The hunter becomes the hunted.
When our South African tour guides asked us if we've ever heard of the Big 5, everyone nodded their heads knowingly. But when asked if we knew why they were called that, we all had our guesses. We were wrong. :) Hippos are the culprit that kill more Africans than any other animals so there went my guess. The Big 5 are the main five animals that if hunted, will not just run away but will turn around and get even. The hunted, in essence, becomes the hunter. I thought this applied to so many aspects of life, that when faced with a difficult decision, person or situation, running away is a sissy option. Facing it head on and standing your ground, or in some cases, charging at full speed ahead is the way to make it in the big boys club.
My group and I soon learned this the hard way when we did our walking safari at Hlane National Park in Swaziland. Some of us had just completed a sunrise walking safari at Kruger in S.A and our guides were equipped with shot guns and the knowledge of telling us that should we come across one of the big 5 or any other sizable animal for that matter, DO NOT run away. Freeze and listen for instructions. Needless to say, we all took this info with a grain of salt, just like when you hear the emergency info on a plane. So when we met our guides at Hlane, we were a bit uneasy as there were two safari guides, to our group of about 14 and they were equipped with good ol' fashion sticks. Not even a bat or a 2x4, but sticks! What. The. F?? As we walked down a path before entering the 'animal side', we took noticed to the wimpy fences made of 3 barbed wires. It wasn't until one of the guides stretched out two of wires for us to crossover, did we realize that those barb wires were what kept the animals - lions, rhinos, elephants, buffalos and leopards, not to mention hippos - from coming into our camp grounds. Again, what. the. f?? We figured 'hey, this was 100% safe because if there were any issues or safety concerns, there's no way they would only be using sticks and relying on a fence that I could have constructed to keep us safe.'
As we walked for a bit, the only thing exciting was dodging the trees which had a particular leaf that if broken off, produced some sort of milky substance - this substance if eaten, smoked or even burned and inhaled would give us a running stomach (diarrhea) and we would die! Good shit! No pun intended! :) Every now and then our guides would stop us, using hand signals and would listen intently. It made word down our little line that they had heard elephants in the distance. One of the guides went off and did a bit of inspecting. He came back and reported a family of elephants with 2 young ones making their way near us. They advised us that we would turn back to avoid getting in their way, as elephants with young or most animals for that matter, get really defensive. As we walked back towards the path we came from, the guides both all of a sudden signalled for us to stop again. This time it felt a little different. We looked up and in the distance, through the trees, we saw the family of elephants. They were less then 100 metres away from us, I heard one of my safari mates whisper.
As we were snapping our cameras away, no one expected that the dominant male elephant would fake 'charge' at us. I swear if I had just chugged a beer, I would have peed myself, no lie. One of the guides, slowly walked behind our group towards a little opening and whispered for us to slowly follow him. Again he used his stick to hold up one of the barb wires and instructed us to gather around, as to not have us separate too much aka look bigger/threatening to the elephants. That didn't really work. As most of us approached the fence, the male was stomping its' feet and raising its trunk. Our guide hurriedly had a few of us cross over onto the 'safe' side. Me and my buddy were one of the first few who crossed over and as I looked back, I saw the elephant take off and charged towards us. My friend who wasn't on the sunrise walk, turned and began to run - I grabbed her hand and held her in place, saying 'don't run, don't run.' All that was running through my mind was 'oh my god, this is how I'm going to die!' According to our guides, after the elephant stopped about halfway, the elephant did that because it remembered that the fences are electrical and it was really just trying to scare us. My first thought was 'damn, that elephant was an a-hole' for nearly making me shit myself. But also that, elephants are pretty smart. I'm sure one would have taken one for the team and have risked the electrocution, held down the fence and let the others stomp us into human peanut butter. Well actually with all of the wine we've been drinking, it would have been more like human wine jelly. The best part of our rush with 'death' was that one of our safari mates ended up scratching his leg on the barb wire, during all of the chaos and when asked if he felt the electric shock on his leg? Nope, not at all.
I learned some interesting life lessons on that trip but the most memorable is if you're going to start a fight, be well prepared that someone else can finish it.
My Big 5 paw print tat (leopard, elephant, rhino, lion and buffalo.) Location: St Lucia, South Africa. Nov 2013.
