by Jodi Picoult
Grace told me that she never intended to live this far north. She had grown up in Georgia and couldn’t stand the cold. But then Gideon had come to work for her mother, and when Thomas asked for their help starting this sanctuary, Grace went along as a silent partner. “So you weren’t working at the circus?” I asked.
Grace dropped potatoes into individual buckets. “I was going to be a second-grade teacher,” she said.
“They have schools in New Hampshire.”
She looked at me. “Yes,” she said. “I guess they do.”
I got the feeling that there was a story there, one I didn’t understand, much like my silent conversation with Dionne. Had Grace followed her mother here? Or her husband? She was good at her job, but lots of people were good at their jobs without actually enjoying what they were doing.
Grace worked with ridiculous speed and efficiency; I’m sure I was only slowing her down. There were greens and onions and sweet potatoes and cabbage, broccoli, carrots, grains. Some elephants needed vitamin E or Cosequin added to their diets; others needed supplement balls—apples hollowed out with medicine inside and peanut butter on the top. We hauled the buckets into the back of the four-wheeler, heading out to find the elephants, so that they could have breakfast.
We followed dung and broken branches and prints in mud puddles to track the elephants from the places they were last seen the night before. If it was colder in the morning, like it was now, they’d be more likely to have moved to a higher elevation.
The first elephants we located were Dionne, who’d left the barn when we went in to prepare the food, and her best friend, Olive. Olive was bigger, although Dionne was taller. Olive’s ears draped in soft folds, like velvet curtains. They stood close enough to touch, and their trunks were entwined, like young girls holding hands.
I was holding my breath, and I didn’t realize it, until I saw Grace looking at me. “You’re like Gideon and my mother,” she said. “It’s in your blood.”
The elephants must have been used to the vehicle, but it was still amazing for me to be this close while Grace hefted the first two buckets and dumped them out about twenty feet apart. Dionne immediately picked up a Blue Hubbard squash and crunched the entire thing in her mouth at once. Olive alternated food choices, following each bite of vegetable with a palate cleanser of straw.
We continued this, going on a treasure hunt for the other elephants. I met them all by name, taking note of which elephant had a cut in one ear, which had an odd gait from previous injuries, which ones were skittish, which ones were friendly. They congregated in twos and threes, reminding me of the Red Hat ladies I saw once in Johannesburg, celebrating the good fortune of old age.
It wasn’t until we reached the African elephant enclosure that I realized Grace had slowed the ATV down and was idling outside the gate. “I don’t like going in there,” she admitted. “Gideon usually does it for me. Hester’s a bully.”
I could see why she felt that way. A moment later, Hester came charging out of the woods, her head shaking and her massive ears flapping. She trumpeted so loudly the hair stood up on my arms. Immediately, I felt myself smile. This, I knew. This, I was used to.
“I could do it,” I suggested.
From the look on Grace’s face you would have thought I’d suggested that I sacrifice a goat with my bare hands. “Dr. Metcalf would kill me.”
“Trust me,” I lied, “if you know one African elephant, you know them all.”
Before she could stop me, I hopped off the ATV and lugged the bucket with Hester’s food through the gap in the fencing. The elephant lifted her trunk and roared. Then she picked up a stick and whipped it at me.
“You missed,” I said, my hands on my hips, and I walked back to the ATV to get the bale of hay.
Let’s not even begin to make a list of all the reasons I should never have done this. I didn’t know this elephant or how she reacted to strangers. I didn’t have Thomas’s permission. And I certainly shouldn’t have been lifting heavy bales of hay, or putting myself in danger, if I had any thoughts of keeping this baby.
But I also knew never to show fear, so when Hester came at me as I was carrying the hay, her feet flying in the dust and creating a cloud around me, I stood my ground.
Suddenly I heard a loud bellow, and I was lifted off my feet and hauled outside the gap in the fencing. “Jesus,” a man said. “Do you have a death wish?”
Hester lifted her head at the sound of the voice, then bent over her food, as if she hadn’t been attempting to scare the hell out of me a moment before. I squirmed, trying to get out of the iron grip of this stranger, who was staring with confusion at Grace in the ATV even as he held me in a vise. “Who are you?” he asked.
“Alice,” I said, my voice clipped. “Lovely to meet you. Can you put me down now?”
He dropped me on my feet. “Are you an idiot? That’s an African elephant.”
“Actually, I’m the opposite of an idiot. I’m a postdoc. And I study African elephants.”
He was over six feet tall, with skin the color of coffee and eyes that were unsettling, so black I felt like I was losing my balance. “You haven’t studied Hester,” he said under his breath, so quietly that I knew I wasn’t supposed to hear him.
He was at least ten years older than his wife, who I estimated to be in her early twenties. He strode toward the ATV, where Grace was standing. “Why didn’t you radio me?”
“When you didn’t come to get Hester’s bucket I figured you were busy.” She reached up on her tiptoes and wrapped her arms around Gideon’s neck.
The whole time Gideon was embracing Grace, he stared at me over her shoulder as if he was still trying to decide if I was a moron. In his arms, Grace was lifted off her feet. It was nothing more than a height discrepancy, but it looked like Grace was dangling from the edge of a cliff.
By the time I wandered back to the main office, Thomas had disappeared, headed into town to make arrangements for the arrival of the tractor-trailer that would bring his newest elephant to the sanctuary. Me, I hardly noticed. I wandered the grounds as if I were doing field research, learning here what I couldn’t learn in the wild.
I hadn’t had much exposure to Asian elephants, so I sat and watched them for a while. There’s an old joke: What’s the difference between African and Asian elephants? Three thousand miles. But they were different—calmer than the African elephants I was used to, laid-back, less demonstrative. It made me think about the gross generalizations we made about humans from those two cultures, and how the elephants followed suit: In Asia, you were more likely to find someone averting his eyes to be polite. In Africa, the head would be defiantly lifted and the gaze met directly—not to show aggression but because that was acceptable for the culture.
Syrah had just waded into the pond; she was splashing around with her trunk, spraying her friends. A chorus of squeaking and chirping followed, as one of the other elephants delicately skidded down the slope into the water.
“Sounds like gossip, doesn’t it?” a voice behind me said. “I’ve always hoped they’re not talking about me.”
The woman had one of those faces that is difficult to judge by age—her hair was blond and pulled back into a braid, yet her skin was smooth enough to make me jealous. She had broad shoulders and ropy muscles in her forearms. I remembered my mother telling me that if you wanted to know an actress’s age, no matter how many facelifts she had had, you should look at her hands. This woman’s were wrinkled, coarse, and full of garbage.
“Let me help you,” I said, taking some of the refuse from her: gourd shells and husks and half a rind from a watermelon. I followed her lead, dumping them into a bucket, and then wiped my hands on the bottom of my shirt. “You must be Nevvie,” I said.
“And you must be Alice Kingston.”
The elephants behind us were rolling in the water, playing. Their vocalizations seemed musical compared to those of the African elephants, which I knew by heart. “These three are busybodies,”
Nevvie said. “They’re always talking. If Wanda wanders down a hill out of sight to graze and then walks up it again five minutes later, the other two greet her like she’s been gone for years.”
“Did you know that the sound of an African elephant was used in the movie Jurassic Park for the T. rex?” I said.
Nevvie shook her head. “And here I thought I was an expert.”
“You are, aren’t you?” I said. “You used to work at a circus?”
She nodded. “I like to say that when Thomas Metcalf rescued his first elephant, he also rescued me.”
I wanted to hear more about Thomas. I wanted to know that he had a good heart, that he had saved someone on the brink, that I could depend on him. I wanted in him all the traits any female would want in the male she chose as the father for her offspring.
“The first elephant I ever saw was Wimpy. She was privately owned by a family circus that came every summer to the small town in Georgia where I grew up. Oh, she was wonderful. Smart as a whip, loved to play, loved people. Over the years, she had two babies, which also became part of that circus, and she treated them like they were her pride and joy.”
None of this surprised me; I had long ago learned that elephant mothers put human ones to shame.
“Wimpy was the reason I wanted to work with animals. She was why I apprenticed at a zoo when I was a teenager, and why I got a job as a trainer when I finished high school. It was another family circus, this one in Tennessee. I worked my way up from the dogs to the ponies to their elephant, Ursula. I was with them for fifteen years.” Nevvie folded her arms. “But the circus went bankrupt and got liquidated, and I got a job with the Bastion Brothers Traveling Show of Wonders. The circus had two elephants that had been labeled dangerous. I figured I’d make that judgment call myself, after I met them. So you can imagine how surprised I was when I was introduced to the animals and realized one was Wimpy, the same elephant I’d seen as a kid. At some point in her life, she must have been sold to the Bastion brothers.”
Nevvie shook her head. “I never would have recognized her. She was chained up. Withdrawn. I wouldn’t have identified her as the elephant I used to know even if I’d been watching her all day. The second elephant was Wimpy’s calf. He was housed across the way from Wimpy’s trailer, in an enclosure made of hot wire. On the ends of his tusks were little metal caps that I had never seen before. As it turned out, that calf wanted his mama, and kept tearing down the hot wire to try to get to her. So one of the Bastion brothers had come up with a solution: to put those caps on the calf’s tusks, and wire them to a metal plate in his mouth. Every time he tried to tear down the hot wire with his tusks to get closer to his mother, he got an electric shock. Of course, every time he squealed in pain, Wimpy had to hear it, and see it.” Nevvie looked up at me. “An elephant can’t commit suicide. But I’m pretty sure Wimpy was trying her damnedest.”
In the wild, a female elephant would not separate from her male calf until he was ten to thirteen years old. To be artificially separated, forced to see a baby in distress and unable to do anything about it … well, I thought of Lorato charging down the hill to stand over the body of Kenosi. I thought of grief in elephants, and how maybe a loss was not always synonymous with a death. Before I even realized what I was doing, I crossed my arms over my abdomen.
“I prayed for a miracle, and one day Thomas Metcalf arrived. The Bastard brothers wanted to get rid of Wimpy, because they figured she was close to dying anyway, and now that they had her calf, they didn’t need her. Thomas sold his car to pay a rental trailer to transport Wimpy up north. She was the first elephant at this sanctuary.”
“I thought it was Syrah.”
“Well,” Nevvie said, “that’s true also. Because Wimpy passed two days after she got here. It was too late for her. I like to think that at least she knew, when she died, she was safe.”
“What about her baby?”
“We didn’t have the resources here to take on a male elephant.”
“But surely you’ve tracked what happened to him?”
“That calf is an adult male now, somewhere,” Nevvie said. “It’s not a perfect system. But we do what we can.”
I looked at Wanda, delicately dipping a toe into the water of the pond, while Syrah patiently blew bubbles under the water. As I watched, Wanda waded in, splashing at the surface with her trunk, sending up a fountain of spray.
“Thomas may know,” Nevvie said, after a moment.
“About what?”
Her face was smooth, unreadable. “About that baby,” she replied. Then she picked up the bucket of rinds and slop and headed up the hill to the garden, as if she had only been speaking of elephants.
The arrival of Maura, the new elephant, had been pushed up a week, throwing the entire sanctuary into a tornado of preparation. I pitched in where I could, trying to help get the African enclosure ready to host its second elephant. In the frenzy, the last thing I expected to find was Gideon, in the Asian barn, giving Wanda a pedicure.
He sat on a stool on the outside of the stall, the elephant’s front right foot poking through an open trap in the steel grid, resting on a girder. Gideon hummed as he used an X-Acto knife on the pads on the bottom of her foot, shaving away the calluses and trimming the cuticles. For such a big man, I thought, he was surprisingly gentle.
“Please tell me she gets to pick a nail polish color,” I said, coming up behind him, hoping I could start a conversation that would erase the unfortunate way we had met.
“Foot-related diseases kill half the elephants in captivity,” Gideon said. “Joint pain, arthritis, osteomyelitis. Try standing on concrete for the next sixty years.”
I crouched down. “So you do preventative care.”
“We file down the cracks. Keep rocks from getting caught. Do foot soaks in apple cider for abscesses.” He jerked his chin toward the stall, so that I would notice Wanda’s left front foot, immersed in a big rubber tub. “One of our girls even had giant sandals made by Teva, with rubber bottoms, to help with the pain.”
I would never have imagined this was a concern for elephants, but then again, the elephants I knew had the benefit of rough terrain to naturally condition their feet. They had limitless space to exercise stiff joints.
“She’s so calm,” I said. “It’s like you’ve hypnotized her.”
Gideon ignored the compliment. “She wasn’t always like this. When she first came, she was full of beans. She’d drink up a trunk full of water, and when you got close enough to the stall, she’d spray the whole load at you. She threw sticks.” He glanced at me. “Like Hester. But with less impressive aim.”
I felt my cheeks redden. “Yes, I’m sorry about that.”
“Grace should have told you. She knows better.”
“It wasn’t your wife’s fault.”
Something flickered across Gideon’s features—regret? Annoyance? I did not know him well enough to read his expression. At that moment, Wanda pulled back her foot. She snaked her trunk through the bars of the stall and overturned the bowl of water sitting beside Gideon, soaking his lap. He sighed, righted the bowl, and said, “Foot here!” Wanda lifted her leg again for him to finish.
“She likes to test us,” Gideon said. “I guess she’s always been that kind of elephant. But where she came from, if she acted out like that, she’d get beaten. If she refused to move, she got pushed around by a Bobcat. When she first arrived, she’d bang on the bars, making a huge racket, like she was daring us to punish her. And we’d all cheer her on, and tell her to make even more noise.” Gideon patted Wanda’s foot, and she delicately pulled it back inside the stall. She stepped out of the cider bath, lifted the tub with her trunk, dumped the liquid down a drain, and handed it to Gideon.
Startled, I laughed. “I guess now she’s a model of propriety.”
“Not quite. She broke my leg a year ago. I was tending to her hind foot when I got stung by a hornet. I jerked my hand up, and something about the way I hit her on the bottom mus
t have spooked her. She reached through the bars with her trunk and smacked me against them over and over, like she was having some kind of bad trip. Took Dr. Metcalf and my mother-in-law both to get Wanda to put me down so they could tend to me,” he said. “Three clean breaks in my femur.”
“You forgave her.”
“Wasn’t her fault,” Gideon flatly replied. “She can’t help what’s been done to her. In fact, it’s incredible that she lets anyone close enough to touch her, after all that.” I watched him cue Wanda to turn, to present her other front foot. “It’s amazing,” Gideon said, “what they’re willing to excuse.”
I nodded, but I was thinking of Grace, who had wanted to be a teacher and wound up scraping elephant dung off the barn floors. I wondered if these elephants, which had become accustomed to a cage, could recall the person who had first put them into it.
I watched Gideon tap Wanda’s foot, so that she pulled it away from the gap in the fencing and rocked the fat pad on the floor of the barn, testing his handiwork. And I thought—not for the first time—that forgiving and forgetting aren’t mutually exclusive.
When Maura arrived, the trailer was parked inside the African enclosure. Hester was nowhere nearby. She had been grazing in the northernmost corner of the property; the trailer had been dropped along the southern edge. For four hours, Grace and Nevvie and Gideon had tried to coax Maura out, bribing her with watermelon, apples, and hay. They had played the tambourine, hoping that the noise would interest her. They had piped classical music through portable speakers and, when that failed, classic rock.
“Has this ever happened before?” I whispered as I stood next to Thomas.
He looked exhausted. There were circles beneath his eyes, and I don’t think he’d actually managed to sit through an entire meal in the two days since he’d gotten word that Maura was en route. “We’ve had drama—when Olive was brought here by her circus trainer, she sauntered out of the trailer and walloped him twice before she went off into the woods. I have to tell you, though, the guy was a jerk. Olive just did what all of us were thinking of doing. But all the others—they were either too curious or too cramped to stay in the trailer for very long.”