|
From the best-selling authors of Cry
of the Kalahari, the dramatic story of Mark and Delia
Owens’s last years in Africa, fighting to save elephants,
villages, and, in the end, themselves.
Crossing stick bridges over swollen rivers
and battling swarms of tsetse flies, Mark and Delia Owens
found their way into one of the most startlingly beautiful,
wild places on earth, the northern Luangwa Valley in Zambia.
As they were setting up camp to launch their lion research,
gunfire echoed off the cliffs nearby. Gangs of ivory poachers
were not only shooting the elephants but also virtually enslaving
local villagers. Against unimaginable odds, Mark and Delia
stopped the poaching by helping the villagers find other work,
start small businesses, and improve their health care and
education.
Living with wild creatures all around
(lions sleeping at their toes, an orphan elephant dancing
a jig in camp), Mark and Delia observed surprising similarities
between the behaviors of humans and those of other animals.
The bonding among young female animals and the competition
among males reminded them of their own childhoods. As the
elephant population slowly recovered from poaching, the Owenses
saw parallels to human societies under stress. Older elephants,
killed for their tusks, had taken with them the knowledge
that had been passed down to the young for generations. The
slaughter of the elders led to chaos—single mothers
without older females to guide them, solitary orphans, rowdy
gangs of young males—and a scientific mystery: how could
there be so many babies and so few females old enough to be
mothers? A young orphan they named Gift eventually provided
the clue to the remarkable discovery that revealed the elephants’
secret.
After the local ivory poachers were put
out of business, they shifted their sights from the elephants
to the Owenses. To save themselves, Mark and Delia took a
lesson from the elephants, employing one of the last secrets
of the Savanna.
MARK and DELIA OWENS are
the authors of Cry of the Kalahari, an international
bestseller and winner of the Burroughs Medal, and The Eye
of the Elephant.
Alexandra Fuller (author of Scribbling
the Cat) was born in England in 1969 and in 1972 she moved
with her family to a farm in Rhodesia. After that country’s
civil war in 1981, the Fullers moved first to Malawi, then
to Zambia. Fuller’s first book, Don’t Let’s Go to the
Dogs Tonight: An African Childhood, was a national best-seller,
a New York Times Notable Book of 2002, and a finalist
for the Guardian First Book Award and was chosen
the BookSense Best Nonfiction Book of the Year 2002.
|
