After a day and a night in which the couple tried to make him confess and reveal the poachers’ routes into the park, he said, Mr. Owens drove him to an airstrip.
“‘Mutondo, today the crocodiles are going to eat you,’” Mr. Mutondo said Mr. Owens told him.
He said Mr. Owens instructed him to sit on a net, and bewildered, he followed orders, watching as Mr. Owens and a scout, Tom Kotela, attached it to a cable, and then started the helicopter. Mr. Mutondo said he found himself lifting off the ground, caught in the net.
“That’s when I knew I’d been put in a cage,” he said.
He said they flew over scrubby trees, and then along the swirling Mwaleshi River. Mr. Owens brought the helicopter low over the water, Mr. Mutondo said, then still lower. Petrified, Mr. Mutondo said he looked down, and saw crocodiles and hippos. He said he was only a yard or so above their jaws.
“I just knew I was going to die,” he said.
But he was not dunked, and he did not die. He said Mr. Owens flew back to the airstrip, and after releasing him, told him that he was a very brave man and that he wanted them to work together. He remembered Mr. Owens saying, “That was just training I was putting you through.”
Mr. Mutondo said, “I never believed that.”
Mr. Owens denied the incident ever happened.
“Occasionally, I transported gear under the chopper and on one occasion assisted some game scouts to cross a river with a sling under the helicopter,” he said via email. “I never once slung poachers under the helicopter.”
