The Cowboy and his Elephant (2 page)

Amy’s mother soon grew impatient and took herself several yards from the birth celebration for food and rest. A daughter of the matriarch, she was acknowledged to possess strength and character. She was smaller but more dominant than her sisters, whom she bossed, and they obeyed as if she herself were the matriarch.

Like all female elephants of every age, she switched
effortlessly from watchful mother to distracted child. Lessons for life were surely to be learned in “play,” but as the true kings and queens of Africa, elephants lorded over life. They seemed to have
leisure,
which they used for friendship and gaiety, courtship, reverence—and for itself alone.

Now Amy’s grandmother scooted away the aunties and cousins as if in weary disgust. Their doting over Amy threatened to weaken the baby, whose ability to keep up with the herd was a matter of her survival. The family was migrating in loose association with its herd along the western edge of their territory, inside the 423,000-acre Charisa (in the Sengwa Wildlife Research Area), on the boundary of Zimbabwe’s Chizarira National Park. The Sengwa River traversed the Charisa and meandered across a valley floor of escarpments and cliffs of Karoo sandstone before pouring into Lake Kariba, some fifty miles below the falls. Each family member needed sixty pounds of forage daily to satisfy his or her appetite. Wander for food was what elephants did, how they lived, and what consumed their time. It was their
job.

After the hiatus of the birth, the matriarch rumbled a familiar call,
“Grah,”
the “Let’s go” signal. The elephants stood still, as if frozen in place. They listened to her calls, and they obeyed her without question. For she alone was their link to the lore of their collective past. She was their leader. Without her they would not know what to think, or do, or where to go. Until the day she died, she was their mother, their compass, their memory.

With their ears flared, the family set off in single file at a
pace to ease the strain on the baby. The aunties guarded the column’s rear and flanks against the jackals and hyenas that had already devoured Amy’s placenta and sought her out eagerly as a tender meal. Her mother urged her along when she scampered through a forest of legs. Many big eyes peered down and never lost sight of her. Elephants’ eyes, with the acuity to spy a tiny morsel on the ground from seven or eight feet high, and to see to their sides—and with a slight movement of their head to their rear—missed nothing, especially not a 150-pound baby careening through their legs.

No sight could convince an observer of the goodness of their being more than that of female elephants on the march. They showed toward one another what humans would call contentment, joy, and affection. They touched as though they would rather have been there and nowhere else, and with no other creatures. They were at peace. Their world pleased them, as the ladies of the land. They
were
the world.

T
he baby Amy grew stronger, heavier, taller; and with a widening world, she was learning where she belonged in an order that changed over the seasons by birth, maturity, and death.

The elephants displayed personalities as varied as any extended human family. Unlike the bulls, who separated from the family when they reached adolescence—in their early to middle teens—and achieved their prominence
through physical strength, females found their order through assertiveness, character, intelligence, and judgment; the capacity for memory, and something else mysterious and hard to define. Some elephants remained adolescents their whole lives, forgetful and foolish, while others brooded and stood aloof, and still others sought neither high nor low ground but were content to eat, breed, raise their young, remain a part of the female family, and die.

The more assertive females stood up to the younger bulls that pestered those females who had already chosen as a mate a more dominant male. These females tolerated no bullying. They stood between their sisters and trouble, and led them away from harm. They worked and lived together as a unit, subsuming individuality, while the males distinguished themselves in more clearly obvious ways, presenting themselves in broad strokes. They were cranky, or outright mean, or sometimes just timid, souls who were terrified of their own shadows, and so on. Males needed to define themselves thus. Females did not. And this made them who they were.

As a collective of mothers and mothers-to-be, the females spoiled the babies; watched over them; and nurtured, encouraged, and praised them. They did not discipline or punish them for their mistakes. A moment’s inattention or a baby’s wandering away from the herd to play could mean a life ended quickly. Indeed, the brutality of nature served elephants as discipline served humans.

_____

T
hose who know elephants, work with them, study them, and have hunted them have never doubted their intelligence. One hunter says, “These are special animals. I know it. I’m not a guy who has ever done research. I just kept my eyes open and lived here among them for forty years. They are the most intelligent animals of all, period.”

Amy depended on her elders’ intelligence in times of trouble. All elephants got stuck—in mud, in pits, in bowls under the surface of shallow water, in sand. Amy was no different,
and
she was curious. Once she found herself trapped on a shelf in the river. She could not climb the bank. She screamed her alarm call. Her mother panicked and ran to her rescue. She saw the trouble, and she called the aunties to help her. With patient but insistent coordination, the adults waded into the river and pushed and prodded with their tusks and trunks to lift her up to safety.

Y
ears before Amy’s birth, when lightning had sparked a wildfire that burned hot and fast, one elephant in the family was seriously scorched, and in her agony she lost the will to flee from the flames. She screamed in pain; she faltered. The other females, heedless of their own safety, rushed into the fire and pushed her to get her out. Her family would not allow her to give up, and she lived.

Another time, also before Amy’s birth, a younger female died of unknown causes. She had not been shot, and she
was too young to have died of any ailment of old age. The other females, by their subsequent actions, did not believe that she was dead. They tried to pick her up. They pushed her huge body more than fifty yards into a clump of thick underbrush, where they inspected her all over with their trunks. They pushed at her; they mounted her; they screamed at her, shaded her, and brought her water.

Some hours went by. Humans arrived, and the elephants fled. The humans removed the dead elephant’s tusks, and with butcher knives they cut a large panel of valuable hide off her side, leaving a broad square of bright white subcutaneous tissue exposed to the light. The females returned that night. Clearly upset by what they saw, they set out to “doctor” her. One by one they went down to the riverbank some miles distant and picked up mud, with which they returned to salve the dead elephant’s whitened side. And when they were done, and the dead elephant was dark skinned once more, in the eyes of the other elephants she should have been ready to come along with them. They waited. In the morning, when she did not get up, they went on reluctantly without her.

This remarkable ability to feel distress in their own kind—and also in other, unrelated species—and to try to relieve it sets elephants apart from other species. This compassionate quality certainly impressed Alexander the Great, who fought the Battle of Hydaspes in early summer 326
B.C
., in which the Indian monarch Porus was grievously wounded and would have died if the elephant he was riding had not
carried him off the field of battle, laid him down on the earth, and with its trunk plucked out the arrows from his body with a gentleness that Alexander described as “human.” So impressed was he that later he minted a coin in the elephant’s honor.

Since then, throughout history, the compassion of elephants has intrigued, mystified, and forced on humans a reappraisal of anthropomorphism as a needless and artificial wall between humans and other animals. For the most part women anthropologists (Cynthia Moss, Joyce Poole, Katy Payne, Daphne Sheldrick, and others) have pioneered this sensible, logical view through their studies of elephants, using words like “fun,” “silly,” “sad,” and “happy” to describe aspects of elephant behavior. Sheldrick, for one, says, “[Elephants] have a sense . . . that projects beyond their own kind and sometimes extends to others in distress. They help one another in adversity, miss an absent loved one, and when you know them really well, you can see that they even smile when [they are] having fun and are happy.”

A measure of elephants’ intelligence is their ability to communicate over long distances through sound frequencies below the level of human hearing. Elephant researchers such as Katy Payne have recorded the sounds of elephants, which some skeptics have dismissed as noise. But the debate over meaning would seem silly to a child, who might reasonably ask,
If elephants
don’t
talk over such long distances, why do they have such big ears?
In fact these function as biological radiators to cool the blood to an elephant’s
brain. But is that all? Might not the same ears also scoop delicate low-frequency bundles of sound (messages) out of the air, just as humans’ huge parabolic radio telescopes sweep the skies for scintillas of celestial sound (messages)? Why do some think of one as ridiculous when the other is called science?

T
here is no doubt that elephants’ sounds had shaken the air above the Sengwa with a warning to Amy’s family, then browsing along a southward track within the Lake Kariba watershed, and within the boundaries of the research area. In response the family had shifted farther west. From time to time the older females lifted their trunks high above their heads, sweeping the air for the scent of danger. For verification the matriarch hoisted the end of another female’s trunk as if to say, I
smell danger. Do you?
She acted as if she did not know how to decide. The patterns of the sounds were mixed, and the smells seemed vague. There might be danger ahead, but it had neither a shape nor an identity that the family could understand. And the matriarch relied on the patterns, customs, routes, and rituals that had protected her family before. These new warnings were frightening—without content. For several weeks, while the herd’s bulls continued on their southward migration, the females slowed down and listened, and waited until there was silence again.

T
he whole world of Amy’s family had not changed for generations, until about fifty years ago, when humans began to
farm the lands that were the elephants’ traditional migration grounds. The products of human toil and the sun and the rain, the crops were seen by the elephants simply as glorious gifts. The consequences of this misunderstanding would soon spark a tragic chain of events that would change baby Amy’s life forever.

F
or now she was learning to become self-sufficient. She still nursed at her mother’s breasts, but as she grew and gained weight, she needed occasional food supplements. She watched the adults strip the bark from trees, reach for the higher branches and pull them down, lean into trees with their broad rumps and foreheads and shove them down, pound the dirt bulbs off grasses, and snap the stiff fronds of palms with their tusks. The sound and commotion of their foraging could be heard for a hundred yards.

More than anything else the elephants in Amy’s family—like all African elephants—were eating machines with pass-through digestive tracts that absorbed only a fraction of their foods’ nutrition. They needed plenty to get by. And so they cleared the vegetation in their path, almost as though a war had recently been fought there. They did not know the meaning of sharing, and left very little for other animal species that browsed after them. They needed vast tracts of fodder to keep them alive, while every other species down the food chain had to settle for what was left.

As weeks followed the days after her birth, Amy’s world
widened to include her cousins. They roughhoused and heaped up their bodies in elephantine “pig piles” with trumpets of glee. They rammed one another and butted, collided, and rolled over on each other. Play satisfied their need for intimacy through touch. Amy assessed her cousins as individuals with strengths and weaknesses. She was quick to grasp the pecking order. She was growing up to become even-tempered, somewhat aloof, and mature for her age.

Her older cousins had taught her by example to pull her mother’s tail, ears, and trunk. Sometimes when she was tired she leaned against her mother’s leg as if it were a convenient pillar. She touched all over her mother’s body and stroked her mother’s velvety tongue with the fingers of her trunk. In those intimate moments her eyes closed dreamily, and she purred with what seemed like utter contentment.

Her personality began to develop. For one thing, she was even more than normally reluctant to share. She stole food out of other elephants’ mouths with daring and stealth, with which she compensated for her smaller size. She distracted her cousins, then scooped their food into her mouth and walked away as if nothing had happened. She chased and skirmished with zebras, which fled and then stopped, turned, and stared at her. Baboons charged her with loud coughing cries. A plover no bigger than a human’s hand, refusing to fly, its feet planted on the dried mud near a wallow and its feathers puffed up, chased Amy away with its strident calls. The wind in the trees, the shadows of clouds
on the ground, falling leaves, crawling insects and reptiles, “ghosts” and imagined creatures—almost anything served to give Amy the thrill of fear. Butterflies dancing on the air in balloons of color sent her running, while the older females watched them flutter past with the appreciation of bystanders at a parade.

Like all young elephants Amy loved the frisson of being chased. In mock terror she trumpeted and shot her trunk straight out in front of her like a lance, with which she parted the high grass as she fled. Out of breath, she turned around and seeing how far she had separated herself from the others, ran in real terror to rejoin them. And when they met and were together again, her limbs, shoulders, and ears went floppy and loose. She shook her head as if in elephant laughter, while the mothers and aunties, standing in the shade of the leafy
mopanes,
watched and rumbled and nodded as if they approved.