The Great Elephant Charge

14th June 2009 - Corbett National Park, India

It was a day before the park closes for the monsoons and after 2 days of frantic Elephant back Tiger tracking we were making our way back to Dhikala. Corbett in this season is flooded with Elephants as they are on their retreat towards the forest of Rajaji National Park and also since it is prime Elephant mating season.

Wild Elephants can be more dangerous than Tigers in these forests. If a Tiger attacks your car, you are still safe inside but if an Elephant does...it will surely make a football out of your car.

As we made our way back towards the camp, The grassland was full of elephants. There must have been over 250 elephants in different groups as far as one's eye could see and that too Elephants at their aggressive best. We managed maneuvering through giant herds saving ourselves from being attacked or provoking them. Now the camp was in sight and I looked back at the path from which we came and all I could see was Elephants and more Elephants and even up ahead I could see 2 groups of Elephants over 50 strong each that we had to cross from the middle but this is where our calculations went wrong. We stopped to gauge the distance between us so that we could safely pass the herds but instead they saw us first and started giving out loud trumpets. Before we could think of retreating our Elephant to take a different route the two herds started running towards each other...one from the right and one from the left in front of us. As they joined together they suddenly changed direction and headed straight for us from a distance of less than 50 meters. Our Elephant was frozen at one spot and didn't move, The Mahaout (Nisar) said "Aaj to gaye" (Today we are done for) looking at the charging herd of Elephants.

I had my bigger 400MM lens mounted on the Camera and I took as many shots of them as possible thinking that these might be my last...LOL ... The thudding sound of Elephants charging towards us had engulfed our minds and there was dust all over and just when the Elephants were less than ten meters away from us they turned towards the left and passed us on the side trumpeting loudly leaving us totally stunned and in shock. I took a sigh of relief when I saw that the Elephants were leaving us and going towards the forest and I pointed it out to Nisar. Nisar looked back at me and could see me totally spell binded by what had just happend and I could see the same expression on his face. We didn't utter a word and while trying to catch our breath back reached our camp in one piece to tell the tale of The Great Elephant Charge.