7 minute read
The Forest Roars
An expedition to film destructive wild elephants in the Himalaya tests an Explorer Club fellow's courage.
Words: Kim Frank
Photography: Kim Frank, Avijan Saha, Trevor Wallace
PICTURED: Mother and calf attempt to cross highway along a migration route in North Bengal. Photo top and pictured by Avijan Saha.
PICTURED: Mother and calf attempt to cross highway along a migration route in North Bengal. Photo top and pictured by Avijan Saha.
Midnight on the India-Nepal border. A full moon hides behind the clouds, no longer illuminating the wispy thin trail. The snowy peaks of the eastern Himalaya are shrouded in darkness. A crowd forms along the edge of a field: farmers with flashlights, boys with firecrackers and mobile phones, and young men with homemade cannons the sky. Searchlights sweep over the crops, ready for harvest. Lights shine out from the hands of men protecting the clusters of homes behind them, where their mothers, wives, and children sleep. Aggressive shouting and static from walkie-talkies echo like a game of call and response. Sirens from a patrol jeep pierce the air; headlights flash. I feel like I am on the front line of a war zone.
A farmer casts a broad beam of light over elephant with curved, piercing tusks, the sticky black secretion of musth visibly draining from his right temple as he gnaws the rice paddy. I am shoots a cannon the blast sounds lethal. It is not. more chilling than calm. All sound abates. The large male tusker, known as Lama, continues to eat. From the trees rises a noise I have heard only in movies and dreams: the resounding trumpet of a second to our right, another elephant responds with an earth-shaking, full-bellow roar, followed by a steady and thunderous rumble that rattles me to my core. My watch hands illuminate the time, 12:30 a.m. I still have to spend another five hours in these forests, careening on the back of a motorcycle over darkened trails to document this to be a long night.
PICTURED: Filmmaker Trevor Wallace and photographer Avijan Saha interviewing a local farmer.
PICTURED: A young male elephant bathing. Only male asian elephants have tusks.
PICTURED: Generations of women living in a high conflict tea garden villages.
PICTURED: This Forest Department team of elephant, mahout, and ranger patrols the National Forests to protect endangered wildlife. Photo: Kim Frank.
PICTURED: This Forest Department team of elephant, mahout, and ranger patrols the National Forests to protect endangered wildlife. Photo: Kim Frank.
If this were a vintage Rolex advertisement, the narrative would continue with lines like these: “Inhospitable conditions seem to pose no problem for George Schaller” or “Neither searing heat nor violent sandstorms can stop Tom Sheppard & his Rolex from Crossing the Sahara.” But not here. I could not feel further from these tough and heroic indestructability: a Rolex Explorer. However, I have been granted the use of this iconic symbol of exploration by The Explorers Club as part of its Expedition Watch Program, in collaboration with Rolex. The Explorers Club has also granted me the honor of carrying its historic Explorers project to document the coexistence of humans and elephants at the base of the Himalayas.
What began as a desire to tell a single story about people dying while taking sel es with wild elephants for social media glory has become a multiyear, multimedia quest to deeply understand human-elephant coexistence in this region of India. For four years, I have been working toward this goal.
PICTURED: Kim with tea garden village children during a ranger football match. Photo: Trevor Wallace.
A sudden blast from a nearby and nearly drop my camera. It now dangles from my wrist, capturing video of men’s feet, snatches of dirt and grass, and a blur of movement. I wonder, “Who am I to travel across the globe, the only woman here in the middle of the night, the rare westerner, given this extraordinary access, only to squander it out of fear?”
This ancient habitat stretches along the foothills of the Himalaya from Bhutan to northern India and onward through Nepal. While the area once supported wildlife and people in delicate balance, rapid population increase and widespread deforestation have turned the routes for Asian elephants into a dangerously fragmented landscape. Elephants now travel between patches of natural forest interrupted by barbed fences, tea gardens, chaotic highways, army barracks, speeding trains, and villages with ripe paddy crops. Desperate for food, elephants have discovered that these crops deliver far more nutrients, in a much shorter time, than anything they are able to obtain from stripped forests. This diminishment of resources is creating one of the highest humannationally resulting in fatal clashes that kill more than 500 people and 100 elephants each year.
As the forest roars, Lama lifts his heas and slowly ambles into the trees. The smell of musth, earthy and ominous, clings to the mist and smoke that swirls around us. Elephants in musth tend to be violent, attacking when disturbed. With two teenage daughters and a loving husband waiting for me at home, I am loathe to move closer. Risk is sometimes difficult to fully calculate until you are in the thick of it, leaving little to do but manage. My companions see this situation differently, and soon we are following Lama’s route.
Not wanting to take any chances, I wait alone near a fragile tin house, glowing with purple lights to make it visible to passing traffic. My companion, photographer Avijan Saha, instructs me to throw myself inside the crack between the house and outbuilding if an elephant appears. The crowd joins our team, forming a reception line at the bend of the road where the tusker is expected to cross.
I think they are foolhardy, and I am stricken for putting myself at such risk. Distracted by a phone alert from my daughter’s dermatologist, I text an urgent appointment reminder to my family back home. (Did Shackleton confirm his teenager's doctor appointments from Antarctica?) When I look up, the mob is running toward me, flashlights waving across the field. Lama fooled the mob by passing directly behind me, as I was oblivious to the danger of an agitated male elephant in full musth using the glow from my smart phone to guide his escape.
PICTURED: Forest Department Rangers on foot patrol during monsoon. Photos: Kim Frank.
PICTURED: Mother and child in their house destroyed by elephants a week before monsoon starts. Photo: Kim Frank.
“The great strength of a Rolex is strength; Designed for survival in extreme conditions,” says the Rolex ad featuring Jean Claude Killy. It reminds me of an image of Killy, his bright eyes, calm and focused, peering intensely from beneath his ski helmet. I am wearing a helmet, too, a motorcycle half-helmet meant to protect me as I zip through dark forests at night. Sensing my need for additional strength, my teenage daughter has painted a brilliant Ganesh on its top and a protective blue and pink third eye on the front. This meager lid has become a talisman, and I won’t take it with Lama. The phone must go away: It emits dangerous I glance at it as we hurtle through the night, happening on herds and lone bulls at each stop, time is blessedly moving on.
It is 4:30 a.m. when we return to the house in the village that just last week had its kitchen crushed by an with a kaleidoscope of dreams: yelling boys chasing slow sauntering herds, thick black oozing from the eye trumpeting. I wake to a powerful sense of foreboding, certain the elephant from last night is roaming nearby. In stillness, with a full bladder but less courage, I wait.
When the light becomes more pronounced, I peer out. Framed directly through the window, etched in highest mountain in India, third highest in the world. not 40 miles from me, wearing its predecessor. And of course, Edmund Hillary, the original inspiration for of this range, only now does it appear. Proving that just because we can’t see something doesn’t mean it isn’t there . . . or it isn’t true. A 1970s Rolex ad features a woman in a Gernreich dress, with this quote: “A woman is beautiful when she looks like what she is. A woman.” I cannot imagine what I look like now, but if feminine charm comes from a sense of accomplishment to illuminate the truth, in the hope of saving elephants and ourselves, then I must be radiant.
PICTURED: Kim Frank. Photo: Trevor Wallace.
