As the elephant goes to take a drink, the crocodile leaps out and clamps down on the elephant''s trunk. Picture: Picture Me

As the elephant goes to take a drink, the crocodile leaps out and clamps down on the elephant’s trunk. Picture: Picture Media Source: Picture Media

But luckily for the elephant, he was able to whip his trunk out of the reptile''s jaws with no more than a few cuts to remember the encounter by.

The remarkable scene was captured by amateur wildlife photographer Ian Salisbury, 62, at the South Luangwa National Park in Zambia.

Mr Salisbury, general manager of Mfuwe Lodge, said: "One of our guests had seen a crocodile try a similar attack on another elephant earlier in the day so, camera in hand, I went to see if there might be a repeat performance.

"The action was so quick - a couple of seconds - and fortunately I had the camera pointing in the right direction.

"Having spent 30 years in the African bush, I realise how lucky I was to catch the scene."

Mr Salisbury said the elephant "fled rapidly into the bush" after the attack.

The incident has remarkable echoes of Rudyard Kipling''s children''s story, The Elephant''s Child, which tells how the animals got their trunks after a crocodile grabbed a baby elephant''s nose and kept pulling it.

The short story written in 1902 told of a young inquisitive elephant that wanted to discover what crocodiles eat.

Kipling wrote that in going to the river to find out, the elephant was bitten on the end of his nose by a crocodile which stretched it into a trunk.

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