Books: Elephants in the Raw

KOMOON!—CAPTURING THE CHAD ELEPHANT (219 pp.)—Heinrich Oberjohann —Pantheon ($3).

The elephant in captivity, says Heinrich Oberjohann, is a pious fraud—a nine-foot canting hypocrite that gives the human public what it wants while privately laughing up its trunk at the hairless little apes. Only in the wilds of Asia and, better still, of Africa, can elephant nature be seen in the raw; and then usually only by other elephants, for the largest of land animals is also one of the more elusive.

Heinrich Oberjohann is a bring-’em-back-alive man, and he probably knows as much about elephants in the raw as anybody living. In the ’30s, Animal Trader Carlo Hagenbeck sent him out to kidnap a few calves from the great herds which still roam the noxious swamps around Lake Chad, in North Central Africa. He lived for four years within scent of elephants —”I became an elephant myself.” In Komoonl (Berberi dialect for elephant) he tells what it was like. Author Oberjohann is no scientist; some of his conclusions about the big animals will strain the faith of stay-at-homes. But he has written one of the most absorbing adventure stories in many a week.

Mothers Do Not Desert. Hunter Oberjohann traveled light. He slept beneath the sky on grass mat and saddle, ate only once a day, native style. To keep off mosquitoes, he often lived in a swath of thick toweling. All the while, day & night, he followed the herds through the stinking swamps, disdaining snakes, crocs and insects in his passion for pachyderms.

Oberjohann made his first capture when a cow elephant charged him in swamp water. She turned aside when his native boy screamed, and charged the boy instead. The boy ducked under water. So did Oberjohann, and the cow ran off. Her baby, left behind, accepted Oberjohann’s rope, and off they went, on the double, toward dry land. Oberjohann, knowing that mother elephants do not desert their children, waited for trouble.

All that night the baby elephant stood tethered while Oberjohann sat in a giant acacia tree, to wait for the mother’s attack and watch the proceedings. At 2 a.m., “the night turned into a roaring, crashing hell.” The acacia tree was torn from its roots, and Oberjohann was hurled 15 feet into some thorn bushes. In a few minutes, he says, the mother smashed 14 acacias and some 50 other trees, trampling them almost level with the ground.

In the morning the hunters fled with their captive. All at once, at the edge of a forest, “I stood beside a dark grey rock, twelve feet high.” It was the mother. “Her eyes were uncanny, fixed and empty.” Oberjohann judged that she “had actually been driven mad by her boundless sorrow at losing her child. I prodded her trunk lightly with my bamboo staff.” Dully, she moved away. Next night she destroyed a native village, but Oberjohann never saw her again.

Rumbling Majorities. Sometimes Oberjohann was able to keep close to a herd for several minutes at a stretch without being detected; piece by piece he added to his elephant lore.

Elephants, he says, cannot see clearly beyond 25 yards, but they can hear and smell for hundreds of yards, and sometimes farther. More than once he followed groups of elephants which had detached themselves from the main herd; when he revealed himself, the groups fled. And at the same moment, sometimes miles away, the main herd would break off in uneasiness. Oberjohann, who tested this observation by leaving several natives to watch the main herd, believes that it points to something remarkably like elephant telepathy.

Oberjohann submits that the elephants even have a secret service of wise old elephants that spy on human activity over a wide area. All information so gathered is “discussed,” sometimes for rumbling hours on end, in a herd council, until “agreement” is achieved—occasionally by a resort to force on the part of the majority.

During his four years, Oberjohann captured 19 baby elephants (all of them died), killed a dozen or more, had a leg injured and some ribs fractured by an irritated elephant, barely escaped with his life a hundred times. The herds knew and hated him, he believes. Yet sometimes, in their night passages, they would trundle through his camp, passing not six feet from where he lay marveling and afraid, and move on without ruffling a hair of his head or touching a stick of his equipment. Apparently, as John Ruskin once concluded, the great animals have a susceptibility to “points of honor.” Says Oberjohann flatly: “They never attack a human being while he is asleep.”