Wild life | 29 June 2017

Laikipia, Kenya

  During our evening walk on the farm, Claire kept looking around nervously instead of engaging in conversation. At one point the dogs ran ahead, probably thinking that they were after the scent of a rabbit. Seconds later, they tore back past us, leaving a trail of dust, and heading after them came a bull elephant moving at quite a pace, trunk up, ears flapping. Claire took off after the dogs and I followed, briskly but grumpily. I had been irritated by Claire’s anxiety in the bush, excited by the story of an incident that had happened a few days before, when an elephant had charged and completely flattened a man on the plains nearby. It was probably the same elephant and, I grudgingly had to admit, she was right. The next day we were going along a track and Claire said: ‘I bet there are buffalo in that thicket.’ ‘Nonsense,’ I said. At that instant the bush exploded and out of it came a huge buffalo with horns like the front of a train. It rumbled away from us, and the realisation that I had been wrong again was my main thought instead of relief that it had not charged us. The truth is that I can sense that at the age of 52 I am not right as often as I used to be. My one solace is that my hearing has been impaired in the left ear — the result of a gunshot going off too close to my head recently — which produces an incessant sound like a whistling kettle. For the first time in my life I can cup my hand over my ear and say, ‘Sorry, darling, I didn’t hear you. I must be going deaf.’ I am getting used to being wrong. For months now at the farmhouse the bookshelves have been empty and the walls are blank expanses without our children’s pictures.