The gunshot makes no sound. So I’m not sure if it has been fired or not until I see the matriarch’s knees buckle under the weight of her one and a half-ton elephant mass. Two minutes behind schedule she melts to the ground and rolls onto her side. In this kind of operation every minute, if not second, is valuable. “We have only fifteen minutes,” the vet tells us. We need twenty.

“It doesn’t matter how many times you’ve done this. Each time is different and equally dangerous to the animal and people involved,” Iain, one of the world’s foremost authorities on the African elephant explains to the BBC cameraman as we exit our trucks to approach the fallen matriarch. “Things can go wrong.”                                                                                    I’m visiting Save the Elephants in northern Kenya; invited by Iain Douglas- Hamilton, founder of the organization, to join his team replacing a radio collar onto an older elephant during the filming of a documentary.  Minutes earlier a member of our group had driven a Landrover into the herd, separating the matriarch from her sisters, aunts and daughters. Confused and lost without their leader, the herd, now blocked from us by our five vehicles, huddle together with trunks held high, and ears spread wide, trying to sense the enemy, deciding whether or not to charge us. Even the baby elephant mimics the adults same displays of agitation. Then she hides under a larger female for protection.               Earlier at the research center Iain’s daughter Saba (now the gorgeous female star of Animal Planets Big Cat Diaries) had shown me the result of a failed attempt to calm an irate elephant. The crushed piece of metal, barely recognizable as a truck, had a puncture that went from the back through two rows of seats into the front dash.  Using it’s tusks the animal had turned the Landrover up onto itself, smashing the engine and hood into the floor board. The driver, inches from being stabbed to death, remained in the vehicle, while the elephant then tossed the car around with its trunk as if it were a tree branch. “This was a very large bull,” Saba told me, smiling. I remember years ago reading her father’s first book, Among the Elephants. There was a picture of a three-year-old Saba, barefoot next to her dad, with a herd of elephants in the background. I remember wishing it was me in that photograph. Twenty-five years later she has that same born free smile.

“Twelve minutes,” the vet says to everyone, and places my fingers at the tip of the matriarch’s trunk into which he has already positioned a thin stick to keep her two finger-like nostrils open. “Make sure that stick stays in place,” he tells me.

“Today is good for collaring. Not too hot. Sedated elephants mustn’t get overheated,” Iain says, his British accent hardly detectable after 40 years of living in the African bush.

The vet’s khaki ranger uniform has round sweat marks under his arms and he moves with a sense of urgency filling a vial with blood from the motionless animal.

A member of the herd trumpets in protest and two guys pour buckets of water onto the matriarch’s delicate ear skin.

“Those veins regulate her body temperature.” Saba tells the cameraman.

With every earthy smelling exhale her warm breath fans my hand. I match my breathing with hers hoping she will feel me there wanting her to feel protected and safe even as she is unconscious. The whiskers covering her thick-skinned trunk are hard like wire, and up this close she is more massive, wrinkled, and dry than I could have imagined. The seven people now surrounding her seem tiny in comparison. Under any other circumstance I wouldn’t be this close to a wild elephant, yet I’m conflicted. I know the tracking information is used to establish protected corridors and minimize elephant/human conflict with surrounding communities. But how can we be absolutely certain we are helping, more than we are hurting these highly intelligent beings?

“Nine minutes,” says Dominique, our timekeeper.

“When she wakes, she will jerk herself upright. Be mindful,” the vet reminds everyone.

The old collars lock is hidden under the elephant’s neck. Unreachable.  Using a pair of shears one person cuts through the collars six-inch leather and loops a long piece of wire through one of the collars holes. It takes two men, one sitting on her front leg pushing against her chest for leverage, to pull the collar, while two other men on the opposite side of her head push her sagging neck skin out of the way.

“Four minutes,” Dominique says, and the vet checks his watch too.

The old collar gives way and the team feeds the new one along the ground, under her neck, to skilled hands that fasten it together.

“Vizuri.” the vet says. Well done. We pack up the buckets, the old collar, and wire, and the vet removes the twig from her nostril. It’s now up to her fifty year old body to find its way back to consciousness. According to the vet, she should stir any second. But she doesn’t. Eyes still closed, she is as still as death. But there is nothing we can do now but wait. As our trucks pull away, I hear Ian over the radio telling Saba, “I’m not sure why she isn’t up yet.” My driver looks worried too. A few years ago an elephant died from a collaring operation like this, he tells me.

“You never know when the stress is too much, and this big girl has been through this two times before,” he says.

Dominique stands up through the sunroof for a better view. The radio exchanges are mostly in Swahili, but I understand the subdued tone. Then I hear Ian, “Let the others go in now,” talking to the one truck that is still blocking the other elephants.                                                                                                                                                                                                       As the last Landrover backs away, the herd hesitates, and then an adult elephant approaches the still motionless matriarch. This is risky my driver tells me, because in tying to help the fallen elephant up she could hurt her instead. Everyone is silent and tears form in my eyes as we wait. The approaching female is within 5 feet of her fallen leader when my driver exhales and I see the matriarch lift her head and body as if in one motion, unsteadily rising to her feet. For a moment it looks like she will run; but she’s too shaky.  The other elephant sniffs her before the other members join the greeting. Within two minutes the matriarch finds her balance and steadily moves toward the forest with her family in tow. She looks back once before they disappear.                                                                                                                                          Several hours later we find the herd grazing as usual, oblivious to our trucks presence. One of the characteristics Iain has documented about elephants is their amazing memories. They return to old watering holes after decades of drought, and visit graveyards of herd members who’ve died years earlier. So, I don’t wonder if they will remember todays experience, but in what frame of reference? And how will the baby be different because of what she saw today? I know they won’t forget, so the best I can hope for is that they will forgive.

For more information about Save the Elephants go to:

http://www.savetheelephants.org/home.html