It is just before dawn at a hunting camp in Botswana’s game-rich northern savanna, and Robyn Waldrip is donning an ammunition belt that could double as a hernia girdle.
“You can’t help but feel like sort of a badass when you strap this thing on,” she says. Robyn, a Texan in her midthirties, seems to stand about six feet two, with piercing eyes of glacial blue shaded by about twelve swooping inches of eyelash. She’s a competitive bodybuilder and does those tractor-tire and sledgehammer workouts, and there is no part of her body, from the look of it, that you couldn’t crack a walnut on. In her audition video for a reality-television show called Ammo & Attitude, Robyn described herself as a stay-at-home mom whose “typical Friday-night date with [her] husband is going to the shooting range, burning through some ammo, smelling the gunpowder, going out for a rib-eye steak, and calling it a night.”
Robyn Waldrip could kick my ass, and also your ass, hopping on one leg. Her extensive résumé of exotic kills includes a kudu, a zebra, a warthog, and a giraffe. But she has never shot a Loxodonta africana, or African elephant, so before she sets out, her American guide, a professional hunter named Jeff Rann, conducts a three-minute tutorial on the art of killing the world’s largest land animal.
“You want to hit him on this line between his ear holes, four to six inches below his eyes,” Jeff explains, indicating the lethal horizontal on a textbook illustration of an elephant’s face. The ammo Robyn will be using is a .500 slug about the size of a Concord grape, propelled from a shell not quite as large as Shaquille O’Neal’s middle finger. About three feet of bone and skin insulate the elephant’s brain from the light of day, and it can take more than one head shot to effect a kill. “If he doesn’t go down on your second shot, I’ll break his hip and you can nish him off.”
“Anything else I need to know?” Robyn asks.
“That’s it,” says Jeff.
“Just start shooting when they all come at us?”
“The main thing is, just stay with the guns,” Jeff tells the rest of the party, which includes Robyn’s husband, Will Waldrip, two trackers, this journalist, a videographer who chronicles Jeff’s hunts for a television program, Deadliest Hunts, and a government game scout whose job it is to ensure that the hunt goes according to code. The bunch of us pile into the open bed of a Land Cruiser and set off into the savanna, the guides and the Waldrips peering into the lavender pre-dawn for an elephant to shoot.
If you are the sort of person who harbors prejudices against people who blow sums greater than America’s median yearly income to shoot rare animals for sport, let me say that Will and Robyn Waldrip are very easy people to like. They didn’t grow up doing this sort of thing. Robyn’s dad was a reman who took her squirrel hunting because it was a cheap source of fun and meat. Will’s father was a park ranger. In his twenties, Will went into the architectural-steel business, and now he co-owns a company worth many millions of dollars. They look like models from a Cabela’s catalog. They are companionable and jolly, and part of the pleasure of their company is the feeling that you’ve been welcomed into a kind of America where no one is ever fat or weak or ugly or gets sad about things.
The Waldrips arrived in Rann’s camp on the eighth of July, and they’ve allotted ten days for the hunt. But it is unlikely to take that long to find their trophy. Botswana contains somewhere in the neighborhood of 154,000 elephants, most of them concentrated in this 4,000-square-mile stretch of northern bushland where the Kalahari Desert meets the Okavango Delta.
In addition to airfare, ammo, and equipment costs (the antique double-barreled Holland & Holland rifle Robyn bought for the trip typically sells for about $80,000), the Waldrips are paying Jeff Rann $60,000 for the privilege of shooting the animal, at least $10,000 of which goes to the Botswana government. In September 2013, a ban on elephant hunting goes into effect in Botswana, making the Waldrips’ hunt one of the last legal kills. It is a precious, expensive experience, and Robyn wants to take her time to find big ivory, not to simply blast away at the first elephant that wanders past her sights.
Through the brightening dawn, the Land Cruiser bucks and rockets along miles of narrow trails socked in by spindly acacia trees, camellia-like mopani shrubs, and a malign species of thornbush abristle with nature’s answer to the ice pick. No elephants are on view just yet, though a few other locals have come out to note our disturbance of the peace. Here is a wild dog, a demonic-looking animal whose coat is done up in a hectic slime-mold pattern. Wild dogs, among the world’s most effective predators, are the biker gangs of Africa. They chase the gentle kudu to exhaustion in a merciless relay team. A softhearted or lazy dog who lets the prey escape can catch a serious ass-kicking from the rest of the heavies in the pack. What’s that, Mr. Wild Dog? You’re on the endangered-species list? Well, karma is a bitch. Let’s move along.
Now here is a pair of water buffalo. Charming they are not. They scowl sullenly from beneath scabrous plates of unmajestic, drooping horn. “Hostile, illiterate” are the descriptors I jot on my notepad.
And there is the southern yellow-billed hornbill, and there the lilac-breasted roller, which, yes, are weird and beautiful to look upon, but if you had birds jabbering like that outside your window every morning, would you not spray them with a can of Raid?
Say what? I’m unfairly harshing the fauna? Yes, I know I am. I’m sorry. To the extent that I’ve discussed it with Jeff Rann and the Waldrips and other blood-sport folk I know, I believe that hunters are being sincere when they say they harbor no ill will toward the animals they shoot. Not being a hunter myself, I subscribe to an admittedly sissyish philosophy whereby I only wish brain piercing bullets upon creatures I dislike. I’ve truthfully promised Jeff Rann that I’m not here to write an anti-hunting screed, merely to chronicle the hunt coolly and transparently. But the thing is, I’m a little worried that some unprofessional, bleeding-heart sympathies might fog my lens when the elephant gets his bullet. So I’m trying to muster up some prophylactic loathing for the animals out here.
Perhaps out of a kind of kindred impulse, Will and Robyn Waldrip are quick to point out the violences elephants have inflicted on the local landscape. And it’s true, the Loxodonta africana isn’t shy about destroying trees. We are standing in an acreage of bare earth ringing a watering hole Jeff Rann maintains. It looks like a feedlot on the moon. Where there is not a broken tree or a giant dooky bolus, there is a crater where an elephant started eating the earth.
“Man, [the elephants] have just destroyed the ecosystem,” Will says. “People who oppose hunting ought to see this.” Will is a bowhunter. Elephants aren’t his bag. And while he has no reservations about Robyn shooting the elephant, he is doing, I think, some version of the hunt-justifying psych-up going on in my own head. He wants to feel like it’s a good deed his wife is doing out here, a Lorax-ly hit in the name of the trees.
It’s midafternoon before we spy a candidate for one of Robyn’s Concord grapes. In the shade of a very large tree, a couple of hundred yards from the jeep trail, is something that does not at first register as an animal, more a form of gray weather. We dismount and huddle before setting off into the brush.
The elephant appears to be a trophy-caliber animal, but at this distance, it’s hard to say for sure. “One thing,” Jeff says to Robyn. “If it charges, we have to shoot him.”
“If he charges, I’m gonna shoot him,” Robyn says.
The entourage begins a dainty heel-to-toe march into the spiky undergrowth. As it turns out, it is not one elephant but two. One is the big, old, shootable bull. The other is a younger male. Elephants never stop growing, a meliorative aspect of which (elephant-hunt-misgivings-wise) is that the mongo bulls that hunters most want to shoot also happen to be the oldest animals, usually within five or so years of mandatory retirement, when elephants lose their last set of molars and starve to death.
For the record, this detail does not soothe me as the guns make their way toward the elephants under the tree. I have not yet figured out how to dislike elephants enough to want to see one shot. In private treason against my hosts, I am thinking, Not now, not now. Let it please not get shot today.
We near the creatures. The big bull shifts its ears, and it is a significant event, like the hoisting of a schooner’s rigging. Jeff lifts his binoculars. As it turns out, the bull is missing a tusk, probably broken off in a fight. So it will not be shot, its ultimate reward for the tusk-snapping tussle.
We creep back to the jeep. Robyn is electrified, breathing hard, her blue eyes luminous with adrenaline: “That was big!” she says to Will. “As soon as we got out of the truck, was your heart going?”
“Nah, but when he turned and his ears spread and he went from huge to massive? Yeah.”
“Huge,” says Robyn. “It could just mow us down.”
“We’d be jelly,” says Will. “But you wouldn’t want to have shot him on your first day, anyway.”
Fair Warning: An elephant does get shot in this story. It gets shot pretty soon. Maybe that upsets you, as it did 100 percent of the people (hunters and nonhunters) to whom I mentioned this assignment.
Elephants are obviously amazing, or rather, they are obvious receptacles for our amazement, because they seem to be a lot like us. They live about as long as we do. They understand it when we point at things, which our nearest living evolutionary relative, the chimpanzee, doesn’t really. They can unlock locks with their trunks. They recognize themselves in mirrors. They are socially sophisticated. They stay with the same herds for life, or the cows do, anyway. They mourn their dead. They like getting drunk (and are known to loot village liquor stashes in Africa and India). When an elephant keels over, its friends sometimes break their tusks trying to get it to stand up again. They bury their dead. They bear grudges against people who’ve hurt them, and sometimes go on revenge campaigns. They cry.
So why would you want to put a bullet in one? Well, if we are to take hunters at their word, it is because the experience of shooting an animal yields a thrill, a high that humans have been getting off on since we clubbed our first cave bear. And if you go in for this sort of thing, then it arguably stands to reason that the bigger the beast, the bigger the thrill when it hits the ground.
On the subject of hunting’s pleasures, Robyn Waldrip has this to say: “It kind of taps into your primal instincts. I think everybody has it in them.”
But an elephant?
“It was on my bucket list of hunting. It’s the largest land mammal, and just to go up against something that big, it’s exciting. I ran into this mom at the grocery store and she was like, ‘What are you doing for the summer?’ and I said, ‘I’m going to Africa to do an elephant hunt.’ And she said, ‘Why in the world would you wanna do that?’ and I’m like, ‘Why wouldn’t you?’ ”
Jeff Rann has a similar take: “Hunting’s almost like a drug to people that do it.” In his thirty-eight-year career, Jeff has presided at the shootings of around 200 elephants, and he has never had a trophy get away from him. It is Jeff Rann Whom King Juan Carlos I of Spain calls when he wants to shoot an elephant, as he did in April 2012. (King Juan Carlos likely will not get the hankering again. He broke his hip on the safari—in the shower, not on Rann’s watch—and amid the general outrage sparked by leaked photos of the king posed alongside his kill, Juan Carlos was booted from the honorary presidency of the World Wildlife Fund and compelled to issue a public apology.)
Rann is the most perfect exemplar I have ever met of Hemingway’s speak-softly-and-shoot-big-things-without-being-a-blowhard-about-it masculine ideal. He is lethally competent and incredibly understated and cool, even when he’s telling swashbuckling stories, such as the time he nearly got killed by a leopard: “The leopard charged. I shot him. It was a bad shot. He jumped on me, and we just kind of looked at each other. I remember those yellow eyes staring back at me. He bit me twice and dropped to the ground. He also pissed all over me. For about a year, I’d wake up in the night and I’d smell that strong cat smell. But I don’t think about it anymore.” Or the time he led the Botswana Defence Force into a camp of poachers who’d been hunting in the land he leases from the government. “We went into camp, and there were two old guys and one kid about 16 years old. The agents just opened up on them. Killed the two old guys outright. The one they shot eleven times, the other they shot fourteen times. The kid took off running, but they shot him a couple of times in the back.”
In addition to million-acre leases in Botswana, Rann has a hunting concession in Tanzania and a 5,500-acre rare-game ranch outside San Antonio. The economic downturn did not put much of a bite in Rann’s business, a happy fact he credits to the addictive nature of hunting’s elemental pleasures: “Our clients might not buy a new car as often, or buy a second or third home, but they’re still going to go hunting.” But this new hunting ban is poised to do to Rann’s elephant-hunting business what economic calamity could not.
There’s been a regulated hunting industry in Botswana since the 1960s. Before the ban took effect, the government was issuing roughly 400 elephant-bull tags per year, of which Jeff Rann was allowed to buy about forty. And counterintuitively, even in the presence of an active bullet-tourism industry, Botswana’s elephant population has multiplied twentyfold, from a low point of 8,000 in 1960 to more than 154,000 today. These healthy numbers, as people like Rann are keen to mention, mirror elephant populations in other African countries where hunting is allowed. Despite a recent uptick in poaching problems, both Tanzania (with 105,000 elephants) and Zimbabwe (with 51,000) have seen similar patterns of population growth. Kenya, on the other hand, banned elephant hunting in 1973 and has seen its elephant population decimated, from 167,000 to 27,000 or so in 2013. Some experts predict that elephants will be extinct in Kenya within a decade.
As the pro-hunting side has it, elephant safaris assist conservation by pretty simple means: A bull killed on a legal hunt is, in theory, worth more to the local economy than an animal slaughtered by poachers. In the most far-flung parts of the Botswana bush, the hunting industry has been the chief employer, offering a paycheck to people in places where there simply is no other gainful work.
When locals’ livelihoods are bound to the survival of the elephants, they’re less likely to tolerate poachers, or to summarily shoot animals that wander into their crop fields. Furthermore, hunting concessions are uninviting to poachers. Hunters like Jeff Rann employ private security forces to patrol the remoter parts of the preserve.
Hunting’s critics maintain that, in practice, the industry tends to fall short of these ideals. For every professional hunter who follows the rules, there are others who overshoot their quotas, or engage in illegal ivory trafficking, or cheat their employees of a living wage. In countries more corruption-plagued than Botswana, crooked officials commonly siphon off safari profits before they reach the elephants’ rural human neighbors on whose mercy and financial interest the fate of the species ultimately depends. And lately, in Tanzania and Zimbabwe (where last year 300 elephants were poisoned in a single massacre), the hunting industry has proven no antidote to poaching. Citing “questionable management” and “lack of effective law enforcement” in Zimbabwe and Tanzania, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, in April 2014, suspended the import of elephant trophies from both nations.
But Satsumo, the Department of Wildlife and National Parks employee who’s tagging along on the Waldrips’ safari, believes that Botswana’s hunting ban may ultimately turn out badly for the elephants. “There will be more poachers,” she says. “More elephants will get out of the reserve. They will go to people’s crop fields. The hunters pump the water for them, but now they will have to move to the villages to find it. It’s a bad thing. It’s a very bad thing.”
Abhorrent as the practice is to most Western, Dumbo-adoring sensibilities, elephant hunting occupies an awkward, grayed-out space in the landscape of conservation policy. Some nonprofits such as the World Wildlife Fund have quietly endorsed it as part of a conservation strategy but decline to discuss their position on record. The issue is such an emotional live wire, for people on both sides of the debate, and is so deeply laced with PR perils, that it’s just about impossible to find a frank and disinterested expert opinion about hunting’s efficacy as a means to help conserve the species. It’s worth noting that I couldn’t find anyone on the anti-hunting side who could convincingly answer this question: If hunting is so disastrous for the long-term survival of the species, why do the countries where it’s legal to hunt elephants have so many more of them than those where the practice is banned?
With the next couple of tourist seasons, most of Botswana’s elephant concessions will be converted to photographic-safari destinations, which many conservationists promote as an effective way to monetize the animals and thereby protect them. But according to Jeff Rann, photo safaris aren’t all that difficult for poachers to work around. “[Photo tourists] are not armed. And they stick to a set, predictable routine, so the poachers just go kill animals in parts of the concessions where they know the photographics aren’t going to go.”
Obviously Rann’s got a vested interest in this perspective. But looking at the case of Kenya, home to one of Africa’s largest photo-safari sectors and a poaching problem of catastrophic proportions, you sort of have to give Rann his due. Of course, there’s every possibility that some combination of public policy, private money, and anti-ivory market pressures will render hunting obsolete as a conservation instrument. But for now, if you are one of those people who chokes up at reports of poachers poisoning elephants by the herd, you may have to countenance the uncomfortable possibility that one solution to the survival of the species may involve people paying lots of money to shoot elephants for fun.
The hunt continues. We are not back in the truck ten minutes before the tracker calls for a halt. Robyn and Will linger in the Land Cruiser while Jeff and the tracker go off into the bush to investigate. On the heels of our run-in with the monotusker and his pal, it feels as though the day has already coughed up a full lode of potential prey. So it registers as something of a surprise when Jeff returns with this news: “There’s five bulls, all of ‘em pretty good size.” One of them is carrying at least sixty pounds of ivory, Jeff’s threshold, I gather, for trophy viability. “It’s a shooter,” he says. “If we get a shot, we’ve gotta shoot it.”
Robyn shoulders her rifle. Her eyes are incandescent. Off we troop over the sand.
The bush resounds with a din of timber destruction. The sun is making its descent, and perhaps a hundred yards off, through the brambles, tusks glow in the rich light. The animals are fanned out ahead of us, noisily munching. We come in closer, and the elephants begin to take note, though we register more as a mild irritant, not a mortal threat. The trophy animal is in a lane of dense shrubs, mooning us. Robyn could conceivably flank it and get an angle on its head, but in the thick undergrowth it would be a poor shot, and that first bullet might be all she’d get. There’s a risk that she would only wound it and her $60,000 would sprint off into the weeds. Jeff and Robyn whisper tactically. The elephant’s obliviousness is exasperating. It seizes my lungs with a breathless frustration to watch the elephant foolishly grubbing salad while we stand within a stone’s throw, plotting the proper method to put a bullet in its brain.
Not thirty feet from us, the elephant with the missing tusk, the same elephant we just ran into, suddenly appears, having made its approach way more stealthily than an animal the size of a bread truck ought to be capable of. The bull is pissed. It nods and snorts and tosses snoutfuls of sand our direction. Okay, whatever you are, it’s kind of annoying, so get the fuck out of here, please.
I find the performance convincing. It keeps coming. Two more strides and the elephant could reach out and touch someone with its trunk. The elephant looks to be about twelve feet tall. The trunk weighs hundreds of pounds and is easily capable of breaking a human spine.
Apologies if that sounds like sensationalistic inanities you’ve heard intoned sotto voce by Discovery Channel narrators trying to ramp up the drama of snorkeling with porpoises and such. But the elephant is about fifteen feet away, and I will now confess to being scared just about shitless. The elephant snorts and brandishes its vast head. Lunch goes to lava in my bowels. If not for my present state of sphincter-cinching terror, I would well be in the market for an adult diaper. This is an amazingly pure kind of fear. My arteries are suddenly capable of tasting my blood, which right now has the flavor of a nine-volt battery.
Jeff Rann is in dialogue with the elephant. This consists of whispering menacingly and jabbing his rifle around in the air. The elephant does its pissed-off little shuffle for perhaps a minute, probably less. And then the tape runs in slow reverse. The elephant retreats backward into the shrubs, eyeing us, curtsying hostilely as he goes.
“Wells, you good, buddy?” Robyn asks, grinning. Apparently I’m visibly, risibly freaked. I regain my bearings, and we resume our approach to the trophy bull.
It requires the same strategy. The target is in the middle of the fan of five. The elephants have arranged themselves such that it’s kind of difficult to get an angle on the prize without straying into the paths of the others. A disquiet, a shared unease, is taking hold among these fellows. The racket of salad consumption is tapering off. The elephants are beginning to push on. But, goddamn, these guys could use a coach. The interaction with the one-tusker notwithstanding, their defense pretty much sucks. They’re moving, but it’s not so much flight as a slow and cranky mosey.
The light is caramelizing. If Robyn can’t get a shot in the next five or ten minutes, the sun will sink past the trees and it will be lion-o’clock out here. The sun, too, seems murderously slow in its descent. We move past one elephant, past another, until we are on the trophy beast. Again, its butt is to us. Nothing in the animal world tops an elephant’s ass as an emblem of indifference and reproof.
Coyness is keeping the elephant alive. If he does not turn his head, the sun will set and the elephant will not be killed today.
And then he turns his head. His expression is wary, rueful. In his long-lashed bedroom eyes is the look of an old drag queen turning to regard an importunate suitor tugging at the hem of her dress.
Robyn raises her rifle. For the past few months, she’s been rehearsing this moment in her bedroom closet in Texas, aiming, reloading, aiming again. She shoots.
The rifle’s thunder is somehow insignificant. The shot catches the elephant in the appropriate place, at the bridge of its trunk. But an elephant brain is a big piece of equipment—it can weigh as much as twelve pounds. Robyn’s bullet did not apparently sever enough vital neurons to kill the animal in a single shot. He shakes his head, as if to wag away the pain of a wasp’s sting. There is a second shot that strikes him in the neck. He turns to flee, but his right foreleg has buckled. He strives to stand. The effect is of a cripple trying to pitch a broken circus tent. In the franticness of his movements, one can sense the elephant’s surprise that his body, a machine that has served him well for over fifty years, has suddenly stopped accepting his commands. To see so large and powerful an animal vised in an even larger and more powerful inevitability is, for lack of a better word, intense.
The other elephants scatter. Robyn and Jeff jog toward the animal. In the fervor of the moment, Robyn has momentarily forgotten to put fresh rounds in her gun. “Reload, reload, reload,” Jeff instructs. They advance to a distance of maybe twenty-five feet. “Okay, shoot him right in the hip.” The gun fires twice. The tent sags right and seems to sort of sway and billow, as though surrendering to wind.
“Okay, come with me,” Jeff says. He leads Robyn along the animal’s left flank. At the sound of the hunters coming in close, the elephant struggles more direly to rise, but instead, he loses ground against gravity and settles closer to the earth. “Just watch his trunk. [Be sure] he doesn’t hit you with it.”
Jeff leads her to a position perhaps ten feet from the elephant’s left temple. “Okay, hit him right in the ear hole.” At this point there is little the elephant can do except to turn his face away. The last shot claps into the elephant’s ear.
“Perfect,” says Jeff Rann. “Brain shot. You brained him.”
And the elephant, still swaying on its haunches, a slow faucet of blood trickling from his forehead, is no more.
So that is how the elephant got shot. Once in the forehead, once in the neck, twice in the hip, once in the ear. How it felt to watch the elephant get shot is something else. As I watched the elephant go down, what obtruded into my consciousness was a kind of a thing, a psychological sensation with a very particular shape and weight and texture, a geometry as discrete and seemingly physical as a house key or a tire iron, but which I don’t have any useful language to describe. This thing, this mute-pseudo revelation, had something to do with adrenaline’s power to catalyze time into taffy. Forty seconds elapsed between the first shot and the last, yet what happened in those forty seconds seemed to happen out of time. It was another kind of time in which a new understanding of death impressed itself upon me more rapidly than my cognition could accommodate.
The indescribable thought sensation was not this, but some tiny part of it was sort of like this: Before I saw the elephant get shot, I understood that there was life, and there was its cessation. But now I understand there is this other thing—dying, when death stops being an idea and becomes a thing that the body, if not the conscious mind, grasps in its full intensity. Watching the elephant die granted the illusory understanding of death’s grammar and meaning, as with an alingual child who hears five words and thinks he knows a language. The first word went through the forehead, the second through the neck, the third and fourth through the hip, the fifth through the ear. The month before this trip, on another assignment for this magazine, for the first time in my life, I handled the corpse of a dead human being, and I learned nothing about death. I learned nothing about death, either, when Robyn Waldrip shot the elephant. But it left in my skull at least the languageless shadow of the indescribable thing: Death is this. Death is the elephant taking the first shot in the forehead, and the second in its neck, slumping, listing right, taking two in the hip, struggling, sinking, turning, taking one through the ear and not moving anymore. As it was in the beginning, and as it always will be: one in the forehead, one in the neck, two in the hip, one in the ear, world without end.
Sorry about all that. Useless, I know.
The dead elephant is leaking audibly. A substance resembling scrambled egg is spattered on its ear. I’m jotting notes and hoping Jeff Rann or Robyn does not notice how badly my hand is shaking. But Robyn is off in her own intense moment. She is sort of hooting and jumping up and down, going “Oh, my God, oh, my God,” and generally experiencing an order of ecstasy we tend to share only with our intimates. On either side of the animal, we are both of us breathing hard, massively doped with a storm of neurochemicals that, if you could synthesize in a smokable form, would make you very rich. But the manner in which we are riding our respective highs is a pretty good illustration of why, in high school, Robyn was almost certainly a more welcome and popular presence at parties than I was. While I am privately gibbering darkly and visibly whacked-out, she is pepped up, thrilled. We embrace her congratulatorily. She kisses her fingertips and touches the bull’s trunk. Salt water, rather gratuitously, spills from the elephant’s eyes.
In the morning, the elephant is as we left it, unmolested by snacking carnivores. Today, the animal will be cleaned and butchered, its flesh shared out among the locals. The hide and other mementos will be packed up for the Waldrips. Though the tusks and the rest of it are, ostensibly, the prizes Robyn came to Africa to collect, the electricity has gone out of the safari. Returning to the animal has a cleaning-up-after-the-party sort of feel.
A team of a half-dozen Botswana men and women have turned out for the event. The equipment list includes an ax, a winch, and a bunch of cheap-looking plastic-handled boning knives. First order of business is a stropping orgy that lasts the better part of half an hour. While that’s going on, the Waldrips’ children—Lola, 6, and Will junior, 8—who have been back at the camp, play with the elephant, touch its trunk for its rough, lichenish feel, handle its ears.
“It’s surreal, isn’t it?” Will senior says, squinting at the creature.
“Yeah,” says Robyn, a little dreamily. “I hope it stays that way for a long time.”
I’m feeling it, too, the slightly spongy sense of dislocation emanating from the previous day, but this is why I will never be a hunter: She wants to savor it. I am ready for it to go away. Before the skinning commences, the tableau is beautified and made camera-ready. The elephant’s tusks are scrubbed. One of Jeff’s assistants takes an ax to a tree that is casting an unphotogenic shadow.
“Look how long it takes him to chop that down,” Will observes. “An elephant would walk right over it.”
Larry the videographer takes some footage of the children perched on the elephant’s skull, though Jeff cautions him, “You might get shit if you put that in the show. You don’t want to be seen as disrespecting the animal.”
The children dismount, and the skinners move in.
The cleaning goes like this: First you take the ears. Each is the size of a manta ray. It is severed close to the head and laid in the dirt. Next, the trunk, the size of a middle-aged gator, is girdled at its bridge and then removed. Blood comes forth in an incredible tide, more of it than I’ve probably seen in aggregate over the course of my lifetime. Yet the flaying, surprisingly, inspires none of the mortal vertigo the killing did. As the knives flash, the animal becomes less extraordinary, less like the world’s largest land mammal and more a bricolage of familiar butcher-shop hues. The trunk is stripped of its leather, and for a time it lies in the dirt, looking like an automobile transmission made of fresh raspberry sorbet.
Will is by the elephant’s rear. He has taken up a knife, eager to do his share of the dismantlement. “I always tell my kids, anything you kill, you gotta clean it yourself. I know Jeff’s got clients who come out here and kill five elephants. Shoot ‘em and leave ‘em. To me that’s not right. Out of respect for the animal, you gotta do it yourself. I didn’t kill this elephant, but even still.”
A cut has been made along the spine. Will slashes away, pulling at the skin, revealing a goreless expanse of fibrous white fascia. The winch is applied to help peel the hide. The resistance is sufficient to pull the truck forward at first when the crank turns on.
Once the skin has been freed, Will and the skinners begin blocking out the meat. The sound is of hard, wet work.
Up front, they are getting at the skull. The skin is gone from the elephant’s cheeks, and the bare eye peering from the pale tissue is demonic. Below the eyes, the look of the tuskless head, still actively suppurating, recalls a cliff face after a strong rain. Then the head itself is cut off, into the arms of a pair of catchers. Later today or tomorrow, the skull will be buried for a period of ten days. Insects will attend to the finer details of cleaning the skull for its voyage to Texas.
When the head is removed, the elephant begins to speak in a morbid throat-flatus. Air escaping the trachea makes sounds of growls and shudders and sighs. This is not upsetting. By now, it is not elephant but a wrecked Volkswagen made of flesh.
The job wears on. How much of the creature, I ask Jeff Rann, do the skinners intend to take?
“Everything,” he says. “This’ll probably feed a hundred people.”
The skinners cut away re-hydrant-sized wads of meat and fling them heavily into a Land Cruiser’s bed.
The carcass is winnowed to a pile of innards that calls to mind one of those inflatable-looking sports arenas. In the flawless blue above, a fleet of delighted buzzards has begun to wheel.
The work is mostly over. Will Waldrip can now retire from the job. He is abundantly daubed in blood and is exhausted, though chipper. “A little different than quartering out a whitetail,” he says.
Amid the spare parts lying in the grass is the elephant’s jaw, from which we can know the elephant’s age. An elephant gets six sets of teeth in its lifetime. This one was on its final set, and judging from its condition it was probably about 53. The sand of the savanna is hard on an elephant’s dentition. Five to seven more years and it’d have blown through this set and starved to death, assuming neither Jeff nor the poachers got him first.
Looking at this rummage sale of elephant flesh inspires an equally messy inventory of contradictory thoughts.
The elephant’s skull is buried. Its flesh has been hung out to dry. The Waldrips are booked at Jeff Rann’s safari camp for eight more days, but these folk are hunters, and the notion of spending a week doing nothing but observing creatures of the wild holds little interest for them. So tomorrow, they will go to South Africa, because Will Waldrip Jr. wants to undertake something called a “springbok slam,” which involves shooting one of each of that species’ four subvarieties. Jeff has an extra elephant tag for his concession in Tanzania. He offers this to Will senior, and Will declines.
Our last evening in camp, we go for sunset cocktails at a locally famous baobab tree. The tree is craggy, Gandalfian, and 1,000 years old. It has a crazed unruly spread of branches, which inspired the folk saying, Jeff tells us, that “God pulled the baobab out of the ground and stuck it upside down.” A leopard sometimes hangs out in the man-sized cave in its trunk. The leopard isn’t home. The only locals on the scene are a squadron of huge buzzards, resting in the baobab’s branches. The camp dumps its hunting refuse not too far from here, and the buzzards, Jeff tells us, have likely spent the day gorging on the remains of Robyn’s elephant. At our approach, they take grudging flight in a storm of black wings.
While Jeff’s wife is arranging the cocktail table, the party moves in to have a look at the leopard hole. Suddenly the sounds of shrieking pierce the quiet of the dusk. My first thought is that the leopard was home after all and has mauled one of the children. But it turns out that one last buzzard had been hiding in the tree. The bird had gobbled so much of Robyn’s elephant that it couldn’t take off. So, to attain flight weight, the buzzard started puking on the safari group. Fran, the Waldrips’ nanny, got the heftiest portion of Robyn’s elephant, on her shoulders and hair, and Jeff Rann got speckled a bit. The elephant huntress herself dodged the vomit entirely as the bird set a course for the sun.
Wells Tower is a GQ correspondent.
This story originally appeared in the June 2014 issue with the title “Who Wants To Shoot An Elephant?”
