Predators I Have Known - Alan Dean Foster [60]
“But you said not to run under any circumstan—”
“Run, run!” He slowed his pace long enough to look back at the trees and at us, but he did not stop.
Unsurprisingly, we ran.
A couple of hundred yards away, we were forced to stop to catch our breath. Perspiration poured down the length of our bodies like slender threads of channeled whitewater. Looking back at the section of forest we had been a mere couple of steps from entering, we saw nothing. No movement, and no sign of whichever elephant had startled us into anxious flight.
“Cruella?” Bent over with her hands on her knees, my sister was panting hard, but she hadn’t fallen. As was her preference, she had been hiking barefoot.
“Possibly.” Our guide was studying the motionless trees intently, still not wholly content with the distance we had put between them and ourselves. “No way of telling unless she comes out.”
“How close were we?” my sister asked.
I looked at her, then I looked at our guide. He looked at me.
“Too close,” he said. “A matter of feet, not yards. She was right there, just inside the first branches.”
I had not seen so much as a trace of elephant. I did my best not to sound accusing. “You told us not to run.”
He didn’t hesitate. “Almost every time, you don’t run. Ninety-eight percent of the time, you don’t run.” He nodded in the direction of the trees from whence the overwhelming blast of sound had originated. “But when you’re that close, you run. Might well have been a mother with a calf. Just letting us know we were getting too close.”
As we slugged down the contents of our water bottles, a part of me was sorry we had not seen the elephant in question. It would have been interesting to know its identity. And while I realize that I am succumbing to easy anthropomorphizing, I cannot escape this image of Cruella, lying on her back in the forest with her forelegs crossed over her chest, trunk in the air, laughing some self-satisfied, uncontrollable, elephant laugh.
* * *
Mikongo Camp lies not in the Congo but deep within Lopé National Park in the center of Gabon. Its simple but sturdy individual wooden chalets boast showers, large beds, and plenty of mosquito netting, though nothing can keep rain-forest bugs completely out of any building. As you go about your business, you learn to dance around the potentially dangerous ones, admire the attractive ones, and ignore the ants. It’s their forest, after all.
With a pair of dedicated trackers, we were off searching for mountain lowland gorillas. As the hours wore on and we found ourselves struggling up and down mud-slicked jungle paths, we found plenty of gorilla spoor but were unable to catch up to the local group itself. We were advancing along a trail cut into the side of a steep hill when my sister stopped in front of me. Intent on keeping watch for insects and other denizens of the forest floor (we had encountered a young green mamba the day before), it dawned on me that not only had everyone stopped, but they had gone completely silent.
Then I saw our lead guide gesturing for us to back up.
I had been on numerous jungle walks with a wide assortment of guides on four continents and had been their recipient of a full compliment of hand gestures, but this was the first time one of them had ever indicated I needed to back up. The other guide had placed a finger against his lips in the universal signal for silence.
From my position at the back of the line, I strained to see past them. Around us, the trees rang with the symphony of the forest: unseen chattering monkeys, the occasional cry of a bird that was a flash of iridescence as it darted between branches, the electronic whine of cicadas. Buttressed boles fought their neighbors for precious sunlight. Spreading its wings and thereby surrendering its camouflage, an audacious butterfly shone sapphire as it briefly exposed itself like a Manhattan flasher. All about us there was sound, no fury, and little movement.
Peering past the heads of my sister and our