Fifty elephants across a road

A little rain overnight — unusual this late. Nyae Nyae has had far more rain this season than normal and it is still coming. We drove east to the Botswana fence, then south along it toward the mountains. A lone young roan. A big bull-roan spoor on the road. A young kudu bull with a cow, and two young bull elephants feeding a hundred meters off, with more cows and calves deeper in the thick.

Near the concession’s southern boundary we saw an old bull crossing the main gravel road ahead of us. We stopped, glassed him, and noticed that more elephants were trying to cross — they heard the cruiser and held up. We drove off a distance to wait.

It took forty-five minutes for them all to cross. More than fifty elephants in the line, almost all of them cows and calves. When the last one was in the bush on the far side we started driving again, and kept looking for a good bull spoor to track, and kept not finding one.

After lunch we took a dirt road we had never driven. Like most of them we cut our way through branches and overgrowth for the first kilometer. Elephant sign everywhere. Robert saw a bull three hundred meters off; we followed him an hour before he knew and walked. We let him go — the track was not quite right.

Near last light we found it: a big old-bull spoor from yesterday, the biggest we had seen in four days. Too late to follow tonight. We marked the spot.