African Incident

African Incident

by

Kortpeel

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In veterinary practice the big deal is always big animals and I wasn't getting a look in. So when I saw the job ad for a qualified vet to work on a game park in Africa I answered it. The country concerned was having its own affirmative action programme for the benefit of its underprivileged groups which included women. As a woman, albeit one of (distant) European extraction I, Samantha Milner BVSc, a spinster of 30, got the job.

An African game park is something of a vet's paradise. For a start there are hundreds of the biggest land animals in the world, all wild and living in their natural state. Secondly there are diseases that you wouldn't come across in a lifetime in the west.

I was expected to take over the work of two men. Both ex-patriates, they'd grown to hate Africa and couldn't wait to get back to pet cats and dogs in the west. "Don't worry too much sweetheart," one of them said. "Those fellows out there clean up all your mistakes beautifully." He pointed to the vultures circling over a kill in the distant veld.

The job wasn't so much treating animals as observing their behaviour and cataloguing them. The park's policy was to let nature take its course and only to interfere in the case of harm caused by people. Hence I found I was removing poachers' rifle bullets from rhinos and treating antelope caught in snares.

The park had a problem. A recent culling programme had taken out a lot of the older bull elephants. That had been a mistake as the old bulls controlled the behaviour of the young ones. Now the young bulls were running amok like hooligans, destroying trees and plants. Also for some unknown and totally unanticipated reason, those young bulls had taken to fighting among themselves and to fighting with rhinos.

Rhinos, unlike elephant, are a truly endangered species and a rhinoceros doesn't stand a chance in a fight with an elephant. Normally animals only fight to establish dominance. Once dominance is established, the weaker animal concedes and that is the end of it. These rogue elephants were out to kill rhinoceros for the sake of killing. We were losing more rhinos than we could afford.

At a park management meeting the senior ranger explained the probable reason for the elephants' bad behaviour. Our game park was designed to share an open border with a neighbouring country's game park. For centuries elephant herds had been migrating from one area to another across what was now the border. The neighbour was indulging in a civil war and the open boundary had promptly been closed by a game fence to prevent belligerent activities spilling over on to our side of the border. Quite by chance the fence trapped a majority of cow elephants in the neighbouring country. On our side of the fence we had an excess of young bull elephants.

"So the problem is the excess of young bulls," the senior ranger concluded. "Too much testosterone and no outlet for them. Also we took out the old bulls who would have kept them in line."

"A case of blue balls," someone muttered. I as a young single woman affected not to hear that. It occurred to me that a lot of guys back home had a similar problem.

"So now we have to cull the young bulls," the chairman said. A serious minded man, he knew that the meeting could easily get side tracked by a sniggering discussion of the elephants' testosterone problem.

Culling was always an unhappy topic. Those guys were genuine conservationists and although they all tried to pretend that animals were only animals with no rights they hated the cold blooded slaughter. It got them a bad press too. They spent a lot of time talking about how they could keep it secret: "Blame the poachers" was one suggestion.

My hesitant suggestion that we castrate the bull elephants rather than shoot them brought the meeting to a shocked silence. They all stopped talking and looked at me. "Only a woman would have thought of that," someone muttered.

It was an object lesson in cross-species male solidarity. Those senior managers were all intelligent, well educated and well intentioned men. They'd all rather be shot than have their balls off and they were trying to do the right thing by the elephants.

The guys at the meeting were all staring at me in shocked surprise at my outrageous suggestion. I felt a need to justify my idea. "If the problem is too much testosterone remove the testosterone, not the elephant."

One of the guys did some quick figuring in the silence that followed. "To get the necessary reduction in the elephant population we'd have to castrate 900 bulls. Then it would take about two years for the population to decrease to target."

"Can the flora survive two more years of elephant damage?" the chairman asked.

"Certainly." The botanist was puffing on his pipe. Smoking in Africa isn't quite the health hazard it's supposed to be in the west. "Especially bearing in mind that the castrated elephants will soon stop their nonsense."

"It would help the rhinos," someone remarked.

"And it would save a lot of bad publicity," The Public Relations person also happened to be the one other woman at the meeting. As a matter of unspoken strategy we sat apart but we always supported each other.

That settled it. Tens of thousands of people die every day in car crashes, thousands more are killed in various wars and the world just carries on. But shooting nine hundred elephants would create such an international outcry that it would threaten the country's foreign aid and alienate the tourists.

It was just over one hundred days to the elephant mating season. Could we castrate nine elephants a day?

Heavy going. Elephants are larger than tom cats and even less manageable. I spoke to my team of people in the veterinary department. There were twelve of them altogether. None of them had any formal training but they’d all picked up skills in the informal way that exists in Africa.

My second in charge was Ena. I suppose you'd call her a European African. Age mid twenties, she could barely speak English. She always wore her long straw blonde hair pulled back in a pony tail. She was simple minded, seldom spoke and when you looked into her lovely sky blue eyes if was as if no-one was there. If you can be too thin Ena was. She looked like she had a severe case of worms. She never wore make up and tended to wear faded summer dresses neatly washed, darned and ironed. Her two small paps didn't justify a bra and she never wore one. She would have been useless but for one great talent. She could talk to animals.

I'd seen her call a bird from a tree and it would come and perch on her outstretched arm. She could soothe any wild beast when it was in a panic. I was there when she'd released a baboon from a snare, talking to it, calming it so that it let her loosen the wire from its leg. I'd seen her mend broken legs and wings on birds. On one occasion she'd helped me fix up the broken hind leg of a giraffe. Ena had explained to him that he needed to keep still and stand on three legs while we set the broken one. The giraffe co-operated. It had been against the park's policy but at Ena's request I'd stretched a point and the giraffe made a complete recovery. It would hang around the camp after that and George the friendly Giraffe became quite famous as a tourist attraction.

Ena was quite shocked at the idea of castrating the elephants. "If God gave them those things who are we to cut them off?" In the end she accepted that it was for the best. She hated the thought of culling.

The rest of the team were African Africans. They had no qualms at all about the proposed course of action, especially as they would have the first pick of what was considered a rare, strength giving delicacy. What they couldn't eat they could sell and they saw good times ahead.

I split my people up into three teams of four. Ena, Mathew and Luke were team leaders. Each team had to castrate three elephants a day to meet the deadline. We spent a couple of days on training but they already had most of the skills. It was more a matter of showing them where to cut, how to tie off, and checking that they knew how to stitch the wounds afterwards.

I’d had some doubts about making Ena a team leader. Not only is there still reluctance from African men to take instruction from a woman but Ena herself was not much of a one for giving instruction. However her guys knew of her unique abilities and had considerable respect for them, even awe. For her part she had a way of tacitly accepting and deferring to their masculinity. As a result they accepted her as someone special and tried to support her.

We discussed the practicalities of the operation with the game rangers. The game rangers knew the whereabouts of the herds and could identify the rogue bulls that that needed to be castrated. The trick was to get the team quickly to the bull after it had been darted. An elephant's lungs are so heavy that it cannot breathe properly laying on its side. After half an hour or so it will suffocate. The idea was to dart the elephant, operate and inject the antidote to the dart drug all within fifteen minutes.

We had three Land Rovers and a microlight airplane. The microlight pilot would locate a herd. He'd radio back to a ranger who would take one of my teams in a Land Rover to the herd, pick out and dart a bull so that the team could climb in and do the necessary to the elephant.

Elephants are gregarious and tend to be supportive of other members of the herd. If we were to dart one in the pack the others would all gather round in support. This would have rendered our project impossible. However, bulls tend to leave the main pack which is matriarchal and roam around by themselves, usually within trumpeting distance.

The first few days things went more or less as planned except that the distance between one elephant and the next took a lot of time to cover. I went from team to team, checking progress and sorting out problems as they arose. The people were all doing their jobs and seemed to be coping well. We should meet our target easily.

However as time went by the elephants got harder to find. Twice we darted bulls who'd already been castrated. To prevent that from happening again we painted a white cross on the backs of castrated elephants. "Word's got around of what's happening," was team leader Luke's explanation of why he'd only done one elephant on a particular day. He was joking but with elephants I could almost believe that might have been the case.

It was distance that was beating us so I took a decision to leave the main camp and its comforts and tent out in the bushveld. One morning a little convoy of us set out for a spot 300 kilometres to the north. From there we could more easily dart the rest of the elephants that needed to be castrated. The microlight would follow once we were ready.

We left mankind and all his works behind on that trip. We went from tar to dirt roads and then over virgin veld. Soon, as far as the eye could see, there was no sign of humans: not even a distant power line to mar the view. This was how the world would be without people. As it had been for millions of years. We saw huge herds of antelope and zebra grazing contentedly. Some of them looked at us with brief curiosity. Tall giraffe interrupted their task of browsing the tree tops to check out these noisy intruders. Two stalking lionesses growled at us for spoiling their concentration as we passed.

If we stopped here I would be treading on ground where no human being had ever trod. The vastness and the isolation were making me nervous. Nothing in my life to date had prepared me for this. I took comfort from the Land Rover I was driving. That had been built by men in factories in cities, by my own kind. It was a link to my world.

The link was vital. Without our equipment we wouldn't survive more than a few days before falling victim to a predator. We would be incapable of feeding ourselves in that environment. I came to respect early man, our distant ancestors who not only survived but prevailed in fearsome conditions.

We reached our camp site an hour before sunset. In the centre of a large flat plain Two simple stone sheds with corrugated iron roofs were the only way of knowing it was the right place. Otherwise one spot would have been as good as anywhere else. My people knew what to do and within half an hour the tents were up, fires lit and food cooking.

There was a relaxed picnic cum party atmosphere. The people had brought their ghetto blasters and an ample supply of beer for the occasion. I thought the blaring music jarring and out of place but everyone else seemed to like it. I supposed it was a link for them as the Land Rovers were for me.

Ena didn't say anything. She just prepared one of the stone huts for her and me to sleep in. Normally these places would be full of all manner of insects, snakes and other creatures that would hinder peaceful sleep. Ena just asked them all kindly to move out for a few nights and when they'd left proceeded with broom and duster to clean the room. Luke and Mathew, the other two team leaders, shared the other shed with each other, the insects and the dirt, grime and cobwebs.

By ten that night the camp was quiet. The radio batteries had run flat, the beer had been drunk, the food eaten. The people were sleeping off their evening's excess in their tents. Only two watchmen remained to keep each other awake and tend the fires during the night. And me.

I'd like to think it was the African night that kept me awake. A sky so clear and so full of stars with the Milky Way actually looking like its name that it all seemed unreal, like a vast computer generated projection. The sounds of the night with the complete absence of machinery were so African: the chirping of crickets, an occasional roar and a bellow as a predator made a kill. As time went by the chirping died away to leave a silence so deep you could hear your own blood flowing around your ears.

Actually it was a full bladder keeping me awake. I lay with my legs crossed trying to get up the nerve to go outside in the dark. In a lab or a surgery I am as scientific and objective as the best of them. In the middle of the night in this wild place I was just a scared nervous stupid female, terrified of something horrible crawling up her leg. In the end I could stand it no longer. I had to go out there.

I quietly got out of bed and in the darkness slipped off the bottom of my black satin pyjamas - this was to simplify things once outside. I put on my veldboots which laced to calf height for maximum protection against things horrible. And I took a torch and some tissue.

I certainly didn't want to wake anyone or draw attention to myself so I felt my way to the door, opened it as quietly as I could and looked out. The watchmen were asleep but the fires were burning. I left the door open and fumbled my way to the back of the shed, away from the camp. Of course I was acutely aware of being bottomless and of the cool night air around my nether parts.

Earlier, before it was dark, Ena and I had gone to the latrines. I'd smiled as I heard her warn the insects to move out of the way. That was so typical of her. I wanted them out of the way too. The thought of something crawling on me gave me the creeps. I stood tall, legs apart and let go.

Ah blessed relief. If some of the pee splashed on my legs or boots that was too bad. Dam' but that felt good.

Then there was a hand over my mouth and a knife at my throat. The stink of unwashed body pressing against my back almost made me vomit.

The voice in my ear whispered "Don't struggle. Don't shout. Or you die."

Somehow I knew that knife would be scalpel sharp. The accent was that of a second language English speaker. I was trembling in panic

I'd been so scared of the insects this sort of danger hadn't occurred to me. Whoever had grabbed me was much bigger and stronger than me. He half dragged, half carried me back into the shed and closed the door. I just had time to see Ena's body on the floor by her camp bed.

The man put me on the ground and proceeded to unzip his fly and part drop his pants. It was dark but I had the impression he was in some kind of military fatigues. And I was in a satin pyjama top.

He knelt beside me, pressing my shoulders to the ground, his breath stank even worse than his body.

This was the situation that in calmer moments I had often wondered how I would react. I was so terrified that I couldn't think and I couldn't move. You may have seen courtroom dramas where some fool counsel asks the rape victim why she offered no resistance. I know why. She couldn't move and if she could have moved she couldn't think what to move that would have helped.

The man put a hand on my thigh and stroked me in a ghastly parody of affection. His fingers fumbled at my labia and went inside. All I could do was let it happen. Maybe I whimpered.

He put a leg over, literally, to get into position. Of its own accord my right knee, powered by adrenaline charged muscles came up and struck him in the groin. It caught him off balance and he fell flat on top of me, his chest on my face. I felt the handle of his knife, which he'd put in his belt fall into my right hand. My right hand, also of it's own accord seized the knife and plunged it into his back. It missed his ribs and penetrated flesh like it was going into butter. The man shuddered and went limp on top of me.

I got out from under and vomited all over him. I was in a kneeling position. I remained like that for a few moments trying to think what had happened, to make some sense of it and trying to get my shaking limbs under some kind of control.

What must I look like, kneeling here with my bare backside sticking out? That one thought was enough to take my mind off the shock. Thank God for vanity.

Ena was dead. Her throat had been cut. I opened the door a crack and looked out. As before the fires were burning. The guards were sleeping. There was no movement. Everything was peaceful, dark and silent. I had a thought that this great landmass known as Africa lives daily with death and takes it in its stride.

It suddenly occurred to me that the guards too were dead. For all I knew so were the rest of my group.

I felt a panic attack coming on. Not now girl, later. I had to think. How many of them were there? Surely no one would be in this wilderness alone? There had to be at least one other. Could be a dozen.

No way of finding out. I certainly wasn't going outside. What to do?

Wait until dawn I guess. Then what? They wouldn't go without my rapist. MY rapist? They'll come looking for him. They'll find me. I won't be so lucky another time. I'll have more than one rapist. May be it'll be a gang rape. How can I defend myself?

"Use my dart rifle." It was Ena's voice inside my head. I'm going mad, I thought, but I took the rifle that Ena used for darting the bull elephants. It was only a light, single shot .22 but accurate. I sat looking through the gap in the part open door. The fires died down and the guards hadn't moved. The rifle was at least some reassurance. I'd used it myself on animals before now. I thought I could see a movement around the tents. As I readied the rifle it occurred to me that Ena would never have left it loaded. I left the door and went to get some ammunition. With some fumbling I found a box of drugged darts in her kit and went to take up position by the door again. Before I got there the door was kicked in and somebody jumped inside. From what I had seen on television, it was the classic method of entering a room when there could be armed opposition. He knocked me down in the move.

This one too had that rank odour of stale sweat. A torch shining right in my eyes blinded me. He must have shone around, seen the corpses of Ena and his comrade. On my back, I felt his knife at my throat and knew that he meant to kill me.

What saved me was the crack of a dart rifle shot. It was close but from somewhere outside. It was followed by a burst of automatic rifle fire then silence again. The man left me on the ground and leapt to the door.

His movement was fast and silent. As he looked for the cause of the shooting I tried to move back, to get away from him. All I achieved was to come up against the far wall of the shed. My scrabbling hand knocked against the barrel of the dart gun and moved it. The noise startled the man. He turned and dived at me where I lay on the floor not three yards away. In an instinctive gesture of protection I brought my arm up in front of me. I thought this was the end and closed my eyes. The arm I'd raised took a heavy jolt and then nothing.

It occurred to me that I had suffered an instant and painless death. When I opened my eyes The man who had leapt at me was motionless in space, just inches above me, his unblinking eyes looking at me. It was as if time had stopped.

I felt a different kind of fear. Terror from other humans was bad enough. Now it was terror of the supernatural, of actually being dead. Then I realised what had happened.

When I'd raised my arm my hand was clutching the breech of the dart rifle and had lifted it. The butt was wedged in the corner of the wall and the floor. My attacker had impaled himself on the rifle barrel.

I stood up as quickly as I could. I was shaken, trembling and barely able to control my limbs. I tried to think; to take stock. I'd had an attempted rape, an attempted murder and I'd killed two men. And I was as near naked as made no difference.

I put on the clothes I'd worn the previous day and the act of doing so forced me to regain control of my limbs. The dart rifle was still in the corpse's neck. I put a boot on its face, pulled on the gun and twisted it. It came out with a squelching sound, probably damaging the foresight. I wiped the gore off the barrel and went to the door to see what was happening.

Jeez! There was another approaching just a few steps away. The dart gun seemed to go off in my hands. He took two steps forward and collapsed just outside the door of the shed. The darts were designed to render an elephant unconscious. They would probably kill a man.

I reloaded the rifle and sat by the door waiting to see if there were any more of them. Everything was silent again. The fires had died so that the glowing embers were just discernible. A late rising half moon cast a dim silvery light over a monochrome veld.

"Dr. Milner." I awoke with a start and readied the rifle. Heck! It was sunrise and I'd fallen asleep. Mathew and Luke had woken me. Was I glad to see them alive!

Actually they both looked like they'd been in a fight: they were well blooded, their clothes badly torn. Even worse, they both looked like they'd enjoyed it. There was a brightness of eye and an excitement about them that I hadn't seen before.

Mathew looked into the shed and called to Luke. There was some discussion in their language. They emerged looking impressed.

"Dr. Milner, you kill those two men?"

"Yes."

"Aieee!"

There were two other survivors left from our party. They were called to come and look at what the warrior doctor had done. I had the feeling I was going to become an African legend. Certainly I was the most respect-worthy woman they'd ever known.

I remembered being told that these guys were of a tribe with a great fighting tradition. They had inflicted a humiliating defeat on the British Empire at its height in the nineteenth century. It was easy to forget that fact in the normal day to day of life but fighting was in their blood. They were brought up to it from infancy. Last night they'd been able to do what they'd been born for.

At that point the guy I'd darted recovered consciousness.

Mathew went over and was about to kill him.

"No."

He looked at me in amazement. He was too polite to say so but the question "why not?" was apparent in his look.

Human rights are a relatively new concept to most of Africa. While the legislation and constitution of the country were as first world as you can get, much of the population had been left behind.

"He's entitled to a fair trial and will be punished if he's found guilty."

At that stage, after what I'd been through, that sounded stupid even to me. Why should he get free food and board for the rest of his miserable life?

Mathew and Luke were looking at me as if I'd let them down. Then I thought of Ena dead inside the hut, killed by these bastards.

"This man is an elephant," I told them.

They looked puzzled, not understanding.

"Paint a white cross on his back."

More puzzlement. Then Mathew's face lit up in happy enlightenment. A little light torture was more fun than straight forward slaughter.

I left them to it and went inside the shed to attend to Ena while they figured out what I meant. It didn't take them long. I heard the screams outside as I arranged Ena's body on the camp bed. I tidied the shed and dragged out the corpses of the two men I'd killed.

Mathew and Luke had their prisoner naked. They'd been crushing his testicles one at a time with their bare hands. I watched with a sense of justice being done as, with his own knife, they sliced through his scrotum. Then, for good measure, they cut off his penis at the root. He didn't pass out. He screamed. Blood was pouring from his genital area. I got my medical bag. Having killed two men it would be a redeeming thing to save this one's life. I stopped the bleeding and stitched him up. Mathew and Luke held him still as I worked. They were not gentle. My rifle dart had passed right through the fleshy part of his left thigh so he'd only got a minimal dose. If the dart had stayed in his body the drug would have killed him. I cleaned and dressed the dart wounds.

Luke painted the cross on his back and then they fell about laughing at the strange sight of a man with a groin like a woman. It turned out this man was the only survivor of a party of five rebels from the neighbouring country. They'd come over the border on a looting expedition.

We'd just about got our camp straightened up by the time the army arrived at nine a.m. It seemed to me that our prisoner had done most of the work. The commander of the small detachment was a Major van Niemand, a big burly European African with a moustache. He looked as tough as nails and certainly not a man to mess with. My first reaction was that he was just a stupid white racist red-neck.

He carried out a thorough and conscientious investigation of what had happened. By the time he'd finished I realised that he was actually professional at his job, a decent and very shrewd man. It was apparent too that he was liked and respected by the black soldiers who were with him. He wasn't a racist red-neck at all. He just looked like one. It was his military moustache that did it.

He came back to me after he'd checked everything. "Dr. Milner I think there is an error in your statement."

There wasn't. I'd told him the truth. I looked at him thinking how cute his blue eyes were and how much nicer he'd look without that silly moustache.

"The man you took prisoner."

"Yes Major?"

"I would say that his injuries were caused in the course of the battle. You were good enough to apply the best first aid possible under the circumstances."

The Major was telling me that it would save a lot of trouble all round to stick to that story. Otherwise a serious criminal charge might be contemplated.

"You are quite correct Major. Thank you for pointing that out to me."

He smiled and those blue eyes flashed and again I had trouble controlling my limbs. Only this time I was feeling a much nicer emotion than fear.

The Major wanted me to check inside the shed again with him, now that all the corpses had all been transferred to the army vehicles. I think what happened in there was simply a natural reaction to all the violence and killing of the night before.

The castration programme was abandoned. The park board, in its wisdom, decided that my team of people was an unaffordable extravagance and didn't recruit any replacements. The saving grace was that the game fence didn't last very long, the war next door saw to that. The cow elephants crossed over and the young bulls had better things to do than kill rhino and push over trees.

We had a beautiful African funeral for those who were killed. Major van Niemand came. I haven't seen him since. Our prisoner got twenty years for murder. There are some people in the game park who know about prison life. They explained that a man with his modifications will be very popular with some of the other prisoners. Mathew and Luke marvelled at my cruel vindictiveness in letting our prisoner survive for a life of living hell. Their respect for me grew even stronger.

We are all missing Ena, even the animals.

Footnote: Castration proved to be a difficult but successful means of controlling an elephant population and, as it eliminates culling, has become the preferred method in some African game parks.

End