Larger Than Life (Novella) Read online

  Larger Than Life is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  2014 Ballantine eBook Edition

  Copyright © 2014 by Jodi Picoult

  Excerpt of Leaving Time copyright © 2014 by Jodi Picoult

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Ballantine Books, an imprint of Random House, a division of Random House LLC, a Penguin Random House Company, New York.

  BALLANTINE and the HOUSE colophon are registered trademarks of Random House LLC.

  This book contains an excerpt from the forthcoming book Leaving Time by Jodi Picoult. This excerpt has been set for this edition only and may not reflect the final content of the forthcoming edition.

  eBook ISBN: 978-0-553-39210-4

  www.ballantinebooks.com

  Cover design: Gabrielle Bordwin

  Cover photograph: gungerguni/Getty Images

  v3.1

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  1999, Botswana

  Excerpt from Leaving Time

  About the Author

  Other Books by This Author

  1999, Botswana

  Moments after receiving the worst news of my life, I drive into the middle of a massacre.

  The five elephants lie on their sides, dusty hills, aberrations in the landscape. Flies swarm around the black blood that has seeped into the dirt, and overhead spins a pinwheel of vultures.

  I park the Land Rover beneath a mopane tree and walk toward the bodies. I am looking for signs of life, although I know I won’t find them. I’m not sure how the poachers took this herd down. They use guns and spears, sometimes arrows poisoned with acokanthera. I’ve heard of watering holes being contaminated, of the elephants dropping like boulders after they drink.

  The largest elephant is one I recognize. Karabo has a half-moon torn from her right ear, which is now draped over her face like a shroud. I fold back the skin as I would smooth clean sheets on a bed, revealing the gash in her flesh. Her face is a blunt cliff of brow where her trunk and the tusks have been sheared away.

  I lean over and get sick in the brush, bracing my hands on my knees. Pull yourself together, Alice, I tell myself. You have a job to do.

  I have seen death in the bush before, and there is always a protocol. When an elephant dies, we researchers dutifully record the place and time of death in the data we keep on the herds. We contact a ranger, so that the tusks can be removed before villagers can come at night to cut them away, to sell them on the black market. We leave the carcass to the vultures and the jackals and the hyenas. But what are we supposed to do when the tusks are already missing? When they were the reason for the slaughter?

  I’ve been told that the Chinese believe elephants shed their tusks like deer shed their antlers, that they have no idea that the ivory pendants and carvings they covet come at so great a cost. They also don’t realize the collateral damage: In addition to the five elephants from this herd who were slaughtered, there are more who ran frantically from the poachers—and who no longer have a matriarch to lead them to food and water, to steer them away from danger. When the matriarch is gone, so is the herd’s collective memory.

  In this moment, it’s too much for me, and I start to cry. Because bad things happen all the time. Because I am too late. Because yesterday these elephants were part of a family, and today they are not.

  Maybe it is the noise I’m making, maybe it is just a shift in the wind that carries the scent of me—too human—across the bush. But suddenly there is a rustling sound that draws my attention. I look up and see an elephant calf, so young that her trunk still dangles like a broken comma, peeking from behind the mountain of her dead mother’s spine.

  She can’t be much older than a week or two; she’s less than three feet tall at the shoulder. The calf pushes against the body, trying to rouse her mother. She stretches her trunk toward her mother’s mouth, which is how she would normally check in for comfort, but there is no mouth anymore.

  There is no mother.

  “Hey, sweetheart,” I soothe, keeping my voice low, which is what elephants like. “Hey, now, you’re all right.”

  I move forward before I can think better of it. She may not be a full-grown elephant, but she still easily outweighs me by more than 150 pounds. I do not want her to startle and run—and yet I know she won’t. She will stand by her mother’s body until she wastes away.

  I’ve seen it with my own eyes.

  Until a few months ago, I worked in South Africa, at Madikwe Game Reserve. The elephants there were juveniles, survivors of the massive culls in the Kruger Park that were meant to control the elephant population through the mid-1990s. From a helicopter, government hunters would dart the matriarch with scoline, which is prohibited for human use because it causes total paralysis while conscious. When the matriarch fell, the members of her herd would bunch around her, confused and frantic. Without the matriarch telling them where and when to run, the rest were easy to kill. The calves were spared, and because they would not leave their mothers’ bodies, they were rounded up with no difficulty. They were sent to zoos and circuses overseas, or put together in forced herds on reserves, like the one in Madikwe. The hope had been that these orphans could form new family units, together. But that wasn’t how it worked out, in the long run. They became abnormally aggressive in the absence of the social guidance they would have been given by a matriarch in the wild.

  There had never been culling here in Botswana, so there are no reserves for orphans here. If I let my new boss, Grant, know that I’ve found this calf, I will be told to let nature take its course.

  I get close enough to the calf to see the hairs that sprout from her head, the dark smudges of her eyes.

  The job of scientists is to study wildlife but not to interfere with it. That’s why we are called naturalists. Yet there have been too many times in the past year when I’ve wondered if that might just be an excuse for not having to be held responsible when something goes terribly wrong.

  The calf and I both startle as one of the vultures dives like a missile, landing on the body of the elephant, pecking at the raw flesh. I turn, flailing my arms and shouting until the bird rises into the sky again, momentarily eclipsing the sun.

  When I look back at the calf, she takes two steps closer, and that’s when I know that I’m going to break all the rules. Again.

  I was ten years old, standing on an overturned crate behind a podium, trying desperately not to throw up. My hands were sweaty and my knees were banging together, and through the sea of faces in the audience, I was searching for the only one who mattered. She knew that our presentations were today. She’d promised me she would be there.

  “The life of an elephant and the life of a human,” I said, barely audible, “are not so different.” My fingers clutched the watercolor painting I’d done of an African elephant; I had to make a conscious effort to relax my grip. I knew that my face was red and that everyone was staring at me because of it, which only made me blush even more. Speaking in public had never been easy for me, but today, having to present my animal research project to a packed gymnasium, was terrifying.

  I swallowed hard. “Over the course of a lifetime, elephants both affect and are affected by their environment. Elephants live in female herds. The matriarch—the oldest in the family—makes all the decisions.”

  I glanced at my teacher, who gave me a smile of encouragement, and just then I saw a movement at the rear door of the gym. She didn’t look like anyone else’s mot