Isdori and the Elephant Tooth

We waited in the Land Rover outside the yellow office building. I in the passenger seat looking out beyond the building toward farmland and bomas, looking out somewhere in the distance to where Isdori might live. Scott was in the driver seat. “I hope he doesn’t stand us up,” he said.

Scott had been wanting to check out these elephant bones for several weeks now, ever since we walked up to Monduli Juu and, on the way, came across one of our students, Isdori, herding his cows. We had told Isdori where were going and how we were in search of a rumored elephant reserve. That following Monday in school, Isdori told Scott of bones that were located on the way to Monduli Juu, remnants of an unfortunate encounter between two elephants and downed electric lines.

There had been much talk of seeing the bones between Scott and Isdori, even the likely possibility that Scott might be able to procure an elephant tooth. So there we were, the two of us in the borrowed work vehicle, waiting by the side of the road near the yellow village office building. This was our meeting spot with Isdori. Isdori and Scott agreed on a 30-minute window, between 8:30 and 9 am, to wait for the other. With no way to communicate with Isdori outside of school, all we could do was wait.

It was Sunday – church and market day – so there was a lot of activity on the road. Families dressed up in their Sunday finest. Massai women carrying babies on their backs and huge rice bags filled with unknown contents on their heads. Young boys with only one or two goats instead of their normal herd – the unlucky ones that will be sold in the market. There was an energy and hint of possibility characteristic of any Sunday in Monduli.

We decided to move the Land Rover in case the yellow office building itself was blocking Isdori from seeing us, and just as we were about to settle in for another stretch of waiting, Isdori came running from the other side of the street. He jumped in the vehicle and off we went toward Monduli Juu.

‘Juu’ means above or up in Swahili, so Monduli Juu is located above the Monduli Scott and I live in, within the Monduli Mountains. We didn’t drive all the way to the next town, but somewhere in between, parked the vehicle and ascended into thick, thorny brush and into the woods. Isdori was our guide as there wasn’t a clearly defined footpath and on the way we saw a few scattered bones and older elephant scat. We finally came upon a pile of large, old bones, and Scott, ever the biologist, was in awe. From the pile he picked up vertebrates and ribs, pelvis bones and femurs, all large enough to have been inside an elephant.



Isdori allowed Scott to pick around and linger a bit, but the main attraction was yet to come – the pair of skulls. We walked a bit farther, through some twists and turns of the woods. When we looked toward the sky, we saw the culprit electric lines, no longer down. In less than a minute I could hear that Isdori and Scott and had found one of the skulls – I was always lagging behind. They were hovering over it. I caught up to them and as Scott pointed it out to me – a big grayish lump lying on the ground – Isdori was in the process of turning it over for further inspection. He only picked it up a little bit before he dropped it and charged towards us. “Bees,” Isdori said. Bees had made their home inside the skull and we had disturbed them and, as any group of bees would be, they were upset. “Can we move quickly?” asked Isdori, who with his few years of English doesn’t yet possess succinctness or the knowledge that he can be brash in certain situations. Scott quickly followed up with, “RUN!”

I hadn’t been as close to the skull as Scott or Isdori so I didn’t realize the gravity of the situation – that a swarm of bees was trying to attack us – plus I knew I couldn’t run away as fast as they could through the thorns and brush so I let them pass me as they hightailed it up the hill. I was close behind and when we got to a distance far enough that the bees had trailed off, we collected ourselves. Isdori had been stung once, Scott twice, and me null.

The second head – the one minus a beehive we hoped – was lying a few feet away from the first. We walked the opposite way to get to it and, when our hopes were confirmed, carried it into a clearing for further inspection. It wasn’t the whole skull, but the top half minus the bottom jaw. We could see the part where the trunk would’ve attached, the tusks – those valued parts, we suspected, had disappeared long before the elephants were bones – where the eyes would’ve been. When we asked Isdori about any remaining teeth he said he had thrown one, possibly the last remaining one, down the hill toward the road and would look for it when we went back down.

We stayed in the woods for a little while longer revisiting the pile of bones, remarking on their massive size and picking them up again. But soon, despite his unwavering politeness, Isdori’s impatience started to show and he asked, “Can we go now?” It was fine. Scott had has his fill of large animal anatomy. So we walked down through the brush, a different way that avoided many of the thorns, and out of the woods into the blue sky day.

True to his word, Isdori began searching the grass for the elephant tooth that he had thrown down there some weeks earlier. It only took him a few minutes before he produced before us a large, yellowing, and dirty elephant tooth about the size of Scott’s fist – a back molar. This was the prize of the day.


We jumped back into the Land Rover and headed down the hill towards Monduli Chini (‘chini’ means down or below). Before we got to the bottom, we spotted a little boy herding goats and Isdori asked us to pull over. Isdori was looking for his own herd of cows that he had abandoned to show us the elephant bones. They had a short exchange in Maa, the language of the Massai, before Isdori hopped out of the vehicle, said a quick farewell, and went off in search of his cows.