Bismarck Tribune

By LAUREN DONOVBy LAUREN DONOVAN

HAZEN - A few days ago, Steve Gowin's friends and neighbors received the strangest invitation of their lifetime.

But they know Gowin, of Hazen. His invite to an elephant unpacking party was a bit odd. But it would have been odder coming from anyone else.

One neighbor, Judy Dinkins, said she showed the invite to her brother, who quipped, "What kind of crowd do you hang around with?"

She had to admit she had never been invited to an elephant unpacking party before.

That overworked phrase "the elephant in the room," used to describe a reality no one admits to? It did not apply on this frigid February Friday.

There really was an elephant in the room.

About a dozen folks watched and helped Gowin take apart a sturdy wood crate that had come by ship over the Atlantic Ocean and by truck across America and contained the head, cast tusks and detached ears of Twiza.

Twiza was a bull elephant Gowin killed two and a half years ago with a pair of .357 Magnum rifle shots to the brain. It was the biggest elephant he'd ever seen.

The old bull fell to its knees in the hot, dusty earth of Zimbabwe, Africa.

He weighed five tons and he had lived for 65 years, Gowin's own age at the time. It has taken until now to complete the mounting and shipping.

Twiza was older than any villager. And he was greatly feared for his bad temperament. He had a painfully decaying tusk, and a toothache of that dimension would make anyone crabby.

Gowin mounted a video recorder to his rifle and on his footage following the kill was the brilliantly smiling face of his chief guide, a man named Nixon.

"Good thing you shoot so straight," Nixon said on the film. Good thing.

Five tons of bad temperament, braying in pain, is not something a person wants to hear charging behind them.

Gowin will add the mount to his amazing collection of sport trophy animals, his passion and hobby.

Twiza will go in his own special building, and Gowin plans to create a diorama of sorts to put the animal in the context of where it had lived so long.

It was surreal and maybe a little uncomfortable for some to watch, wineglass in hand, while the terror of Zimbabwe emerged forever stilled, its head and ivory the trophy of one man.

In balance was a short film, beautifully and professionally produced, of Gowin's 10-day hunt and the end of Twiza's life.

The film, with a soundtrack of stirring and rhythmical African music, focused on the faces of the villagers. Some 1,000 in number, the men, the women and all their ragged children and babies, emerged from the bush for a portion of the elephant's meat after the thick wrinkled skin had been peeled away.

Within a few chaotic hours, the elephant disappeared, its meat and entrails, bones and fat, feet and tail carried away for the cooking pots.

Gowin said it was eerily quiet afterward. Then the butterflies came to take moisture from the dung.

His kill fed many, and Gowin said he is thankful that he remained to shoot on camera what happened after rather than celebrate in camp.

It was something to see, and so is Twiza.

The bull was separated from its 120 pounds of ivory, which Gowin has insured for $35,000. The tusks on the mount are replicas.

He may not sell the ivory, but his heirs may. So they are kept separate to prevent them from ever having to be wrenched from the mounted head.

The mount is extraordinary and arrived across continents completely undamaged, its enormous ears packed separately in bubble wrap. A baboon Gowin killed to reassure his guides he could indeed pull the trigger was in the crate as well.

The elephant unpacking party was an unqualified success.

There was the unusual nature of the invitation, of course. There was good food and drink made by Gowin's wife, Verna. And there was the excitement of being with Gowin, who never really stopped smiling, while he opened what he had waited so very long to see.

Ray Engbrecht, a friend of Gowin's, expressed it this way: "I will never forget what I have witnessed today."

No one could.

As for Twiza, well, the renowned memory of an elephant died with him there in the searing heat of Zimbabwe.

But for the years he ruled the bush and for the fear he struck in the hearts of men, he must have really been something.

(Reach reporter Lauren Donovan at 888-303-5511 or lauren@;westriv.com.)