One traveler and elephant hunter reads the following gloomy answer: "As a result of the man's pursuit of ivory, all of Africa is a continuous elephant graveyard."
Something like a catchphrase. But, like any catchphrase, behind its biting wording, it misses the essence of the matter. In reality, despite the mass extermination, thousands of elephants die a natural death every year. However, all elephant hunters claim that no one has ever found elephant corpses, either in Africa or India.
The head of the state station for capturing elephants in Mysore, Sanderson, in his book 13 Years Among the Wild Beasts of India, writes that, walking the length and breadth of the Indian jungle, he never came across the corpse of an elephant that died of natural death.
He only saw the remains of elephants twice, and in both cases these animals died under special circumstances - the male drowned, the female died during childbirth. Europeans, who have been conducting topographic surveys in areas where elephants are distributed for decades, have never seen a single corpse of an elephant.
African elephants
The Indians, whom Sanderson asked if they had found dead elephants, also answered negatively. Only in one single case did he receive an affirmative answer. Residents of the area surrounding the city of Chittagong (in Pakistan) once encountered a large number of dead elephants during a severe epidemic raging among animals.
Where do elephants die of natural death disappear? There are people who say: "They are buried by living brothers!" There is even no point in challenging such an opinion.
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There are legends in both Asia and Africa. In Ceylon, it is believed that elephants, sensing the approach of their last days, go to the rugged forest thicket near the majestic ruins of the ancient capital of the island, the city of Anuradhapura.
In South India, the elephant graveyard is considered to be a treasure lake, which can only be reached through a narrow passage; in Somalia, it is a deep valley surrounded by impenetrable forests. However, no one can report anything reliable and detailed about these legendary cemeteries, no one has ever seen them.
Of course, such uncritically accepted legends and traditions do not become more convincing because they are repeated on their pages by some European newspapers. One such teller of zoological fables claims that sick giants, “driven by an ancient instinct,” themselves go to the elephant cemetery:
“There, in the inaccessible thicket of the virgin forest, these suicide bombers stand among the ivory mountains, among the innumerable treasures that will make the finder of them the richest man in the world.”
This is what this author asserts, at the same time forced to admit that there is still no person in the world, white or dark-skinned, who would witness the natural death of an elephant, and that none of these mysterious cemeteries has ever been discovered.
More seriously, there is an article by A. M. Mackenzie, who observed that in the Elgeyo and Souk districts of Uganda, where he hunted, shot elephants always went north. One day he followed the tracks of a seriously wounded animal, but lost them on the banks of the Perquell River. From this, he concluded that the doomed elephant swam across the river to get to the island in the middle of it.
At night, Mackenzie himself crossed over to the island and, finding there an animal, finished it off. At the same time, he found twenty skeletons of elephants on the island, but without tusks. Mackenzie claims that the ivory was taken away by local residents who knew about it, as well as about other similar cemeteries, but kept this information secret.
Mackenzie spent a whole week on the island. Sick elephants arrived there every day, apparently to spend their last days here, or to die right away. In one case, such an elephant was accompanied to the coast by a male, but he crossed to the island alone.
According to Mackenzie, the cemetery he opened was one of the smallest. From a conversation with old Maasai Africans, he learned that there is a much larger elephant cemetery in the Kawamaya district.
Noteworthy is the observation made by the German wildlife catcher Hans Schomburgk. One day, leaving the camp on the Ruaha River, he followed a sick male elephant, separated from the herd. The animal was heading for that part of the steppe, which was constantly covered with water for a meter and a half. For five whole days the elephant stood here completely motionless. Finally Schomburgk approached him and shot him.
Williams, who has dealt with these animals for more than twenty years in India and Burma, and commanded a "company" of elephants during World War II, talking about the last days of a dying elephant, also gives an important place to water:
“After an elephant reaches the age of 75 or 80 years, it begins to gradually decline in strength. His teeth fall out, the skin on his temples becomes flabby and sagging. Once upon a time, together with the whole herd, he overcame large spaces and devoured his three hundred kilograms of green forage a day. Now he is no longer able to make long transitions.
He leaves the herd. In cold seasons, it is easy for him to find food, consisting mainly of bamboo. When the hot months come, finding food becomes difficult. In April or May, he goes to some pond, which is located above a mountain gorge.
There is still plenty of green forage. But the pond dries up every day and in the end turns into a muddy pit. The elephant, standing in the middle of it, lowers its trunk into the wet sand and sprinkles it on itself. But then one day a strong thunderstorm breaks out. Rough streams of water rush down from the mountains, carrying pebbles and uprooted trees. The decrepit elephant can no longer resist these forces of nature. He bends his knees and soon gives up. The waves carry away his corpse and throw it into the gorge …"
However, what Williams describes still seems to be a special case, not a rule. The pond, to which the dying elephant reaches, is not always over the abyss, and the thunderstorm does not always break out at the decisive moment.
But in general terms, Williams' data nevertheless coincide with the opinion of zoological science. When an elephant gets old, science says, the muscles refuse to serve it. He is no longer able to lift his trunk, and therefore he is in danger of perishing from thirst. In such a languid position, he has no choice but to look for deep places to get to the water.
But at the same time, he easily gets bogged down in the silt and can no longer get out of it. He is gnawed by crocodiles, and the flood carries away his skeleton. The waterhole becomes the grave of an elephant, and since he comes here in the days of old age in the hope of quenching his thirst, he is not alone, but this watering hole can really become an elephant graveyard.
When clarifying the question of the existence of elephant cemeteries, one cannot ignore the exceptional ability of the virgin forest to absorb all kinds of corpses without a trace, including such gigantic ones as elephants. Large and small carrion eaters attack the corpse, and birds such as the kite and marabou, for which the elephant's skin is too strong, penetrate into its body through the mouth or through the rectum.
There are even fans of the bone marrow contained in elephant tusks. They are porcupines. To get to their favorite "delicacies", they grind ivory in the same way as a beaver - a tree.
Unterweltz once witnessed how a whole flock of hyenas with a howl attacked the corpse of a slain elephant. The corpse was teeming with millions of white insect larvae, and millions of fly flies gave its skin a bluish sheen. Soon the vegetation grew wildly on the fertilized place …