Our book today is a classic of popular natural history from 1975, Among the Elephants by Iain and Oria Douglas-Hamilton, who are now old and wrinkled but who were once lithe and limber back forty years ago when they first set out to study the elephant herds in the vicinity of Lake Manyara in the great Manyara National Park in Tanzania.

Iain went out first and received all the standard warnings in advance from the wise old-timers of the era (the exact same kind of warnings that were dispensed to a young Jane Goodall): don’t get emotionally involved with the animals you’re studying, don’t name them, don’t anthropomorphize them. How much poorer this book – and science’s understanding of the nature of wild elephant societies – would have been if Hamilton had followed such advice!

Instead, while studying the ways elephant societies help to dictate the movements of elephant herds, he came to know the different members of those herds as well as the humans he was living with and working with. He collected an elaborate identification system for the Manyara elephants and named them all – Slender Tusks, Two Holes, little calf N’Dume, mighty matriarch Boadicea, and many others – and when Oria originally comes out to join him (they’ll go on to raise a family in the bush, always within sight of elephants raising their own families), she narrates a hair-raising little initiation:

We must have been less than twenty yards away from them. The elephants hardly moved. Only the young ones turned inwards with their backs towards us, the big cows just looked at us, their heads still, trunks down and ears perked up. Then suddenly one great beast emerged, her head held high and her ears stretched out to such and extent that they looked like wings. Her tusks pointing at us, she advanced four terrifying steps, loomed up beside us, shook her head from side to side, slapped her ears against each other with a cloud clap, kicked up the dust with one of her forefeet, crossed them and stopped. I nearly died of fright.

Then she let out a shrilling trumpet, flipped her trunk forwards, kicked up more dust, turned and ambled off in that amusing baggy-pants trot so characteristic of elephants; finally she pushed herself back into the group, causing a lot of commotion. There were more trumpets and growlings and rumbling noises and then she stood side-on to us, with her head held high, fixing us with a piercing eye.

Turning to Iain I asked him, as coolly as I could, ‘Isn’t that a little dangerous?’ He just smiled, signalling me to keep quiet, and started taking down notes and observing the other elephants who were standing under the trees.

‘Don’t worry about Boadicea,’ he whispered, ‘she’s an extremely nervous elephant, but she’s only bluffing. I wanted you to meet her because she is the most important lady in this Park, the grand matriarch of the largest family.’

There are close calls and tense moments with the elephants (one extremely assertive cadre of sisters in particular), although one of the most perilous moments involves not an elephant but a touchy rhinoceros who chases Iain and very nearly kills him:

Out of the corner of my eye I saw it turn after me, and I ran for my life. Twisting and dodging round the bushes, I could not shake it off. Every time I looked round it was withing a few feet and closing in. It was incredible. Bushes were tearing at my clothes as I searched for a way through, I must have covered fifty yards when they formed a blank wall. A strap snapped on my sandal and I pitched headlong at high speed on my face. As I fell I twisted and saw a huge dark shape with its long sharp horn bearing down over me. The thought flashed through my mind that in the next instant I would be killed or spared.

With every passing year it grows a little more jarring to re-read In the Company of Elephants, since the Iain Douglas-Hamilton in these pages is a woolly-headed rubber-bodied young man, not the flinty sage he is today. The Manyara elephant herds have been devastated by poaching many times since the author first wrote this bestselling and groundbreaking book, and through all those years of blood and loss – and with the occasional modest triumph thrown in – Iain Douglas-Hamilton has been a tireless advocate for this slow, impressive species that first claimed his heart half a century ago. This is my favorite of his books in large part, I realized after this latest re-reading, because it’s the one where the bedazzlement of that initial encounter is the freshest.