Killing in Kenya: Aidan Hartley tracks the last steps of an elephant

 

Laikipia

The bull elephant had roamed our northern marches of the Laikipia plateau for decades. I always recognised him when he passed through the farm because his handsome 65-pound tusks had a distinctive curve and a thickness that showed his ivory might have grown much larger, had he lived. Instead, armed Pokot poachers ambushed him as he browsed with two other younger bulls one afternoon in the woodland at the top of our Pinguaan valley. They sprayed a burst of bullets at him and several rounds ripped into his lungs and guts. He was mortally wounded, but staggered away bleeding. The poachers chased him up and their aim would be to finish the job of killing, then use an axe to hack away half his skull to extract the tusks, which they would take off to sell to a Somali, who would sell to a Chinese man, who would smuggle the tusks to China. The poachers’ plan was spoiled when a courageous man who had heard the shooting arrived on the remote scene and engaged them in a brief exchange of gunfire. They ran away without their trophies. By this time the bull elephant was long gone. He bled profusely from the high-velocity bullet wounds that had torn his internal organs, but he died slowly, stumbling through bush, among rocks of our valley, sagging on his great legs as he struck out on to the high plains, separated from his younger askari bulls and the sight of the main herd of females, blinded by pain and falling and rising once more and then collapsing for the last time. We could see the course of his last tragic journey in his tracks up to the point where his carcass lay. Within hours of his death the predators had converged and when we arrived the great cage of his chest was a door, out of which a lioness emerged caped with gore.