Larger Than Life (Novella) Read online

  When I was four years old and was asked what I wanted to be when I grew up, I repeatedly said I wanted to be either a doctor or one of Charlie’s Angels. My mother, in her infinite wisdom, somehow crossed these two careers and came up with scientist. She bought Dixie cups and marigold seeds and brought a bucket of dirt from the backyard. “What do plants need to grow, Alice?” she asked me.

  The way she tells the story, which she does—often—I was a genius, because even at that young age I came up with the answer of water and light. I’m pretty sure, in retrospect, she coaxed the answer out of me. Then she asked how we could prove it.

  We planted three seeds. One, which I watered daily, went on the windowsill in front of the kitchen sink, which had sunlight for ten hours every day. Another, which I also watered, went into the back of the hall closet, where there was no light. The third I set on the windowsill in my bedroom, which had tons of sunlight streaming through the glass—but I left this one dry.

  Every day at 4:00 P.M. my mother had me report my observations, and she recorded what I said in a small black journal. The plant in the closet did grow—but it never flowered. It looked like a creepy jungle vine. Nothing at all happened to the cup on my bedroom windowsill. The seed in the kitchen, however, grew and flowered. It had a gorgeous, bright yellow blossom that craved the attention of the sun. Each day it craned its stalk toward the light, much like the way I’d looked up to my mother when her hands pressed that seed into damp soil for the first time.

  My first stop is at the Department of Wildlife and National Parks in Gaborone, asking for permission to translocate an orphaned calf to Karen Trendler’s reserve in South Africa. As it turns out, however, even getting across the border between Botswana and South Africa is a nightmare, thanks to the 1985 raid by the South African military on the ANC offices in Gaborone that killed twelve people. I manage to score an appointment with the director of the wildlife department, a man named Wilhelm Otto with a distractingly thin mustache that looks like a residue of chocolate milk floating above his upper lip. Otto assures me this isn’t like taking a puppy on vacation. Elephants in Botswana, he says, belong to the state, and to move one across the border, international permission has to be obtained.

  I travel to Trendler’s reserve and explain the situation, hoping she will agree to take in another stray. The moment I mention that Lesego is a survivor of poaching I know I have her sympathy, since Trendler has spoken out publicly and forcefully against the killing of rhinos and elephants for ivory. On a handshake, she agrees to house Lesego, and then she introduces me to the other orphans—several rhinos and a vervet monkey and a hawk, even another elephant calf.

  She leaves the details, however, to me. So from the sanctuary I travel to Pretoria, chasing down a CITES wildlife export permit, and an import permit to South Africa, until I finally have a thick file stuffed with all the necessary paperwork to set Lesego’s transfer into motion. My final destination, seven days later, is the first place I’d gone—the Department of Wildlife in Gaborone. Wilhelm Otto calls me the Orphan Calf Lady and invites me into his office. As I wilt in the heat on the far side of his desk, he sifts through the stack of papers for ten minutes. At this rate, Lesego will be fully grown before she’s translocated, I think. Finally, Otto glances up at me. “T’s crossed and i’s dotted,” he pronounces. “Well done, Ms. Metcalf.”

  “Doctor,” I correct.

  His eyes narrow. “Yes. Well.”

  I’m not going to get into a pissing contest with the man who controls Lesego’s fate. “What happens next?”

  “We’ll get a bush vet dispatched as soon as we can, maybe by the end of the week. Your calf will be darted and flown to the facility in South Africa.”

  He offers me a ride to a local hotel, but I am itching to get back to the game reserve to see Lesego. And, I suppose, to give Neo the good news.

  We know, at the reserve, when visitors arrive. They have to be radioed through the gate, even though it is another forty minutes of driving through the bush to reach the camp itself. So it is not a surprise to find Grant waiting for me when I pull in. “I did it,” I say, triumphant. “It wasn’t easy—it was the opposite of easy—but the vet will be here by Sunday, and Karen Trendler agreed to take her and—” When I see his expression, my sentence falls away, one syllable at a time, pebbles from the edge of a cliff. “Grant,” I whisper. “What’s wrong?”

  I am thinking of those little yellow telegrams.

  But Grant walks me to my hut, explaining on the way. Once she realized I had left, Lesego had stopped eating. No matter what Neo did to encourage her otherwise, she had refused. The calf had not eaten or drunk since I’d gone away—a full week now.

  “It’s my fault,” I murmur.

  “I called Dame Sheldrick’s orphanage in Kenya,” Grant says. “She started taking in orphaned calves in the nineteen seventies, when poaching became widespread in Tsavo. I figured if anyone could help us, it would be her. Alice … her keepers rotate. No one person watches an elephant, because the calves get too attached.” Grant stops walking and looks at me. “Before, if a keeper left for even a single day, the calf stopped eating. It started to mourn. Those first calves of hers,” he says, “they died.”

  At that, I break into a run. I fly down the path of the researchers’ village toward my hut. A flashlight has been rigged to hang over the porch, where Neo sits with Lesego. His hand strokes the stark planes of her brow, the sunken cheeks. I can see the knobs of her spine. She has deteriorated so far, so fast.

  I’ve left her before, but for minutes at a time. How long had she waited for me before beginning to give up?

  Neo looks up at me, his face ravaged.

  “I’m back, Lesego,” I croon to the calf. She struggles to get up, but she is too weak. Her eyes are dull, flat. Her skin sags, sallow, under her chin. I try to lift her head, but it is too heavy; instead, I curl my body around hers, as if I could will her my strength.

  As it turns out, you can love someone too much.

  Then, when they leave, your heart goes missing. And no one can survive that great a loss.

  “You’re going to get better,” I say fiercely. “You’re going to a new home in South Africa.” But even as I make this promise, I realize it’s one I can’t keep, unless I stay there with her. Be careful what you wish for, I think. When I’d walked her to Mpho’s herd, I’d thought I could not live without her … when all along, she was the one who could not live without me.

  I try to feed Lesego, but she is too weak to take any sustenance. And so, it happens just after 3:00 A.M. My cheek is pressed against Lesego’s belly. One minute, I can feel life thrumming beneath her skin. And the next, it’s gone.

  In Tswana, there are two ways to say goodbye. Tsamaya sentle means “go well.” Sala sentle means “stay well.” It depends on whether you are the one leaving or the one being left behind.

  Once, I came across an elephant herd grazing near a river. There was a calf that was testing its independence, that had wandered off maybe twenty or thirty yards. I was certain every female in that herd still knew his whereabouts, as surely as if he were emitting a radio signal. Suddenly, a crocodile popped out of the water, its jaws wide, its tongue a pink sponge. The calf’s mother could not see this, because she was around the river bend. But somehow she knew that calf was in trouble, and she bolted—all nine thousand pounds of her—moving faster than an animal a fraction of her size. She was at the calf’s side before I could even turn the ignition in my vehicle to try to scare off the crocodile. The elephant charged, shoving the baby out of the way so that it tumbled like a stone being skipped over the surface of the river. Then she grabbed the crocodile by the tail with her trunk, swung it over her head, and flung it so that it struck a tree and fell down dead.

  The calf scrambled beneath the safe haven of his mother.

  When you are truly, deeply scared, that’s the only place you want to be.

  I am there when my mother opens her eyes for the first time, pos