ELEPHANT ATTACK
I was safari-guiding in Botswana, tracking a lone bull elephant through some scrubby riparian bush on the dry banks of a tributary of the Limpopo River with four American clients. I had briefed my clients to walk silently and in single file behind me. I also explained to them that it was important to follow my command in any situation. A light steady breeze was blowing towards us and I was confident that we would soon see the animal.
There was a sudden movement to my left and a huge grey mass crashed through some small trees less than 20ft away. I turned to face the charging elephant and was immediately bowled over by Jeff, who was screaming “run, run” at the top of his voice. Jeff was a big-boned American with large boots and a big Texan attitude. In his panic to escape the charging elephant, he ran me over, leaving a large dusty boot print on my chest.
I landed on my back between the exposed roots of a large acacia tree. My rifle had been knocked out of my hands and my backpack tangled with one of the roots, effectively pinning me to the ground. The elephant was kneeling over me and his thick trunk was smashing into the roots on either side of my body. I managed to squirm out of the shoulder straps of the entangled pack and wriggled through the roots to the back of the tree. A very loud single enraged trumpet pierced the dusty silence as I ran flat out to thicker cover.
When I looked back, I could see that the elephant was still on his knees. He pushed his left tusk through my pack and then pulled it to bits with his trunk. After about half a minute, he stood up with a deep earth-shaking stomach rumble and silently disappeared.
When we returned to camp for brunch, I fashioned two wire hooks for the bar area. On one hook I suspended the remains of my pack and on the other I hooked my shirt that still displayed the prominent dusty imprint of Jeff’s mighty Texan boot.
Colin Bristow
GREAT WHITE SHARK ATTACK
I was attacked by a great white on Christmas Eve 2002 while snorkelling off Scarborough beach, south of Cape Town. I can’t describe the fear that went through me then. It’s everybody’s worst nightmare and it was happening to me. I was about 80 yards out and had started swimming for shore when I saw the fin coming towards me at speed. Before I knew it, this huge mouth had taken both my arms with a crunching sound, and then his body hit me. I knew I was going to die and I basically gave up. I just lay there and he started swimming slowly out to sea, dragging me along by the arms. I was hanging underneath his belly and it took a while for me to react properly. It was the thought of dying without saying goodbye to my children that made me fight back, so I pulled as hard as I could with my right arm and all that came out appeared to be the stump of my forearm. My ulnar artery was flapping about spraying blood all over the place and I thought I had left my hand inside his stomach.
I got my left hand free — I was running on pure adrenaline now — and I knew I had to make it back to the beach before I bled to death. I was expecting the shark to snatch me back at any moment, but somehow I made it. I’d lost five pints of blood by the time I got ashore. Before the helicopter arrived, I had slipped into shock. They flew me to Cape Town, where doctors spent four hours saving my arms. Despite what I thought, both my hands were still attached, but the right one isn’t much good, these days.
I think shark attacks on people will become more frequent because great whites are beginning to associate humans with food — and the shark-diving operators are to blame. Feeding, baiting and teasing great whites is downright dangerous. Stupid tourists will go home with tall tales, to leave the surfers, the divers and the swimmers to deal with a macro predator who sees people as food.
Craig Bovim
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()SCORPION ATTACK
I was camping in Mexico, on a beach by the Sea of Cortez. It was sunset and I was up on the headland looking for firewood. Others had warned me the bush was rotten with snakes, spiders and scorpions, but in several hours of foraging I’d seen no critters and little in the way of logs. Then I noticed the dead cactus. Perfect for the fire. I knocked off the spines and heaved it onto my shoulders, but after a few steps it snapped, sagging like an inverted V. I felt a trickle down my back and along my bare legs and looked down to see a stream of startled scorpions scarpering into the brush. I dropped the cactus pretty smartish, realising, as I watched the venomous critters scuttle away, that I had just taken a scorpion shower without getting stung.
I bent to lift the cactus again at the solid end and felt the slightest prickle against my middle finger, as though I’d brushed against a cactus spine. Then another. One of the scorpions had stood its ground. The pain was as startlingly intense as it was sudden — imagine stabbing your finger with an ice pick then walloping it with a club hammer before plunging the whole hand into boiling battery acid. By the time I arrived back at camp, my lips were numb and I was drooling. In the absence of qualified medical opinion, my American camping companions decided that tequila and nicotine were my best bet.
“What did it look like?” they asked. “Thpiteful,” I replied. “Bark scorpion,” they decided, with the certainty of frontiersmen. “Gonna be a tough night, bud.” And continued with their poker game.
I threw up a couple of times, had an agonising urge to pee every few minutes and felt certain that if I stopped thinking about breathing, I would simply suffocate. The Americans kept dealing cards and pouring me tequila, and by midnight I noticed that the affected hand was now hot, numb and very heavy, but as long as I didn’t touch the sting site, the hurt was gone. Breathing was no longer a problem and I was obviously over the worst of it.
The next morning, I showed the sting to a local. “You play cards with the other gringos last night?”
“Course not,” I replied. “I was too ill.”
He raised his eyebrows. “Too bad. Scorpion stings are very lucky, muchacho.”
Chris Haslam
POLAR BEAR ATTACK
I thought we were out of danger. In March, with three team mates, I made the first winter ascent of the highest mountain in the Arctic — Greenland’s 12,100ft Gunnbjorn Fjeld. It was -35C and if that weren’t mad enough, just below the summit I unfurled a special lightweight paraglider and made a historic flight off the mountain. I descended 3,600ft and more than five miles back to camp in just 15 minutes.
A few days later, on our penultimate night on the ice, I was just dozing off at about 11.30pm when I felt the tent shudder. Half asleep, I assumed that someone had tripped over a guy wire or was helpfully brushing the fresh snow off our tent. Then Paul’s voice woke me: “Guys, there’s a bear in the camp. I’m serious!” I bolted upright alongside my tent mate, Adrian, and leant forward on my knees to unzip the tent door to look out. Directly in front was a bear, outside Doug and Lucy’s tent, about 30ft away. It heard the sound of my tent zip and turned to face me, all 1,200lb or so of him. It wasn’t the best time to recall that polar bears are the largest land carnivore on the planet, with extra big incisors for gripping and ripping seal flesh.
I started screaming abuse at the bear and waving my arms. When he got about 4ft away, we grabbed pots and pans and threw them at his face. He backed off a few feet, then advanced again. Luckily, a large jug of drink powder was by my side and it had a substantial handle on it. I heaved this into the bear’s face like a shot-putter. He turned and walked off, although at some point he must have lashed out with a paw because we later found that the door of the tent was shredded.
In the meantime, Paul had lit a flare, prompting the bear to waddle out of camp and out of sight. The rest of the team were also screaming and shouting as they made their way out of the comfort of their tent into the night. Together we set up a perimeter watch — 10 minutes later, we spotted the bear about 200 yards away from camp. Paul sent up another flare over the bear and that was the last we saw of him — although we maintained an all-night vigil until our plane landed the next day.
Baz Roberts
Continued on page 3
()SNAKE ATTACK
I was working as a guide at Jack’s Camp in Botswana. One day, I was collecting a guest from the dirt airstrip. She was fairly hysterical before she had even arrived at the camp and the first thing she said was: “Just tell me there are no snakes.”
“Of course not,” I replied. “I haven’t seen one in 14 months.” Which was true. There had been hardly any rain at all for months on the Makgadikgadi saltpans. The drought made the place too inhospitable, even for snakes.
As we got back to the camp, I saw four workmen, who’d been digging out an old drain, carrying what looked like a log. Except it wasn’t a log. It was a 15ft rock python. To survive in this drought, it had to be the biggest and strongest of its species. And it had found a cool spot to wait out the drought, deep in the drains, but it had been disturbed and was understandably angry.
The American woman, near breakdown, scuttled off to her room, while I, my boss and a couple of other guides took the snake from the rather nervous workmen. Unfortunately, I got the head end and, while we held it up to photograph it for our records, it suddenly hissed, reared up, wrung itself free and attacked me.
Its huge jaw was fully open as it struck, the top jaw sinking into my cheek, its lower one into my chin. Because a python’s inches-long teeth curve backwards, 90% of the times they strike, they lock on to their prey. To get them off, you either have to prise the jaws open or tear them off. If I hadn’t been in the lucky 10%, I would have lost half my face. Instead, the snake reared away and prepared to strike again. While everyone else froze in terror, my boss threw his hat over the python’s head to subdue it.
Then came the blood. It was pouring from the four puncture wounds — there must have been some sort of anticoagulant involved. Curiously, it didn’t hurt at all, and the whole thing happened so quickly, I didn’t have time to be shocked. It took four hours to stem the flow, but both I and the snake survived: me to tell the one about how I was kissed by a 15ft rock python; the 15ft rock python to find another place where he wouldn’t be disturbed in the saltpans.
Charlotte Hunt-Grubbe
PELICAN ATTACK
I was at a zoo and dinosaur park in Combe Martin, Devon, with mummy and daddy, two years ago. It’s the kind of place with giant plastic dinosaurs stuck in the bushes that growl every now and then, and a bunch of scruffy sea lions that smell like cat food. I had eaten about 400 tonnes of ice cream and now I wanted to see more animals. In a large open area next to a pond, daddy saw some big fat pelicans, all full of fish. “There you are!” he said. “Some animals for you to annoy.”
I was very pleased and danced up wiggling at them. The pelican was very big close-up and looked at me for a long time — then he tried to eat my T-shirt. It didn’t really hurt and daddy got this great picture while mummy and another daddy had to rescue me. I did some great paintings and drawings of killer pelicans with lots of teeth when I got home. I just wish I had some kind of scratch on my skin to show my friends.
Zebedee Ellis (age six)
