“And I’ve never met anyone who’s ever collared an elephant. I guess we’re even.”
“What made you want to start a sanctuary?”
“In 1903 there was this elephant at Coney Island named Topsy. She helped build the theme park, and gave rides, and performed in shows. One day, her handler threw his lit cigarette in her mouth. She killed him, big surprise, and was labeled a dangerous elephant. Topsy’s owners wanted her killed, so they turned to Thomas Edison, who was trying to show the dangers of AC current. He rigged up the elephant, and she died within seconds.” He looked at me. “Fifteen hundred people watched, including my great-grandfather.”
“So the sanctuary is some kind of legacy?”
“No, I didn’t really remember the story until I was in college and worked one summer at a zoo. They had just gotten an elephant, Lucille. This was big news because elephants are always a draw. They were hoping she would pull the revenue of the zoo back into the black. I was hired as an assistant to the head keeper, who had extensive experience with circus elephants.” He glanced out at the bush. “Did you know that you don’t even have to touch an elephant with a bull hook to get it to do what you want? You just put it near the ear, and they’ll move away from the threat of the pain, because they know what to expect. Needless to say, I made the grave mistake of saying that elephants were conscious of how badly we were treating them. I was fired.”
“I just changed the focus of my fieldwork to how elephants grieve.”
He glanced at me. “They’re better at it than people.”
I put my foot on the brake, so we rolled to a stop. “My colleagues would argue with you. No, actually, they’d laugh at you. Like they laugh at me.”
“Why?”
“For their work, they can use collars, and measurements, and experimental data. What looks like cognition to one scientist looks like conditioning to another—and there’s no conscious thought necessary for that.” I turned to him. “But let’s say I could prove it. Can you imagine the implications for wildlife management? Like you said to Owen—is it ethical to dart an elephant with M99 if she’s fully aware of what we’re doing? Especially if it’s a precursor to a shot in the head, like when we cull a herd? And if we shouldn’t be doing that, how do we manage elephant populations?”
He glanced at me, fascinated. “That collar you put on the elephant—does it measure hormones? Stress levels? Is she sick? How do you predict a death, so you know which elephant to collar?”
“Oh, we can’t predict death. That collar’s for someone else’s project. They’re trying to find out the turning radius of an elephant.”
“Whatever the elephant needs it to be,” Thomas said with a laugh. “That’s the punch line, right?”
“I’m not kidding.”
“Really? How could anyone possibly think that research matters more than what you’re doing?” He shook his head. “Wanda? The elephant that nearly drowned? She has a partially paralyzed trunk, and she needed a security blanket of sorts when she came to the sanctuary. She got into the habit of dragging a tire around with her. Eventually, she bonded with Lilly and didn’t need the tire all the time anymore because she had a friend. But when Lilly died, Wanda was pretty devastated. After Lilly was buried, Wanda brought her tire to the grave site and laid it down on top of the dirt. It was almost like she was paying tribute. Or maybe she thought Lilly needed a little comfort now.”
I had never heard anything so moving in my life. I wanted to ask him if sanctuary elephants stayed with the bodies of those they’d considered family. I wanted to ask if Wanda’s behavior was the anomaly or the norm. “Can I show you something?”
Making a decision on the spot, I took a detour, driving in a widening circle, until we reached Mmaabo’s body. I knew that Grant would have a fit if he learned I had taken a visitor to see an elephant corpse; one of the reasons we told the rangers of deaths was so that they could avoid taking tourists near a decaying body. By now, scavengers had picked apart the elephant; flies buzzed in a cloud around the carcass. And yet Onalenna and three other elephants were standing quietly nearby. “This was Mmaabo,” I said. “She was the matriarch of a herd of about twenty elephants. She died yesterday.”
“Who’s in the distance?”
“Her daughter and some of the rest of the herd. They’re mourning,” I said defensively. “Even if I’m never able to prove it.”
“You could measure it,” Thomas said, mulling. “There are researchers who’ve worked with baboons in Botswana, to measure stress. I’m pretty sure that fecal samples showed an increase in glucocorticoid stress markers after one of the baboons in the group was killed by a predator—and those markers were more pronounced in baboons that were socially linked to the dead one. So if you can get fecal matter from elephants—which looks to be pretty abundant—and can statistically show a rise in cortisol—”
“Then maybe it works like it does in humans, to trigger oxytocin,” I finished. “Which would be a biological reason for elephants to seek out comfort from each other after the death of a member of the herd. A scientific explanation for grief.” I stared at him, amazed. “I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone quite as passionate as I am about elephants.”
“First time for everything,” Thomas murmured.
“You don’t just run a sanctuary.”
He ducked his head. “My undergraduate degree was in neurobiology.”
“Mine, too,” I said.
We both stared at each other, further adjusting our expectations. I noticed that Thomas had green eyes, and that there was a ring of orange around each of his irises. When he grinned, I felt as if I’d taken a dart of M99, as if I was caught in the prison of my own body.
We were interrupted by the sounds of rumbling. “Ah,” I said, forcing myself to turn away. “Like clockwork.”
“What is?”
“You’ll see.” I put the Land Rover into low gear and started up a steep incline. “When you approach wild elephants,” I explained quietly, “you do it the way you’d want your own worst enemy to approach you. Would you feel comfortable if he came in and surprised you from behind? Or cut between you and your child?” I pulled the vehicle in a wide circle at the plateau, and then crested the edge downhill to reveal a breeding herd splashing in a pond. Three calves piled on top of each other in a mud puddle, the one on the bottom rolling out from underneath his cousins and spraying a fountain in the air. But even their mothers were wading and kicking, making waves, wallowing.
“That’s the matriarch,” I told him, pointing to Boipelo. “And that’s Akanyang, with the folded ear. She’s Dineo’s mother. Dineo’s the cheeky one, tripping his brother, over there.” I introduced Thomas to each elephant by name, ending with Kagiso. “She’s due to deliver in about a month,” I told him. “Her first calf.”
“Our girls play in the water all the time,” Thomas said, delighted. “I figured they picked that behavior up at the zoos where they used to live, as distraction. I assumed that, in the bush, it’s always life or death.”
“Well, yeah,” I agreed. “But play is part of life. I’ve seen a matriarch slide down a steep bank on her butt, just for fun.” I leaned back, propping my sneakers on the dashboard, letting Thomas watch the antics. One calf threw herself sideways in the mud, displacing her younger sibling, who squealed his distress. Just like that, their mother trumpeted: Enough, you two.
“This is exactly what I came here to see,” Thomas said softly.
I looked at him. “A watering hole?”
He shook his head. “When an elephant is brought to us at the sanctuary, she’s already broken. We do our best to put her back together again. But it’s all guesswork, unless you know what she looked like when she was whole.” Thomas faced me. “You’re lucky, to see this every day.”
I didn’t tell him that I’d also seen calves orphaned by culling, and droughts so severe that the skin of the elephants stretched over their hip bones like canvas on a frame. I didn’t tell him how, in the
dry season, herds would split up so that they didn’t have to compete with each other for limited resources. I didn’t tell him about Kenosi’s brutal death.
“I told you my life story,” Thomas said, “but you haven’t told me what brought you to Botswana.”
“They say people who work with animals do it because they’re no good around other people.”
“Having met you,” he said drily, “I’ll refrain from commenting.”
The elephants were nearly all out of the water by now, trudging up the steep slope to dust their backs with dirt and amble into the distance, wherever the matriarch led. The last female pushed her baby’s rump, giving him a boost uphill before scrambling up herself. They moved away in a silent, syncopated rhythm; I’ve always thought elephants walk as if they have music being piped into their heads that no one else can hear. And from the roll of their hips and their swagger, I’m going to guess that the artist is Barry White.
“I work with elephants because it’s like watching people at a café,” I told Thomas. “They’re funny. Heartbreaking. Inventive. Intelligent. God, I could go on and on. There’s just so much of us in them. You can watch a herd and see babies testing limits, moms taking care, teenage girls coming out of their shells, teenage boys blustering. I can’t watch lions all day, but I could watch this my whole life.”
“I think I could, too,” Thomas said, but when I faced him he was not looking at the elephants. He was staring at me.
It was the habit of the camp not to let our guests walk unescorted through the main camp. At dinnertime, rangers or researchers would meet guests at their huts and lead them by flashlight to the dining hall. This wasn’t meant to be charming; it was practical. I’d seen more than one tourist run in a panic after a warthog crossed the path unannounced.
When I went to get Thomas for dinner, his door was ajar. I knocked, and then pushed it open. I could smell the soap from his shower hanging in the air. The fan was turning over the bed, but it was still beastly hot. Thomas sat at the desk in his khakis and a white tank, his hair damp, his jaw freshly shaved. His hands were moving with quick efficiency over what looked like a tiny square of paper.
“Just a second,” he said, not looking up.
I waited, jamming my thumbs into my belt loops. I rocked back and forth on the heels of my boots.
“Here,” Thomas said, turning around. “I made this for you.” He reached for my hand and pressed into my palm a tiny origami elephant, crafted out of a U.S. dollar bill.
In the days that followed, I started to see my adopted home through Thomas’s eyes: the quartz glittering in the soil like a handful of diamonds that had been tossed outside. The symphony of birds, grouped by voice part on the branches of a mopane tree, being conducted by a distant vervet monkey. Ostriches running like old ladies in high heels, their plumes bobbing.
We talked about everything from poaching in the Tuli Circle to the residual memories of elephants and how they tied in to PTSD. I played him tapes of musth songs and estrus songs, and we wondered if there could be other songs passed down, in low frequencies we could not hear, to teach elephants the history they mysteriously accumulated: which areas were dangerous and which were safe; where to find water; what the most direct route was from one home range to another. He described how an elephant might be transported to the sanctuary from a circus or a zoo after being labeled dangerous, how tuberculosis was a growing problem in captive elephants. He told me about Olive, who had performed on television and at theme parks, who one day broke loose from her chains, and how a zoologist was killed trying to catch her. Of Lilly, whose leg was broken in a circus and never reset. They had an African elephant, too—Hester—who was orphaned as a result of culling in Zimbabwe, and who had performed in a circus for almost twenty years before her trainer decided to retire her. Thomas was in negotiations, now, to bring in another African elephant named Maura, who he hoped would be a companion for Hester.
In return I told him that while wild elephants will kill with their front feet, kneeling to crush their victims, they use their sensitive back feet to stroke the body of a fallen elephant, how the pads of those feet will hover over the skin and circle, as if they are sensing something we can only guess at. I told him how I once brought the jawbone of a bull back to camp to study, and how that night Kefentse, a subadult male, broke into camp, took the bone from my porch, and returned it to the place of his friend’s death. I told him how, the first year I came to the reserve, a Japanese tourist who had wandered away from camp was killed by a charging elephant. When we went to retrieve the body, we found the elephant covering the man, standing vigil.
On the evening before Thomas was supposed to fly home, I took him somewhere I’d never taken anyone before. At the top of the hill was a huge baobab tree. The native people believed that when the Creator called the animals together to help plant all the trees, the hyena was late. He was given the baobab, and he was so angry, he planted it upside down, giving it a topsy-turvy look, as if its roots were scratching the sky instead of buried beneath the ground. Elephants liked to eat the bark of the baobab, and used it for shade. The old bones of an elephant named Mothusi were scattered in its vicinity.
I watched Thomas go still as he realized what he was seeing. The bones glowed in the boil of the sun. “Are these …”
“Yes.” I parked the Rover and got out, encouraging him to do the same. This area was safe, at this time of day. Thomas moved carefully through Mothusi’s remains, picking up the long curve of a rib, touching his fingertips to the honeycomb center of a split hip joint. “Mothusi died in 1998,” I told him. “But his herd still visits. They get quiet and reflective. Kind of like we would, if we went to visit someone’s grave.” I leaned down, picking up two vertebrae and notching them together.
Some of the bones had been carried off by scavengers, and we had Mothusi’s skull at the camp. The remaining bones were so white that they looked like rips in the weave of the earth. Without really thinking about what we were doing, we started gathering them, until they formed a collection at our feet. I pulled up a long femur, grunting as I dragged it. We moved in silence, creating a puzzle that was larger than life.
When it was done, Thomas took a stick and drew an outline around the elephant’s skeleton. “There,” he said, stepping back. “We just did in an hour what it took nature forty million years to do.” There was a peace wrapped around us, like cotton batting. The sun was setting, simmering through a cloud. “You could come back with me, you know,” Thomas said. “At the sanctuary, you’d be able to observe plenty of grief. And your family in the States must miss you.”
My chest tightened. “I can’t.”
“Why?”
“I saw a calf get shot, in front of its mother. And not a little calf, either—a nearly grown one. She wouldn’t leave him, not for days. When I saw that, something just … changed in me.” I glanced at Thomas. “There’s no biological advantage to grief. In fact, in the wild, it can be downright dangerous to be moping around or swearing off food. I couldn’t look at that matriarch and say I was watching a conditioned behavior. That was sorrow, pure and simple.”
“You’re still grieving for that calf,” Thomas said.
“I guess I am.”
“Is his mother?”
I didn’t reply. I had seen Lorato in the months since Kenosi’s death. She was busy with her younger calves; she had gone back to being a matriarch. She had moved past that moment in a way that I hadn’t been able to.
“My father died last year,” Thomas said. “I still look for him in crowds.”
“I’m sorry.”
He shrugged. “I think grief is like a really ugly couch. It never goes away. You can decorate around it; you can slap a doily on top of it; you can push it to the corner of the room—but eventually, you learn to live with it.”
Somehow, I thought, elephants had taken it a step further. They didn’t grimace every time they entered the room and saw that couch. They said, Remember how many good mem
ories we had here? And they sat, for just a little while, before moving elsewhere.
Maybe I started crying; I can’t remember. But Thomas was so close now that I could smell the soap on his skin. I could see the sparks of orange in his eyes. “Alice. Who have you lost?”
I froze. This wasn’t about me. I wouldn’t let him make it that way.
“Is that why you push people away?” he whispered. “So they can’t get close enough to hurt you when they’re gone?”
This virtual stranger knew me better than anyone else in Africa. He knew me better than I knew myself. What I was really researching was not how elephants deal with loss but how humans can’t.
And because I did not want to let go, because I didn’t know how, I wrapped my arms around Thomas Metcalf. I kissed him in the shade of the baobab tree, with its upside-down roots in the air, with its bark that could be cut a hundred times and still heal itself.
JENNA
The walls of the institution where my father lives are painted purple. It makes me think of Barney, that giant, creepy dinosaur, but apparently some very renowned psychologist wrote an entire PhD dissertation about which color inspires healing, and this was right at the top of the list.
The nurse on duty looks straight at Serenity when we walk in, which I guess makes sense, because we appear to be a family unit—if a dysfunctional one. “Can I help you?”
“I’m just here to see my dad,” I say.
“Thomas Metcalf,” Serenity adds.
I know several of the nurses here; this one I haven’t met, which is why she doesn’t recognize me. She puts a clipboard on the counter so that I can sign us in, but before I do, I hear my father’s voice, shouting somewhere down the hall. “Dad?” I call out.
The nurse looks bored. “Name?” she says.
“Sign us in and meet me in Room 124,” I tell Serenity, and I start to run. I can feel Virgil falling into step beside me.