Word: oberjohann
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...morning the hunters fled with their captive. All at once, at the edge of a forest, "I stood beside a dark grey rock, twelve feet high." It was the mother. "Her eyes were uncanny, fixed and empty." Oberjohann judged that she "had actually been driven mad by her boundless sorrow at losing her child. I prodded her trunk lightly with my bamboo staff." Dully, she moved away. Next night she destroyed a native village, but Oberjohann never saw her again...
Rumbling Majorities. Sometimes Oberjohann was able to keep close to a herd for several minutes at a stretch without being detected; piece by piece he added to his elephant lore...
...hear and smell for hundreds of yards, and sometimes farther. More than once he followed groups of elephants which had detached themselves from the main herd; when he revealed himself, the groups fled. And at the same moment, sometimes miles away, the main herd would break off in uneasiness. Oberjohann, who tested this observation by leaving several natives to watch the main herd, believes that it points to something remarkably like elephant telepathy...
...Oberjohann submits that the elephants even have a secret service of wise old elephants that spy on human activity over a wide area. All information so gathered is "discussed," sometimes for rumbling hours on end, in a herd council, until "agreement" is achieved-occasionally by a resort to force on the part of the majority...
During his four years, Oberjohann captured 19 baby elephants (all of them died), killed a dozen or more, had a leg injured and some ribs fractured by an irritated elephant, barely escaped with his life a hundred times. The herds knew and hated him, he believes. Yet sometimes, in their night passages, they would trundle through his camp, passing not six feet from where he lay marveling and afraid, and move on without ruffling a hair of his head or touching a stick of his equipment. Apparently, as John Ruskin once concluded, the great animals have a susceptibility to "points...