An explorer's drive to conserve wildlife in Africa

The Nkangala people of southeast Angola have an origin story: One day, a small elephant walked away from the herd and headed for the Quembo River, reports CNN. At the water's edge, it began to remove its skin. A watching hunter helped the elephant, and from the creature, a woman emerged. The two formed a union, and from them, the Nkangala were born.

They see themselves as the children of elephants, and today they consider themselves the sacred animal's keeper. But for decades, the Nkangala have been protecting ghosts.

A 27-year civil war beginning in 1975 made exploration of Angola's remote highlands - already a near-impenetrable, largely uninhabited landscape the size of England - impossible. It also made it the perfect place for the world's largest land animal to hide.

South African explorer Steve Boyes dreamed of this herd for a long time. Starting around a decade ago he began venturing into the land, setting 180 camera traps, motion and acoustic and heat sensors, and flew over it in a helicopter. No elephants materialized. They became Boyes' obsession; a compelling mystery that pulled him into the wilderness, even as part of him questioned whether it was a mystery best left unsolved.

"It's almost like the pursuit of the white whale of 'Moby Dick,'" said feted German director Werner Herzog, who made Boyes and his quarry the subject of his latest film. His documentary "Ghost Elephants" follows Boyes' 2024 expedition to find Angola's mythic herd. The filmmaker, in his inimitable style, narrates the story of the explorer and a team of KhoiSan master trackers from Angola and Namibia, who achieved what technology could not.

"Normally," Herzog said, in nature documentaries "a crew finds a new species or is successful. There's high fiving and tears being shed. Not so in my film. I'm saying one thing that you never hear: now Steve Boyes has to live with his success."