Cape Talk, Tuesday night

Cripple it, break its back, or whatever. Anyway, so he said, yes, it's still alive, and the herd won't move. So this meant that the train needed to be stopped and then production, you know, the cargo would be stopped and so on. So I had to get out there as quickly as I could. The only person to help me was Megan, my wife. And my assistant was on leave at the time. So she came and held the spotlight for me while I went out there. And I arrived to find a small

Herd, a small breeding herd of elephants, about 20 animals. And I could see they were milling around what looked like a younger calf, a young calf. I couldn't ascertain the age at the time because all there was was this forest of legs and trunks as they were trying. It was like a huge octopus with its trunks, trying to feel and communicate with this. And I could see this elephant was in a bad way. It lifted its head up and then would put its head down again. So this meant.

That its back was broken or spined. So I knew I had to put this animal down as quickly as possible. But yeah, we had this situation. I've got this huge rifle. I've got the land cruiser. I've got my wife on the back with a spotlight. Now I have to get as close as possible. I've got one shot, one moment, and probably a couple of seconds to do this. And of course, I've got to put this, I've got to shoot through this forest of legs without hurting women. Without hurting anyone, anyway, long story short, I managed to do it. But instead of expecting.

The herd to go crazy and trumpet and run in every direction, or worse still, come for me. I managed to reverse the cruiser thinking they would come for me. They went up to the calf and sniffed the blood trail out of its head and where the bullet had gone in, and slowly accepted what had happened. It was the most surreal experience of my life with those animals. And they slowly moved off the row of line. There was a clearing.

Close by. So I realized what they were doing. They were now off the tracks. So I reversed up and tied the elephant on with a snatch rope and we managed to pull it into the clearing and I left it there. And by the time I got there the next morning, the elephant had moved off, but the little carcass was still there. And for years afterwards, the remnants of that carcass, whatever the hyena had left behind in the vultures, the elephant would come and sniff and they would regularly come and

Check and some of the elephant that came to check weren't the elephant that were there that night. They were much bigger bulls and so on. Interesting. Sentient animals, absolutely sentient animals. Yes. Just want to say, for anybody who's coming in midway to this conversation, Mario Cesare is with us, the author of Tracks in the Dust, his latest memoir of life in the bush, published by Jonathan Ball, and just full of wonderful anecdotes of the animal encounters, the human encounters, the people he worked with in a long career in wildlife management. And I want