Free Elephant Herd South of Sahara Threatened : Environment: Small tusks and good human neighbors have kept the animals safe in the past. The future is in doubt.

Noumou Diakite signaled the others with a finger to his lips and pointed to a stand of acacias near the water where a tree trunk seemed to step forward. They had found the Gourmas--the last remaining wild elephant herd in Africa just below the Sahara.

A six-ton bull raised his trunk in a graceful backward arc and sprayed a cooling stream of water. About 50 other elephants bathed languidly near some cattle drinking from the murky pool.

Suddenly for the group, it was worth all the days of dust and and relentless heat of a bronze sun of northern Mali.

“It was marvelous, although a bit scary. You’re on foot, not in a vehicle, and really in the middle of nowhere near animals which have never been tamed by anyone,” said U.S. Ambassador Robert Pringle, a member of the expedition into elephant territory led by Diakite, leader of the regional livestock authority.

“It is miraculous that they have survived here where wildlife has generally been run ragged.”

Hidden in the remote reaches of northeastern Mali, the Gourmas are the last remaining herd on the southern fringe of the Sahara, according to a report commissioned by the U.S. Agency for International Development. They are the most northern herd on the continent, one of the last to roam free.

The Gourmas are fast in their pursuit of food, water and shade across an arid 4,800-square-mile migratory zone, an area slightly smaller than Connecticut.

No accurate count has been made of how many elephants are out there. But several international agencies and governments, including the United States, hope to conduct a census soon.

For the moment, the best estimate comes from Diakite, whose World Bank-financed program has hundreds of agents in the bush speaking with nomadic herders. The best they can estimate is that 500 to 1,500 elephants share the vast expanse of golden savannah, rose-colored dunes, oases and hard-pan flats.

There are a lot of calves, they say, and the number of elephants seems to have been on the rise since the devastating drought of the mid-1980s that decimated the herd.

Whatever their number, the Gourma elephants are a tiny remnant of the enormous herds that less than century ago roamed this area from Senegal to Chad. Drought killed some. Ivory poachers slaughtered more.

But the Gourmas were blessed with small tusks and good neighbors. Unlike people living near elephant populations in other parts of Africa, the Tuareg, Fulani and Songhai of Mali consider the elephants good luck.

“When an elephant passes between two hills near my village, the people say it will be a good growing season. This doesn’t always pan out, but we’re fond of the elephants anyway,” said Jean-Geny Dao, a guide.

Stephen Cobb, an elephant expert and director of the Environment and Development Group at Oxford University, said that the Gourma elephants’ estimated foot-long tusks have protected them somewhat from ivory-seeking poachers “but the cultural tradition is far and away the most important factor.”

“In Mali we find an ideal to which we should aspire in getting people to live amicably with the elephants,” Cobb said.

The number of elephants throughout Africa has plummeted over the last eight years from 1.2 million to about 600,000. In October, at a meeting in Lausanne, Switzerland, the signatories to the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species approved a formal ban on ivory trade.

Despite the ban, China has said it will continue to import ivory for jewelry and other objects. Experts predict that at the current rate of slaughter, Africa’s elephants could be extinct before the end of the century.

Even in Mali, conflict has developed as the spreading desert forces nomads to give up their animal herds and settle down near water holes to plant crops.

More and more, people are grumbling about elephants tromping on turnips or munching on millet supplies, and it may not be long before they start looking upon them as pests rather than symbols of luck.

“Elephants and gardens don’t mix,” Pringle said. “There are new and increasing conflicts with the local people. It seems a safe bet that they will not survive another 10 years without a management regime of some sort.”

Cobb agreed: “There is an urgent need for sensitive and firm planning, limits on places that can be developed for agriculture instead of a haphazard free-for-all.”

Fences built around gardens might be one solution.

“A 10-foot-wide jumble of sharp stones will keep elephants away,” Cobb said. “They have sensitive feet.”

But he added that much can be learned from the little Gourmas.

“There must be a better solution to saving the elephant than shutting them up in national parks and turning them into tamed tourist attractions,” he said. “The Gourma elephants can teach us ways of making elephant conservation work, hand-in-hand with the economic development of people who share the land.”