People ride around in Land Cruisers, with guides, here in the Masai Mara, sharing the same upland plains with all manner of creatures, great and small, harmless and lethal, and it doesn’t take long to think you’re in a sort of zoo, where the chances of you being harmed are remarkably low — unless you do something really stupid, like climb over the rail.

I can’t speak for everyone else in the Land Cruiser with me yesterday, but there was a moment with the African elephant, above, when I believed we stood a chance of being inside a vehicle turned over by an angry beast.

The scene:

We were looking, of course, for a leopard. And as we rocked deeper into the bush, our co-driver, Wilson, spotted the elephant only 30 or so feet to our right. Not that the rest of us would have missed him; he was enormous, even by elephant standards. At least 10 feet tall, at the shoulder, and weighing perhaps six tons.

A weight, our driver, Ashford, noted, about five times what our Land Cruiser, plus eight passengers, weighed.

The elephant was ripping down a small tree. For supper, apparently. “Elephants can be very destructive,” Ashford said in his usual quiet voice.

The elephant was aware of us, perhaps bothered, but not quite afraid.

Ashford turned off the engine. And several of us stood up through the open roof of the Land Cruiser to get a better look, and some photos. A day earlier, we had seen a half-dozen elephants, but they were actively avoiding us, crashing through the brush to get away.

This elephant stood there, and continued eating.

Ashford made the expert assessment that jibed with the amateur one. An old male, because his tusks were at least three feet long. Maybe four. Also, a lone male; no other elephants in sight.

Elephants are intelligent, and sometimes they get ticked off. Which can be a real problem, when the world’s largest land animal flies into a rage.

And it also seems that it may be some sort of universal mammalian thing that older males often are crabby. Crotchety. Certainly applies to humans. Seems to apply to elephants, too … the rest of whom apparently wanted nothing to do with this one old big guy. Or maybe he was sick of being polite around females and juveniles.

An old lone male … Step 1 on the spectrum of crotchety reactions, which begin with “Get off my lawn, you kids!” and continues to “crashing into a vehicle full of humans”.

So there he was. Ashford quietly muttered: “Come around the tree, Big Boy.” So we could get a better look. And he got his wish.

And now the elephant was walking briskly straight towards us.

On the one television in the lodge, the Nat Geo Wild channel usually is running, on some sort of endless loop. It shows animals attacking animals, and animals attacking people, and at least one of the scenes shows an elephant charging into a some sort of bushmobile, and turning it on its side.

That is what I was thinking of as the huge mass of gray came toward us.

Ashford almost immediately started the engine and dropped it into  gear. We were prepared to flee, hoping not to regret our wish to be that close to a pachyderm in the wild.

In a half-second or so I imagined the vehicle rolling and wondering how much we would be tossed about (no seat belts; really) and how badly injured, and how long it would take for help to arrive from another of the lodge’s vehicles.

But the elephant stopped, maybe 10 feet off.

He looked us over, perhaps weighing his anger versus his wariness of humans. Ashford quietly said, “If he waves his ears or trumpets” … leaving unfinished the thought that would have ended “he is going to charge”.

The elephant gave us a long look. Ashford revved the engine a bit. Ears not moving. And then it was over.

The elephant stepped to his right, crossed the quasi-path we were driving along, ahead of us, and walked into the thicker bush on our left, eventually disappearing from view.

We resumed our search for a leopard.

But, yes, it was a moment when all our “inside a movie” assumptions about the harmlessness of untamed, enormously powerful beasts seemed silly and arrogant and just plain stupid.

Most of the time, nothing happens.