One winter’s afternoon a member of our game management team was busy removing a section of an old farm fence he had found. This was up on the back side of Entabeni Mountain where the bush is very thick, and the landscape very rocky, with huge segments of sandstone which have crashed down off the cliff face over hundreds of thousands of years. Some of these are the size of a house, and one of these rocks plays an integral role in this story. The elephants on Entabeni are very adept at traversing the rocky hillsides in order to obtain some of their favourite fruits, such as the milk plum, and one such elephant found our reserve manager. Hands and back aching from the heavy plier work he was doing, he heard a soft sound behind him. He turned around and was face to face with a twenty five year old bull elephant. The animal had walked, silent as always, toward the sounds which he did not recognize. The managers training, and phrases such as stand your ground and don’t run, raced through his mind. This was not, however, a situation where he would have the privilege of standing his ground it seemed. The elephant took another step towards him, closing the gap to five very small looking metres.

Slowly looking around at his vehicle, he gauged the distance and tried to decide whether he would cover the thirty metres past the elephant to its relative safety. No, probably not. Looking around behind him, he noticed a large rock with a crack up the side. Would it be high enough to be out of reach of the trunk of the bull elephant with its thousands of powerful muscles? Only one way to find out, he darted across the clearing, startling the elephant slightly, and vaulted onto the jagged edge of the crack. The elephant, startled, half turned away and then charged. He scrambled hand over hand onto the crumbling rock and threw himself onto the flat top. The trunk of the elephant snaked up over the top, searching for the pest that had startled it so. A strange thought passed through the managers mind, the grey trunk reaching ever closer over the rusty brown boulder, as to whether he would run out of rock before the elephant ran out of trunk.

The trapped farm manager crept closer to the back of the boulder, keeping scant inches from the sniffing proboscis which sought him out so gingerly, and soon he was out of room to move.

Fortunately the elephant bull was out of nose too! For the following hour or two it was a test of patience between the two combatants (one willing and one not so willing), with the elephant moving a few metres to feed, and then sneaking back to try another angle. Luckily for the manager at around sunset the test of wills was decided, with the elephant bull moving off into the bush that he calls home, as silently as he had come affording him the opportunity to beat a hasty retreat towards the camp.