AN ELEPHANT ON MY STOEP

The elephants on her reserve have thousands of hectares to roam so Françoise MalbyAnthony was taken aback to find feisty Frankie in her garden

WHAT was Frankie doing, standing right in front of my gate?

I kept an eye on her you always had to with Frankie; she was unpredictable. You never quite knew what our elephant matriarch would do. She turned to face the house and took a few steps, tall and proud.

 

It almost looked as if she were walking inside my garden, I thought with a chill. But that was impossible. There were five electric wires laid on the ground across the open entrance carrying 8 000 volts of electricity to keep the animals out. There was no way Frankie could have breached the boundary.

I walked closer for a better view. Was I dreaming? Frankie was indeed in my garden! Somehow, she had stepped over the wires and she was walking up to my house.

I couldn't believe what I was seeing. It was July 2018 and Frankie had never come into my garden in all these years, and there she was walking around the place in a very calm, confident way.

She proceeded slowly towards me, one huge foot after the other, until she was no more than six metres from my door. Frankie could've knocked that door down with a little flick of her trunk if she'd wanted to.

Frankie and I have a special - if rather complicated relationship. Twenty years earlier, soon after she arrived at Thula Thula with the original herd, she nearly killed me and my husband, Lawrence Anthony, when we surprised her on a noisy quad bike. I've never forgotten the terror of seeing her hurtle towards us, ears back, eyes blazing, her furious trumpeting splitting the air. I thought my last day had come.

We lived to tell the tale, and Lawrence named her after me, saying that she shared my feisty French temperament.