'What do you mean, killed by a rogue elephant?'  Sandy Kerr snorted as she threw down the morning paper, then pinched her arm to make sure she had her facts right before continuing her diatribe.

'Yes, I'm still here, so why can't these reporters get their facts right?  I'd like to see how they'd manage writing a book.  They'd tell you anything, and hope any mistakes would be corrected by the proof reader!'

Still, the elephant HAD been large and angry, and she'd had to run a long way before she'd managed to shake it off.

Sandy had been gathering experience for her new adventure book by travelling the Serengeti with a group of snap happy tourists, on a modern day safari where the only shooting done was courtesy of Kodak.  She wouldn't have been happy shooting any of those magnificent animals with a gun, so that being restricted to photographs didn't cause her too much anguish.  So if she wasn't planning bodily harm to the old bull with the twisted tusk, why was he so upset with her? 

He'd come rushing at her with his trunk and tusks raised high and with his large ears flaring out, making a trumpeting sound that shook the earth upon which she trembled.  If the dense forest growth hadn't slowed his charge and enabled her to duck between the trees, she'd have been part of that shaking earth, a very messy red part of it!

It really wasn't fair, Sandy muttered to herself, as she sheltered behind the gnarled old tree to catch her breath. 

The pride of lions had strolled past her viewfinder without any fuss, and the baboons had seemed to strike a pose for her.  Even the cheetah had been too intent on stalking its dinner to take any notice of the whirring of her zoom lens, so why did the bloody elephant decide to take exception to her presence down by the river?  Perhaps it was afraid she'd drink it all?

She thought of calling for help in hope that the rest of the party had managed to keep up with her, but as she didn't know the range of hearing of the big eared rampaging pachyderm behind her, she let her survival instinct keep her mouth shut.

Eventually, she shinned up a good tall tree, out of reach of his wicked tusks and flailing trunk, and simply settled to wait for rescue.  Two hours passed, then six.  It would be dark soon, maybe Jumbo would leave when it got dark.  Good job she had her backpack with her water canteen and a couple of army ration packs her son had obtained for her.  They were revolting, but as he'd said, you never know when you might need them while gallivanting around Africa.

All night Sandy sat in the branches, hoping that there weren't any small nasties sharing her perch.  Would she stay here if a spider or snake showed up?  COULD she stay?  After intense cogitation she decided that she'd hit the ground running!  Better to be trampled to death by elephant feet (hooves, paws, what the hell did they call them?).  Anyway, rather that than be scared to death by some eight-legged furry little monster that should have been hunted to extinction by anybody who cared at all for female sensitivities.

As the long miserable night gave way to a long miserable day, she realised that the elephant's attention span was as long as his proverbial memory, and was prepared to wait until she came down to his level so he could take her apart in retaliation for whatever wrong he imagined that she had done him.

Things got even worse when she had to empty her bladder, and the scent of her urine trickling down the tree trunk aroused his fury afresh, making him bang his huge tusks against the tree in an effort to shake her loose like a marula berry.  She wondered if the marula berries were in season?  Sandy had heard elephants would walk miles for the over-ripe berries that they shook from the trees to the ground, and that would ferment inside the elephants' stomachs, making them drunk.  She reflected briefly on the size of an elephant's hangover, when a fresh onslaught on her sanctuary made her decide that a nasty death from alcohol poisoning would serve Jumbo right.

Thankfully, his hunger and thirst eventually got the better of him, and in the evening he trundled off to search for supper, trumpeting his disgust at fading intervals until she judged the coast was clear.

Not even double royalties for her next book could have induced Sandy to spend another night in the tree, so collecting an assortment of splinters in an assortment of places, she made her way to the ground.  After picking the splinters out of the more accessible places, she left the safety of the tree, and headed off into the sunset in search of her safari companions, an unfortunate choice really, as she had all the sense of direction of a pet rock, and her rescuers were far to the south.

She had endured a hairy night and day of staggering around, avoiding everything that walked, crawled or slithered before the tracker and the rest of them found her, a gibbering wreck.  She was out of food and out of water, but not out of invective to hurl at incompetent search parties who couldn't find their backsides with both hands, and at elephants that took offence at anyone who dared to share their jungle. 

Now, back in so-called civilisation, she was going to have to write an icy blast to the newspaper that had reported her dead, and, to add insult to injury, in a very small box on page five!

What made it worse, Sandy, who commanded huge sums of money for her books, was unable to charge the newspaper editor for the letter she was going to write, so that he would end up getting a literary masterpiece for free!  She wished she could chase HIM up a tree.  It would be poetic justice!