WE took one late afternoon trip with Big Boy and he really did us proud when it came to elephants.
There must have been at least a hundred of them and they were doing all the right elephant things – walking through the bush holding each others’ tails – filling their trunks with water and squirting each other.
Corrie was having a marvellous time filming them from the roof of the Land Rover, until a matriarch with a broken tusk appeared out of the bush, right beside us.
She indicated that we shouldn’t be there and, since she out-weighed us, vehicle included, by at least four tons, we didn’t stop to argue.
We tried to pay Big Boy for his services, but he refused money. He had nowhere to spend it. I raided our provisions. With a packet of sweets, a pound of sugar, a handful of tea bags and two tins of condensed milk, he was a millionaire.
When we got back to camp, Katie was smelling very hot and exuding clouds of black smoke. Corrie didn’t think it was anything serious.
“Darling,” said I, as I got out, “there are either some small flames or some dirty great sparks playing about under the bonnet on my side.”
In the time that it took me to say all that, I had grabbed Karen and the cameras – in that order – and retreated. It is a good thing that one can see under the bonnet of a Land Rover without opening it, otherwise we might not have noticed that the battery lead was on fire.
On the way back to Maun, much of the conversation revolved around what we had seen and how good our cine films were going to be.
Corrie was particularly proud of his elephant shots and was really looking forward to seeing the processed film.“It’s a bit odd,” he said, “but I’m sure I took more than fifty feet, yet I never had to change the film.”
He looked at the camera and, sure enough, the film hadn’t moved an inch. The loss of my wedding ring in the river now paled to a minor irritation compared to the disaster of the loss of his precious elephant film. That missing footage had a profound effect on us. From that day on, we were never been able to drive past an elephant without taking a picture of it.
Even without the elephant footage, we still had a fair amount of film to show for our efforts. We thought it was brilliant and spent hours editing and splicing it into a story. I even went so far as to make animated cartoon titles for it.
At last ‘Safari Moremi’ was ready for public showing. We invited John and Judy round for dinner.
Well, we had asked them for constructive criticism, but we hadn’t expected our masterpiece to be torn to shreds. They were right, of course. As movie-makers, we had a long way to go. ‘Safari Moremi’ was diabolical.
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