Earthquakes and Elephants

It all began just after midnight.  Camp was still.  The forest echoed with the songs of cicadas and frogs.  The rats were in the kitchen polishing off our discarded crumbs of rice and flour.  The warm, sticky haze in the air began to give way to the chill of the night.  We were asleep in our tent.  Hours before I’d shoved in my earplugs and given in to the exhaustion of the day, switching off my headlamp and letting the weight of my eyes overcome me.  In an instant my eyes were flung open.  I peeled my sweaty hair from my face and lifted my head, yanking the plugs from my ears to listen to what I thought was the sound of thunder.  The beams of wood that held our platform above the earth began to shift.  The dark canvas walls of the tent bent and swayed.  The forest fell silent. Then it came alive with the frantic roars of colobus monkeys and screams of baboons.  I heard a deep rumble that I thought could only be thunder moving from the escarpment just east of us.  Here comes one hell of a storm, I thought as I jumped from my bed, pulling the mosquito net from under my mattress and ducking out of our cocoon.  When I entered the chilly night air I was surprised to find only a light trickle of rain and a gentle breeze.  Still, I yanked down all of my laundry, ran to the main area and moved my dung samples to a safe, dry place, expecting a heavy rainfall to follow.  When I returned to the tent I noticed that Adam was awake and confused.  He drifted back to sleep immediately, but I just sat with my eyes refusing to shut and my mind racing with questions about this eerie storm.

It wasn’t a storm.  It was an earthquake.  USGS measured it at a magnitude 5.4, with the epicenter not far to our north, at Lake Albert.  Our camp sits in a rift valley along a river.  To the east is a giant escarpment, and to the west is the Rwenzori Mountain range.  I had been stirred awake not by a gust of wind that shifted my tent, but a quake in the earth that shook the whole reserve.  This seemed surreal and exciting all at once, but I had no idea that the day was about to get stranger.

I knew where I wanted to find the chimps today.  Yesterday morning I stumbled upon them at the same spot that we did several times last week.  Adam was in town getting supplies with our camp manager.  Typically on a day like that I would go out with a ranger provided to us by the Ugandan Wildlife Authority (UWA).  The director of the project pays monthly salaries for two of the UWA rangers here in the reserve so that we can have two in camp with us at all times.  They carry a gun to protect us from poachers, buffalo, and elephants, especially from elephants.  It also guarantees that one researcher will always have someone to go into the forest with.  It is absolutely against the rules to travel alone in the forest here.  Dealing with the bureaucratic forces of an African country is often the ultimate test of patience and perseverance, to say the least, and on this particular day I was fighting the frustration of being without a single ranger for the fourth day in a row.  We keep two full time porters in camp to maintain our trails, repair camp, carry our water, and gather firewood.  We pulled one of them from his daily trail-slashing duties to accompany me on a chimp search.

Baluku and I did not find the chimps yesterday.  They found us.  Last week, when I had good, open observations for nearly 3 hours I noticed a large fig tree just off the trail.  Right before the whole group left us, I watched an adult female move across a fig branch with her infant tightly clinging to her chest.  She gingerly reached her fingers out over a clump of the green, round figs, giving each one a slight squeeze.  She plucked one, moved it to her nose, inhaled, and dropped it before moving to the next tree.  I decided right then that this was the tree to watch.  While most of the fruits in the forest are quite predictable, following the ebb and flow of biannual rain cycles with their fruiting and hibernating, fig trees scatter themselves among the whole forest, fruiting at random.  Each time one fills with perfectly ripe fruit it becomes the hottest spot for chimp activity in the reserve.  Ficus mucoso, the large tree that I was looking at right then, can feed many chimps for several days.  As soon as those figs became ripe, that female would likely return, and so would many others, spending all day long gorging themselves on the juicy little treats.  So we returned to that fig tree, clicked off our packs, found a soft spot on the trail, and plopped ourselves down.  Within minutes Hunter, the one handed male, silently appeared above me to once again stare down at this strange human with the blonde hair.  We spent nearly an hour with Hunter and a few other chimps before they left.

Today we set out straight for that giant fig tree.  The earthquake left me feeling a bit disheveled and distracted, but my first priority was to find that party of chimps once again.  We marched through the forest, headed straight for the escarpment.  My eyes scanned all around me for prints, leftover fruit pieces, nests, and motion in the branches overhead.  The further from camp we got, the faster we began to move.  After nearly two hours of weaving over and through the river, sliding through mud and ducking under fallen trees, my mind began to wander a bit.  That was when we heard that unmistakable cry of a chimpanzee – not just one chimpanzee actually, a whole group of them.  They began to call out from both sides of us, and it sounded like they were moving toward the same place that we were.  When I hear a chimpanzee pant-hoot, it freezes my thoughts, my breath, my whole body.  Then, impulsively, I run toward the sound.  This is what we began to do.  We picked up the pace instantly, skipping over logs and under vines as we softly moved toward the relentless calls of a large group of chimpanzees.  We were getting closer!  My heart was beginning to race.  My pants and my shirt and my hair were dripping with water from last night’s rain as we glided through the tall grass of the savanna.  I passed over large piles of dung on the trail.  They looked like the rain had washed them.  “Is this buffalo?” Adam asked.  “No,” I answered, “That’s elephant.  Look, it’s been washed by the rain though.”  Then he paused, “I smell something here.  Is that chimp?”  I sniffed for a second, “no, elephant.”  More calls!  I moved even faster now.

We were closer, and closer, and almost there!  I bolted around a corner, dead set on the great day this was about to become, and there they were.  Not chimps.  Not baboons or colobus monkeys.  Not even buffalo.  It was a heard of elephants, and I had run us right into the middle of it.  Now, when you are on a safari in a giant Land Rover, elephants are an amazing and exciting sight.  They were the highlight of my safari in the Masai Mara in 2008.  Right now, right here, however, on a trail at the base of an escarpment with no ranger, no gun, no car, no easy direction to run to, elephants were the very last beings on earth that I wanted to startle.  That is just what I had done though.  Here I stood, just a couple of meters from these giant beasts, paralyzed with fear.  I could not speak.  I could not breathe.  I felt like I was not even in my own body anymore, like I’d suddenly floated over this trail and looked down on us all, laughing at just how out of place I was.  I did not belong here.  They belonged here.  I’ve never felt so small and insignificant in my life.  One step.  It would only take one step of that giant foot to crush me.  For what felt like an eternity, but was actually less than 30 seconds, my mind raced with different strategies.  Could I run?  Even if I were a good sprinter, which I’m not, I would never outrun an elephant.  No, that was a bad idea.  Should I climb a tree?  There were no large trees here!  Do I speak?  Do I turn my back?  Have they seen me?  Right then the chimps called again.  Adam was moving toward me, wondering why I’d stopped moving toward the calls.  I could not so much as raise a hand to him.  My eyes met the eyes of a big, scared, elephant cow.  Like me, she seemed frozen in fear. 

Then Adam saw them, and when I knew he had, like a switch, it snapped my body back to life.  The only word that would softly come out of my throat was, “Shit.”  With that, the elephants swung their heads away from me.  They lifted their trunks, then let their legs follow, and began to storm in the other direction, all with one eye on me.  I took their cue and did the same.  Slowly stepping away, I began to turn my body to follow my feet.  I looked at Adam and realized he was spinning around to bolt. I heard myself say, “Don’t run!”  That seemed like a bad idea right then.  I had this image of us crashing through the bush, acting like a couple of crazed humans, scaring these elephants that were already on edge.  Our only hope was to keep them calm.  I found myself reaching for a tree to climb it.  That was silly, because the tree was not even as tall as the elephant.  I was wearing a giant pack and gumboots.  Where was I going to go?  We just moved back, away from the calls of the chimps.  I’m embarrassed to say that as we parted ways with the elephants all I could think was, “Shouldn’t I try to go back and follow those chimps?”  I think Adam might have carried me away if I tried though.

We tried to get out of there.  That involved some poor decisions on our point though.  We turned a corner, reached a different trail, and began our silly laughter of relief.  “Can you believe that?!”  “What just happened?!”  “That was crazy!”  We weren’t as safe as we thought just yet though.

With a quick glance at the map, we realized the only other trail to take back was a longer one that took us through the swamp.  We would continue to move down into the valley, back toward camp.  In hindsight, a swamp was a terrible idea.  What do elephants love even more than giant expanses of grassland?  They love the deep, thick, cool mud of a swamp, especially after a fresh rain.  And onward to the swamp we marched.

It was not long before we saw more dung, even fresher this time.  We fell silent again.  No gasps, no cussing, just a point of my finger, and a deafening silence between us.  I have never heard my husband hike that quietly and gracefully.  I heard him step more softly than I ever thought he could.  We had nowhere to go but forward.  We were in the middle of a herd of these beasts, and we just wanted to get home.  There were giant tracks all over.  They created small wading pools all over the swamp.  We were walking over crushed branches and logs.  It made my heart jump into my throat to think of the heavy foot that crumbled these trees beneath it.

I saw urine on the ground – a fresh, smelly, heart-wrenching puddle of elephant pee, right next to my foot.  We began examining the tracks.  Where are the toes?  Which way was this elephant going?  Were we just following it?  That was when I saw different tracks – human tracks.  Our staff had not been on this trail in weeks.  UWA did not maintain this trail.  No tourists came here.  Those tracks could only belong to one kind of person: poachers.  Inside each of the giant elephant feet was a human boot, clearly in close pursuit.  For a second these giant beasts that I was so terrified of seemed so weak and vulnerable to me.  My heart broke for them.  I understood why they would want to trample me.  Oh yes, they want to trample me.  That thought snapped me back into the reality of fleeing this whole day.

We made it out of the swamp.  We made it back to the safe part of the forest.  We didn’t laugh this time.  We didn’t shout.  We just sighed deeply, exhaling two hours of tightly held breaths as we reached out to touch each other on the shoulder.  I nearly fell over from exhaustion as Adam touched my shoulder in the same moment that the adrenaline began to leave my veins.  We collapsed onto the trail.  Both of us were suddenly starving.  For a few minutes we scarfed down chapatis and bananas in silence.  Then we began to talk.  Actually, we began to rant.  Those chimps were so close!  A whole group of them!  We almost had them!  We could have followed them all day!  We knew where they were.  I could shut my eyes and picture them shoving figs into their mouths, rolling them around and spitting out the leftovers, all while we were stuck on this side of the elephants.  The only way to the chimps was through the herd, and we weren’t going back there.  We hiked back to camp with heavy feet and discouraged, downward stares.  We spent the afternoon catching up on data, washing dung for seeds, transferring DNA samples to drying tubes, and jumping every time someone or some animal made a sudden move.  This was by far the strangest Independence Day I’ve ever had.