Who doesn't love elephants? They are sooo cute, with their slow & graceful movements. Such a delight to watch.
Kids love to feed elephants and watch in amazement as the food just disappears.
How much ever you give the elephant, it has space for more.
In a jungle landscape, the elephant is a majestic animal. One of the few that cannot be messed around with.
So, we are all agreed. We love elephants!
Well, this is a story of an elephant that made us change our mind about how cute they are. Similar to the Kill story, this was at the Masai Mara, just as we drove out of our lodge one fine morning. We were going down a muddy path when we saw a couple of elephants, towards our left, just ahead.
Ah, two elephant playing with each other... we had seen that before. But soon, it was obvious that the matter was serious. The sounds they were making and the aggressive head butting made us realize that these two guys were in the midst of a fight.
The fellow on the right was clearly the bigger and older of the two males. Yet, the fight seemed to be quite evenly poised. They used their tusks and trunks to go one up.
Soon, the youthful aggression of the smaller elephant seemed to win the day... the older fellow retreated.
As he walked past our vehicle, about five metres away, the younger one followed him. What happened next we couldn't say, but the older elephant broke into a run, and quickly put some distance between themselves.
The younger one perhaps wondered if he should give pursuit or claim victory. As he was mulling those options, he came face to face with us.
Maybe he was pissed off that the older elephant ran away without a real fight or maybe he didn't like the look of us, he took a few quick steps towards us.
Our naturalist, Benson started the vehicle and began backing up. We went a few metres behind and waited, hoping that the angry fella would cross the road and go after his real opponent.
He decided that we were the bad guys, after all. He took a few more steps towards us.
You can see the vehicle windshield in the frame of this photo. He was probably 2-3 metres away from us. Benson started the vehicle again. However, the path was uneven, muddy and sloping... the tyres squealed as Benson floored the pedal. The other eight of us, not used to such raw encounters in the wild, held our breath tight. I am sure a few prayers crossed our minds at that moment.
Fortunately, the four-wheel drive engaged and we managed to put a few metres between us and the grey beast. We could not beat a complete retreat because there were two or three other vehicles behind us and each of them was simultaneously struggling in the reverse gear.
The face-off resumed. When I say face-off, it was really the elephant staring at us, and we returning extremely scared and pleading looks. Of course, he couldn't see my face because I had my camera lens pointed at him.
Maybe it was the lens that scared him off, I can't say, but, he decided that he had had enough of these human beings. He turned and went off the path.
It felt like an eternity but the entire incident from the time the older elephant ran away to the younger one deciding to leave us alone took just about a minute and half. In 90 seconds, we had seen our emotions turn from happy-tourists to scared shit to immense relief.
Having found our voices back, we asked Benson what the elephant would / could have done. He would have toppled the vehicle, Benson replied non-chalantly. And then he would trample upon those who fell off the jeep, he continued unnecessarily.
Oh, Ganesha!!