good cage is an empty cage” (368).