The indescribable thought sensation was not this, but some tiny part of it was sort of like this: before I saw the elephant get shot, I understood that there was life, and there was its cessation. But now I understand there is this other thing—dying, when death stops being an idea and becomes a thing that the body, if not the conscious mind, grasps in its full intensity. Watching the elephant die granted the illusory understanding of death’s grammar and meaning, as with an alingual child who hears five words and thinks he knows a language. The first word went through the forehead, the second through the neck, the third and fourth through the hip, the fifth through the ear. The month before this trip, on another assignment for this magazine, for the first time in my life, I handled the corpse of a dead human being, and I learned nothing about death. I learned nothing about death, either, when Robyn Waldrip shot the elephant. But it left in my skull at least the languageless shadow of the indescribable thing: Death is this. Death is the elephant taking the first shot in the forehead, and the second in its neck, slumping, listing right, taking two in the hip, struggling, sinking, turning, taking one through the ear and not moving anymore. As it was in the beginning, and as it always will be: one in the forehead, one in the neck, two in the hip, one in the ear, world without end.
Sorry about all that. Useless, I know.
The dead elephant is leaking audibly. A substance resembling scrambled egg is spattered on its ear. I’m jotting notes and hoping Jeff Rann or Robyn does not notice how badly my hand is shaking. But Robyn is off in her own intense moment. She is sort of hooting and jumping up and down, going “Oh, my God, oh, my God,” and generally experiencing an order of ecstasy we tend to share only with our intimates. On either side of the animal, we are both of us breathing hard, massively doped with a storm of neurochemicals that, if you could synthesize in a smokable form, would make you very rich. But the manner in which we are riding our respective highs is a pretty good illustration of why, in high school, Robyn was almost certainly a more welcome and popular presence at parties than I was. While I am privately gibbering darkly and visibly whacked-out, she is pepped up, thrilled. We embrace her congratulatorily. She kisses her fingertips and touches the bull’s trunk. Salt water, rather gratuitously, spills from the elephant’s eyes.
In the morning, the elephant is as we left it, unmolested by snacking carnivores. Today, the animal will be cleaned and butchered, its flesh shared out among the locals. The hide and other mementos will be packed up for the Waldrips. Though the tusks and the rest of it are, ostensibly, the prizes Robyn came to Africa to collect, the electricity has gone out of the safari. Returning to the animal has a cleaning-up-after-the-party sort of feel.
A team of a half-dozen Botswana men and women have turned out for the event. The equipment list includes an ax, a winch, and a bunch of cheap-looking plastic-handled boning knives. First order of business is a stropping orgy that lasts the better part of half an hour. While that’s going on, the Waldrips’ children—Lola, six, and Will junior, eight—who have been back at the camp, play with the elephant, touch its trunk for its rough, lichenish feel, handle its ears.
“It’s surreal, isn’t it?” Will senior says, squinting at the creature.
“Yeah,” says Robyn, a little dreamily. “I hope it stays that way for a long time.”
I’m feeling it, too, the slightly spongy sense of dislocation emanating from the previous day, but this is why I will never be a hunter: She wants to savor it. I am ready for it to go away. Before the skinning commences, the tableau is beautified and made camera-ready. The elephant’s tusks are scrubbed. One of Jeff’s assistants takes an ax to a tree that is casting an unphotogenic shadow.
“Look how long it takes him to chop that down,” Will observes. “An elephant would walk right over it.”
Larry the videographer takes some footage of the children perched on the elephant’s skull, though Jeff cautions him, “You might get shit if you put that in the show. You don’t want to be seen as disrespecting the animal.”
The children dismount, and the skinners move in.
The cleaning goes like this: First you take the ears. Each is the size of a manta ray. It is severed close to the head and laid in the dirt. Next, the trunk, the size of a middle-aged gator, is girdled at its bridge and then removed. Blood comes forth in an incredible tide, more of it than I’ve probably seen in aggregate over the course of my lifetime. Yet the flaying, surprisingly, inspires none of the mortal vertigo the killing did. As the knives flash, the animal becomes less extraordinary, less like the world’s largest land mammal and more a bricolage of familiar butcher-shop hues. The trunk is stripped of its leather, and for a time it lies in the dirt, looking like an automobile transmission made of fresh raspberry sorbet.
Will is by the elephant’s rear. He has taken up a knife, eager to do his share of the dismantlement. “I always tell my kids, anything you kill, you gotta clean it yourself. I know Jeff’s got clients who come out here and kill five elephants. Shoot ’em and leave ’em. To me that’s not right. Out of respect for the animal, you gotta do it yourself. I didn’t kill this elephant, but even still.”
A cut has been made along the spine. Will slashes away, pulling at the skin, revealing a goreless expanse of fibrous white fascia. The winch is applied to help peel the hide. The resistance is sufficient to pull the truck forward at first when the crank turns on.
Once the skin has been freed, Will and the skinners begin blocking out the meat. The sound is of hard, wet work.
Up front, they are getting at the skull. The skin is gone from the elephant’s cheeks, and the bare eye peering from the pale tissue is demonic. Below the eyes, the look of the tuskless head, still actively suppurating, recalls a cliff face after a strong rain. Then the head itself is cut off, into the arms of a pair of catchers. Later today or tomorrow, the skull will be buried for a period of 10 days. Insects will attend to the finer details of cleaning the skull for its voyage to Texas.
When the head is removed, the elephant begins to speak in a morbid throat-flatus. Air escaping the trachea makes sounds of growls and shudders and sighs. This is not upsetting. By now, it is not elephant but a wrecked Volkswagen made of flesh.
The job wears on. How much of the creature, I ask Jeff Rann, do the skinners intend to take?
“Everything,” he says. “This’ll probably feed a hundred people.”
The skinners cut away fire-hydrant-sized wads of meat and fling them heavily into a Land Cruiser’s bed.
The carcass is winnowed to a pile of innards that calls to mind one of those inflatable-looking sports arenas. In the flawless blue above, a fleet of delighted buzzards has begun to wheel.
The work is mostly over. Will Waldrip can now retire from the job. He is abundantly daubed in blood and is exhausted, though chipper. “A little different than quartering out a whitetail,” he says.
Amid the spare parts lying in the grass is the elephant’s jaw, from which we can know the elephant’s age. An elephant gets six sets of teeth in its lifetime. This one was on its final set, and judging from its condition it was probably about 53. The sand of the savanna is hard on an elephant’s dentition. Five to seven more years and it’d have blown through this set and starved to death, assuming neither Jeff nor the poachers got him first.
Looking at this rummage sale of elephant flesh inspires an equally messy inventory of contradictory thoughts.
Eww.
Then a sort of wordless, inner viola fugue that accompanies the sight of a magnificent organism that has been treading the savanna since the Kennedy administration, now scattered in pieces on the ground.
Then, this retort: Yeah, but wasn’t the leather your wallet’s made from once the property of a factory-raised cow whose sole field trip from the reeking, shrieking bedlam of the factory farm was a terrified excursion to the abattoir? And don’t you gobble bacon and steaks whenever you get the chance? And aren’t “hypocrite” and probably also “pantywaist” accurate words to describe a person w
ho gets queasy at an animal being flayed but who eats meat and/or dons leather shoes?
Right, but elephants are so smart, and old.
A caged chicken once beat you at tic-tac-toe. I don’t hear you crusading for the pearl mussel, which can live for over a century.
But elephants are so splendid to look at.
Unlike a 10-point buck?
No, but okay, look: We can assume that most people, for whatever totally arbitrary reason, have an affinity for elephants over chickens and pearl mussels. Sure, it’s the same illogical pro-mammal bigotry that lets people mourn the slaughter of dolphins and not mind so much the squashing of an endangered spider. BUT? Isn’t it a little bit fucked, when the average person looks at an elephant and goes, “Aww, what an amazing animal,” to be the one guy in a thousand who goes, “Yeah, cool, I want to shoot it”?
So it’s bad to shoot elephants because other Westerners arbitrarily sentimentalize them? Consider your fantasies of grenading the deer who eat your gardenias. Multiply that by about 10,000 and you’ve probably got a good approximation of the feelings of the Botswana farmer who wakes up to find that elephants have munched a full year’s worth of crops.
No, I mean I guess I just don’t really understand the impulse behind wanting to shoot this big amazing animal, or how, after shooting one, you’d want to jump up and down.
So what’s she supposed to do? Cry and drop into the lotus position and sing a song in Navajo? It’s not terribly hard to understand why people go hunting. They go hunting because they find it exciting. As Robyn herself put it, you get a primal thrill. And whether or not you want to admit it, you had the thrill, the neurochemical bongload that hit you when the elephant died. It made Robyn Waldrip jump up and down and it made you go on a pompous, half-baked death trip, which is your version of jumping up and down. You were at the party, bro.
But I’m not the one who shot the elephant.
No, you’re the one who came on this hunt so that you could ride the adrenaline high while at the same time reserving the right to be ethically fastidious about it. I mean, what really distinguishes your presence here from Jeff Rann’s or the Waldrips’?
Maybe only this: Though the harrowing intensity of the elephant’s death will, in time, denature into a fun story to tell at cocktail parties, right now I would trade all of it—the morbid high, the anecdote for my memoirs—to bring this particular elephant back to life.
The elephant’s skull is buried. Its flesh has been hung out to dry. The Waldrips are booked at Jeff Rann’s safari camp for eight more days, but these folk are hunters, and the notion of spending a week doing nothing but observing creatures of the wild holds little interest for them. So tomorrow, they will go to South Africa, because Will Waldrip Jr. wants to undertake something called a “springbok slam,” which involves shooting one of each of that species’ four subvarieties. Jeff has an extra elephant tag for his concession in Tanzania. He offers this to Will senior, and Will declines.
Our last evening in camp, we go for sunset cocktails at a locally famous baobab tree. The tree is craggy, Gandalfian, and 1,000 years old. It has a crazed unruly spread of branches, which inspired the folk saying, Jeff tells us, that “God pulled the baobab out of the ground and stuck it upside down.” A leopard sometimes hangs out in the man-sized cave in its trunk. The leopard isn’t home. The only locals on the scene are a squadron of huge buzzards, resting in the baobab’s branches. The camp dumps its hunting refuse not too far from here, and the buzzards, Jeff tells us, have likely spent the day gorging on the remains of Robyn’s elephant. At our approach, they take grudging flight in a storm of black wings.
While Jeff’s wife is arranging the cocktail table, the party moves in to have a look at the leopard hole. Suddenly the sounds of shrieking pierce the quiet of the dusk. My first thought is that the leopard was home after all and has mauled one of the children. But it turns out that one last buzzard had been hiding in the tree. The bird had gobbled so much of Robyn’s elephant that it couldn’t take off. So, to attain flight weight, the buzzard started puking on the safari group. Fran, the Waldrips’ nanny, got the heftiest portion of Robyn’s elephant, on her shoulders and hair, and Jeff Rann got speckled a bit. The elephant huntress herself dodged the vomit entirely as the bird set a course for the sun.
ARIEL LEVY
Breaking the Waves
FROM THE NEW YORKER
THE FIRST TIME Diana Nyad tried to swim around Manhattan, in the fall of 1975, she was pulled out of the East River in the black of night after eight hours of nonstop swimming—“trembling uncontrollably, muttering an incoherent stream of monosyllables,” she wrote in her 1978 memoir, Other Shores. She had contracted a virus in the contaminated water, and it took her 10 days to recover. Then she got back in the water and did it again. On her second try, she wrote, “the Hudson was rough, but the full force of the tide was with me and I almost frolicked in the waves.” Nyad made it around in seven hours and 57 minutes, breaking the record by nearly an hour: “Manhattan Island was mine!”
There were pictures of her on the front pages of the New York papers the next morning. She was on Saturday Night Live. Woody Allen called her up for a date. (Nyad said yes, even though she’s gay, and they became friends; at one of his birthday parties, Diana Vreeland asked where she got her little shorts.) Nyad was 26 and strikingly beautiful, with big brown eyes, a toothy smile, and freckles. Her looks and her pronounced confidence made her a natural for television: she made a dazzling appearance on The Tonight Show. Her friend Bonnie Stoll remembers, “She walked on to Johnny Carson’s show as if it was her show—no fear whatsoever.” Nyad was already an accomplished long-distance swimmer, having broken the women’s world record for the 22-mile route from Capri to Naples and made the first north-to-south crossing of Lake Ontario. But after Manhattan she was a star.
For a follow-up, she decided, she would swim from Cuba to Florida: 111 miles, the equivalent of five English Channel crossings, and the longest open-ocean swim in history. (The closest comparable feat was a 60-mile crossing of Lake Michigan, performed by two men.) Nyad would have to contend with the strong currents and rough waves of the Gulf Stream, and with sharks and jellyfish. In an interview on The Today Show, Jane Pauley asked about her motivation. “The most difficult thing I know, mentally or physically, is swimming these great bodies of water,” Nyad replied. But when she reached her destination, she said, she experienced “a moment of immortality.”
The Cuba swim was instead an epic deflation. Nyad entered the water in Havana Harbor protected by a steel shark cage, and the weather soon turned horrid. She was attacked by jellyfish, and eight-foot waves slammed her against the walls of the cage. The current pushed her wildly astray, toward Texas. Nyad had swum 79 miles, in 42 hours, when her team pulled her out of the water and told her that a squall had sent them irretrievably off course. She was devastated. “I have never summoned so much willpower—I’ve never wanted anything so badly,” she told a television reporter just after she returned. Fighting tears, she added, “And I never tried so hard.”
A year later, on her 30th birthday, she broke the open-ocean world record for both men and women, swimming 102 miles from the Bahamas to Florida, unassisted and without a shark cage. She did not swim another stroke for three decades.
One morning in November, Nyad, who is 64, was at home in Los Angeles, where she lives with her dog, Teddy, in a rambling house in a neighborhood of green lawns and carefully pruned roses. Two ragged flags, American and Cuban, hung from a pole in her front yard.
When Nyad stopped swimming, she reasoned that 30 was a good age for an athlete to retire. She began a career as a television personality, on Wide World of Sports and CNBC, and as a radio commentator for NPR. Nyad’s voice is deep and resonant, and she is a voluble, impassioned storyteller; she also found work as a motivational speaker. She stayed in shape, and took a 100-mile bike ride every Friday. “Part of the pleasure of these endurance activities is to be so engaged in your mind and in nature
and just get away from the monkey chatter,” she said. “But I’d get back to the house and think, ‘Oh, my God, I didn’t notice a thing. I didn’t look over and see if there were dolphins in the ocean.’” Her mind was monopolized by regret. “I was very engaged in examining the past: ‘Why didn’t I do it this way instead?’”
She thought about the dissolution of her decade-long relationship—her marriage, as far as she was concerned—with a television executive named Nina Lederman, who is now a close friend. She thought about injustices she’d suffered and how she wished she’d fought back. And sometimes she thought about how differently she would approach her sport now. “There’s that French expression ‘If only the young knew, and the elderly could still do,’” she said. “How many athletes have I interviewed who say, ‘Oh, if only I could have my mind of this age and be back on the world stage’ as a skater, golfer, tennis player . . .”
She first had the idea of swimming from Cuba to Florida, in the 1970s, when she was living on the Upper West Side. (She liked to gamble at the time—she used to meet her bookie at the cheese department in Zabar’s.) “I went out and got all the nautical charts of the earth’s surface, and I put them out on a big swath of the rug and got rid of the Antarctic Circle,” she said. When her eyes reached Cuba, “I literally had a palpitation about it. I thought, It’s Cuba. It’s magic. It’s that forbidden land we’re not allowed to go to, and they’re not allowed to come here. I thought of all the stories of the hundreds of Cubans who have tried to swim out on their own and not made it—they call it the Havana graveyard.” When Nyad was growing up, in Fort Lauderdale, her mother used to take her to the Lago Mar beach club and, pointing off the shore toward Cuba, say, “It’s so close you could actually swim there.” “She meant it figuratively,” Nyad said. “But I think somewhere, bubbling in my imagination, I was, like, ‘It’s right there.’” Around her neck, Nyad wore a pendant that Lederman had given her: a scrimshaw map of Cuba with ONWARDS engraved on the back.
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