Anthony battles crisis after crisis, including the discovery that his own staff of guards are involved in poaching, while slowly and painstakingly building a relationship with the new matriarch, Nana, and getting the traumatized herd to recover and accept their new home.

We follow the scramble to get ready for the elephants, the shock of learning that the herd matriarch and her youngest daughter had been shot anyway, the elephants' breakout from their holding pen almost immediately on arrival. Common sense said he should refuse, but saying no would mean the deaths of all nine elephants. This book covers the time from that first phone call asking him if he wanted a herd of elephants who kept breaking out of their current home and making trouble. Dedicated to the preservation of all African wildlife, his rescue of a 'troublesome' elephant herd that was about to be shot lead to a particularly close connection to elephants. Lawrence Anthony (1950-2012) was a South African conservationist and the long-time head of the Thula Thula game preserve. Presumably he does not even give names to the new babies anymore. Thus, he develops no relationships with the newer additions to the elephant family. His reserve is a place for wild animals to live wild. Ultimately, though, the saddest part of the book is the end where we are reminded rather suddenly that Anthony is really running a game reserve, not a petting zoo. His descriptions of the Zulus who inhabit the country with him are fairly even-handed they are portrayed as individuals, but it's always a fine line, and they do always feel a bit 'other'.Anthony develops relationships with this herd because they come to him with problems that must be overcome - they need to learn to trust him and accept his reserve as their new home. Anthony's descriptions of 'communicating' with his herd do not devolve into the unbelievable or anthropomorphizing - though many of his brink-of-disaster stories do sound almost unbelievable still, I feel they were too crazy for someone to have risked making up. My experiences with 'problem' goats had me relating very much to many of these incidents sympathizing wholeheartedly with members rejected by the herd and babies born deformed and seeing the same emotions and smarts we attribute to ourselves in our fellow mammals. Snapshots from his efforts to introduce a small herd of wild 'problem' elephants into his South African game reserve.

Babylon's Ark by Lawrence Anthony