In 1958, engineers finished sealing the Kariba Dam across the Zambezi River, one of the largest hydroelectric projects ever built in Africa. As the reservoir behind it filled, it would become Lake Kariba, the largest artificial lake in the world by volume. Nobody had asked the animals living in the valley below.

A Valley About to Disappear

The rising water would eventually cover more than 2,000 square miles of the Zambezi Valley, a stretch of bush thick with black rhinos, elephants, antelope, warthogs and snakes. As the lake crept higher, animals found themselves stranded on shrinking islands and hilltops with nowhere left to run. Rupert Fothergill, the chief game ranger for what was then Southern Rhodesia, was handed an almost impossible job: get as many of them off the rising water as he could.

Two Boats and a Handful of Rangers

Fothergill started the rescue, later named Operation Noah, with just two small boats and a handful of wardens and trackers. The team eventually grew to around seven white rangers and fifty African trackers, working from small dinghies with outboard motors and a larger diesel boat nicknamed "The Tuna." Across the river in Northern Rhodesia, a separate team led by warden Tad Edelman ran its own rescue effort at the same time.

The equipment was improvised out of necessity. Rangers roped animals with old nylon stockings because they were gentler on the skin than rope. Black rhinos, too heavy and dangerous to carry, were tranquilized, strapped to stretchers, and dragged onto rafts made from empty oil drums for the crossing to high ground.

Shepherding Elephants to Shore

Elephants posed a different problem entirely. They were too big to lift, but strong enough to swim across the widening lake on their own. Fothergill's solution was simple. "An elephant can swim a long way," he said at the time. "It will merely be a matter of shepherding him in the right direction." Rangers used their small boats to nudge stranded elephants toward the mainland, guiding them across stretches of open water they could never have crossed alone.

What They Saved

By the time the operation wound down in 1964, Fothergill's crew and the Northern Rhodesian team had together rescued more than 6,000 animals, including dozens of black rhinos, thousands of impala and warthogs, and elephants, lions, leopards and zebras relocated to what is now Matusadona National Park on the shore of the new lake. It remains one of the largest wildlife rescue operations ever recorded, run not by a government agency with a budget and helicopters, but by a handful of rangers with two boats and a length of old stockings.

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