Joyce Poole moved to Africa with her parents in the early 1960s and, for her, the spirit of Africa was embodied in the elephant: so it was that at nineteen she found herself in the bush, in Amboseli National Park in Kenya, studying the behaviour of a population of 480 elephants. Life in a tented camp was unusual: she describes the challenges she faced in trying to unravel the behavioural patterns and communication of elephants, and the inner conflicts and the very real dangers she faced both from elephants and humans as a young woman living alone in the bush.