Elephant Winter
Praise for
Elephant Winter
“This is fine and brave writing . . .”—
Saturday Night
“Stylistically assured, entirely captivating . . . Kim Echlin’s
Elephant Winter
is an original, emotionally resonant novel . . . Echlin draws her characters with realistic, unsentimentalized strokes, and in the process evokes their poignant humanness with honesty and grace.”—
Books in Canada
“What is so powerful about
Elephant Winter
is the reconciliation of life with death, of joy with pain . . . we are swept briefly into the lives of these characters and exposed to a beauty rarely seen in individuals, both animal and human.
Elephant Winter
is as refreshing as it is thought-provoking, offering a prescription for balance in a shaken world.”—
The Readers Showcase
“Echlin has managed to convey the beauty and grace of living and dying, with elephants and people, all from a seedy tourist farm in southern Ontario. This is no small achievement . . . This is wonderful writing.”
—
Edmonton Journal
“Echlin has a gift of capturing the essence of a character, of the sweep of her tale, simply and elegantly . . . Echlin’s novel is achingly beautiful, at once sad and uplifting. It is a story for the heart, the mind and the soul.”
—
The Evening Telegram
“A captivating tale about listening to the language of love and having the faith to fill in the gaps.”
—
Ottawa Citizen
“The story is a rich, powerful exploration of intimacy on many levels, through the language of art, music, poetry and the language of silence. It is to be hoped there will be many more novels from this gifted storyteller.”
—
Star Phoenix
“Echlin’s love of learning, literature and high culture makes this not just an emotionally powerful debut but a smart one as well.”
—
NOW Magazine
“Echlin’s wonderful first novel explores the language of intimacy in all relationships and explores the vitality of words.”
—
Why Magazine
“A well-written book, full of fine and rich literary description. When the author of
Elephant Winter
writes a second novel, I want to read it.”—
Leader Post
“Anyone who reads Kim Echlin’s debut
Elephant Winter
will savour it for a long time. The story is painful and triumphant in turns, a pleasing, optimistic first novel.”—
The Daily Press
“
Elephant Winter
is enormously engaging, unusual enough to catch the popular imagination, and well and wisely enough to endure . . . The end comes too soon.”—
Quill & Quire
PENGUIN CANADA
ELEPHANT WINTER
KIM ECHLIN
has been a documentary filmmaker, editor, and teacher. She has worked and travelled in Europe, China, the Marshall Islands, Africa, and Cambodia, and has completed a doctoral thesis on Ojibway storytelling. She currently writes and teaches in Toronto. Her first novel,
Elephant Winter
, won the Torgi Talking Book of the Year Award and was shortlisted for the Chapters/Books in Canada First Novel Award. Her most recent novel is
The Disappeared
, a love story set against the backdrop of the Pol Pot era.
ALSO BY KIM ECHLIN
Dagmar’s Daughter
Inanna: From the Myths of Ancient Sumer
The Disappeared
WINTER
KIM ECHLIN
PENGUIN CANADA
Published by the Penguin Group
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Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
First published in a Viking Canada hardcover by Penguin Group (Canada), a division of Pearson Canada Inc., 1997
Published in Penguin Canada paperback by Penguin Group (Canada), a division of Pearson Canada Inc., 1998
Published in this edition, 2009
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 (WEB)
Copyright © Kim Echlin, 1997
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
The acknowledgments on page 203 constitute an extension of this copyright page.
Publisher’s note: This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental
.
Manufactured in Canada.
ISBN: 978-0-14-317058-7
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication data available upon request to the publisher.
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for Ross who showed me
the marvels of Lake Kariba
&
for my mother who always says
follow your heart
Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani?
That is to say, My God, my God,
why hast thou forsaken me?
–
The Passion of St. Matthew
Singing a Magnificat, Conception of an Elephant
ELEPHANT-ENGLISH DICTIONARY: PART ONE
ELEPHANT-ENGLISH DICTIONARY: PART TWO
ELEPHANT-ENGLISH DICTIONARY: PART THREE
ELEPHANT-ENGLISH DICTIONARY: PART FOUR
ELEPHANT-ENGLISH DICTIONARY: PART FIVE
The Birth of Omega, or Breeding in Captivity
ELEPHANT
WINTER
I
am called the Elephant-Keeper, which suits me. My name is Sophie Walker. When I am not at the elephant barns, I live in a crowded house near a tacky commercial tourist farm in southern Ontario. I have a daughter and I take care of the elephants.
I used to read about women who live with animals, women who have followed orangutans and gorillas through sodden rain forests and misty mountains. They talk about looking into the eyes of their animals and seeing the face of God. But I cannot merely observe my elephants, because I feed them, fill their water troughs, shovel their dung, take them for walks and train them to safely carry small children. They dip their knees so that I can climb up their sides to ride on their shoulders. Swaying up there, I hang between heaven and earth. In short, I live with the elephants and they have allowed me into their community.
The elephants have taught me their language. Much of it I cannot hear but I’ve filled in the spaces with invention,
which is how most people listen to language anyway. The longer I am with them the less invention we need. Wittgenstein said that to imagine a language is to imagine a form of life. But I’m not imagining the elephants. They are really there.
If you choose to live with elephants you’ve chosen to live enthralled. I allow myself to be ravished by them. I risk their force, to break and blow, to untie and overthrow. I am imprisoned with them and our bonds free us. We have little language for this sort of thing.
The story I am about to tell you is how I came to live with elephants in captivity.
Batter my heart.
of
an ELEPHANT
T
he place was closed for the season. My mother’s house backed on the maple forest at the far end of the Ontario Safari. While she slept each afternoon I watched the elephant-keeper take the elephants on walks through the woods. They rubbed their sides on the trees and scuffed in the fresh snow.
The keeper was a young man who wore his thick grey jacket open to the freezing winds and only a baseball cap pulled down over his long hair. He had high cheekbones and a strong jaw and his blue eyes were wrinkled at the corners from squinting against wind and sun. His jeans were tucked into barn boots but his step was light and his body lithe. He moved with the attractive, loose carriage of men who choose not to submit to offices and desks.
He thought himself unobserved as he rolled up snowballs and tossed them playfully, talking and lightly swaying, at ease in the elephants’ company. One of them touched a trunk to his face and he kissed the end and took its tip right inside
his own mouth. That was when he glanced up and spotted me looking at him through the window. I lifted my hand to wave but he turned away and stamped his feet and pulled his meagre hat down over the whitening edges of his ears. He reminded me of young men I had met in Africa, easier out in the bush than anywhere else. He moved away as if to go, and all the elephants moved with him, but then he paused, looked back for me through the glass and beckoned me to come out with his hand. I shook my head, no.
The light over those snowy Ontario fields was short and grey and bleak. We were just past winter solstice and though I’d been home some weeks, I still found it odd to look through the kitchen window and see the curious face of a giraffe above the snowy maple trees. But my mother had always found unusual places to live, and soon enough I was inured even to the swaying grey silhouettes of elephants at play in the snowy fields.
