Baby Elephant Rescued From a Collapsing Riverbank

A riverbank in Botswana is made of two materials that do not agree with each other: water below, and earth above, and between them a band of mud where the two have been negotiating for as long as the river has flowed. In the dry, that mud bakes into a slope an animal can climb. In the wet, it becomes what it was for the baby elephant on this day: a collapsing edge, a slope that accepted weight and then, politely and completely, refused to keep it. The calf had come down to the river the way elephant calves come to rivers, close to the herd, in the middle of the day’s heat, for water and for the pleasure of water — and on its way back up, the bank betrayed it. Not all at once. A collapsing bank betrays an animal in instalments. The calf’s front legs had reached, or nearly reached, the firm ground at the top, the grass-rooted, solid earth where the herd stood. Its hind legs were still on the slope below, and the slope, under their weight, kept sliding: each push upward bought a few inches and then paid them back, with interest, in mud.

A baby elephant is not a small animal in any sense except the relative one. It is small the way a grand piano is small compared to a house. It weighs what several grown men weigh, it is strong beyond anything its size in most species can match, and none of that strength can help it on a collapsing bank, because strength needs something to push against, and mud is precisely the material that removes that something. Each effort the calf made was real effort, honestly spent, and each effort moved mud rather than elephant. Worse, the struggle itself was collapsing the bank further: the slope it needed was being eaten by its own attempts to climb it, so that the situation, left alone, did not stay the same. It improved for nobody. A calf in this position tires. Its front legs, holding at the top, bear an increasing share of a body that its hind legs cannot lift. Its skin, wet and mud-plastered, loses any grip it had. And a herd, watching from firm ground, cannot solve it either, for all their size and all their willingness, because an elephant’s tools for rescue are an elephant’s body, and bodies are exactly what the mud has already declined to hold.

The rescue team that came to the bank brought the two things mud cannot argue with: wide lifting straps, and a controlled winch. The straps were the broad kind, made to spread support around a big body without concentrating pressure anywhere — placed to assist an elephant, never to hang one. The winch was the controlled kind, vehicle-mounted, its pull governed by an operator whose whole craft is the difference between a pull and a jerk, between assistance and force. The plan was built around the calf’s own effort, because the calf was not helpless in the way a tiny animal in a box is helpless. It had front legs at the top of the bank and a will to climb that had not dimmed; what it lacked was a back end that could be trusted. So the straps would be its back end’s insurance: rigged around its body, taken up by the winch to a tension just below assistance, ready to become assistance at the exact moment the hind legs failed, and to stay assistance — steady, level, unhurried — for as long as the last short distance took.

The team worked on the firm ground, which was the other half of the plan’s wisdom: nobody went down onto the collapsing slope to push, because a slope that is dropping elephants will drop people into the same problem, at the bottom of the same bank, with considerably less dignity and exactly the same mud. Voices went down the slope instead. A rescuer positioned where the calf could see a face at its own eye level, on the bank’s shoulder, talked it through the rigging — the slow appearance of the straps, brought around by people who moved like people with all the time in the world, because a baby elephant that decides the straps are a threat will spend its strength fighting the rescue instead of the bank. The calf’s ears, wide even on a calf, fanned once at the straps’ approach and then settled, and its trunk, that marvellous, undecided organ, reached toward the nearest human smell and then curled back to its work, which was the work of holding on.

The rescuer at its eye level kept his voice low and steady, talking to the calf over the sounds of the river and the creaking winch line, the way people talk to young elephants when they want the animal to save its strength for one good effort and to believe that the strange equipment gathering around it is on its side.

“Hey, big baby… I see you holding on up there. Keep those front legs where they are. The straps are coming, and we’re going to help you the last little bit.”

Then the rigging was complete, the straps seated and the slack taken up, the winch operator’s hand on his control and his eyes on the calf rather than on his own machine, and the climb began for the second time, this time with a team inside it. The calf gathered itself with the particular, rocking deliberation elephants use before a great effort, front legs set, head low, and pushed. The winch answered as it had been set to answer: not leading, following, taking weight only as weight was offered, so that the push and the pull became a single motion divided between mud-born strength and machine-born patience. The hind legs scrabbled, found mud, lost mud, found the slope’s slightly firmer mid-band, and the calf’s great hindquarters rose — really rose, higher than any effort of the morning had raised them — and the firm ground, the grass, the herd’s shadow, the whole dry world at the top of the bank came close, close enough that the watching people could see dirt under the calf’s belly instead of slope, close enough that one more effort, one more half-metre, would end it.

And then came the climax, in the oldest place such moments live: at the very end, when the body believes it has already arrived. The calf’s hind foot, reaching for what it judged to be the top, landed on the bank’s last, most treacherous gift — the lip, the crumbling rim where slope becomes level, made entirely of the wettest, loosest, most thoroughly collapsed material on the whole bank, because the lip is where every previous slide had deposited its mud. The foot went into it, and the lip went away beneath it, and the calf’s hindquarter dropped and slid backward in a long, grinding, mud-powered retreat that carried it, in two terrible seconds, almost the whole of the distance it had just gained — not to the bottom, because the straps were there, and this, exactly this, was what the straps were for. The winch, already under tension, already in an operator’s hand, did not need to be started. It needed only to be allowed to do a little more of what it was already doing, and it did: the straps took the sliding weight, the slide became a sag, the sag became a hold, and the calf hung, front legs at the top, body supported, hind legs in wrecked mud — neither up nor down, in the suspended moment that the entire rescue had been engineered to make survivable.

The operator’s voice went out over the winch noise, unchanged, deliberate, the most important piece of equipment in that suspended moment, because a baby elephant that panics inside straps can injure itself against their support, and a calf that hears calm has a reason to try once more instead.

“Easy, big baby… the straps have you, you’re not going any further back. Rest a second. Then we go together, one more time.”

They let it rest, actually rest, hanging in its straps with its breathing slowing, while two rescuers at the top — on firm ground, nowhere near the lip — cleared what could be cleared and firmed what could be firmed of that last stretch, packing the worst of the lip down into something a foot could argue with. Then, on the voice’s count rather than the machine’s, calf and winch moved together a second time: the calf pushed with everything the rest had returned to it, and the winch, this time, led by a fraction, carrying just enough more of the weight that the hind legs’ push, instead of moving mud, moved elephant. The hind feet crossed the packed lip. The belly cleared it. The great, mud-armoured hindquarters came over the top like a ship coming over a bar, and the baby elephant stood, all four legs, swaying slightly, on grass, on firm Botswana earth, while the straps slackened around it and the river went on being a river far below, robbed, by preparation, of a prize it had been collecting in instalments all morning.

In the closing moments, the straps were worked off the calf where it stood, slowly, so that the last touch of the rescue was a gentle one, and the calf — mud from belly to ear-tips, breathing deep, legs tested one by one as it shifted its weight across them under the lead rescuer’s eye — was pronounced a calf with nothing broken and nothing strained that rest would not answer, a calf whose morning had ended exactly where its morning had been trying to end since the bank first slid: on the top, with the herd. It moved toward the other elephants with the unhurried dignity elephants recover with astonishing speed, pausing once, at a distance it chose, to look back down the ruined slope, as if filing the bank under a category it shares with rivers, trucks, and men with winches: things a young elephant survives by accepting help from.

“There you go… up and over, big baby. Safe now, solid ground, all yours. Let’s get you checked and let you rest.”

It would be watched for the day, as calves are watched after such efforts — for the hind legs that slid, for the shoulders that held, for exhaustion that sometimes arrives an hour after the effort that caused it — and the bank, its lip repacked by boots as an afterthought, would be a bank again by the next rain, awaiting its next negotiation between earth and water. But the morning’s essential fact was already settled and would not un-settle: that the difference between a calf at the top of a bank and a calf at the bottom of a river had been, in the end, a pair of wide straps rigged before they were needed, a winch controlled by a man who understood that assistance is a kind of patience, and a few handfuls of firm ground packed, by hand, into the one place a hind foot was going to land.