Larger Than Life (Novella) (2 page)

I keep waiting for the punch line to the joke: How do you get a 250-pound calf to
follow you home?

Very carefully.

The calf doesn’t react when I take a length of rope I’ve found in the back of my vehicle
and loop it around her belly, under her arms, knotting it at her back to create a
makeshift leash. I grab the rifle that is on the hood of my Land Rover, standard equipment
in the bush, just in case. But the minute I try to walk with her, she digs in her
feet and will not budge.

I don’t really have a game plan here. I cannot load the calf into the back of my vehicle
by myself. And I can’t radio a colleague and call in a favor, because that means putting
another researcher at risk for punishment. Which means that if I want to transport
this elephant anywhere, she’s going to have to be a cooperative partner.

“Listen,” I say, “I’m doing this to help you.”

If I do not take the calf with me, she will die—it’s really that simple. She needs
her mother’s milk, and her mother can no longer provide it. Even if her aunts and
sisters return—although there’s every reason to believe they won’t, since they now
associate this spot with violence at the hands of humans—they won’t feed the calf.
If they share their milk with this newborn, there won’t be enough to sustain their
own babies. Eventually, the calf will fall behind the herd, weak and dehydrated, and
putting the interests of the whole herd over the individual calf will cause them to
leave her.

I tug on the rope again. She is less than three feet tall; surely I can make her budge.
“Please?”

The calf shakes her head, flapping her ears. They are still pink, undercooked, translucent.
She sticks her trunk straight out and trumpets feebly.

I know of other countries in Africa that have elephant orphanages—as well as staff
and planes and medicine and everything needed to mount a rescue operation. Me, I have
a length of rope, and my sheer stubbornness.

Even if, by some miracle, I am able to sneak the calf into camp—then what? I don’t
know what to feed her. I can’t keep her hidden without Grant finding out what I’ve
done. But I also can’t leave her behind and get up tomorrow morning and pretend it
is just another day.

The little elephant turns her back on me and hurries toward her mother. She fusses
near the dead elephant’s armpit, searching for a teat. When she can’t reach one, she
pats her mother’s hide with her trunk.

When I was a child, I was terrified of thunderstorms. Even after my mother came into
my bedroom and explained the mechanics of rising and falling air currents and friction
and electrical charges, I’d cry until she pulled me into her arms and rocked me. I’d
pat her back, as if she were the one who needed comfort, but really, it was just to
make sure she was still there.

We know that elephants grieve. We know they will return for years to the site where
a family member has died. I can only imagine, then, that when an elephant sees her
mother murdered, she will relive that moment for the rest of her life. She will mourn,
just like I would.

“I know you don’t want to let her go,” I say to the calf.

The elephant is no longer looking at me. She is staring at the rifle I hold in my
other hand, the one I’ve pried from its latches on the hood of the Land Rover.

I feel a sharp pain in my chest as I realize that this calf does not differentiate
me from any of the humans who killed her family while she watched. I realize she expects
to be next.

As stupid as it is to try to single-handedly transport an orphaned elephant the distance
back to base camp, it is even more stupid to do it on foot. There are predators in
the wild who could easily make a meal of a 125-pound woman and a newborn elephant.
They could track us by scent, move in stealth, and kill me before I even understood
what was happening. This is why, of course, even in the safety of our vehicles, we
always carry rifles.

Yet I now place my rifle back into the Land Rover, leaving me completely unarmed and
at the mercy of the bush. That same rifle—in my hands—will make it impossible for
me to convince the baby to move.

Yes, I am being reckless.

Yes, I know the stories of even highly skilled native rangers who’ve been killed in
the wild.

Yes, I know better.

But that baby elephant, she starts to follow me.

To say elephants have been around forever is not really an exaggeration. There are
examples of elephants in art since the Paleolithic era. Romans included elephants
in mosaics in Tunisia and Sicily. The Mbuti people of Africa believed that the souls
of their ancestors returned as elephants; chiefs from other tribes were buried with
elephant tusks. The Airavata—mythological father of all elephants in Hinduism—is associated
with lightning and thunder. Ganesha, with his elephant head, is one of the most important
Hindu deities, and it is he who removes obstacles. According to Buddhist lore, Buddha
was a white elephant reborn as a human. The year 570, to Muslims, is when Mohammed
was born … and it is also called the Year of the Elephant.

Elephants have been around forever—but they have not been ubiquitous. When James Stevenson-Hamilton
came to the Sabi Nature Reserve in South Africa a hundred years ago to be its first
warden, he couldn’t find a single one. Through conservation, the numbers slowly grew,
but then from 1979 to 1989, the population of elephants in Africa plummeted again,
from 1.3 million to 600,000, mostly due to illegal poaching for ivory. In 1989 the
trade of ivory was banned, allowing their population to rebuild. Then in 1997 Botswana,
Namibia, and Zimbabwe were allowed to downlist their elephants to a less endangered
status, and the taste of ivory led to a surge in the hunger for it again. It was like
trying to hold back a tide. But poaching was no longer a trickle; it had become a
flood.

The first sign of poaching is a disparity of gender in an elephant population—too
few males, who are being picked off for their ivory. When the big males are gone,
poachers turn to the matriarchs, whose tusks are next largest in size. But in killing
the dominant female in a herd, they destroy the collective knowledge of the entire
family. They sentence to death the young calves still being nursed. They leave the
surviving elephants with long-term deficits in communication, decision making, and
transfer of
knowledge. The matriarch is a knot that holds together a rope made of many strings.
Cut the rope below the knot, and it unravels.

I wonder, when women who buy beautiful ivory jewelry fasten those elaborate pendants
around their throats, if they are choked by sadness.

There is a part of the game reserve that is set apart for tourists who pay exorbitant
amounts of money to come on safari, to photograph the Big Five, and to stay in lovely
thatched huts with luxurious furnishings. And then there is the place where the rest
of us live: small, spartan buildings with kitchenettes and box fans, and toilets that
work about half the time you need them to.

My cottage is at the end of a long row, set apart from the other huts inhabited by
researchers, as if it were an afterthought. This is due to seniority—I was the last
to arrive, and thus am the farthest from our communal office space. It is not usually
something I complain about, except for the times I’ve had to walk home alone on a
moonless night and have been scared out of my wits by a warthog running across the
path. Tonight, though, I’m grateful, because my cottage’s location will make it easier
to hide what I’ve brought back to camp.

I’m grateful, too, for the darkness. Walking through the bush as the day bled out,
tethered only to the umbilical leash of the calf, I felt like I had a target on my
back. The bright neon eyes of the jackals and bush babies became a lion’s or a leopard’s
in my imagination; every flutter of a bird’s wing and crack of a branch made my heart
skip a beat. But now night’s a veil, a curtain that lets us slip past the watering
hole, past the
boma
where the paying guests are enjoying their dinner, toward the residences.

The only buildings even farther down the road than my cottage belong to the rangers.
The local Tswana men who are lucky enough to have those jobs sleep there in barracks.
They are often four or five hours’ drive from their home villages, and get only a
few days off a month. Sometimes, their families will come to visit, staying overnight
in the rangers’ village. We all know and like the rangers and get on easily with them,
but when the sun goes down, they amiably go their way and we go ours. The other
researchers and I will convene in the office to open a bottle of wine or play cards
while the rangers’ lights are all out before 9:00
P.M
. They will be up at 3:30
A.M
. servicing the vehicles and sweeping the reserve to assess what’s happened overnight—a
hyena that has finally given birth, a dead giraffe, the tracks of a leopard stalking
its prey.

When I get to my cottage, I tie the elephant to the wooden post of the porch. My door
faces the bush (another stroke of luck), so someone walking by will not immediately
be faced with the reality of a calf hitched up like a horse at a saloon. I dash inside,
making a quick inventory of the food I have in my small pantry. Stale crackers, processed
cheese, a bag of almonds, a ginger beer. Nothing that would help the calf. I can hear
her stomping around, knocking against the post. I stick my head out, and she stops.
“You need to be quiet,” I whisper. I put my finger up to my lips.

She lifts her trunk and blows a raspberry.

“Stay here,” I say, and I slip silently down the path to the office we researchers
share. In addition to our computers and research logs, there is a ratty couch and
a few armchairs that have coughed out their stuffing.

I hesitate at the door, peeking to see Anya, another researcher, dealing cards to
Lou, who has been here longer than anyone. Taking a deep breath, I step inside.

Anya looks up first. “Where have you been?”

“Battery died on the Land Rover,” I say.

“So you walked back?” She whistles. “You’re either very brave or very stupid.”

You have no idea
, I think. I was traveling with what any big cat would consider an appetizer.

“You want to be dealt in?” Paul asks.

“No, I’m wiped out,” I say. I start rummaging through the cabinets where we keep our
coffee supplies. There are sugar packets, which have caked into tiny bricks in the
humidity, and pods of instant coffee. But the tin that contains our powdered milk
is empty. “You’ve got to be kidding me,” I mutter.

Anya glances at me. “I know, it sucks. The shipment was due in two days ago. I’d tell
you the coffee’s not so bad black, but I’d be totally lying.”

“Son-of-a-bitch,” I say, smacking my hands on the counter.

Anya and Paul exchange a glance. “Maybe you should switch to herbal tea,”
Anya suggests.

I don’t respond, just grab the wine bottle where it sits on the table between them.
Back at my cottage, I leave the door open so that the elephant can watch me as I dump
the remaining liquid into the sink and rinse the bottle as best I can. She bleats,
loud enough for me to freeze to see if anyone else has heard her. When no one comes
running, I fill the empty bottle with water and add a few drops of corn syrup two
years past its expiration date that was left in the pantry of the hut by my predecessor.
Glucose would have been better, but this is a decent substitute.

The calf stares at me as I lift the bottle and try to tilt it into her mouth. She
turns her head and knocks me down sideways, so that the bottle goes spinning and half
its contents spill.

This time I try lifting her trunk to mimic the way she would be standing if she were
nursing from her mother. Her mouth opens, but when I attempt to pour the sweetened
water into her mouth, she chokes and backs away. Then she arches her trunk beneath
my arm, jerking her head, as if I could nurse her.