“They are never very far away from each other. Dog and boy. They kind of communicate telepathically,” he said. “The boy, Anurak, hasn’t spoken since he was born, but that mutt, his name is Decha, understands him perfectly. And I know Anurak understands us fine, too, don’t you, laddie?”
The boy cocked his head and grinned.
“What happened to him?” Natalie asked. “Was he sick?”
Hatcher’s face darkened as if it wasn’t a story he wanted to share with her. He hesitated, then said, “I’m not quite sure, but from what we can tell, his birth mother’s diet was low in iodine and that might have caused his mutism. She passed away shortly after he started to walk, and his father remarried, and moved further north. No one knows where, so I haven’t been able to put the pieces together. I believe what happened to our boy here is quite rare. The child doesn’t appear bothered by his inability, though.” He reached out and high-fived Anurak. “He hears fine, is smart and comical, and certainly can communicate quite nicely. Just wish he’d tell Decha to stay away from Sophie. No matter how many bones she breaks, he keeps going back to tease her more. Dumb dog.” Hatcher rose and spoke in Thai to the boy, then pointed outside.
Anurak shyly waved at Natalie, then he and Decha navigated the door together, the boy’s hand on the dog’s back, the dog adoringly staring into the boy’s face. She recognized that look. Pure and unadulterated puppy love.
Hatcher busied himself with the box he’d brought in. With his back still to her, he said, “I suppose you want to learn the clinic and our routine. If you’re going to stay, that is?”
Her shoulders stiffened. Did she read a bit of hopefulness in that last sentence?
“I’m staying.” As soon as the words came out of her mouth, she realized they’d been a bit too forceful so she followed with, “So it would be good to know my way around.”
He stopped and turned to face her. For a long minute, he stared at her quizzically as if trying to decide whether to say what he was thinking. She didn’t speak.
In the silence, she studied the cracks in the floor, picked at a nail, thought about an exit strategy. She half expected him to argue that she needn’t stay, that he had a truck at the front entrance to take her to the airport, and a return ticket in his pocket. And that would break her heart, because during the past couple of days, she’d found the girl she was at ten, the one who’d adopted the feral fox who lived behind her parents’ barn and nursed that crazy red animal through a very difficult birthing of four black-pawed kits. The moment she looked into the animal’s eyes, she saw the pain of another being and realized the fox feared that her kits would be hurt. That was the exact moment when she realized working with animals would be her life’s work.
No doubt Maman abolished the adoption of anymore wild animals when the last kit returned to the wild, but Natalie found a three-legged dog on the side of the road the summer after. Then there was the thousand-pound pig the Stantons had given to her as a piglet when she’d reassured them that, yes, of course her parents knew she was bringing the piglet home. Finally, Pops convinced Maman that they might as well celebrate Natalie’s ability to tame any animal—wild or domestic—and they contacted one of Maman’s cousins, an instructor at North Carolina State. At thirteen, Natalie visited the campus and decided she wanted to be part of the Wolf Pack. No one questioned the odd animals in the barn after that point, and even Maman admitted a preference for the one-legged peacock who crookedly spread his fan, leaning against a tree or fence or lamp-post like “a drunken rainbow with eyes,” Maman said.
Peter broke the silence. “Didn’t Andrew give you a tour yesterday?”
“He started to, but then that elephant . . .”
“Sophie.”
“Yes.”
He placed the glass bottle he’d been holding into a white metal cupboard and gestured for her to follow him. Without another word, he guided her around the clinic, pointing out where he stored certain dry medicines, showing her recent medical records, giving her the password for the computer and the access codes for the high speed lab centrifuge, as well as for the refrigerator where he stored large amounts of amoxicillin, which “I use more often than any other drug.”
Finally, they were acting like the professionals they were rather than teenagers. Hopefully, it would continue. She didn’t have the energy for drama. Christ, that’s what she came to Thailand to circumvent. It didn’t matter whether the drama was hers or someone else’s; she didn’t want it in her life.
She asked about daily routines and drug availability, mentally noting some of his answers and jotting down the complicated ones in the small notebook she always kept in her back pocket. Even in the States where her colleagues relied on their cell phones, she kept a paper notepad, a habit which often proved wise, especially when she visited horse farms so remote that cell phone service was spotty at best. Besides, she found the pen and paper somewhat comforting. Reliable. She could sketch quickly, write prescriptive notes, and remind herself of tasks. That’s all she needed. And she had it in her hip pocket, twenty-four-seven.
She asked him about the number of animals—besides elephants—that the clinic treated, surprised at the dozens of dogs, cats, birds, and even reptiles that Hatcher and the volunteers serviced every week. He impressed her by remembering each animal’s name and detailing their histories.
“What about the elephants? We haven’t discussed them yet.” She helped Hatcher organize the bandages kept in a large woven bamboo shelf under one of the windows. He appeared to tolerate her assistance, yet she caught him straightening out the row she’d just arranged as if she hadn’t done a proper job. The back of her neck prickled. She swallowed her frustration.
“Yes, the elephants,” he said. “Their mahouts care for them, generally. I only handle emergencies or suggest some vitamin supplements when one develops arthritis or some such ailment. You’ve worked with ellies before?”
“Briefly. When I interned years ago, I did a couple of weeks at a sanctuary in the States.”
“A couple of weeks?” He stopped and glared at her. In his eyes was an accusation: how dare she come here and step right in without the appropriate experience?
“I’m not incompetent. As a matter of fact, I’m quite capable of working with elephants.” She caught herself starting to blather and stopped. Took a deep breath. Reminded herself that people could only make her feel the way she gave them permission to. She wasn’t going to give this man permission to question her own capabilities. She’d always been a good student. She could become one again. But Hatcher had no way of knowing that. Best to butter him up. Take the high road. Apologize, even if he’s wrong. Patently wrong. “You know, I have enough knowledge to get started here, and I have a lot to learn . . .” She swallowed hard. “ . . . from you.”
“Elephants are different from horses,” Hatcher told her, “and a couple of weeks of training isn’t enough for me to feel comfortable leaving you in charge if I have to. Christ, what was Andrew thinking?” He slapped a roll of gauze onto the shelf and rose to his feet. “Dr. DeAngelo, I simply do not have the weeks—actually, months! —it would take to train you.”
“We have to start somewhere,” Natalie said, forcing a stiff smile to her lips and hating that she felt compelled to use what some might term “feminine tactics.” “Why don’t you tell me more about Sophie? How are you treating that infection?”
Hatcher opened his mouth, then snapped it shut. His eyes narrowed as if he wanted to say something argumentative, then thought better of it. He rubbed his forehead.
“Sophie,” he said. Both a statement and a complaint. The utterance of her name held a world of frustration and resentment within its two syllables. His eyes wavered a moment as if he was mentally reviewing the details of Sophie’s chart.
“Sophie,” he repeated. “That infection is one I’ve been fighting since she came to us six months ago. Sometimes I g
et it under control, then she goes on another rampage, and we need to restrain her, and it opens up the wound so we have to start all over again. To be honest, Dr. DeAngelo, I’m quite certain she’s not going to be rehabilitated.” He sighed. “I’m afraid she’s getting worse. The wound is very close to being septic.”
Natalie asked, “What caused the original wound? Had she been injured or was it just years of the chain? Do you know?”
“Being chained up every night after working all day in the logging industry. That’s why Andrew refuses to use a chain, even though some of them don’t know how to behave unless they’re controlled, like Sophie,” Hatcher replied. “Most of the ellies we have come from a local logger who finally realized he could no longer care for them.”
“Did she come to the sanctuary with a family?” She remembered that Andrew had mentioned at the conference that he always tried to keep elephant families intact.
“No. She’s probably the most antisocial elephant we’ve had. Andrew heard from the logger that Sophie had birthed several calves during her time with him, but there were no babies with the herd when we took Sophie on. Only her and three other females and one teenage male, Pahpao’s son.”
“Don’t the people who capture elephants in the wild remove them from their calves?” Natalie asked, though she already knew the answer.
Hatcher looked at her askance. “I would have studied a bit more before coming here, Dr. DeAngelo.” His voice had turned frosty.
She ignored his comment. “Couldn’t that explain Sophie’s rage? That and the infection? PTSD, perhaps?”
“It could.”
“Maybe you haven’t given her enough time, then. PTSD in humans often takes years to treat. It must be the same in elephants.” She thought about sharing her own experience, but something told her Hatcher wouldn’t care. That was just as well. She had a tough enough time talking about it with people she trusted. Holding the story close to her chest was safer. She’d find another way to make her point.
“I know that, but we can’t lose any more animals because of her. She’s endangering everyone’s safety.”
Natalie paused. “Do you think it’s possible that the wound is making Sophie’s PTSD worse?”
Hatcher’s silence said volumes. He’d already thought of that, too.
Eight
My words fly up,
my thoughts remain below.
Words without thoughts
never to heaven go.
-William Shakespeare
Natalie awoke screaming again. Gasping for air. Fighting the mosquito netting over her head as if it were a giant spider’s web.
As her eyes adjusted in the dark, she struggled to figure out where she was. Finally, the silence and darkness calmed her.
Thailand. The sanctuary.
Breathe.
Breathe.
One more night of nightmares.
She lay on the single bed, drenched in a thin coat of sweat. The faintest of breezes skimmed her body, wicking the moisture, cooling her. Calming her. She inhaled on the count of six and exhaled to the count of eight. Three times. And repeated. By the third cycle, she found her rhythm and knew she was safe. The worst was over.
She listened to the minute night sounds. An owl’s soft hoot. The scritch-scratch of insects. In the distance, an elephant’s rumble. She struggled to remember the dream that awakened her, but it had dissipated as soon as she opened her eyes. More often than not, she couldn’t remember the nightmares.
Just as well, she thought. Sometimes the night terrors were twice as frightening when her eyes opened. It was a blessing when she couldn’t remember the dreams, because the reality to which she awoke was worse and followed her throughout the day like specters with long bony fingers. She felt haunted, exhausted by the ghastliness of it all. She wished she could awake from that reality as easily as she did from her dreams.
There were times she longed to jump off a cliff, but she hadn’t, and sometimes she thought it was simply because there weren’t any cliffs available when she had the urge to leap.
She breathed again. Concentrated on counting. Something made her feel she was not alone. Comforted.
Another elephant rumbled.
The conversation she’d had with Dr. Hatcher earlier that day repeated itself in her mind. Had he been telling the story to elicit her help or was he showing off his firsthand knowledge of elephants?
She sat up on the edge of the bed and heard a short trumpet. The sound came from a different direction than the rumbles had.
Sophie?
Without hesitation, Natalie slid into a pair of shorts, pulled a T-shirt over her head, slipped on her sandals and left the cabin, carefully shutting the door so the sound wouldn’t reverberate into the night.
The half-moon provided enough light to see the dirt road she’d followed the other day to where Sophie was tethered. In another hour or so, the sky would brighten. This very moment was the coolest and quietest of the day. She headed toward the sound and heard another trumpet, followed by some rumbles from the other direction. She stumbled over a root and righted herself.
The elephants’ trumpets brought back memories of Billy Fribble, the owner of the sanctuary in Texas where she spent her internship. Billy was a small man, jockey-size, with a cloud of curly gray hair. She thought it ironic when she first met him that this tiny man could control such large mammals. One of the first lessons he taught her occurred right after she’d stumbled and fallen over a tree root like the one she’d tripped on.
“Think about an elephant’s physical structure,” he told her as they stood on the edge of the meadow where an old, retired circus elephant named Mildred grazed. “Their larynx is approximately eight times the size of a human’s, so the sounds they produce can be below our range of hearing or extraordinarily high. If ol’ Mildred over there adjusts her trunk or moves her tongue, she can make that sound different or louder. Or softer. And while she’s making a sound, she might hold her head or her ears differently. You have to observe, Nat. Watch and listen. Use your human instincts to figure out what animals are telling each other. And us. You’ll save yourself a lot of heartache if you watch them closely.”
His advice had, indeed, saved her a lot of heartache. She hadn’t been bitten by any dogs. No horses had nipped her or stepped on her feet. Most animals calmed perceptibly when she spoke to them. Now maybe she could get to know Sophie. Listening was always much easier when there weren’t humans around, Natalie thought. No interruptions. No distractions.
She rounded the bend in the road, and Sophie’s pen came into view. A large, clumsily-built structure with cement pillars, its roof rose high into the trees as if it was designed for giraffes rather than elephants. The elephant’s head came up. She had heard Natalie. Sophie’s ears waved, but she stood very still, her trunk pointing straight up in the air like a periscope.
Natalie stopped and turned to the side to make herself smaller so that she appeared less threatening. Speaking softly, she repeated Sophie’s name. She had long ago realized that a soft, low tone was reassuring to animals, and it didn’t matter what words were said. She repeated the name over and over again.
Sophie lowered her trunk, but still she watched, her body at attention.
Moving slowly, carefully, Natalie walked closer to the pen, keeping an eye on Sophie’s body language. The closer she came, the better. Natalie could determine Sophie’s physical traits. She stood approximately eighteen feet tall, and her forehead was broad and flat, her skin a deep gray with freckles down her trunk. Her feet were as wide as Natalie’s shoulders, and if she chose to, could easily crush a full grown, large dog. The elephant rumbled. She was curious but didn’t exhibit any warning signs. Obviously, she was used to having people around.
Natalie strained to see Sophie’s leg. She itched to examine the wound, curious to know whether it had responded to the tre
atment Hatcher administered. She moved closer, maneuvering herself so Sophie had to turn the damaged leg toward Natalie. Still, it was too dark to see it.
“Okay, no examination tonight, Sophie,” she said quietly, “so let’s get to know each other a bit. I’ll sit here for a while, if that’s okay with you.”
The elephant rumbled again as if to reluctantly accept Natalie’s company. They sat in silence, Natalie occasionally jotting comments in her notebook about Sophie’s size, her markings and movements, or the sounds she made.
__________
The elephant rumbles, reluctantly accepting the woman’s presence. She watches the woman sitting against the big tree where the elephant—Sophie—likes to scratch her back. The woman is silent, writing busily. Now and again, she looks at the elephant. It is not a threatening look, but a curious one, as if she’s trying to figure Sophie out.
The curiosity is returned. The elephant reaches out her trunk, lazily sniffing the air around the woman’s head, a sweet smell, something like the fruit every elephant (especially her) yearns for, the ripened papayas and bananas she could eat all day. It is not a man’s smell, not the spicy smell they carry with them, not the smell of fear. It is still a human smell, but this smell is almost comforting.
The woman hands a banana to the elephant, repeats words she often says, but Sophie doesn’t understand the woman. The voice is a low sound, almost a rumble from very far away, making Sophie’s ears twitch with memories of other human voices. Not all the men have hurt her. Some have fed her sweet potatoes and doused her with cool water that eased the bites on her tender skin. Some have talked to her quietly and rubbed that special place at the base of her ear. But none of them have sounded like this woman or had her touch.
The bananas melt in Sophie’s mouth. As she slowly circles her jaw, chews the juice out of the last of the skins, reluctant to swallow their sweetness, she watches the woman, never taking an eye off of her. The elephant wants more bananas. She moves toward the woman and reaches past her for the bananas, stretching into a sudden beam of sunlight. The woman turns, and she and the elephant are inches away.
The Mourning Parade Page 7