The thing about elephants

The thing about elephants
George N. Netto

For the tourist visiting Munnar, nothing can be more scary than running into a wild elephant on the road, especially at night. For Munnarites, however, such encounters are all too common -- an occupational hazard they have learnt to take in their stride. To be fair, the pachyderms are generally well-behaved though a trifle unpredictable at times.

Returning to Munnar through the Chinnar Wildlife Sanctuary last year, we stopped at a safe distance to let a tusker cross the road. It sedately ambled across into the scrub jungle. Suddenly, it wheeled around, trumpeted angrily and came pounding down the road. It chased our car for almost a hundred metres before we outpaced it -- a terrifying experience! Was it a mock charge or did it mean business?

I was therefore apprehensive when one night, a few months later, I again found a young tusker sauntering ahead of my car. It could not leave the road which was narrow with a high embankment on one side and a deep ravine on the other. My driver quickly reversed some distance, turned off the lights and waited. He feared that if a vehicle were to come from the opposite side, the elephant would be trapped between us -- and then anything could happen. With mounting anxiety, we waited. Then, providentially, a KSRTC bus came groaning up the road from behind us. No sight or sound could have been more welcome! `Just follow me!' the driver hollered, seeing our predicament. The bus bulldozed ahead and we sneaked behind it -- to find the elephant meekly and precariously huddled on the very edge of the ravine, its legs protectively bunched close together. It was as scared of the bus as we were of it!

Equally intriguing was the behaviour of another tusker I encountered one evening near Munnar. It suddenly barged out of a eucalyptus plantation flanking the road and headed resolutely towards my car. My driver backed the car quickly. But the elephant kept steadfastly moving towards the vehicle. By then the driver had reversed the car nearly a hundred metres up the winding road. Then, to our indescribable relief, it abruptly turned left and entered a ravine to forage in a narrow strip of evergreen jungle. Light dawned: this patch of vegetation was its only source of food in that vast man-made eucalyptus plantation whose foliage elephants never touch. It was merely hungry and determined to reach its food.

Vegetable gardens and plantain groves are irresistible to elephants. Last year a freelance photographer from Chennai scouted around Munnar for three days without sighting a single elephant. The night before his departure, he heard a deep, guttural rasp outside the bedroom window of his host's residence. He parted the curtains to find a monumental posterior hardly three metres away, with a stumpy tail swinging contentedly like a pendulum. He gaped in disbelief as the elephant guzzled the few cabbages in the garden before lumbering off into the darkness. He was too shaken to take pictures!

Elephants are usually found near the Madupatty dam 10 kilometres from Munnar -- a popular tourist spot. Sadly, it is here that unfeeling tourists often harass them, selfishly forgetting that Munnar is a haven not only for tourists but also for wildlife. I have seen sadistic college students hurl stones at elephants foraging on the hillside and then flee to the safety of their buses when the angered animal advances towards them.

Once I saw a drunken tourist totter up a hillock, in a show of bravado, to tease a pair of elephants. Noisily egging him on were his equally inebriated cronies sprawled in a mini-bus. For almost fifteen minutes he provoked the duo, hurling sticks and stones at them from just fifty metres away. The elephants remained calm, eventually moving away from their raving tormentor who staggered back to his group, triumphantly claiming to have `scared away' the pachyderms! Animals can teach us a thing or two about self-restraint.