An African Love Story by Daphne Sheldrick: review Relentlessly poached throughout the Seventies, Eighties and early Nineties, the elephants of Kenya's Tsavo East National Park are innately suspicious of humans. So when, in 1994, a cow elephant looked up from the muddy pool in which she'd been drinking, raised her ears and walked up to Daphne Sheldrick, she assumed the creature must be her old friend Eleanor. Orphaned at two, Eleanor had been raised by Sheldrick before returning to the wild. Now in her forties, Eleanor would still leave the herd and run to greet her adoptive human "mother" when she saw her. The elephant now allowing Sheldrick to caress the folds beneath her chin was stockier than Eleanor, but Sheldrick assumed she'd just put on weight - until the moment the elephant took a step back, reached out her trunk and sent Sheldrick flying "like a piece of weightless flotsam, high through the air with such force that I smashed down on a giant clump of boulders some 20 paces away. I knew at once that the impact had shattered my right leg," she writes. Sheldrick closed her eyes and began to pray. But instead of kneeling down and crushing the prone woman with her trunk and forehead, the animal standing over Sheldrick inserted its tusks between her and the rocks. It was trying to get her back on her feet, coaxing her up as she would a calf. Later, Sheldrick would discover that her attacker knew Eleanor. And she believes that Eleanor had "told" the wild female about her. Such assertions of animal communication may sound like hokum, but Sheldrick has spent 50 years living closely with the creatures she describes as "the world's most emotionally human land mammal." She and her pioneering game warden husband David have often been ahead of science in their understanding of African wildlife. Cynics scoffed for years at the "thrilling in air" many people claimed to feel around elephants, and at the rumours that they could communicate over many kilometres - until it was proved that infrasonic calls at a frequency of 21 hertz were responsible for both phenomena. So perhaps Eleanor did "tell" her wild friends about Sheldrick. And in this enchanting memoir, Sheldrick returns the favour, telling her fellow humans all about her extraordinary animal friends. An African Love Story begins with a girls" own adventure vibe, as Sheldrick describes the pioneering spirit of her white settler family and her own idyllic upbringing, scampering with her pet mongoose in the rose-scented garden of the family's colonial home. Her more outlandish adult beliefs in elephant "telepathy" and homoeopathic medicine also originated here as the young naturalist spent hours staking out fairies. The tone gets more Mills & Boon as married young mother Daphne meets dashing warden David and spends "a night of wonder, igniting an all-consuming love" under safari canvas. Despite the fact that they both had to get divorced before their relationship was officially recognised, theirs is a devoted, old-fashioned union in which Daphne puts flowers on the table, and David reassures her that antelopes feel no pain as their living flesh is ripped from them by wild dogs. Sheldrick raises her children alongside the orphaned animals of Tsavo. There's a rather alarming photograph of her youngest daughter in a "safari chair" dangling outside of a jeep window in which she looks more like bait than baby. Baby birds, antelopes, elephants, rhinos and a civet cat all pass through Sheldrick's life. She treasures the unique intelligence and emotional make-up of each one. The exhilaration of successfully raising a newborn elephant (after the discovery that coconut milk nourishes where cow's milk proves indigestible) is crushed when that baby dies at six months. All the time, she and David are fighting the poachers and the scientists who believe profitable culling is preferable to natural solutions. This book raises many questions about who belongs where: both people and animals. Daphne Sheldrick doesn't have all the answers. Like a matriarchal elephant, she puts her energy into tender care and hard work. Under her maternal supervision, around 140 elephants have passed through the David Sheldrick Wildlife Trust orphanage. Now aged 77, she continues an inspiring fight. With modern poachers armed with AK47s to meet increasing demand from China, and global warming threatening her elephants" environment, it's a net that appears to be tightening for the elephants that Sheldrick now raises with such love. An African Love Story by Daphne Sheldrick 352PP, Viking t £14.99 (PLUS £1.25 p & p) Buy now from Telegraph Books (RRP £16.99, ebook £8.99)