Larger Than Life (Novella) (4 page)

You cannot force a family. I learned this firsthand when I was doing research with
the elephants at Madikwe. The translocated youngsters were all roughly the same age.
Without a matriarch—a mother figure—they developed behavioral issues that we researchers
had never seen.

In the wild, the older cows chase bulls out of the herd when they get to be about
thirteen or fourteen years old. Normally, those teenage bulls then roam in small herds
of male elephants, learning from their elders, until they are ready to mate. In Madikwe,
however, without older cows to set limits, the young bulls remained in the herd, acting
aggressively and forcing themselves on the juvenile females. In normal conditions,
a young cow won’t mate till she’s around twelve years old, and she will give birth
at age fourteen. She will spend years being a good auntie or sister to the newborn
calves, so that when it is her turn to have a baby, she knows what to do. She will
have all the guidance
and structure she needs to learn how to become a mother.

In
this
dysfunctional herd, though, cows were getting pregnant at age eight. Two cows gave
birth at age ten. They didn’t know what to do with newborn calves. They didn’t act
protectively, like mothers. They didn’t nurture; they didn’t react when the babies
cried out. Not long after their birth, a slightly larger female killed both calves,
and the mothers didn’t even try to intervene.

I had initially come to Madikwe to study elephant memory. My postdoctoral research
was full of experiments that proved elephants could use smell to differentiate between
individuals, to recognize those they had not seen in a long time, and to track those
who had traveled a distance away. But I was becoming less interested in the reunions
of separated elephants and getting more curious about the forces that prevented them
from staying together as a family unit in the first place. I studied the aberrant
behavior of the young mothers and wondered if there was more to it than just stress
or the lack of a proper hierarchy. They had all seen their own mothers murdered by
government hunters during the culls. Could that incident have scarred these young
elephants so deeply that they were unable to form meaningful relationships—with others,
or with their own offspring?

By suggesting some sort of pachydermal post-traumatic stress disorder, I knew I was
straddling a very fine line between science and anthropomorphism. Science was about
magnification—examining an organism in such detail that you understood it on a cellular,
biological, evolutionary level. Although it was widely accepted in the field that
elephants exhibited signs of cognition—studies had proven their mental acuity and
memory time and time again—no scientist would go on record to say that these great
gray animals
felt
as deeply as we did. Emotions were not quantifiable—not in humans, and not in elephants.
For science to say something was true, it had to be measurable.

And yet.

The bond between a mother and a child weighed nothing on a scale; it took up no room
in a test tube. But most of us would have a hard time saying it didn’t exist.

I kept my hunch to myself but put aside my notes on herd migration and instead began
filling fresh notebooks with the research I wasn’t supposed to be doing: cataloging
the behaviors of elephants in as scientific a way as possible. I was able to record
aggressions between elephants. I marked down incidents where juvenile cows turned
to an older one for security or comfort and were roundly ignored. And then one day,
another unnaturally young female delivered a calf and deliberately stepped on top
of him.

This time, a bush vet intervened, and I volunteered to accompany him as he treated
the calf’s injuries. The newborn’s hind leg was broken; even in a wild herd with an
attentive mother, he would probably not survive. The decision to patch him up as best
as possible and return him to the wild was made, and two hours later I accompanied
the vet when we reunited the calf with his mother. I wanted to see whether this young
cow would again reject her newborn.

From the safety of our vehicle, we watched the cow approach. Instead of reaching out
to touch him the way a mother in the wild would—checking her calf from tip to toe
to make sure he was all right—the elephant charged. Immediately I revved up the engine
and lurched forward, driving her away from the frightened calf.

“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.