Grant was punishing me, plain and simple.
Out of all the colleagues that my boss could have picked to babysit some New England asshole that was coming here for a week’s visit, he chose me. “Grant,” I said. “It’s not every day we lose a matriarch. You have to recognize how critical this is to my research.”
He looked up from his desk. “The elephant’s still going to be dead a week from now.”
If my research wouldn’t sway Grant, maybe my schedule would. “But I’m already supposed to take Owen out today,” I told him. Owen was the bush vet; we were collaring a matriarch for a new study that was being done by a research team from the University of KwaZulu-Natal. Or in other words: I am busy.
Grant looked up at me. “Fantastic!” he said. “I’m sure this fellow would love to see you do the collaring.” And so, I found myself sitting at the entrance of the game reserve, waiting for Thomas Metcalf of Boone, New Hampshire, to arrive.
It was always a hassle when visitors came. Sometimes they were the fat cats who sponsored a collar for GPS monitoring, and wanted to come with their wives and their business buddies to play the politically correct version of the Great White Hunter game—instead of killing elephants, they watched a vet dart one so it could be collared, and then toasted their magnanimousness with G & T sundowners. Sometimes it was a trainer from a zoo or a circus, and when that was the case, they were almost always idiots. The last guy I’d had to squire around in my Land Rover for two days was a keeper at the Philadelphia Zoo, and when we saw a six-year-old bull secreting from its temporal glands, he insisted the baby was coming into musth. No matter how I argued with him (I mean, really? A six-year-old male just cannot come into musth!), he assured me that he was right.
I’ll admit, when Thomas Metcalf pried himself out of the African taxi (which is an experience in and of itself, if you haven’t been in one before), he did not look the way I expected. He was about my age, with small, round glasses that steamed up when he stepped into the humidity, so that he fumbled to grab the handle of his suitcase. He looked me over, from my messy ponytail to my pink Converse sneakers. “Are you George?” he said.
“Do I look like a George?” George was one of my colleagues, a student none of us ever thought would finish his PhD. In other words, the butt of all the jokes—that is, until I started studying elephant grief.
“No. I mean, I’m sorry. I was expecting someone else.”
“Sorry to disappoint you,” I said. “I’m Alice. Welcome to the Northern Tuli Block.”
I led him to the Land Rover, and we started winding along the unmarked, dusty paths that looped through the reserve. As we rolled along, I recited the spiel we give visitors. “The first elephants were recorded here in roughly A.D. 700. In the late eighteen hundreds, when guns were supplied to local chiefs, it affected the elephant population dramatically. By the time the Great White Hunters arrived, the elephants were almost gone. It wasn’t until the game reserve was founded that the numbers increased. Our research staff is in the field seven days a week,” I said. “Although we are all involved in different research projects, we also take care of core monitoring—observing the breeding herds and their associations, identifying the individuals in each, tracking their activity and their habitat, determining home range, doing census once a month, recording births and deaths, estrus and musth; collecting data on bull elephants, recording rainfall—”
“How many elephants do you have here?”
“About fourteen hundred,” I said. “Not to mention leopard, lion, cheetah—”
“I can’t imagine. I have six elephants, and it’s hard enough to figure out who’s who if you haven’t been with them day in and day out.”
I had grown up in New England, and I knew that the odds of there being wild elephants there were about as high as me spontaneously growing another arm. Which meant this guy ran either a zoo or a circus—neither of which I endorsed. When trainers tell you that the behaviors taught to elephants are things they’d do in the wild, they’re lying. In the wild, elephants do not stand on their hind legs or walk grabbing each other’s tails or skip around in a ring. In the wild, elephants are always only a few yards away from another elephant. They are constantly stroking and rubbing and checking in with each other. The whole relationship between humans and elephants in captivity is about exploitation.
As if I didn’t already dislike Thomas Metcalf for being my punishment, I now disliked him on principle.
“So,” he said, “what do you do here?”
God save me from tourists. “I’m the local Mary Kay cosmetics salesgirl.”
“I meant, what research do you do?”
I glanced at him from the corner of my eye. There was no reason for me to feel defensive toward a man I had met a minute ago—a man whose knowledge of elephants was far less comprehensive than mine. And yet I was so used to the raised eyebrows when I talked about my new research that I had become accustomed to not talking about it.
I was saved from replying by a waterfall of horns and hooves bolting across the path. I grabbed the steering wheel and braked at the last moment. “You’d better hang on,” I suggested.
“They’re amazing!” Thomas gasped, and I tried not to roll my eyes. When you live here, you get jaded. To tourists, everything is new, worth slowing down for, an adventure. Yes, that’s a giraffe. Yes, it’s extraordinary. But not after you’ve seen one for the seven hundredth time. “Are they antelope?”
“They’re impala. But we call them McDonald’s.”
Thomas pointed to the rump of one animal, now grazing. “Because of the markings?”
Impala have two black lines running down each hind leg, and another line streaking their stub tail, which does look a little like the Golden Arches. But their nickname comes from being the most prevalent meal in the bush for predators. “Because over one billion have been served,” I said.
There is a difference between the romance of Africa and the reality of it. Tourists who come on safari excited to see a kill, who are then lucky enough to witness a lioness taking down its prey, often become quiet and queasy. I watched Thomas’s face go pale. “Well, Toto,” I said. “Guess you’re not in New Hampshire anymore.”
As we waited at the main camp for Owen, the bush vet, I told Thomas the rules of safari. “Don’t get out of the vehicle. Don’t stand up in the vehicle. The animals see us as one big entity, and if you separate yourself from that profile, you’re in trouble.”
“Sorry to keep you. There was a rhino relocation that didn’t go as smoothly as I hoped.” Owen Dunkirk came hurrying out, carrying a bag and his rifle. Owen was a bear of a man who preferred to dart from a vehicle rather than a helicopter. We used to be on good terms, until I switched my focus of fieldwork. Owen was old school; he believed in evidence and statistics. I might as well have said I was using a research grant to study voodoo or prove the existence of unicorns. “Thomas,” I said. “This is Owen, our vet. Owen, this is Thomas Metcalf. He’s visiting for a few days.”
“You sure you’re still up to this, Alice?” Owen said. “Maybe you’ve forgotten how to collar, since you’ve been writing elephant eulogies and whatnot.”
I ignored his jab, and the strange look Thomas Metcalf gave me. “I’m pretty sure I can do this with my eyes closed,” I told Owen. “Which is more than I can say for you. Aren’t you the guy who missed your shot last time? A target as big as … well … an elephant?”
Anya joined us in the Land Rover. When we went out to collar an elephant, we needed two researchers and three vehicles, so that the herd could be managed while we did our work. The other two Land Rovers were being driven by rangers, one of whom had already been tracking Tebogo’s herd today.
Collaring is an art, not a science. I don’t like to collar during droughts, or in the summer, when the temperature’s too high. Elephants overheat so quickly that you need to monitor their temperature when they go down. The idea is to get the vet about twenty meters from the elephant, so that he can safely shoot the dart. Once that matriarch drops, panic ensues, which is why you ideally want experienced rangers around you who know how to push a herd, and you don’t want novices like Thomas Metcalf, who might do something stupid.
When we reached Bashi’s vehicle, I glanced around, pleased. The landscape was perfect for a darting—flat and wide, so that the elephant, if she ran, wouldn’t hurt herself. “Owen,” I said, “you ready?”
He nodded, loading the M99 into his dart gun.
“Anya? You take the rear and I’ll take the head. Bashi? Elvis? We want to push the herd to the south,” I said. “Okay, on three.”
“Wait.” Thomas put his hand on my arm. “What do I do?”
“Stay in the Rover and try not to get yourself killed.”
After that, I forgot about Thomas Metcalf. Owen shot the dart, which landed square in Tebogo’s bottom. She startled and squealed, whipping her head around. She didn’t pull out the little flag, and neither did another elephant, although sometimes I’d seen that happen.
Her distress was contagious, though. The herd bunched, some facing backward around her for protection, some trying to touch her. There was rumbling that rattled the ground, and every elephant began to secrete, the oily residue streaking their cheeks. Tebogo walked a few steps, nodded, and then the M99 kicked in. Her trunk went limp, her head drooped, her body swayed, and she started to go down.
That was when we had to act, and fast. If the herd wasn’t moved away from the fallen matriarch, they could injure her trying to get her upright again—spearing her with a tusk—or make it impossible for us to get close enough to Tebogo to revive her with an antidote. She could have fallen on a branch; she could have fallen on her trunk. The trick was to never show fear. If the herd came after us now and we backed off, we’d lose everything—including this matriarch.
“Now,” I yelled, and Bashi and Elvis revved their engines. They clapped, howled, and chased the herd with the vehicles, scattering the elephants so that we could pull closer to the matriarch. As soon as there was a good gap between us and the other elephants, Owen and Anya and I leaped out of our vehicle, leaving the rangers to manage the flustered herd.
We only had about ten minutes. Immediately I made sure Tebogo was fully on her side, and that the ground beneath her was clear. I folded her ear over her eye to protect her from dirt and direct sunlight. She stared at me, and I could see the terror in her gaze.
“Shh,” I soothed. I wanted to stroke her, but knew I couldn’t. Tebogo was not asleep, she was conscious of every noise and touch and smell. For this reason, I would touch her as minimally as possible.
I put a small stick between the two fingers of her trunk, so that it would remain open; an elephant can’t breathe through its mouth and will suffocate if the opening of the trunk is blocked. Tebogo snored lightly as I poured water on her ear and over her body, cooling her down for comfort. Then I slipped the collar around her thick neck, settling the receiver of the unit on the top of the elephant, and tied it down under her chin. I tightened the ratchet of the bolt, leaving a space of two hands between her chin and the counterweight, and filed down the metal edges. Anya worked madly, taking blood and a tiny skin clipping from Tebogo’s ear and plucking tail hair for DNA, measuring her feet and her temperature, her tusks and the height from foot to scapula. Owen did a once-over, cataloging the elephant for injury, checking her breathing. Finally, we inspected the collar to make sure the GPS system was working, beeping properly.
The whole thing had taken nine minutes, thirty-four seconds.
“We’re good,” I said, and Anya and I collected all the equipment we’d brought out to the elephant and carried it back to the vehicle.
Bashi and Elvis both drove off as Owen leaned down beside Tebogo once more. “Here, pretty girl,” he cooed, and he injected the antidote into her ear, right into the bloodstream.
We wouldn’t leave until we knew the elephant was up. Three minutes later, Tebogo rolled to her feet, shaking her massive head, trumpeting at her herd. The collar seemed to fit all right as she meandered closer, rejoining them in a flurry of rumbles and bellows, touching and urinating.
I was hot, sweaty, a mess. I had dirt on my face and elephant drool on my shirt. And I had completely forgotten Thomas Metcalf was still there until I heard his voice.
“Owen,” he said. “What’s in the dart? M99?”
“That’s right,” the vet replied.
“I’ve read that a pinprick is enough to kill a human.”
“True.”
“So the elephant you just darted, she wasn’t asleep. She was only paralyzed?”
The vet nodded. “Briefly. But as you can see, no harm done.”
“Back at the sanctuary,” Thomas said, “we have an Asian elephant named Wanda. She was at the zoo in Gainesville in 1981, when there were floods in Texas. Most of the animals were lost, but after twenty-four hours someone saw her trunk sticking up in a flooded area. She was submerged for two days, pretty much, before the water receded enough for her to be rescued. Afterward, she was terrified of thunderstorms. She wouldn’t let any keepers give her a bath. She wouldn’t step in a puddle. And this went on for years.”
“I don’t know that I’d equate a ten-minute darting with forty-eight hours of trauma,” Owen said, bristling.
Thomas shrugged. “Then again,” he pointed out, “you’re not an elephant.”
As Anya bounced the Land Rover back to camp, I sneaked glances at Thomas Metcalf. It was almost as if he were implying that elephants had the capacity to think, to feel, to hold a grudge, to forgive. All of which came dangerously close to my beliefs—the same beliefs that I was ridiculed for, here.
I listened to him telling Owen about the New England Elephant Sanctuary as we traveled the twenty minutes back to the main camp. In spite of what I’d assumed, Metcalf was not a circus trainer or a zookeeper. He talked about his elephants like they were his family. He talked about them the way … well, the way I talked about mine. He ran a facility that took elephants once kept in captivity and let them live out the rest of their years in peace. He had come here to see if there was any way of making that experience more like their lives in the wild, short of bringing them back to Africa and Asia.
I’d never met anyone like him.
When we arrived at camp, Owen and Anya walked toward the research facility to log Tebogo’s data. Thomas stood, his hands in his pockets. “Listen. You’re off the hook,” he said.
“Excuse me?”
“I get it. You don’t want to be saddled with me. You don’t want to have to do the dog and pony show for some visitor. You’ve made that patently clear.”
My rudeness had caught up to me, and now my cheeks burned. “I’m sorry,” I said. “You’re not who I thought you were.”
Thomas stared at me for a long moment, long enough to change the direction of the wind for the rest of my life. Then, slowly, he grinned. “You were expecting George?”
“What happened to her?” I later asked Thomas, as we drove out into the reserve by ourselves in a Land Rover. “Wanda?”
“It took two years, and I spent a lot of time getting my clothes soaked, but now she swims in the sanctuary pond all the time.”
When he said that, I knew where I was going to take him. I put the Rover into low gear, surfing through the deep sand of a dry riverbed until I found what I was looking for. Elephant tracks look like Venn diagrams, the print of the front foot overlapping the back. These were fresh—flat, shiny circles that hadn’t had time to be covered with dust. I could probably figure out the individual whose track I was seeing if I really wanted to, by paying attention to the crack marks of the imprint. Multiplying the back foot’s circumference by 5.5 would give me her height. And I knew it was a female, because this was a breeding herd—there were multiple tracks, instead of the solitary line of a bull.
It was not all that far from Mmaabo’s body. I wondered if this herd had come across her, what they had done.
Pushing the thought out of my head, I put the truck in gear and followed the trail. “I’ve never met anyone who ran an elephant sanctuary.”
“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.”