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By Andrew County Posted on Nature
 It was unusually hot for an August day in the Makgadikgadi Pans National Park. By 10 a.m., the air was like a blow dryer on speed mode in the face. I was driving north along the track from Kumaga to Phuduhudu. Bull elephants, wildebeest and an ostrich, were feeding in the desert scrub.
A young elephant mock charged from the right as I drove along the corrugated sand track. I stopped. I told my safari guests, sitting white-knuckled in the back of the vehicle, that young bulls do this when in their teens. It’s an inferiority complex thing. Cheeky behaviour. They acknowledged with nervous laughter.
The elephant returned to where it had charged from. I drove on a bit and then switched off the motor anticipating another inferiority attitude charge. It came with more attitude than I expected. I started the motor and drove away a few meters and stopped at a safer distance, didn’t want to frighten the guests too much more. White knuckles on rails, wide-eyed faces in the back of the car.
It wasn’t a young male! She was a young female, in her twenties! She had a serious problem with us being there. Standing on the roof, I saw a tiny baby lying in the sand. The mother returned to shade her infant from the hot sun. Is it newborn? Is it dead? Is it dying?
I climbed back into the driver’s seat, hands on the ignition key, foot on the accelerator. This was a potentially dangerous situation. A wrong move would have an anxious mother elephant hammering into the vehicle. This was my first sighting of a female elephant in the Boteti area. We must have been 10 to 15 kilometers from the riverbed. She was on her own, no other family with her.
Questions spun round my head: Where she was from, why, how, when and what? Only bulls visit the Boteti; females with young just cannot cover the distances between water and feeding places – the youngsters’ little legs are just too slow.
She must have come from the north, Nxai Pan, the only water other than that in the riverbed to the south. So far away for a mother with such a small infant. The closest water was the Boteti. The mother would have to drink soon if she had traveled from the dry north.
I switched on the video camera, still aware of the need to prepare for a speedy escape if she charged again. This was one scenario when I would back off from an elephant charge and drive away. A desperate mother and baby in trouble. In the viewfinder, on full zoom, I saw she was kicking the seemingly lifeless little body. It wan’t moving. She kicked the sand away, as if to expose the cooler sand below.
And then a little head moved, a little leg kicked. The baby was alive! But not able to get up despite anxious prompting by the mother. The mother made a hole in the sand big enough that the baby fell into it. Was this to cool it or to encourage it to stand up? Eventually, with five minutes left on the camera’s counter recording the footage, the baby got up on its feet, stood for a short while, and then followed its mother who had walked off some meters. She stopped to let the several-months-old toddler catch up. She moved on, the baby followed. She was anxious to get the little guy moving. It was a painfully slow process of walking on so the baby followed a few steps and stopped, the mother reversing to touch the baby with an outstretched leg and then moving on again.
One of the mature bulls that had been feeding nearby came over after the baby had tripped and squealed. The bull inhaled a massive dose of baby scent and then moved on in the direction of the riverbed. We sat watching the mother and infant move slowly away in the direction of the Boteti, the closest water available for their survival. We left them to their dilemma and drove on to Nxai Pan, a grueling drive through dry Kalahari sand and scrub. I wondered if they would make it to the water in the riverbed. Her dilemma was the ultimate test. Walk swiftly to drink and survive, leaving her baby to die, or stay with the youngster and risk death by thirst. The ultimate dilemma for a parent, any parent. Imagine. We were going to be returning along the same route so I hoped to see them making progress towards the Boteti.
Hope
Anyhow, I never did see them again and have since wondered about their predicament. Did they manage to get to water, or did the mother have to abandon the calf? A few weeks after I saw the mother and calf, I asked a couple of safari guides based in the area if they had seen them. I was happy to hear the one guide tell us that he had seen them at zebra pool in the Boteti riverbed. I know the place, and it would be the closest water from where I had seen them. The guide didn’t see them again, but he did say the calf looked very weak, in his words, “dizzy,” while swaying his head from side to side. I was thrilled to hear they made it to water.
We reckoned that the recent first rain for the season could have given the calf a better chance of survival. We had 65mm (2.6 inches) of rain at Meno A Kwena in two days, and Kumaga, 25 kilometers away, had 80mm (3.15 inches) in one evening. Fantastic! I just hoped it would keep coming and that the mother and her calf would make it back to their family.
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