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 memories 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.