In this riveting real-life adventure, Mark and Delia Owens tell the dramatic story of their last years in Africa, fighting to save elephants, villagers, and -- in the end -- themselves. The award-winning zoologists and pioneering conservationists describe their work in the remote and ruggedly beautiful Luangwa Valley, in northeastern Zambia. There they studied the mysteries of the elephant population’s recovery after poaching, discovering remarkable similarities between humans and elephants. A young elephant named Gift provided the clue to help them crack the animals’ secret of survival. A stirring portrait of life in Africa, Secrets of the Savanna is a remarkable record of the Owenses' unique passions. When Mark and Delia Owens first went to Africa in 1974, they bought a thirdhand Land Rover, drove deep into the Kalahari Desert, and lived there for seven years. They are the authors of Cry of the Kalahari , an international bestseller and winner of the John Burroughs Medal, The Eye of the Elephant , and Secrets of the Savanna . After more than 30 years in Africa, they returned to the United States to carry on their conservation work. DELIA OWENS is the author of the bestselling Where the Crawdads Sing , her first novel, and the coauthor of three internationally bestselling nonfiction books about her life as a wildlife scientist in Africa: Cry of the Kalahari , The Eye of the Elephant , and Secrets of the Savanna . She has won the John Burroughs Award for Nature Writing and has been published in Nature , African Journal of Ecology , and International Wildlife , among many others. She lives in Idaho, where she continues her support for the people and wildlife of Zambia. 1 Delia Gift A gift into the world for whoever will accept it. —Richard Bach . . . there are conflicts of interest between male and female in courtship and mating. —J . R. Krebs and N. B. Davies Between the trees of the forest, amid the thorny undergrowth, under tangles of twisted twigs is a space that is more color than place. It is a grayness painted by drooping limbs and distant branches that blur together and fade into nothingness. It is not a shadow but a pause in the landscape, rarely noticed because our eyes touch the trees, not the emptiness on either side of them. And elephants are the color of this space. As large as they are, elephants can disappear into these secret surroundings, dissolve into the background. When poachers slaughtered the elephants of North Luangwa, the few remaining survivors slipped into the understory. They were seldom seen and almost never heard because they rarely lifted their trunks to trumpet. When we first came to the Luangwa Valley we could barely grab a glimpse through our binoculars of the elephants’ broad, gray bottoms and thin tails before they tore into the thick brush and disappeared. As poaching decreased, a hushed peace settled over the valley, like the silence of fog folded among hills at the end of a rain. In 1991 fewer than ten elephants were shot in North Luangwa, down from a thousand killed illegally every year for a decade. It was an unexpected yet natural quiet, as if a waterfall had frozen in midsong in an ice storm, leaving the land humming with the soft sounds of life. And then, once again, the elephants began to trumpet. Slowly, beginning with Survivor, then Long Tail, Cheers, Stumpie, and Turbo—the Camp Group—a few of the male elephants learned that they were safe near our camp, Marula-Puku, which we had built in a large grove of marula trees on a small river, the Lubonga, halfway between the massive mountains of the escarpment and the Luangwa River. The elephants came at all times of the year, not just when the marula fruits were ripe. Sometimes they turned their giant rumps to our thatched roof and scratched their thick hides on the rough grass, closing their eyes in what appeared to be the most blissful glee. Elephants can make a lot of noise while feeding, tearing down branches or pushing over medium-size trees, or they can feed as silently as kittens, munching on fruits for long moments. One night, as Cheers fed on one side of our cottage and Long Tail on the other, both only a few yards from our bed made of reeds, they let forth with full vocalizations. Mark and I, shrouded in our mosquito net, sat up as the sounds shook us. A lion’s roar pounds the chest like deep sounds reverberating in a barrel; an elephant’s trumpet, especially after decades of being stifled, stills the heart. In the years before they learned to trust us, they must have watched from the hillsides, remembering the fruits of the marula grove yet afraid to come near. But once they made up their minds that we were harmless, nothing we did seemed to bother them. No matter whether Mark flew the helicopter low over the treetops, or our trucks rumbled in and out, or we cooked popcorn on the open fire, the elephants came to camp. When we stepped out of our cottages, we had to remember to look careful