The sounds of the Savuti hide, like the sightings, stay with you. The coo of Cape turtle doves and the flutter of their wings; the flapping of elephants’ ears, like the snap of bed sheets; the slow slosh and gurgle of trunks scooping the waterhole’s surface; the light fshhhh as water sprays out of trunks and onto warm, muddy heads.

Watching from the hide is like peering through a zoom lens. Just two, three paces and you could step into the water alongside the elephants, the impala and the warthogs. The only thing between you and them is a ring of old mopane logs; a circle within which the senses heighten. The elephant calves, though undeniably cute, from this perspective are not so small after all. The mosaics of dried mud on their heads give the impression of life well lived. Have they always had beards, you ask yourself, noticing for the first time the thick, black strands of hair curving under their chins. One lifts its sand-encrusted foot and its underside, a distressed honeycomb of worn lines, seems to contain an entire world just there. The wrinkles running up its legs make circles around its joints like pools of water. The sunlight reflects off the water at their feet, its ripples undulating against the elephants’ muddied grey skin, dancing with their wrinkles in waves and curls. 

‘44,000 muscles’, my guide Elvis whispers, pointing at the youngest calf’s trunk as it coils around its mother’s. ‘They’re fighting for the borehole pipe’, he chuckles. Sure enough, a little bubble of water bursts at the surface before the mother’s trunk wins and wraps around the pipe’s rim. Elvis tells me how elephants need to protect their molars from soil particles; why they compete for clear water, and drink from the surface with such care and intention.

‘Did you know – ?’ he stops, finger in the air, and I follow his eyeline. A flourish of iridescent colour shines against the dull palette of grey elephant skin and clay-coloured water. ‘Broad-billed roller’, he says matter-of-factly. ‘As I was saying…’

Elvis tells me what other animals have made their way to this waterhole over the years: giraffe and zebra on a good day; lions if you’re extremely lucky; red-billed oxpeckers, starlings and egrets amongst the resident elephants. Yesterday, after hearing a rustling sound behind my suite – which I wrote off as mere guineafowls – a trail of elephants emerged from the trees en route to the waterhole. One by one, their silhouettes crossed my view, the heads of the young ones bobbing as they clumsily followed their elders. Late at night, I awoke to the sound of wading and swashing, and my torchlight illuminated something wide and grey in the water. ‘Probably an elephant. But perhaps a hippo’, Elvis mused. 

A flurry of wings makes us fall silent again; the bull of the herd has had enough of the guineafowls around his ankles and is shaking his head, sending them scampering away. The intricate networks of veins behind his ears come in and out of view. After a time, he turns slowly away from the water, and pads silently into the cotton bushes to seek shade under a large sausage tree. One by one, the rest of the herd follows, and we watch as their tired paintbrush tails, wiry and mud-strewn, swing from left to right, their forms silhouetted against the morning sun.