Leaving Time Read online

  “And I’ve never met anyone who’s ever collared an elephant. I guess we’re even.”

  “What made you want to start a sanctuary?”

  “In 1903 there was this elephant at Coney Island named Topsy. She helped build the theme park, and gave rides, and performed in shows. One day, her handler threw his lit cigarette in her mouth. She killed him, big surprise, and was labeled a dangerous elephant. Topsy’s owners wanted her killed, so they turned to Thomas Edison, who was trying to show the dangers of AC current. He rigged up the elephant, and she died within seconds.” He looked at me. “Fifteen hundred people watched, including my great-grandfather.”

  “So the sanctuary is some kind of legacy?”

  “No, I didn’t really remember the story until I was in college and worked one summer at a zoo. They had just gotten an elephant, Lucille. This was big news because elephants are always a draw. They were hoping she would pull the revenue of the zoo back into the black. I was hired as an assistant to the head keeper, who had extensive experience with circus elephants.” He glanced out at the bush. “Did you know that you don’t even have to touch an elephant with a bull hook to get it to do what you want? You just put it near the ear, and they’ll move away from the threat of the pain, because they know what to expect. Needless to say, I made the grave mistake of saying that elephants were conscious of how badly we were treating them. I was fired.”

  “I just changed the focus of my fieldwork to how elephants grieve.”

  He glanced at me. “They’re better at it than people.”

  I put my foot on the brake, so we rolled to a stop. “My colleagues would argue with you. No, actually, they’d laugh at you. Like they laugh at me.”

  “Why?”

  “For their work, they can use collars, and measurements, and experimental data. What looks like cognition to one scientist looks like conditioning to another—and there’s no conscious thought necessary for that.” I turned to him. “But let’s say I could prove it. Can you imagine the implications for wildlife management? Like you said to Owen—is it ethical to dart an elephant with M99 if she’s fully aware of what we’re doing? Especially if it’s a precursor to a shot in the head, like when we cull a herd? And if we shouldn’t be doing that, how do we manage elephant populations?”

  He glanced at me, fascinated. “That collar you put on the elephant—does it measure hormones? Stress levels? Is she sick? How do you predict a death, so you know which elephant to collar?”

  “Oh, we can’t predict death. That collar’s for someone else’s project. They’re trying to find out the turning radius of an elephant.”

  “Whatever the elephant needs it to be,” Thomas said with a laugh. “That’s the punch line, right?”

  “I’m not kidding.”

  “Really? How could anyone possibly think that research matters more than what you’re doing?” He shook his head. “Wanda? The elephant that nearly drowned? She has a partially paralyzed trunk, and she needed a security blanket of sorts when she came to the sanctuary. She got into the habit of dragging a tire around with her. Eventually, she bonded with Lilly and didn’t need the tire all the time anymore because she had a friend. But when Lilly died, Wanda was pretty devastated. After Lilly was buried, Wanda brought her tire to the grave site and laid it down on top of the dirt. It was almost like she was paying tribute. Or maybe she thought Lilly needed a little comfort now.”

  I had never heard anything so moving in my life. I wanted to ask him if sanctuary elephants stayed with the bodies of those they’d considered family. I wanted to ask if Wanda’s behavior was the anomaly or the norm. “Can I show you something?”

  Making a decision on the spot, I took a detour, driving in a widening circle, until we reached Mmaabo’s body. I knew that Grant would have a fit if he learned I had taken a visitor to see an elephant corpse; one of the reasons we told the rangers of deaths was so that they could avoid taking tourists near a decaying body. By now, scavengers had picked apart the elephant; flies buzzed in a cloud around the carcass. And yet Onalenna and three other elephants were standing quietly nearby. “This was Mmaabo,” I said. “She was the matriarch of a herd of about twenty elephants. She died yesterday.”

  “Who’s in the distance?”

  “Her daughter and some of the rest of the herd. They’re mourning,” I said defensively. “Even if I’m never able to prove it.”

  “You could measure it,” Thomas said, mulling. “There are researchers who’ve worked with baboons in Botswana, to measure stress. I’m pretty sure that fecal samples showed an increase in glucocorticoid stress markers after one of the baboons in the group was killed by a predator—and those markers were more pronounced in baboons that were socially linked to the dead one. So if you can get fecal matter from elephants—which looks to be pretty abundant—and can statistically show a rise in cortisol—”

  “Then maybe it works like it does in humans, to trigger oxytocin,” I finished. “Which would be a biological reason for elephants to seek out comfort from each other after the death of a member of the herd. A scientific explanation for grief.” I stared at him, amazed. “I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone quite as passionate as I am about elephants.”

  “First time for everything,” Thomas murmured.

  “You don’t just run a sanctuary.”

  He ducked his head. “My undergraduate degree was in neurobiology.”

  “Mine, too,” I said.

  We both stared at each other, further adjusting our expectations. I noticed that Thomas had green eyes, and that there was a ring of orange around each of his irises. When he grinned, I felt as if I’d taken a dart of M99, as if I was caught in the prison of my own body.

  We were interrupted by the sounds of rumbling. “Ah,” I said, forcing myself to turn away. “Like clockwork.”

  “What is?”

  “You’ll see.” I put the Land Rover into low gear and started up a steep incline. “When you approach wild elephants,” I explained quietly, “you do it the way you’d want your own worst enemy to approach you. Would you feel comfortable if he came in and surprised you from behind? Or cut between you and your child?” I pulled the vehicle in a wide circle at the plateau, and then crested the edge downhill to reveal a breeding herd splashing in a pond. Three calves piled on top of each other in a mud puddle, the one on the bottom rolling out from underneath his cousins and spraying a fountain in the air. But even their mothers were wading and kicking, making waves, wallowing.

  “That’s the matriarch,” I told him, pointing to Boipelo. “And that’s Akanyang, with the folded ear. She’s Dineo’s mother. Dineo’s the cheeky one, tripping his brother, over there.” I introduced Thomas to each elephant by name, ending with Kagiso. “She’s due to deliver in about a month,” I told him. “Her first calf.”

  “Our girls play in the water all the time,” Thomas said, delighted. “I figured they picked that behavior up at the zoos where they used to live, as distraction. I assumed that, in the bush, it’s always life or death.”

  “Well, yeah,” I agreed. “But play is part of life. I’ve seen a matriarch slide down a steep bank on her butt, just for fun.” I leaned back, propping my sneakers on the dashboard, letting Thomas watch the antics. One calf threw herself sideways in the mud, displacing her younger sibling, who squealed his distress. Just like that, their mother trumpeted: Enough, you two.

  “This is exactly what I came here to see,” Thomas said softly.

  I looked at him. “A watering hole?”

  He shook his head. “When an elephant is brought to us at the sanctuary, she’s already broken. We do our best to put her back together again. But it’s all guesswork, unless you know what she looked like when she was whole.” Thomas faced me. “You’re lucky, to see this every day.”

  I didn’t tell him that I’d also seen calves orphaned by culling, and droughts so severe that the skin of the elephants stretched over their hip bones like canvas on a frame. I didn’t tell him how, in the