XVIII. Trapped in the Spotlight, Part Three

We didn’t notice the rustling behind us – until it got very loud, very quickly. Two more elephants were in the bush fighting, slamming and bashing into each other. One of the great beasts rammed the other hard in the side. He lost his footing and crashed through the trees into the road, stumbling sideways right towards our truck.

“Go go go!” I yelled.

Tom shifted into drive and gunned the engine. We pulled out from under the teetering mammoth just in time. He regained his footing and turned back to his opponent. The first three elephants were still up the road ahead of us and they were getting closer faster, running towards the fight like bloodthirsty kids in a schoolyard. They were boxing us in. Tom tried to back the truck out of their way, but there was nowhere to go.

He drove back and forth in short bursts like a runner caught between bases. Looking for any kind of opening, he edged towards the three in front of us, then tried backing up again, then stopped. We didn’t know which way the fight might move; every direction was a gamble. Soon there would be no room to maneuver at all. Tom saw one slim chance. He stuck his head out the window, pointed to a steep gully by the side of the road and cried, “Hold on!”

He hit the gas hard, heading straight for the three elephants. Everybody screamed. Just as it looked like we were going to hit the elephants, he made a sharp right turn into the gully. The tires screeched. The truck tipped. I was still standing on the back fender gripping onto the rail. The tipping swung me around, my back hit the outside of the truck. Tom accelerated and the truck straightened up, churning up huge chunks of earth as it tried pulling out of the gully. I tried pulling myself back onto the fender. The truck, and I, gained traction and made it back onto the road, safe on the other side of the elephants. I crawled into the bed of the truck and collapsed, flat on my back. Looking at the travelers who staring down at me in various states of shock, I announced, “You can take pictures now.”

I didn’t realize it at the time, but one of the travelers videotaped the whole thing. The next morning, we all sat down to watch over breakfast. There wasn’t all that much to see. The night was dark and the camera was jerking all over the place. There were occasional glimpses of action lit up by the wildly moving spotlight. (Now that I think of it, I probably should have turned the light off.) The screen was dark, then we could see some trees, then a scared traveler, more dark, the back of Tom’s head, an elephant trunk, a foot (human), dark again, then something that might have been the side of the stumbling elephant when it almost fell on us. We rewound that section a couple of times, but we really couldn’t tell.

All in all, not much to see, but more than enough to hear. The whole story was on the soundtrack, the soundtrack that would forever change my image as Jungle Guide. From the moment we encounter the elephants, there was one, and only one, voice clearly heard above all others – mine.

“Be quiet!”

“You’ve got to remain calm!”

“For God’s sake, everybody shut up!”

“QUIET!!!”

Somehow, I don’t think Crocodile Dundee would have reacted the same way. But then, he never had to deal with elephants.