Who Wants To Shoot An Elephant?

The Killing

The hunt continues. We are not back in the truck ten minutes before the tracker calls for a halt. Robyn and Will linger in the Land Cruiser while Jeff and the tracker go off into the bush to investigate. On the heels of our run-in with the monotusker and his pal, it feels as though the day has already coughed up a full lode of potential prey. So it registers as something of a surprise when Jeff returns with this news: “There’s five bulls, all of ’em pretty good size.” One of them is carrying at least sixty pounds of ivory, Jeff’s threshold, I gather, for trophy viability. “It’s a shooter,” he says. “If we get a shot, we’ve gotta shoot it.”

Robyn shoulders her rifle. Her eyes are incandescent. Off we troop over the sand.

The bush resounds with a din of timber destruction. The sun is making its descent, and perhaps a hundred yards off, through the brambles, tusks glow in the rich light. The animals are fanned out ahead of us, noisily munching. We come in closer, and the elephants begin to take note, though we register more as a mild irritant, not a mortal threat. The trophy animal is in a lane of dense shrubs, mooning us. Robyn could conceivably flank it and get an angle on its head, but in the thick undergrowth it would be a poor shot, and that first bullet might be all she’d get. There’s a risk that she would only wound it and her $60,000 would sprint off into the weeds. Jeff and Robyn whisper tactically. The elephant’s obliviousness is exasperating. It seizes my lungs with a breathless frustration to watch the elephant foolishly grubbing salad while we stand within a stone’s throw, plotting the proper method to put a bullet in its brain.

Not thirty feet from us, the elephant with the missing tusk, the same elephant we just ran into, suddenly appears, having made its approach way more stealthily than an animal the size of a bread truck ought to be capable of. The bull is pissed. It nods and snorts and tosses snoutfuls of sand our direction. Okay, whatever you are, it’s kind of annoying, so get the fuck out of here, please.

I find the performance convincing. It keeps coming. Two more strides and the elephant could reach out and touch someone with its trunk. The elephant looks to be about twelve feet tall. The trunk weighs hundreds of pounds and is easily capable of breaking a human spine.

Apologies if that sounds like sensationalistic inanities you’ve heard intoned sotto voce by Discovery Channel narrators trying to ramp up the drama of snorkeling with porpoises and such. But the elephant is about fifteen feet away, and I will now confess to being scared just about shitless. The elephant snorts and brandishes its vast head. Lunch goes to lava in my bowels. If not for my present state of sphincter-cinching terror, I would well be in the market for an adult diaper. This is an amazingly pure kind of fear. My arteries are suddenly capable of tasting my blood, which right now has the flavor of a nine-volt battery.

Jeff Rann is in dialogue with the elephant. This consists of whispering menacingly and jabbing his rifle around in the air. The elephant does its pissed-off little shuffle for perhaps a minute, probably less. And then the tape runs in slow reverse. The elephant retreats backward into the shrubs, eyeing us, curtsying hostilely as he goes.

“Wells, you good, buddy?” Robyn asks, grinning. Apparently I’m visibly, risibly freaked. I regain my bearings, and we resume our approach to the trophy bull.

It requires the same strategy. The target is in the middle of the fan of five. The elephants have arranged themselves such that it’s kind of diffcult to get an angle on the prize without straying into the paths of the others. A disquiet, a shared unease, is taking hold among these fellows. The racket of salad consumption is tapering off. The elephants are beginning to push on. But, goddamn, these guys could use a coach. The interaction with the one-tusker notwithstanding, their defense pretty much sucks. They’re moving, but it’s not so much flight as a slow and cranky mosey.

The light is caramelizing. If Robyn can’t get a shot in the next five or ten minutes, the sun will sink past the trees and it will be lion-o’clock out here. The sun, too, seems murderously slow in its descent. We move past one elephant, past another, until we are on the trophy beast. Again, its butt is to us. Nothing in the animal world tops an elephant’s ass as an emblem of indifference and reproof.

Coyness is keeping the elephant alive. If he does not turn his head, the sun will set and the elephant will not be killed today.

And then he turns his head. His expression is wary, rueful. In his long-lashed bedroom eyes is the look of an old drag queen turning to regard an importunate suitor tugging at the hem of her dress.

Robyn raises her rifle. For the past few months, she’s been rehearsing this moment in her bedroom closet in Texas, aiming, reloading, aiming again. She shoots.

The rifle’s thunder is somehow insignificant. The shot catches the elephant in the appropriate place, at the bridge of its trunk. But an elephant brain is a big piece of equipmentâ€"it can weigh as much as twelve pounds. Robyn’s bullet did not apparently sever enough vital neurons to kill the animal in a single shot. He shakes his head, as if to wag away the pain of a wasp’s sting. There is a second shot that strikes him in the neck. He turns to flee, but his right foreleg has buckled. He strives to stand. The effect is of a cripple trying to pitch a broken circus tent. In the franticness of his movements, one can sense the elephant’s surprise that his body, a machine that has served him well for over fifty years, has suddenly stopped accepting his commands. To see so large and powerful an animal vised in an even larger and more powerful inevitability is, for lack of a better word, intense.

The other elephants scatter. Robyn and Jeff jog toward the animal. In the fervor of the moment, Robyn has momentarily forgotten to put fresh rounds in her gun. “Reload, reload, reload,” Jeff instructs. They advance to a distance of maybe twenty-five feet. “Okay, shoot him right in the hip.” The gun fires twice. The tent sags right and seems to sort of sway and billow, as though surrendering to wind.

“Okay, come with me,” Jeff says. He leads Robyn along the animal’s left flank. At the sound of the hunters coming in close, the elephant struggles more direly to rise, but instead, he loses ground against gravity and settles closer to the earth. “Just watch his trunk. [Be sure] he doesn’t hit you with it.”

Jeff leads her to a position perhaps ten feet from the elephant’s left temple. “Okay, hit him right in the ear hole.” At this point there is little the elephant can do except to turn his face away. The last shot claps into the elephant’s ear.

“Perfect,” says Jeff Rann. “Brain shot. You brained him.”

And the elephant, still swaying on its haunches, a slow faucet of blood trickling from his forehead, is no more.