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?
There 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.
The 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.
For 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.
The whole family played in the wallow—any shallow pan of water mixed with dirt or any riverbank or any watering hole. Glorious mud was all that was needed. On hot days the mud soothed skin that was neither thick nor coarse. To rid themselves of a mosquito, fly, or bee the elephants gyrated, leaped, rolled, ran, and crashed into mud with bellows that sounded very much like those of relief. (If hunger did not take them away constantly in search of food, elephants would probably bathe all day, every day.) A bath in the early afternoon suited Amy’s family, and another in the evening. A long drink in the morning and a splash and wade gave the day its start. Water was a luxury as precious as new life to elephants. At its sight, or its scent nearby, they trumpeted and bellowed, and the younger elephants raced ahead and crashed in up to their knees, headless of what creatures had arrived before them. The older females held back, drank and pounded holes in the mudbank with their heels, and splashed mud over their backs and bellies, waiting until the youngsters were ready to eat again.
At the river’s edge Amy timidly rolled over in a slippery bowl of muddy water. It was cool and smelled musty, of decayed vegetation. Her skin glistened with slick mud. It was a
world she clearly wished never to leave. But soon she was ready to feed, and when she tried to stand up, her legs slipped, and she fell and slid to the bottom of the pan. With a complete loss of dignity, she finally crawled out and ran to her mother for reassurance.
The older elephants stayed in the middle of the river and filled their stomachs with enough water to overcome their natural buoyancy. They walked along the bottom as hippos do, breathing through trunks held aloft like snorkels. Trunks waved above the water like black snakes on glass.
The teenage elephants bathed somewhat closer to the riverbank. They held their heads above the water, braided their trunks in twos and threes, and bobbed like huge black corks. In this weightless world they danced impromptu ballets with sinewy grace. They swam by instinct and could cover great distances in water when the need arose. One family was once observed swimming one hundred miles without a rest, the stronger females giving the weaker ones a lift with their trunks. Their matriarch, it seemed, had led her family on a migration route that had been flooded in the family’s long absence by the construction of the Kariba Dam and the subsequent formation of the artificial Lake Kariba.
Amy—now in her tenth month—still needed her mother to nurture her, but she was found more and more in the company of the family’s other females, the aunties and older cousins and sisters, who raised her, protected her, taught her, and played with her. On tree-shaded riverbanks Amy looked at her aunties as if to say, Now this would be a good place for me to roll over, and maybe you could tickle me.
All elephants clearly loved being tickled, no matter what their ages. Amy was as ticklish as any child. Even the old matriarch enjoyed a tickle now and then. Quick to find playmates, Amy rolled in the grass and split the air with trumpeting sounds of elephant laughter as older cousins played the fingers of their trunks down her ribs and in her armpits and the soft crannies under her chin. At these times the family could lose sight of one another, discovering with a sudden fright that they were being left behind, and they caught up to the other elephants in a hurry.
When the family met its bond group—the elephants with whom they shared common ancestors—the reunions were extravagant displays of pure elephant emotion. As they came within sight and sound of one another, the families ran and touched and stomped and defecated and twined trunks and bumped foreheads and dusted and clicked ivories. It did not seem to matter if they had met and celebrated like this only an hour before. Elephants could never say hello too often.
Their dead were greeted with a show of respect. When they came upon the bones of a blood relative, they always lingered to caress the bones with their trunks. Did they plan their route to intersect with the graves of their fallen family members? Amy watched her mother touch a sun-bleached elephant skull on the ground. She snaked her trunk in the eyehole and brushed over its surface, almost as though she were grieving for the dead relative, remembering her in life.
Even at her young age, Amy rolled the bones and picked them up and dropped them with a different, even solemn, behavior.
Now almost a year had gone by. After plentiful spring rains, Amy’s family was reminded of the fields at the bottom of their migration route. Last season while the bulls had eaten the crops of the humans, the females stood at the boundary fence without daring to cross into the forbidden territory. Perhaps this year would be different, and they would feast in the cornfields too.
As time went by, Amy was adding one hundred pounds to her weight every couple of months. Everything was happening faster now. She had to use her trunk with greater dexterity to feed herself the foods that she saw her aunties and cousins eat. Sometimes a bouquet of green grass grasped in her trunk ended on the top of her head or draped over her ears. At other times she snatched a leaf or grass directly from her mother’s mouth. Eating on her own, she identified the grass by sniffing it: then she pulled it up or broke it off, and brought it up to her mouth and ground it with her molars.
Drinking frustrated her. Water was hard to hold. She siphoned it into her trunk by breathing in, but not inhaling too hard lest the water go to her head. Then she would sneeze loudly, spraying the air with a fine mist. She practiced sucking water up in her trunk. She learned to raise her head and reach the tip of her trunk up to her lips. The older elephants, who drank without effort, forced the water into their mouths by gently blowing. Amy let gravity work for her. The water drained out of her trunk and dribbled into her mouth. And as she repeated this exercise, she gained proficiency and could be said to drink on her own.
She was rapidly acquiring social skills as well. Again, as in everything else, she learned by observation, example, and trial and error. She noticed those males in the herd that from time to time came around to check for females in estrous. In comparison to her family members, these males were huge and overbearing, their behavior direct and single-minded. The presence of the males intrigued all the family’s females, no matter what their ages. By watching her aunties and older cousins with the males, Amy learned lessons for use later in life.
She was communicating with her family more often now, learning the basic elephant language by listening and entering the “discussions.” And from the leadership of the matriarch she was gaining useful knowledge of her habitat. Indeed, she was reaching a time when she would start to show the other elephants what she was to become—strong, resourceful, and prepared to contribute in important ways to the family’s future.
Then more time passed, and the females finally approached the boundary of their reserve. The whole herd at last was together again. As the sun set, the air around the southern edge of the Sengwa filled with elephant sounds. The long-awaited feast was soon to begin. This was the moment they had all waited for. Majestic and sublime, they were the greatest creatures to walk the land.
The headman of the Tonga, a skinny old great-grandfather with crooked teeth, was the enemy of the elephants. He hated them. Vermin, Siwelo Bvathlomoy Dingani said. No better than rats!
At that moment Dingani was leaning on the gnarled stick that he used as a cane. Even this early in the morning Dingani despaired as he limped past the village’s cinder block shed, where the corn was ground into meal. Its gas engine had lain idle for days with nothing to mill from the fields. Roosters crowed, the hens scratched the dirt, and a black pig burrowed its nose into a heap of garbage. Villagers emerged from their thatch-roofed huts for the first time since sundown. Out early before school began, Dingani’s great-grandsons started to play a game of soccer in the dirt lot in back of the huts, kicking an object that rolled but was not an inflatable ball.
Dingani did not have to walk far to come within view of the southern edge of the Sengwa Wildlife Research Area. He saw the fence that was supposed to keep the elephants out of the village’s cropland. Then he turned to look at that land. The evidence of the elephants’ damage from the previous night was strewn everywhere. Soon nothing would be left of the spring planting.
Necessity had taught the Tonga tribe, which numbered around a million, how to survive. As refugees in a foreign land, they were ignored by Zimbabwe’s ruling tribe. Forty years earlier colonial Britain had forced the Tonga on Zimbabwe (then Southern Rhodesia) to make way for the opening of the Kariba Dam. Poor soil since then had given them paltry, bitter harvests. And now the elephants had the same devastating effect on their crops as any flood or plague of locusts.
The sight of the cornstalks in the fields had emboldened the elephants behind the fence. They lined up each evening, waiting for the sun to set. A fence, even the elephants knew, was only as good as its repair, and nights ago the stronger bulls had pushed a younger one into the electrified wire, sparks flew, the circuit shorted out, and the fence had been worthless as an elephant barrier ever since. Most nights the elephants stepped out of their reserve onto the lands adjacent to Dingani’s village. Afraid to go out of their huts, the villagers listened to the feasting in their maize fields. At sunrise the raiders were gone again, and so too were several acres of the Tonga’s precious c
rops.
Dingani had no idea what to do to save his people. The law forbade Tonga ownership of guns. Hunting with any kind of weapon was proscribed. Dingani had asked the officers in the Game Department for help. The last he had heard from them, they were ending their system of elephant control. With it would go the village’s last hope of salvation.
In the den of his split-level farmhouse in Zimbabwe’s Gwayi Valley, a white African rancher, Buck deVries, hung up the telephone. He walked into the dining room, where his family, already seated at the dinner table, waited for him to say the blessing. They held hands in a circle and bowed their heads, and in his native Afrikaans, deVries uttered thanks to God. As they passed around a tureen of steaming kudu stew, deVries turned to his wife, Rita. “They’ve just told me the Tonga have asked the Zimbabwe government for another cull”—a slaughter of all those elephants that had encroached on tribal lands—he told her, and mentioned where. He also told her it was going to be the last one.
Rita deVries knew all too well that her husband had a secret commitment to keep.
A superstitious sixty-eight-year-old, deVries had vowed long ago to rescue at least one elephant from the slaughter. Perhaps as a hunter, his commitment to this rescue was meant to atone for a lifetime of taking elephants’ lives, necessary as he believed that to be. He was to be a rescuer, not a savior. He could not release any elephant he was going to save back into the wild, or raise her to adulthood, or even keep her on his ranch for long. Sure, he could use the money (four thousand American dollars) an exotic animal broker would pay him for her. He had misgivings about that, but, knowing what he knew, anyplace would be better for this young elephant than the continent of her birth.
“Why, Mother, is this a good place for her to stay,” he asked his wife, “if she needs me to rescue her from the guns?”
The Cowboy and his Elephant Page 2