Poison Ivory (19 page)

Surprisingly few people groaned, so I cut mine short.

“At any rate, I’m sure it puzzled my family when I started spending some time with my very wealthy ex-son-in-law not too long ago. I might even have stepped on a few feelings. However, I hope that a ten-day Caribbean cruise for everyone here in this room on his megayacht, the
Abby-Lone,
will help erase any hard feelings. Lord only knows, my daughter is the single most precious thing in my life. Oh, and did I mention that my grandchildren will be joining us on this cruise?”

“A
cruise
?” Rob shouted.

That was a cue for one of the uniformed waitpersons to begin beating a child’s drum. At that, the doors to Rob’s study opened and out marched my children: Susan, age twenty-five who lives in New York City; and Charlie, age twenty-three, who had obviously flown in all the way from Paris.

“Happy birthday to me,” sang Mama happily. She was off-key as usual.

Everyone in the room joined Mama in singing the birthday song, even the waiters, and I doubt if there was a dry eye there. In fact, it sounded like even the chefs and their helpers were adding their varied voices; I thought I heard the meat chef from Maison de la Nez.

“Speech, speech!” someone cried predictably afterward, but Mama shook her head. She knew when to end a production.

It was then that I pushed Send on my cell phone and spoke to the man upstairs. I do mean that literally, by the way. Phillip Canary, who was being paid handsomely for his gig, was not at all put out about having to wait in the Rob-Bob’s media room with a cold beer and a large screen TV until he got my signal.

Eightieth birthday, or not, I’m telling you, it was a sight to see Mama’s face as Phillip came down the stairs, serenading her with “You Are the Wind Beneath My Wings.”

M
r. Curly (aka Lord Bowfrey) was charged with two counts of murder and impersonating a United States customs officer, as well as smuggling into the country just over three hundred tons of banned ivory. However, he turned state’s witness in exchange for extradition to his home country of Zimbabwe.

Lady Bowfrey was convicted of two counts of kidnapping, as well as smuggling into this country just over three hundred tons of banned ivory. She was given a life sentence to a prison somewhere in the Carolinas. After a year on prison food she has lost 126 pounds and is no longer confined to her wheelchair. She has acquired a special friend named Tamika and reports being happier than she’s ever been. She has also started a women’s self-help group called Bitches with Stitches.

I
was born and raised in what was then the Belgian Congo (now the Democratic Republic of Congo), in the geographical center of Africa. It is a vast area of land that sprawls across the equator and contains a variety of wildlife habitats. In the northern region small herds of pygmy elephants follow ancient trails through dark, mysterious rain forest. But I was born in the south, where the sunlit savannahs butt up against the southern reaches of the rain forest and the elephants achieve normal size, like they do in East Africa.

My parents were missionaries to the Bashilele tribe, which at that time were renowned for their elusiveness (they were head-hunters who drank from human skulls) and for their prowess as hunters. They were not poachers; the men hunted game solely for their cooking pots. They hunted with six-foot, tightly strung bows, and were assisted by beautiful, but barkless, little hunting dogs known today as basenjis.

Larger animals could not be felled immediately by the arrows, but were chased on foot until they “bled out,” much as Americans hunt deer with arrows today. Elephants and hippos, however, possess hide that is several inches thick, and arrows are generally only a mere nuisance to them. The traditional way to hunt them was to dig a large pit, into which sharpened stakes were positioned pointing upward. The pit was then covered with branches and leaves. With any luck the animals wandered into the pit, but barring that, they were driven to it by beaters. This method of hunting dates back to prehistoric times and was used by cave dwellers to hunt mammoths.

The Bashilele did not posses modern weapons of any kind. They owned no guns; in fact, it was against the law for them to do so. They were, however, very skilled at crafts. One observant man, a hunter named Kabemba, had been recruited as a soldier by the Belgian colonialists. When he returned to his village, he was able to perfectly reconstruct, by memory, a functioning musket, as well as musket balls. Where he got the necessary gun powder, I don’t know.

One day a herd of elephant cows and their calves (the bulls are solitary) passed within two miles of our house. Upon hearing, via the talking drums, that the elephants were approaching, Kabemba climbed into the branches of an acacia tree. He had with him only three homemade musket balls. The unsuspecting herd walked single file beneath him, and as soon as the last
cow passed, he fired the gun, hitting the elephant in the soft spot directly behind her ear. The musket ball entered the large elephant’s brain and she sank quietly to her knees. She died instantly. It was truly one shot in a million.

The year was 1952. I was four years old. There was great excitement in the village and on the mission; everyone ran through the bush to see the elephant and to congratulate the mighty hunter. Kabemba instantly became a hero, and a legend throughout the district. No man before him had ever been brave enough to attempt to shoot an elephant with a homemade gun. Killing an elephant was a community activity. No one had ever managed to do so alone; it literally took a village.

My daddy lifted me up and placed me on the dead elephant’s back. He held me up so I could look in her ears. That night, and for days afterward, the entire village feasted on elephant meat, while the drums recounted the hunter’s cleverness and bravery. If the bullet had only wounded the elephant, she could have easily knocked the small acacia tree over and trampled Kabemba. It is most unlikely that he would have had time to refire his homemade musket.

The next evening Mama served us elephant burgers for supper. She’d cooked them in a pressure cooker to make sure they were tender, before browning them in a cast iron skillet on our wood-burning stove. Mama didn’t tell us that we were eating elephant meat until supper was over. And she waited another full day to confess that our
portion of elephant meat came from the trunk. Mama had heard somewhere that the trunk was the tenderest part of an elephant, so that was what she had arranged to buy from Kabemba.

Mama’s younger brother bought one of the elephant’s feet from Kabemba. He intended to make an umbrella stand out of it. Unfortunately for all of us, Uncle Ernie knew nothing about taxidermy, or curing hides, and subsequently the foot stank horribly. Soon Mama, who was his big sister, ordered him to throw it out. Uncle Ernie threw the elephant’s foot out, but not very far—just over the edge of the front lawn. That night a pack of jackals dragged the foot hither, thither, and yon, as they tried to scavenge the interior of it for meat. The next day Daddy commented that the poor elephant’s foot had probably traveled more when it was off the elephant than when it was still attached to her.

The grassy hills among which we lived were well-watered, and many of the valleys contained small forest-rimmed lakes. There was a local legend of an “elephant graveyard,” a special lake where old and injured elephants went to die. It was said that the elephants knew instinctively where this place was, and when death approached, they sought it out, but they did so only if they were not being pursued. A badly injured elephant might prolong its death for hours, maybe even days, until it knew for sure that it could enter the waters of this mysterious lake unseen.

My daddy was determined to find the “elephant
graveyard.” He reckoned that there must actually be several of them, and that after eons of time they must be chock full of valuable ivory. It was his dream to find one of these lakes, drain it, and become a multimillionaire. He would then use his fortune to buy a Bible for every soul in America (Daddy firmly believed that Americans needed saving just as much as did the Congolese).

Finding the “elephant graveyard,” and claiming its ivory, became our annual New Year’s Day quest. Armed with an elephant gun, as well as a double gauge shotgun, and accompanied by a “snake spotter” from the Bashilele tribe, my father would set out from the house every New Year’s Day to seek his fortune. My two older sisters and I trotted along behind him. Mama, who was on the heavy side, never came along, but occasionally we were joined by other curious missionaries, those who were willing to thrash through the bush all day in search of a pipe dream.

One year a middle-aged American woman wearing high-heeled pumps decided that she would hike with us to investigate a little lake that had just been “discovered” in a valley about ten miles away by foot. There was no path, and Daddy and the “snake spotter” had to chop their way through head-high elephant grass. When we got to the special valley, there wasn’t even a lake, much less a stash of ivory—but we had a fine picnic next to a termite mound. As for the lady in pumps, a heel broke off before she’d walked half a mile, so she turned around and limped home.

Daddy never found the “elephant graveyard.” In the years since our New Year’s Day excursions, this region of Africa has witnessed tribal war, civil war, and an almost unparalleled population explosion. Soldiers and political potentates have hunted some big game species almost to extinction with the aid of automatic weapons and helicopters.

Some areas that were once set aside as game preserves are now hemmed in on all sides by starving refugees, and as a consequence are heavily poached. To put it kindly: although there has been valiant effort given to conservation by many of the game wardens—some of whom have paid with their lives—the Democratic Republic of the Congo remains a land of conservation potential.