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Ivory Wars
MARCH 2007
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| Ivory Wars: Last Stand in Zakouma (continued) |
By J. Michael Fay
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Photographs by Michael Nichols
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April 11 Luis received a report of a column of 80 Chadian military vehicles moving south toward Am Timan, 25 miles (40 kilometers) east of the park. They had been sent to intercept rebels moving north toward the capital, N'Djamena. Marc Wall, the United States Ambassador to Chad, happened to be visiting the park, so I asked him about the rebels. He said they were targeting the regime of President Idriss Déby and were rumored to be financed by the Sudanese government. The region around Zakouma has always been in the cross fire of opposing interests—be it the U.S. versus Muammar Qaddafi, the Axis powers versus the Allies, or the sultans from Ouaddaï or Darfur versus the tribes of the south.
After dark, I joined Nick on the bridge. As we talked, four figures with AK-47s emerged from the blackness. They threw their guns to their shoulders and spoke to us in Arabic. To our relief, they were Chadian army regulars. They said their vehicle had broken down and they were seriously thirsty, so we took them to the tourist camp for water. There, an agitated Pierre told us that poachers had poisoned a roadside pool near the Machtour water hole. Nine civets, a lioness, two hyenas, five raptors, and hundreds of doves had died from drinking the water. Nathalie Vanherle, a lion researcher working in Zakouma, was also worried. The lioness she was monitoring had not come to feed her cubs that evening, and her den was close to the contaminated water hole.
We returned to the bridge, somewhat nervously because of the rebel activity, but the elephants had not been informed. They showed up around 8:15. In the moonlight, I could see the little guys getting shoved forward, while the adults lined the banks, frantic for a drink.
April 12 Nathalie came on the radio this morning. She had spotted a baby elephant killed by lions near the den on the Machtour. We found the carcass later that afternoon; it was a three-year-old female, still tuskless, whose mother may have been killed by poachers. The lower part of one of her back legs and her neck had been eaten, and a plate of skin was missing from her belly. A lion known to Nathalie as M03-03 was stretched out under the shade of a small kharoub tree, napping. He raised his head from his siesta, ambled over to the carcass, licked the belly, and approached the neck. He had a broken lower canine; you could see the exposed root. Slowly but surely, he cut into the flesh, yanking, grinding, licking, pushing ever deeper into the throat, finally pulling off a chunk of trachea and chewing contentedly with his back molars. After an hour, M03-03 headed off to find water.
Nathalie said that lions in the park commonly prey on young elephants. In the early 1980s, when elephant poaching by Arab horsemen from Darfur was out of control in the Central African Republic, I had seen many elephants orphaned by poaching become the preferred prey of lions in Manovo–Gounda–Saint Floris National Park. I wondered if this was now happening in Zakouma.
We followed M03-03, hoping he wasn't heading for the poisoned water hole, until we reached a lone ngato tree, the grass tamped down below a halo of low-hanging branches. "This is where the cubs are," Nathalie said. Hearing our voices, the two cubs, whose mother we never found, emitted high-pitched growls and squeals. They wrestled and tumbled, not knowing that without the protection of their mother, they must now be counted as members of the living dead.
April 13 News from the capital: hundreds of rebel soldiers killed or captured, and the rest of the column routed. We were on our way south to check on a breeding colony of bee-eaters when I saw a large helicopter to the southeast. It made straight for our truck. We could run, but we couldn't hide. It was a Russian-made Mi-17 with a missile launcher, the same type that had mistakenly fired the day before on a column of Chadian and American soldiers north of the park. The helicopter passed over us, continued to the Tinga River, and circled the trucks Luis had hidden to prevent them from becoming rebel spoils.
April 15 We heard that the Mi-17 had fired nine missiles on a rebel column passing through the park about three miles (five kilometers) from where the chopper had taken a bead on us.
April 17 A pair of French military Mirage fighter jets running sorties toward Sudan (more than a thousand rebels were retreating there) buzzed the Tinga, spooking a herd of elephants I was watching at the pool. We went south again to check on an elephant we thought might have been wounded by poachers; she was limping hard, likely having taken a bullet in the leg. That evening, a low moon cast the ghostly reflection of a hundred elephants on the water at the Tinga pool. Zakouma was in the grip of the driest part of the year. This water hole was now elephant mecca.
April 18 We found a fresh elephant carcass in the bed of the Salamat, which now held the only potable water in the park. Hundreds of pelicans lined up in rows, dipping their beak pouches into the water, pushing masses of fish to one end like a seine net. When the fish tried to escape, the pelicans quickly filled their gullets. Vultures appeared beyond the bank, hissing and pecking, claiming places at the dinner table with their serpentine necks. As whooshing wings departed, we got a clear view of the carcass. It was a bull. The elephant's face had been chopped off, his tusks gone. We camped with this fellow for three days, mourning him.
In the afternoon, we went upstream, where an elephant thoroughfare arrives from Rigueik. We saw elephants approaching the river downwind. We looped around. More elephants. We looped again. Yet more elephants—at least 500. Moms were leading their families up the river, the kids goofing around, whipping their trunks from side to side and splashing each other as they ran. In the excitement, a fish eagle dropped a flopping tilapia at my feet. A vervet monkey cackled from a branch over the high bank.
For an hour, I watched, marveling that these elephants, who spend their lives being hunted and killed by men, can find peace. How do they endure the terror and despair? I have had a close bond with elephants since 1985, when I was doing research in the Dzanga clearing in the Central African Republic. I learned to speak their language—not literally, of course, but I feel as if I understand them. I know their habits, their personalities, their moods. I have laughed with elephants, and I have played their jousting game. Once, I almost died from tusk wounds inflicted by a frightened female on a beach in Gabon. After that, my African bush friends said, "Your blood is now part elephant blood."
I also thought about the humans living in this area, their lives ravaged over centuries by the slave trade. In Zakouma, the Goula people built their villages near the rocky crags in the west of the park, in an attempt to escape mounted Arab and Ouaddian raiders, who savaged, captured, and sold them as slaves, decimating their numbers. I have seen contemporary savagery on the same scale in civil war in central Africa, where friends of mine were hunted, raped, starved, and killed. Yet their kids still played; their women still laughed.
It is a sad fact that the vast majority of elephants in southeastern Chad don't die of old age. They die at the hand of man. Yet when I meet the Zakouma elephants, all I see is joy. No rage or thirst for revenge—just a desire to protect their young.
April 21 I flew Luis to Am Timan so he could debrief Ahmat Hassan Djimet, governor of the Salamat region, about the passage of the rebels through Zakouma. Luis and the governor collaborate to preserve the park and maintain law and order in the region. Ahmat congratulated Luis for handling the rebel incursion so well—calming fears in the villages and communicating effectively with the military and with him. He was unhappy to hear that some of the park's weapons and radios had been stolen, but Luis suggested that this was a small price to pay for no animal or human casualties. The governor said he would speak to President Déby about getting more arms and ammunition for Zakouma.
April 24 We tagged along with Luis on a public relations pilgrimage to see Aboul Habib, the grand marabout of the Ouled Rachid Arabs—nomads who, in the dry season, base themselves with their cattle at Andouma, a vital water hole just north of the park. Luis wanted a face-to-face discussion with the man who had great influence over those who felt inclined to graze their livestock and hunt elephants, giraffes, and buffalo in the national park. The scene evoked medieval Arabia: hundreds of grass huts, organized by clan, occupied an expanse of short, green grass. A cloud of smoke hung over the clearing. Boys chased herds of goats; women collected water in clay pots in the shallows. Dogs barked. We passed a group of men with camels who looked as if they might have come from ancient Jerusalem. The grand marabout's grass palace was filled with men in robes thumbing prayer beads. They were tall, black, with fine features, and they greeted us with long salutations in Arabic.
Luis sat in front of Aboul Habib, crowded by 30 clan members. The grand marabout wasted no time. He said that he knew that the plan was for Andouma to be annexed and incorporated into the park. Looking Luis in the eye with a paternal stare, he said, "If this happens, there will be death among men." Luis assured him repeatedly that Andouma would never be incorporated into Zakouma. But Aboul Habib had the example of history as evidence that Europeans do not always tell the truth. For the first 25 years of his life, Chad had been a French colony, won through warfare, assassinations, land grabs, and lies. Before the colonial era, his people had used the entire region as a dry season watering ground. Who could blame him for denying us his friendship and his tea? Having satisfied—albeit uncomfortably—our objective to maintain contact and peace with the Ouled Rachid, we joined Aboul Habib in prayer, then left.
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