ALICE
Twenty-two months is a long time to be pregnant.
It is an enormous investment of time and energy for an elephant. Add to that the time and energy it takes to get a newborn calf to a point where it can survive on its own, and you can begin to understand what is at stake for an elephant mother. It does not matter who you are or what kind of personal relationship you’ve forged with an elephant: Come between her and her calf, and she will kill you.
Maura had been a circus elephant that was then brought to a zoo as the mate of a male African elephant. Sparks flew, but not the way the zookeepers had intended—and small wonder, since in the wild a female elephant would never have lived with a male in close proximity. Instead, Maura charged her paramour, destroyed the fencing of the enclosure, and pinned a keeper against the fence, crushing his spinal cord. When she came to us, she was labeled a killer. Like any animal coming to the sanctuary, she had dozens of veterinary tests, including one for tuberculosis. But a pregnancy test was not part of the protocol, and so we didn’t know she was going to have a calf until very nearly before it happened.
When we figured it out—the swelling breasts and dropped belly—we quarantined Maura for those last couple months. It was just too risky to guess how Hester, the other African elephant in the enclosure, would react, since she had never had a baby of her own. We also didn’t know how much practice Maura had had as a mother until Thomas was able to locate the circus she had traveled with and learned that she had given birth once before, to a male calf. It was one of a bevy of reasons that the circus had classified her as dangerous. Not wanting to risk the maternal aggression of a female elephant, they had chained her during birth so that they could take care of the newborn. But Maura had gone crazy, trumpeting, roaring, throwing her chains, trying to get to her baby. Once she was allowed to touch him, she was fine.
When the calf was two, they’d sold him to a zoo.
When Thomas told me this, I’d gone out to the enclosure where Maura was grazing and sat down with my own baby playing at my feet. “I won’t let it happen again,” I told her.
At the sanctuary, we were all excited for our own reasons. Thomas saw the moneymaking potential a calf would bring to the sanctuary—although unlike a zoo that saw ten thousand more visitors as a result of a newborn elephant addition, we would not be showing the calf off. People were just more likely to give funds to support a baby. There was nothing cuter than photos of a baby elephant, the comma of its trunk dangling like an afterthought, its head poking from between the columns of its mother’s legs—and, we hoped, our fund-raising materials would be full of them. Grace had never seen a birth. Gideon and Nevvie, on the other hand, had seen two during their time at the circus, and were hoping for a happier outcome.
And me? Well, I felt a kinship with this giant. Maura had made the sanctuary her home at approximately the same time I had, and I had delivered my own daughter six months later. Over the past eighteen months, as I went out to watch Maura interacting, I would sometimes catch her eye. It’s unscientific and anthropomorphic of me to say so, but off the record? I think we both felt lucky to be there.
I had a beautiful baby girl and a brilliant husband. I had been able to gather data using some of Thomas’s audiotapes of elephant communication that I was cobbling together into an article about grief and cognition in elephants. I got to spend every day learning from these compassionate, intelligent animals. Given that, it was easy to concentrate on the positive rather than the negative: the nights I found Thomas poring over the books, wondering how we could keep the sanctuary open; the pills he had started to take so that he could sleep at all; the fact that I had not yet documented an actual death at the sanctuary and I had been there a year and a half; the guilt I felt over wishing for an animal to die, just so that I could further my research.
Then there were the arguments I got into with Nevvie, who thought she knew everything, because she had worked the longest with elephants. She discounted any contributions I had to make because she didn’t believe the way elephants behaved in the wild could translate into sanctuary life.
Some of these conflicts were minuscule—I’d prepare food for the elephants and Nevvie would change the individual meals, because she felt that Syrah didn’t like strawberries or because Olive’s stomach was upset by honeydew (although I’d seen no evidence to support either claim). But sometimes she decided to pull rank and it affected me personally—like, for example, when I put Asian elephant bones into the African enclosure to measure the reaction of the elephants, and she moved them away because she felt it was disrespectful to the elephants that had died. Or when she was babysitting for Jenna and insisted it was all right to give her honey to help with teething, in spite of the fact that every parenting book I read said not to feed it to a child until age two. As soon as I brought up the issue with Thomas, he got upset. “Nevvie’s been with me from the start,” he said, by way of explanation. As if it did not matter that I was supposed to be with him till the end.
Since neither of us knew when Maura had become pregnant, her delivery date was an estimate—one on which Nevvie and I disagreed. Based on the development of Maura’s breasts, I knew it wasn’t going to be long. Nevvie insisted that births always happened at a full moon, which was three weeks away.
I had seen one birth in the wild, although you’d think, given the sheer number of babies in the herds, I would have had the opportunity to see more. It was an elephant named Botshelo, the Tswana word for “life.” I happened to be tracking a different herd when I came upon hers beside a riverbed, behaving very strangely. They were typically a relaxed herd, but now they were bunched around Botshelo, facing out, protecting her. For about a half hour, there were some rumbles, and then a splash. They shifted enough for me to see Botshelo tearing at the birth sac and flipping it onto her head, as if it were a lampshade and she was the life of the party. In the grass beneath her was the tiniest little elephant, a female, surrounded by an explosion of sound: rumbling, trumpeting, chaos. The herd urinated, they secreted; and as they rolled the whites of their eyes at me, it was almost as if they were trying to get me to celebrate. The baby was touched from tip to toe by every member of the herd; Botshelo put her trunk around the calf and under the calf and in her calf’s mouth: Hello. Welcome.
The calf was rolling on her side, discombobulated, her legs star-fished in all directions. Botshelo used her feet and her trunk to lift the calf. The baby would manage to get her front end up, only to have it crash forward when her back end lifted, or vice versa, a tripod with the legs at odd lengths. Finally, Botshelo knelt, pressing her face against the head of the calf, and then stood, as if she was trying to show her baby how to do it. When the calf tried and slipped, Botshelo kicked up enough grass and dirt to give her more stable footing. After twenty minutes of Botshelo’s intense ministrations, that little baby wobbled along at her mother’s side, Botshelo’s trunk pulling her up every time she tipped over. Eventually the baby took refuge beneath her mother, her floppy trunk pressed up against her mother’s belly as she rooted to nurse. The whole process of birth was matter-of-fact, abbreviated, and also the most incredible experience I had ever witnessed.
One morning when I went out to check on Maura, as I had made it my habit to do, with Jenna strapped to my back like a papoose, I noticed a bulge at the elephant’s bottom. I four-wheeled to the Asian barn, where Nevvie and Thomas were talking about a fungus that one of the elephants had developed on her toenails. “It’s time,” I said breathlessly.
Thomas acted like he had when I had told him my own water had broken. He started running around, excited, scattered, overwhelmed. He radioed Grace and asked her to come and take Jenna back to our cottage and sit with her while the rest of us went to the African enclosure. “There’s no rush,” Nevvie insisted. “I’ve never heard of an elephant giving birth during the day. It happens at night so that the baby’s eyes can adjust.”
If it took that long for Maura, I knew it meant that something would be wrong. Her body was already showing all the signs of advanced labor. “I think we have a half an hour, tops,” I said.
I watched Thomas’s face turn from Nevvie’s to mine, and then he radioed Gideon. “Meet us at the African barn, ASAP,” he said, and I turned away when I felt Nevvie’s gaze on me.
The mood, at first, was celebrative. Thomas and Gideon argued over whether it would be better for the calf to be male or female; Nevvie talked about what it was like when she delivered Grace. They joked about whether an elephant could have drugs during the birth, and if it would be called a pachydural. Me, I focused on Maura. As she rumbled, suffering through contractions, an auditory current of sisterhood flew through the grounds of the sanctuary. Hester trumpeted back to Maura; then the Asian elephants, at a further distance, checked in.
A half hour had passed since I first told Thomas to come quickly, then an hour. After two hours of moving in circles, Maura had still not progressed. “Maybe we should call the vet,” I suggested, but Nevvie waved me off.
“I told you,” she said. “It’ll happen after sunset.”
I knew of plenty of rangers who’d seen elephants give birth at all times of the day, but I bit my tongue. I wished that Maura were in the wild, if only so that one of her herd could communicate that there was nothing to worry about, that everything was going to be all right.
Six hours later, though, I had my doubts.
By then, Gideon and Nevvie had both gone to prepare and distribute food for the Asian elephants and Hester. We may have been having a birth, but there were still six other elephants that needed care. “I think you should call the vet,” I told Thomas as I watched Maura stumble, weary. “Something’s wrong.”
Thomas didn’t hesitate. “I’ll check on Jenna and make the call.” He looked at me, troubled. “Will you stay with Maura?”
I nodded and sat down on the far side of the fence, my knees drawn up, to watch Maura suffer. I had not wanted to say this out loud, but all I could think of was Kagiso, the elephant I had found with a dead calf shortly before I left Africa. I did not even want to think of her, for superstitious fear that I might jinx this birth.
Not more than five minutes after Thomas left, Maura pivoted, presenting her hindquarters to me so that I could clearly see the amniotic balloon extending from between her legs. I scrambled to my feet, torn between wanting to get Thomas and knowing that I wouldn’t have time. Before I could even equivocate, the entire amniotic sac slipped out in a gush and rush of fluid, and the calf landed on the grass, still caught in its white caul.
If Maura had sisters in a herd, they would be telling her what to do. They would encourage her to tear the sac, to help that baby stand. But Maura had no one but me. I cupped my hand over my mouth and tried to mimic the distress call, the SOS I had heard elephants make when a predator was in the area. I hoped I could shock Maura into action.
It took three tries, but finally, Maura used her trunk to tear at the sac. I knew, though, even as she did, that something was wrong. Unlike the jubilation of Botshelo and her herd, Maura’s body was hunched. Her eyes were downcast; her mouth drooped. Her ears were low and flat against her body.
She looked like Kagiso, when Kagiso’s calf was dead.
Maura tried to pull the small, stillborn male to his feet. She pushed at him with her front foot, but he did not move. She tried to curl her trunk around the body and lift him, but he slipped from her grasp. She pulled away the afterbirth and then rolled the body of the calf. She was still bleeding, streaks down her rear legs as dark and pronounced as the secretions from her temporal glands, but she continued to dust and shove the calf, which had not taken a single breath.
I was in tears by the time Thomas arrived again, Gideon in tow, with the news that the vet would arrive within the hour. The whole sanctuary had gone silent and still; the other elephants had stopped calling; even the wind had died. The sun had turned its face in to the shoulder of the landscape; and in the custom of mourning, the fabric of the night had been ripped, revealing a star at each tiny tear. Maura stood over the body of her son, her body an umbrella, shielding him.
“What happened?” Thomas said, and for the rest of my life, I would always think that he had been accusing me.
I shook my head. “Call back the vet,” I said. “He doesn’t need to be here yet.” By now, the bleeding had stopped. There wasn’t anything that could be done.
“He’ll want to do a necropsy on the calf—”
“Not until she’s done grieving,” I said, and the word triggered my silent wish of just days ago: that one of these elephants would die, so that I could continue my postdoc research.
I felt as if I had subconsciously willed this. Maybe Thomas was right to accuse me. “I’m going to stay here,” I announced.
Thomas stepped forward. “You don’t have to—”
“This is what I do,” I said tightly.
“What about Jenna?”
I saw Gideon take a step away as our voices escalated. “What about her?” I asked.
“You’re her mother.”
“And you’re her father.” For this one night in a year of Jenna’s life, I could pass up putting my baby to bed so that I could watch Maura stand over hers. This was my job. Had I been a doctor, this would have been the equivalent of being paged for an emergency.
But Thomas wasn’t paying attention. “I was counting on that calf,” he murmured. “It was going to save us.”
Gideon cleared his throat. “Thomas? How about I take you back to the cottage, and I’ll have Grace bring a sweater to Alice?”
After they left, I took notes, marking the times Maura ran her trunk along the spine of the calf, and her listless toss of the amniotic sac. I wrote down the differences in her vocalizations—from a cooing rumble of reassurance to the call of a mother trying to get her calf to return to her side—but it was a one-sided conversation.
Grace returned with a sweater and a sleeping bag, and sat with me for a while in silence, just watching Maura and feeling her sadness.
“It’s heavier here,” she remarked. “The air.” Although I knew that the barometric pressure could not be affected by the death of an elephant, I understood what she meant. The quiet pushed in at the soft spot at the bottom of my throat, in my eardrums, threatening to suffocate us.
Nevvie came to pay her respects, too. She didn’t say anything, just handed me a bottle of water and a sandwich and stood a distance away, seemingly shuffling through a deck of memories she didn’t want to share.
Just as I was nodding off, at three in the morning, Maura finally stepped away from the calf. She scooped the baby up in her trunk, but it slipped out of her grasp twice. She tried to lift it by its neck and, failing that, its legs. After several aborted attempts, she managed to curl the body of the baby under her trunk, the way she might lift a bale of hay.
Carefully, slowly, Maura started to walk north. In the distance, I could hear a contact call from Hester. Maura responded softly, muted, as if she were worried about waking the calf.
Gideon and Nevvie had taken the four-wheelers when they left, so I had no choice but to travel on foot. I didn’t know where Maura was headed, so I did exactly what I shouldn’t have done—I ducked through the opening in the gate made for the vehicles and walked in the shadows behind her.
Luckily, Maura was either too lost in her own grief or too focused on her precious load to notice me, slinking along behind the trees as quietly as possible. We walked, twenty yards between us, past the pond and through the birch woods and across a meadow until Maura reached the spot where she liked to come at the hottest part of the day. Underneath a sprawling oak was a carpet of pine needles; Maura would lie on her side and nap in the shade.
Today, though, she placed the calf there and began to cover him with branches, breaking off pine boughs and kicking up fallen needles and tufts of moss, until the corpse was partially covered. Then she stood over him again, making a pillared temple of her body.
And I worshiped. I prayed.
? ? ?
Twenty-four hours after Maura had delivered the calf, I had still not slept, and neither had she. More critically, she had not had any sustenance. Although I knew she could go without food for a little while, she had to have water. So when Gideon found me, safely on the far side of the fencing again, I asked him for a favor.
I needed him to bring back one of the shallow tubs we used for foot soaks in the barns, and five half-gallon jugs of water.
When I heard the ATV approach behind me, I looked at Maura to see if she’d react. Usually the African elephants were curious when it was feeding time. But Maura didn’t even turn her head in the direction of Gideon’s approach. As he idled to a stop on the path, I said, “Get off.”
What I was doing would have been strictly forbidden in the game reserve, because I was planning to adjust the ecosystem. It was also reckless, because I was encroaching on the personal space of a grieving elephant mother. And I didn’t give a flying fuck.
“No,” Gideon said, figuring out exactly what I was up to. “You climb on.”
So I did, wrapping my arms around him as we drove through the small opening in the fencing, into the enclosure with the elephant. Maura charged, flying toward us with her ears spread and her heavy feet thundering on the ground. I felt Gideon throw the ATV in reverse, but I put my hand on his arm. “Don’t,” I said. “Turn it off.”
He looked over his shoulder at me, wild-eyed, caught between obeying his boss’s wife and his own instincts for self-preservation.
The vehicle shuddered to a stop.
So did Maura.
Very slowly, I got off the ATV and pulled the heavy rubber tub from the flatbed on the back. I set this about ten feet away from the vehicle and then poured several gallons of water inside. Then I climbed behind Gideon again. “Reverse,” I whispered. “Now.”
He backed up as Maura’s trunk twitched in our direction. She stepped closer and drank the whole tub of water at once.
She angled herself, so that her tusks were only inches away from my skin, close enough for me to see the nicks and scars on them from years of use, close enough for her to look me in the eye.
Maura reached out with her trunk and stroked my shoulder. Then she lumbered back to the body of her calf and resumed her position sheltering him.
I felt Gideon’s hand on my back. It was partly comfort, partly reverence. “Breathe,” he instructed.
After thirty-six hours, the vultures came. They circled overhead like witches on their brooms. Every time they swooped, Maura would flap her ears and bellow, scaring them off. That night, it was the fisher cats. Their eyes flashed neon green as they crept closer to the calf’s body. Maura, coming out of her trance as if a switch had been flipped, ran at them with her tusks to the ground.
Thomas had given up asking me to come home. Everyone had given up asking me. I would not leave until Maura was ready to leave. I would be her herd, and remind her that she still had to live, even if her calf couldn’t.
The irony did not escape me: I was playing the role of the elephant, while Maura was acting rather human by refusing to stop grieving her dead son. One of the most amazing things about elephants mourning in the wild is their ability to grieve hard, but then truly, unequivocally, let go. Humans can’t seem to do that. I’ve always thought it’s because of religion. We expect to see our loved ones again in the next life, whatever that might be. Elephants don’t have that hope, only the memories of this life. Maybe that’s why it is easier for them to move on.
Seventy-two hours postdelivery, I tried to imitate the “let’s go” rumble I’d heard a thousand times in the wild and to point myself in that direction, like an elephant would. Maura ignored me. By now, I could barely stand, and my vision was blurred. I hallucinated a bull elephant breaking through the fence, only to realize that it was an ATV approaching. On it rode Nevvie and Gideon. Nevvie looked at me and shook her head. “You’re right, she’s a mess,” Nevvie said to Gideon. And then to me: “You’re going back home. Your girl needs you. If you don’t want to leave Maura alone, I’ll stay with her.”
Because Gideon didn’t trust me to hang on to him without falling asleep, I did not climb behind him on the ATV. I sat in the circle of his arms, the way a child might have done, and nodded off until he parked in front of our cottage. Embarrassed, I leaped off the vehicle, thanked him quickly, and walked inside.
To my surprise, Grace was asleep on the couch beside Jenna’s crib—which was in the middle of the living room, since we didn’t have space for a nursery. I woke her and told her to go home with Gideon, and then I went down the hall to Thomas’s office.
Like me, he was wearing the clothes he’d been wearing three days ago. He was bent over a ledger, so engrossed in what he was studying that he didn’t notice I was there. A bottle of prescription medicine was spilled on its side on the desk, and a depleted bottle of whiskey sat sentinel beside him. I thought he might have fallen asleep working, but when I got closer I saw that his eyes were wide open, glassy, sightless.
“Thomas,” I said softly, “let’s go to sleep.”
“Can’t you see I’m busy?” he said, so loud that, in the other room, the baby started to cry. “Shut the fuck up!” he yelled, and he lifted his book and threw it at the wall behind me. I ducked, then bent down to retrieve it. The pages fell open before me.
Whatever had engrossed Thomas so deeply … it wasn’t this book. This was an empty journal, one blank page following the next.
I understood now why Grace had not felt comfortable leaving the baby alone with him.
It was not until after we’d had our wedding ceremony in the Boone Town Hall that I found bottles of pills, lined up like foot soldiers in Thomas’s dresser. Depression, he’d told me when I asked. After his father—his last surviving parent—had died, he could not muster the strength to get out of bed. I had nodded, trying to be compassionate. I was less unnerved by the news of his clinical despair than I was about the fact that I had entered into marriage with someone so quickly I did not even know his parents were both deceased.
Thomas hadn’t had another depressive episode since then that he’d told me about, but to be honest, I hadn’t asked, either. I wasn’t sure I wanted to know the answer.
Shaking, I backed out of the room and closed the door. I picked up Jenna, who quieted immediately, and carried her to the bed I shared with a stranger, who happened to be the father of my child. Against all odds, I fell immediately into a deep, velvet sleep, my daughter’s tiny hand caught like a fallen star in my own.