ALICE
All this time, I’ve said that elephants have an uncanny ability to compartmentalize death, without letting grief cripple them permanently.
But there is an exception.
In Zambia, a calf that had been orphaned by poaching began to hang around with a bunch of young bulls. Just as teenage males will walk up to each other and punch each other on the shoulder to say hello while girls hug, the behavior of these male elephants was very different from what a young female elephant might have experienced otherwise. They tolerated her hanging around because they could mate with her—like Anybodys in West Side Story—but they didn’t really want her there. She calved when she was only ten years old, and since she had no mother to guide her and no practice being an allomother in a breeding herd, she treated that baby the way she had been treated by the bulls. When the baby fell asleep beside her, she would get up and walk away. The calf would wake up and start bellowing for its mother, but she would ignore the cries. By contrast, in a breeding herd, if a baby squeals, at least three females rush to touch it all over and see if it is okay.
In the wild, a young female is an allomother long before she bears her own offspring. She has fifteen years to practice being a big sister to the calves that are born to the herd. I’d seen calves approach young female elephants to suckle for comfort, even though the juveniles did not have breasts or milk yet. But the young female would put her foot forward, the way her mother and aunties did, and proudly pretend. She could act like a mother without having any of the real responsibility until she was ready. But when there is no family to teach a young female to raise her own calf, things can go horribly awry.
When I was working in Pilanesberg, this story repeated itself. There, young bulls that had been translocated began to charge vehicles. They killed a tourist. More than forty white rhino were found dead in the reserve before we realized that these subadult males were the ones who’d attacked them—highly aggressive behavior that was far from normal.
What is the common denominator for the odd behavior of the young female elephant that didn’t care about her own calf and the belligerent pack of teenage bulls? Certainly there was a lack of parental guidance. But was that the only issue at play? All those elephants had seen their families killed in front of them, as a result of culling.
The grief that I have studied in the wild, where a herd loses an old matriarch, for example, must be contrasted to the grief that comes from observing the violent death of a family member—because the long-term effects are so markedly different. After a natural death, the herd encourages the grieving individual to eventually move on. After a mass killing by humans, there is—by definition—no herd left for support.
To date, the animal research community has been reluctant to believe that elephant behavior might be affected by the trauma of watching one’s family being killed. I think this isn’t scientific objection as much as it is political shame—after all, we humans have been the perpetrators of this violence.
At the very least, it is crucial when studying the grief of elephants to remember that death is a natural occurrence. Murder is not.
JENNA
“It’s from Maura’s calf,” I tell Virgil, as we wait in the same room where we met Tallulah two hours ago. That’s what I keep telling myself. Because it’s really too hard to think about the alternative.
Virgil turns the tooth over in his hand. It makes me think of the descriptions of elephants rubbing their feet over tiny bits of ivory in my mother’s journals, the ones my grandmother took from me. “It’s too small to be from an elephant,” he says.
“There are other animals around, too, you know. Fisher cats. Raccoons. Deer.”
“I still think we should take it to the police,” Serenity says.
I can’t look her in the eye. She’s explained her little trick, that my mother had never appeared (as far as she knew, anyway). But for some reason this only makes me feel worse.
“We will,” Virgil agrees. “Eventually.”
The door opens, and an air-conditioned breeze slices between us. Tallulah enters, looking pissed. “This is getting ridiculous. I don’t work for you exclusively, Vic. I’m doing you a favor—”
He holds out the tooth. “I swear to God, Lu, if you do this I will never ask for anything again. We may have found the remains of Alice Metcalf. Forget the blood in the shirt. If you can find DNA in this—”
“I don’t need to,” Tallulah says. “This tooth doesn’t belong to Alice Metcalf.”
“I told you it came from an animal,” I mutter.
“No, it’s human. I worked in a dental office for six years, remember? It’s a second molar, I could tell you that in my sleep. But it’s a deciduous tooth.”
“What’s that?” Virgil asks.
Tallulah hands it back to him. “It belonged to a kid. Probably one under the age of five.”
The pain that erupts in my mouth is like nothing I’ve ever felt. It’s a cavern with lava inside. It’s stars, exploding where my eyes were. It’s a raw, shimmering nerve.
It’s what happened.
When I wake up, my mother is gone, just like I knew would happen all along.
It is why I don’t like to close my eyes, because when you do, people disappear. And if people disappear, you don’t know for sure that they are ever coming back.
I can’t see my mother. I can’t see my father. I start to cry, and then someone else, someone different, picks me up. Don’t cry, she whispers. Look. I have ice cream.
She shows me: It is the chocolate kind on a stick that I cannot eat fast enough, so it melts all over my hands and turns them the same color as Gideon’s. I like when that happens, because then we match. She puts on my jacket, and my shoes. She tells me we are going on an adventure.
Outside, the world seems too big, like the way it feels when I close my eyes to go to sleep and worry that no one will ever find me again in all the darkness. That’s when I start to cry, and my mother always comes. She lies down with me on the couch, until I stop thinking about how the night has swallowed us, and by the time I remember to start thinking about it again the sun is back.
But tonight my mother doesn’t come. I know where we are going. It’s the place where I run in the grass sometimes, and where we go to watch the elephants. But I’m not supposed to be in here anymore. My father shouts about it. A cry swells in my throat, and I think it’s going to come out, but she bounces me on her hip and says, Now, Jenna, you and I, we’re just going to play a game. You love games, don’t you?
And I do. I love games.
I can see the elephant in the trees, playing hide-and-seek. I think maybe that is the game we are going to play. It’s funny to think of Maura being It. I giggle, wondering if she will tag us with her trunk.
That’s better, she says. That’s my good girl. That’s my happy girl.
But I am not her good girl or her happy girl. I belong to my mother.
Lie down, she tells me. Lie on your back and look up at the stars. Let’s see if you can find the elephant in the spaces between them.
I like games, so I try. But all I see is the night, like a bowl knocked upside down, and the moon falling out. What if the bowl drops and traps me? What if I’m hidden, and my mother can’t find me?
I start to cry.
Ssh, she says.
Her hand comes over my mouth and pushes down. I try to get away, because I do not like this game. In her other hand she holds a big rock.
For a while I am asleep, I think. I dream my mother’s voice. All I can see are the trees leaning together, like they are trying to tell secrets, as Maura bursts through them.
And then I am somewhere else, outside, above, around, watching a picture of myself like when my mother puts on movies of me as a baby and I see myself on TV, even though I am still here. I am being carried, and there’s a bounce to it, and we go a long way. When Maura puts me down she rubs me with her back foot, and I think she would have been so good at hide-and-seek after all, because she is so gentle. When she pats me with her trunk, it is the way my mother taught me to touch the baby bird that fell out of its nest this spring, like I am pretending to be the wind.
Everything is soft: the secret of her breath on my cheek, the paintbrush branches she covers me with, like a blanket to keep me warm.
One minute Serenity is standing in front of me, and the next she’s gone. “Jenna?” I hear her say, and then she’s black-and-white, dappled like static.
I’m not in the lab. I’m not anywhere.
Sometimes the connection was crystal clear, and sometimes it was like being on a cell phone in the mountains, where you only catch every third word, Serenity had said.
I try to listen, but I’m only getting bits and pieces, and then the line goes dead.