Still Life with Elephant

by Judy Reene Singer

  “Sit with me,” I begged Richie under my breath. “I’m going crazy trying to understand Grisha.”

  He laughed. “And I thought you two were hitting it off so well.”

  Our jeep followed the helicopter, tracing our way across the savanna toward Makuti, leading two big open trucks, one transporting a huge wooden crate with twenty men standing next to it in the open bed, the other holding another ten or so men sitting in the back and chatting. Our driver had to gun the engine to keep up with the helicopter. Richie was studying the horizon with binoculars, while Grisha chatted his ear off. Tom and I made polite conversation, as though we hadn’t spent the night together. We were jolted and bounced around for another two hours, until, slowly, Makuti bush country revealed itself, the green and yellow grasses, tan-green bushes, and long patches of rocky, dried-out, concrete-hard dirt giving way to thickets of odd-shaped trees. Tom named them for me, majanje, red and gold msasa, acacias, mpanes, strangler figs that hosted huge brown puffs, nests built by weaverbirds. There were termite mounds the height of a man. Giraffes observed us in stately groups as we drove past, buffalo ran next to us, hyenas loped away in small packs laughing eerily; a straggly lion continued to sun itself without showing any interest in us.

  The jeep bounced over the thick grasses like an unbroken horse. I held hard onto the bar over my head to keep from flying out of my seat and braced my legs against the floor. Hours passed and we continued tracking.

  Then I saw them. A troop of baboons. They were sitting under a tree, busily grooming one another, swatting at the flies that hovered over them, chewing on pieces of bark. A female moved from the group to pass near us, her baby clinging to her back, its arms and legs wrapped around her, buried in her thick brown coat. She hesitated for a moment, and stared at us, worried, most likely, that we were a threat, then she moved on. The baby looked back at me with its dark human-like eyes. An infant. I could feel something rising inside of me and took a deep breath. “Stop, stop, stop,” I admonished myself and looked away.

  Dusk came and we had to make camp. The helicopter found a flat spot to land, and the tents were erected nearby. Dinner appeared quickly, and we ate a chewy meat and some vegetables and washed it all down with strong coffee.

  I avoided Matt—I didn’t want a replay of the previous night—and I sat in the jeep, wondering where to sleep. Tom came up to me.

  “Take my tent,” he said. “I’ll stay out here tonight.”

  I slept fitfully—maybe drinking two mugs of black coffee hadn’t been the best idea—and was up early enough to witness another dawn as incredible as the first. I watched the day break over us and wondered how a land so rich with beauty could be so poor in spirit. So broken.

  The trucks were packed in record time, the helicopter lifted off, and we were back in the jeep as it flew northward.

  “Every day that passes, we could lose her,” Tom muttered.

  I dozed under a hot sun, and the dust settled over me, coating my face and my hair. I kept my eyes shut. The scent of the grasses filled the air—woody, spicy scents—and I drifted along with them.

  “She’s ahead,” the radio crackled loudly and I snapped awake. “We’re trying to get a fix on her.” There was a static-filled pause, and Tom leaned forward, his ear pressed to his radio as the volume nearly disappeared.

  “These are fresh batteries,” he complained, fiddling with the knob.

  “Trying to get a fix.” I recognized Billy DuPreez’s Afrikaans accent come back on the air. The helicopter circled around and over the jeep. “She’s gone off into the bush,” Billy declared into the radio. “I can’t get a clear aim with the dart gun.” I looked up to see him hanging out the helicopter door, the dart gun poised on his shoulder.

  They circled again and made another pass close to the trees, but to no avail. The elephant had escaped into the bush. Donovan Hobbs landed the helicopter on a plain of grass and shut the engine down. Matt and Billy DuPreez jumped out, carrying dart guns.

  “We have to dart her on foot,” Billy called over. “Let’s go.” He and Matt ran ahead toward the trees.

  “You stay in the jeep,” Tom barked to me as he climbed out.

  “I want to see,” I said.

  There was no time to argue. I followed behind Richie and Grisha as Tom, Matt, and Billy ran ahead, racing across the thick grass. The crewmen in the trucks were on the ground now, dropping ramps and chains, working all of a piece, in well-practiced precision.

  My heart beat wildly with anticipation. This was it. In only a few minutes, we were going to rescue an elephant.

  Chapter Twenty-two

  I FELT her even before I heard her, a soft throbbing undercurrent, a thrumming, that my body, rather than my ears, was picking up. A quiver ran through the leaves overhead; there was a pulse that penetrated the base of my skull and seemed to synchronize its rhythm to my heartbeat.

  I followed the men for another ten feet or so, across the stiff, knee-deep yellow grass and hardpack sand, passing an area that had been flattened and bloodied, where she had earlier taken rest. Then we moved toward the closure of trees, tracking along a path of broken and hanging branches. The men quickly convened around Tom. She was in there, they agreed, just ahead, and they formulated a strategy to get her. Several of Tom’s crew were dispatched to drive her from behind and into our trap. They slipped among the trees like shadows.

  Richie and I were motioned to the side, to give her plenty of room, while Billy and Matt raised their dart guns, waiting for her to come out. I saw that Tom had a gun, too, the big, ugly one he had had in his tent the night before.

  “What kind of gun is that?” I whispered to Richie. It had a wide, ominous-looking barrel, and I was afraid of his answer.

  “It’s an elephant gun,” he whispered. “A .458 Winchester Magnum.”

  “An elephant gun?” I repeated. “Gun?”

  “To save our asses,” Tom, who overheard me, brusquely whispered back. “I’ve never had to use it, but it’s powerful enough to kill her if she starts stampeding and one of us gets into trouble.” I put my hand over my mouth to stifle a gasp. I wasn’t sure what I would do if I had to watch Tom shoot her. “If you want to save her life, stay out of her way,” he added, and I was sorry I hadn’t stayed in the jeep.

  Behind us, the trucks had been positioned, and now the workers were ready, poised. They had worked together like a machine, thirty men, each one doing his part, lowering the ramp, pulling the electric rollers in place, securing the wooden crate with large chains. Some of the men acted as sentries, pacing the perimeter of the work area, eyes constantly searching the horizon, guns perched on their shoulders like crows. I could barely breathe from anticipation.

  I heard the men in the bush. They let out a low, keening, rhythmic sound, and rattled the trees for effect. The elephant responded with a guttural rumbling, just before she crashed through the bush, back to us.

  Suddenly there she was. Bigger than I could have imagined. A noble monolith of mottled gray. Standing motionless except for her huge ears, flapping the buzzing flies away from her face, her tail lifted with apprehension. She took a step, but it was agony for her. There were open oozing wounds on her legs, on her trunk, wounds that carved out great pieces of flesh from her flanks. She shut her eyes with pain. I could smell the rotting infections and turned my face away. My legs trembled with rage at what had been done to her. The tranq guns went off, phfft, phfft, finding their mark in her right thigh, and the rescue was set into motion.

  It would take about seven minutes for the tranquilizers to take full effect, and everything had to be coordinated. The large wooden crate was opened and pushed closer to the conveyer belt; chains, ropes, all were stretched and held ready.

  She staggered forward a few steps, while the men behind her urged her toward the trucks. Toward us. Richie grabbed my arm and jerked me aside. Tom held the gun up, waiting. She took another step and, with a deep groan, crashed to the ground.

  Thirty men were ready for t
his moment. Tom threw his gun into the jeep and ran toward the crate. Black, sweating faces intensely concentrating on their work, black arms ropy with straining muscles, the crewmen calling out to each other in ChiShona, and though I didn’t know one word, I knew exactly what they were saying. They wrapped thick, soft white cotton ropes around her legs, which I recognized as the kind of ropes I used for training horses, and they pulled her, inch by inch, into the crate. I drew closer to watch. The heat and humidity made me feel like warm dough, struggling to rise against the thick air. I had to sit down in the jeep while thirty men, sweating and heaving, moved an elephant.

  A chain caught, locking onto a corner of the crate, and Billy DuPreez straddled it, trying to free it with his hands. Tom jerked it and the chain lurched upward, hitting Billy between the legs.

  “Hey!” he yelped, jumping out of the way. “Watch it! I’ve only got one ball left after my run-in with that hippo last year!”

  “Watch it yourself,” Tom yelled up at him. “There’s a lady present.”

  “Half a lady,” I announced. “I’ve only got one ovary.”

  Tom looked at me with surprise and then roared with laughter, before giving the chain a final tug. In an instant, the electric rollers eased the crate onto the hydraulic lift and slid it upward onto the back of the truck, where the men strained to right it.

  I checked my watch. It had taken forty-five minutes.

  Billy DuPreez and Matt jumped onto the truck, behind the crate. Billy filled another syringe with the antidote.

  “She can’t be sedated for long,” Richie explained to me. Billy and Matt slipped inside the crate to administer the shot, then quickly ducked out. The crate was closed and locked, and Billy waved his hand at the driver. The truck started and strained, its wheels chewing at the dried yellow grass and packed dirt and spitting it out again, the truck engine whining its loud complaint. Finally, the truck rolled forward.

  Tom grabbed my arm, and I followed him back to the jeep. His crew jumped into the second truck and, at a wave of his hand, gunned forward. The elephant trumpeted loudly. And the convoy started back for Harare.

  Grisha glanced at his watch. “A few cows and we are back in Harare,” he announced, pulling his cigarettes from his pocket. Our jeep jerked to life.

  “None too soon,” Tom said. “She’s worse off than I thought.”

  We had just started rolling across the dried grass when I thought I heard something. Something faint. Barely audible. A distant call. Plaintive.

  The elephant trumpeted again and pushed against the wooden slats of the crate. They squeaked under the pressure.

  I thought something echoed back from the woods. Perhaps it was an answer from another elephant in her herd. Perhaps it was the dry, hot wind. Perhaps it was my imagination. The trucks rolled onward, crushing the dry brown and yellow grasses into whispers, and I turned my body, straining to listen.

  “I think I hear something,” I said to Tom.

  He shook his head. “Ellies make a lot of odd noises,” he said.

  “Just enamel,” Grisha agreed. “Sometimes they make noise for several cows, all the way to Harare.”

  “Can’t we just check the trees one more time?” I asked.

  “We can’t lose the daylight,” Tom replied. “We don’t want to camp overnight with her. We’ll have poachers up our ass, ready to finish her off for her ivory. Kill us, too.”

  She trumpeted again, but it sounded like a cry to me. A call to something she had left behind. And I thought I heard it again. A murmur of grasses, or leaves, really nothing. Hardly a sound, a just-perceptible shiver in the air. A ghost of a call. Like a dying horse. Slipping away from us, as we drove on.

  Then I knew. She had left another elephant. Maybe even more wounded. Maybe lying there obscured by the tangle of trees, maybe dying. I tugged at Tom’s arm.

  “Was there another elephant?”

  He shook his head no. “There was no sign of anything else. We checked thoroughly. But if she calls enough, she could bring other elephants. Strong ones. We don’t want to get stampeded.”

  I sat back and strained to listen. Above the grind of trucks making their way through the grasses, and the screams of birds, annoyed at our intrusion, and the high cackling of a few nearby hyenas, I could hear it. I could still hear it. Distant, dying. Was it coming from the trees? Or echoing back from my own past? I closed my eyes tight and strained against the noise. And then I was certain. I was crazy with certainty.

  I tugged at Tom’s arm. “There’s a calf,” I yelled. “We can’t leave it. We have to go back.”

  “There was no sign of anything,” he said calmly. “We looked.”

  “No!” I screamed. “No! No! We have to get it. We have to. We have to.”

  “We have to get this ellie to Harare and stabilize her,” Billy called down to Tom from the back of the truck, where he was standing, balancing himself against the crate. “She’s in bad shape. We can’t waste any more time here.”

  “You don’t understand!” I pulled the door to the jeep open and jumped out, falling into the sharp blades of dried weeds and scraping the skin off my arm. I didn’t care. I leapt to my feet and began running back.

  “Jesus,” I heard Billy exclaim, “somebody shoot her with the tranq gun.”

  Our jeep lurched to a stop, and the truck in front of us started braking. I was becoming a spectacle for thirty solemn black men, staring at me with disapproving eyes. Matt jumped down from the back of the elephant truck and ran after me, catching me by my shoulder and spinning me around.

  “Neelie, stop it,” he yelled. “You’re acting crazy.”

  Tom jumped from the jeep now and caught up to Matt. “Stay with the other vet,” he ordered. “I’ll get her back in the jeep if I have to carry her.”

  But I had wrested Matt’s arm from my body and was running toward the trees again, toward the sound. “I’ll find it myself,” I screamed back at them. “I don’t care. I hear it!” I ran as fast as I could.

  “Neelie!” Tom caught up with me and grabbed my shoulder. “She doesn’t look like she’s lactating. There’s nothing back there except maybe a lion.” I pulled away. He wrapped his arms around my arms, pinning them to my sides and dragged me backward. “A lion or a hyena that’s just waiting for you to come back.”

  “You can’t let it die,” I choked, trying to free myself from his arms. “Please. She has a baby. Please.” I didn’t care that I was making a fool of myself in front of him. “You can’t let it die.”

  “I won’t,” he growled into my ear. “I won’t. I promise. I believe you. And if there’s something there, I’ll find it. Now get back in the jeep.”

  Twice I had felt my life implode, turn inward, pulling my world in around me. Pulling in the words I was hearing, the trust I had that things would work out, and, finally, pulling me in as well. Now everything was exploding, coming apart in great pieces of death and pain. I screamed at Tom, at the trucks, at the vicious beauty of Africa, at the heartlessness that lay beneath, and let Tom take me back into the jeep. I lay down on the seat, under the khaki blanket, and while Tom awkwardly patted my shoulder, I cried all the way back to Harare.

  In the end, Tom diverted the second truck and sent it back with Billy DuPreez and they found her. A very young calf, dehydrated, lying inside a nearby grove of trees, about a half a mile in the bush, too weak to move, maybe dying, calling back to her mother. Mother and daughter. Or maybe its mother had been killed and we had taken her aunt. Elephants, in their matriarchal wisdom, will adopt each other’s babies. The men carried her onto the truck. It took only a few men. Billy started an IV, and they brought her to Harare just an hour and a half after we arrived with her mother. They loaded them together. To be saved. To live. Together.

  And I thought, Implosion, explosion, it’s not so much about the direction as it is about where it takes you.

  Chapter Twenty-three

  BABY ON board, I repeated to myself, baby on board. Like those signs you us
ed to see in car windows. Only we had a baby elephant in a trailer.

  We were going home. The cargo plane left Harare, and flew directly to New York, where it and Tom were met by USDA officials. The paperwork was smoothed over, and the elephants were loaded onto a large trailer, as Tom had prearranged. We have elephants, I thought with some awe, as I watched them march slowly up the ramp into the trailer. We have elephants!

  Matt was solely responsible for them now. He had restarted IVs in both mother and baby, to stabilize them as the trailer lumbered along the familiar highways that curved through the mountains of upstate New York.

  We left Grisha with the cargo plane, for his voyage home to Pulkovo Airport. And now we sat exhaustedly in the cab, Richie, Tom, Matt, and I, too tired to say much of anything, our heads resting against the back of our seats, only able to grunt half-words, hoping that the others would understand and respond, and spare us the effort of forming whole sentences.

  Despite my nervousness, the plane ride had been uneventful. Matt kept the elephant mildly sedated, enough to examine her. And he bottle-fed the baby, coaxing her to take weak, fitful sips of the special formula that Billy always carried with him. I slept sporadically, trying to keep a watchful eye on Grisha’s cigarettes, and Tom busied himself going over importation papers that he would need for the USDA.

  And now we were driving to the sanctuary in a small tractor trailer, carrying one large and one very small elephant.

  Every so often the trailer behind us swayed from the adult elephant’s shifting her weight. A camera and microphone were trained on her, and we could hear her grunting and barking in an effort to reassure her baby. The calf had dropped down into the straw, too weak to move, and we watched the monitor as her mother ran her trunk reassuringly over her head and body. Several times the mother trumpeted, and I smiled inwardly, thinking how startling it must be to the other drivers on the road to hear the trumpeting of an elephant.