Wild Elephant Chase

A few weeks ago I called the husband of a friend who had just had a baby. I wanted to ask if we could come visit the following morning. Before I could ask about the visit, he casually told me in Karimojong that he was watching a —— (unintelligible word to me). I paused, not sure what he was saying. And since the words for standing there watching are very similar to the question I wanted to ask about seeing his wife, I decided to move onto my question rather than delve into the unintelligible word. “Is it ok for me to come see your wife tomorrow?”

“Oh yes, tomorrow should be fine. Right now I’m just watching —— “ Another pause. “Do you understand the word —?” he asked me. I had to admit that I did not. “You know ——! The big animal!”  Then it hit me. The word I wasn’t understanding was an English word.

When I responded, I used the Karimojong. “Etom a?!” 

“Yes! Elephant!”

We went back and forth a number of times, confirming that he was in fact telling me he was watching an elephant, a real elephant, near his home only a short drive away from us. It became a very comical exchange with languages getting mixed and mashed together. In the end, I did believe him and finally stopped asking him to confirm his facts.

After hanging up I told Tina, who was wrapping up PE with my kids, that I was tempted to go look for this elephant. She, adventurous and energetic as always, asked why not?! So we cancelled the rest of school that morning, jumped into the car with Leah too and began our wild elephant chase. 

My friend’s husband guided us down a road I had never been on before, past a village I had never visited, into savannah dotted with sorghum fields. We called him frequently, confirming directions down these unknown roads until we came to a swamp, at which time we stopped, parked the car and walked on foot about half a mile through the fields.

We knew we were getting close when we began to spot warriors wrapped in their blankets perched atop sycamore trees like diminutive tax collectors yearning to get a glimpse of Jesus. If the elephant wasn’t curiosity enough, we were. We grew a tail of locals eager to see what the white people would do. We were asked if we had come to catch the elephant, which I laughed at outright as I looked at our crew of children and unequipped women. People kept pointing vaguely, determined that the elephant was there – see its trail? see its footprint? see the field it destroyed? But no one seemed quite sure where it was now. Tina and Carmel climbed the first tree, along with twenty others! Tina caught a glimpse of the sorghum in the field swaying. Clearly an animal was there, bigger than a goat, bigger than a cow. So we looked for a closer tree with some open space. This time we could hear the elephant trumpeting. We could feel the earth rumble as it stomped, but the animal remained hidden beneath the sorghum. At one point, I heard the rumbling coming our way and lifted Zion authoritatively into the tree, figuring it was safer up than down. At one point, a young woman almost fell out of the tree on the heads of people on branches below her. In the midst of another rumbling, I myself found a way to climb the tree with Olive tied to my back. It was then that everyone else caught a glimpse of the young bull elephant. Tina, Carmel and Zion all saw its back and trunk. Leah saw its trunk reach up above the heads of sorghum. I definitely saw the sorghum sway, but would be lying if I said I could discern anything reliably a part of an elephant.

Shortly after, we decided we had tempted death enough. We descended from the tree, carefully picked our shoes out of the pile at the trunk base easily identifiable as the only colorful shoes in the midst of tire sandals, and headed back to the car. On the way back, we met the wildlife authorities who were coming to manage the situation. Their aim was to push the elephant back toward the game park not so far away, which hasn’t reported having elephants until that day. Although curiosity did tempt me to see how they would accomplish that, wisdom continued us on our path away from the scene of what turned out to be a fatal failure at controlling a wild animal.

We returned home safely, ate our late lunch in wonderment at the strange events of the morning and utterly thankful for the protection God provided.