Zoo Story: Life in the Garden of Captives - By Thomas French Page 0,3

having fifty wives, some of whom he chose at the annual Reed Dance, a great tribal celebration where thousands of bare-breasted virgins undulated in public and paid homage to his majesty and the queen mother. As a national symbol of fertility, the king was expected to have many wives and produce many children. In nearby South Africa, where Swaziland was often viewed as a backwater, mention of the dance and the king’s topless maidens prompted eye-rolling. The jibes of outsiders were of little consequence to Reilly. A royalist through and through, he dismissed these naysayers as ignorant of his country’s ancient traditions. Besides, his battles against hunters and poachers had earned him more than a few foes in the Swazi parliament. If he was to prevail, he needed the king’s support.

Sobhuza, who longed for the return of wild creatures, proved a dedicated ally. The sanctuary at Mlilwane was only the beginning. Working closely with the king and his successor, his son Mswati III, Reilly went on to create the country’s first national park at Hlane and then opened Mkhaya, a reserve designated for the protection of endangered species such as black rhinos and Nguni cattle. A nonprofit trust was formed to operate the three parks. Reilly trained more rangers, including his son Mick, and stocked the land with more species—lions, sable antelopes, buffalos, cheetahs.

The elephants began to arrive in 1987, when Mick was still a teenager. From the start, they were controversial. There were a dozen of them, all trucked in from South Africa, all of them calves only a few years old. They were survivors of the annual culls carried out to control the country’s elephant population. Though the calves had been spared, they had witnessed the slaughter of their families. Not everyone was sure it made sense to bring them into Swaziland. How would they survive without their mothers? Even if they did make it, would they be haunted by memories from the culls?

Ted Reilly brushed away the questions. He agreed that the calves would be happier roaming the bush beside their mothers. But their mothers were dead. Weren’t they better off, Reilly said, starting new lives in Mkhaya and Hlane?

The elephants survived. They did so well, in fact, that within a few years of their arrival, they exceeded the parks’ resources. Elephants are among the most beloved animals on the planet. But they are also voracious eaters that feed for up to eighteen hours a day. They have a remarkable ability, unrivalled by any species except for Homo sapiens, to alter their surrounding ecosystems. The elephants inside Mkhaya and Hlane were tearing the bark off so many trees and knocking down so many other trees that they were systematically deforesting entire sections. The destruction threatened the future of the eagles and owls and vultures that nested in those trees. It also posed a serious challenge for the black rhinos, one of Africa’s most endangered species, which depended on similar vegetation for their diet.

In the months before the eleven elephants were loaded onto the plane, some animal-rights groups argued that there was plenty of room inside Mkhaya and Hlane, that the overcrowding had been exaggerated, that the Reillys had invented a crisis so they could justify selling the elephants to the zoos.

But the magnitude of the problem is obvious to anyone who tours the parks, even today. The devastation inside Mkhaya is striking. And in Hlane, it is catastrophic. Standing at one of the interior fences, looking toward a section of the park where there are no elephants, visitors see a lush expanse of green trees and bushes. If they turn their heads a few inches and look on the other side of the fence, toward the area where Hlane’s elephants live, all that meets the eye are miles of dead trees. Many have been pushed to the ground. Hundreds of others stand like twisted silhouettes, their branches black and broken and bare.

Gazing across this moonscape, it seems impossible that the elephants have managed to survive, much less any other species.

Above the waves and the clouds, the 747 soared on. Sunlight burned along the wings. A thin trail of exhaust tapered behind, etched across a canvas of perfect blue.

Inside the hold, some of the elephants drifted in and out of sleep. Others were more alert, the effects of their Azaperone and Acuphase injections slowly wearing off. Mick, beyond exhaustion by now, was still patrolling back and forth between them, talking softly in the human language they were most