Larger Than Life (Novella) Read online

  “Alice,” the vet said to me, “if the calf dies, it dies. And if you can’t handle that, you’re in the wrong business.”

  I drove him back to camp in silence. But once he’d been dropped off, I loaded blankets into the Land Rover and returned to the spot where we had left the calf. I covered him in black fleece as he lay on his side, weak and bleating, and that’s when I saw something I had never seen in all the years I had been studying elephants.

  This baby was crying.

  The jury was still out on whether or not elephants could shed tears. Charles Darwin believed that humans wept as a result of grief, and animals largely did not. But he did cite a report of an Indian elephant that had tears flowing from its eyes after its capture. Elephant researcher Iain Douglas-Hamilton had reported injured elephants that cried. There were anecdotal accounts from circus trainers saying elephants shed tears when reprimanded, from hunters who saw a bull they’d shot weep as it fell to the ground, from naturalists claiming they’d seen female elephants cry while in labor.

  I knelt beside the calf, staring at the moisture that dripped down his face, trying to come up with a scientific explanation. Elephants routinely had temporal secretions—wetness that ran not from the corners of the eyes but from the sides of the head. They secreted in times of stress, excitement, sexual attraction, fear—any emotionally charged situation. But I touched my finger to the calf’s temple, and it came away dry. I touched my finger to the inside corner of his eye, and it came away wet.

  It was possible that the calf’s eyes were watering due to heat or dust. After all, there was no doubt that elephants could produce tears. The problem was in suggesting that those tears were a result of sadness.

  It has been shown that when humans cry, the chemical makeup of “sad” tears is different from that of tears shed in happiness or anger. I wished for a way to conduct such an experiment on elephants.

  That whole night, I kept a vigil over the newborn. Shortly after dawn, because he could no longer nurse from his mother, the calf died.

  I was with him when he passed. And yes, I cried.

  Calling in sick the next morning is really not a lie. It is just that the inhabitant of my cottage who is suffering from severe gastrointestinal issues is not me but the elephant.

  Granted, I am not firing on all pistons myself. I had not realized that the calf would get up at regular intervals for more sweetened water, which didn’t sate her in the least. There is a reason people say being a mother is the hardest job in the world: You do not sleep and you do not get vacation time. You do not leave your work on your desk at the end of the day. Your briefcase is your heart, and you are rifling through it constantly. Your office is as wide as the world, and your punch card is measured not in hours but in a lifetime.

  I would trade just about anything right now for an academic library that could offer me resources on what to feed an elephant calf. But all I have is the experience from my years in the field: that this orphan won’t survive for very long unless I find her some milk.

  I slip down the road to the rangers’ village, leaving the calf inside my hut. The door to their small communal kitchen facility is ajar, and I duck inside to raid their cupboards. Like us, they use powdered milk, because nothing keeps for very long in the bush. But unlike ours, their tin is half full.

  I look around the space, which is scrubbed and clean—not at all what I’d expect for the living quarters of six men. In the corner is a small blue bucket filled with wooden pull toys and stuffed animals; these must be for the children who come to visit their fathers. The men who become rangers lead lives like those of soldiers—going off to do their tours of duty for weeks at a time; working long, intense, dangerous hours; enjoying rare conjugal visits from their wives. But there is rarely turnover among the rangers; the job is steady and pays well. In Botswana, such occupations are difficult to come by.

  I arrange the pile of toys as neatly as I can and wash the bucket in the sink with soap and water. Then I dump the contents of the powdered milk tin inside, adding warm water. I mix it up with my hand, trying to get the powder to dissolve.

  When I hear a voice behind me, I startle and nearly upend the bucket. “I can’t wait to see the size of the bowl of cereal.”

  The ranger is smiling, his teeth blindingly white against his dark skin. His hair is shaved close to the scalp, and he wears the tan khaki uniform that all our rangers wear. His voice sounds like music, the mark of a man who has spoken Setswana his whole life and learned English only because he had to.

  He also has a bloody bandage wrapped around his right hand.

  “What are you doing here?” I say.

  “I live here,” he replies. “What is your excuse?”

  I have seen him around but have not been at camp long enough yet to be assigned to ride with him into the bush. I do not remember his name. “The researchers ran out of milk for our coffee.”

  He looks at the bucket, amused. “I am guessing you take it very light?” He smells of cloves, of soap. “Excuse me,” he says, and his shoulder bumps against my arm as he reaches into the cabinet above me. He pulls down a roll of gauze and some tape, and begins to patch up his wound. After watching a few failed one-handed attempts, I offer to hold the gauze in place so that he can secure it. “Damn lions,” he mutters.

  My eyes fly to his face. “You were mauled?”

  There it is again, that smile. “Yes. By only a piece of barbed wire that was cutting into a baobab tree.” He holds out his uninjured hand. “I am Neo.”

  “Alice,” I say, giving a perfunctory shake. My arms circle the bucket, and I think of all the damage a baby elephant can do in five minutes. “I need to go.”

  “I can give you a ride into the bush, if you like.”

  “No. I’m … sick today.”

  He inclines his head and crosses to the pantry on the other side of the room. For a moment he rummages, only to emerge with another tin. “This was left behind by the wife of one of the other rangers. It should work for … indigestion.”

  As he opens the door, I squint into the sunlight. It swallows him whole.

  It takes my eyes a minute to adjust, so that I can read the label more carefully.

  SMA Gold Cap. Neo has handed me a tin of powdered baby formula.

  I did not always work with elephants. In fact, when I started my doctorate in neuroscience, I experimented on primates. My research involved running behavioral protocols on adolescent macaques. Each of the subjects wore a plastic collar, which allowed us to affix a straight pole to jump them from cage to cage without having to fear the piercing canine teeth that grew in as they became adults.

  There were two types of scientists in the lab, I realized. First were the ones who used the pole, but only to put it near the collar, gently tap the macaque, and open the cage so that the monkey could leap inside. The second kind yanked the macaque to the floor and pinned it until the monkey stopped resisting, at which point the researcher released it to take refuge in the cage. Monkeys that had been treated that way required extra caution, because they were more likely to swat at any human who came close. They had long ago stopped differentiating between those of us who might be kind and those of us who weren’t.

  In the four years I worked with primates, I was only mildly hurt once or twice. I slapped my monkey’s hand accidentally, and he decked me; I turned my back and was scratched on my shoulder. And then there was the day I turned down the offer of a tenure-track position in neurobiology at Harvard.

  I remember because it was the only time my mother ever visited me in the lab. She came in white-faced and shaking at the end of the day, when I was the only person in in the room with a group of cages filled with tiny preadolescent macaques. One, which I’d named Hawkeye because of his inadvertent Mohawk hairdo, had a reputation as a difficult animal because he’d struck out at other scientists, who in turn would be more punishing when they worked with him to keep him under control. I took another approach—rewarding good behavior wi