Mothering instinct

Morning,
On one of my trips to the world renowned Kruger National park in the Mpumalanga province in South Africa, I came across this very sad but interesting scene.
It was a mother elephant carrying her dead baby. The baby must have been dead a day or as it smelled already. The most interesting was that she was completely alone, as far as I could see, and making this deep awful growling sounds as if she was moaning or crying even. She would put down the baby and then walk around it a few times and then pick it up and then she will start making this noises again.

SAD, SAD, SAD I tell you
I cried all the way to our camping site. I don’t know how long she carried it until she would have realized it was dead.

It was heart breaking to see, but also very, very interesting. She even had tears running down her cheeks.

Humba Kahle