Now this same bull lay mangled on the forest floor, massive and bleeding.25 Pink cavities marked the spots on his face where once his tusks grew, and his belly pulsed with the movement of maggots.
The sight of the carcass had an instantaneous effect on our herd. My aunts and cousins screamed in distress. They nudged the body with their feet, and when this did not wake it, they thrashed the ground with their trunks and threw dirt violently on their own backs. Some of the younger of us ran hysterically away from the site and back again, repeatedly, as if hoping each time to be greeted by some less terrible scene, while Koni, her breath gone, her screams reduced now to whimpers, shook her head with continued disbelief while her trunk evinced a growing acceptance, softly caressing the decayed body.
Amuta, my mother, stood at some distance from the others, and from this terrible elephant that she had loved, absorbing the herd’s dismay and Koni’s familiar caresses. Finally she approached the body, nudging Koni aside. With her trunk, my mother probed gently the wounds in his belly, the bloody craters in his face, smelling and occasionally tasting his blood. She voiced no emotion, but these attentive explorations of her trunk, I see now, revealed her profound care and patient concern. When she had completed her investigations, my mother turned to the herd and spoke.
Now, when my mother “spoke,” more often than not she articulated the intention of the herd, voiced our collective mind, crystallizing it, giving it form and direction. The herd had a mind and intention, true and plain, constituted by each of us, yet larger than our individual selves, and mother’s voice would give body to this intention. And when she spoke thus, we understood her without effort, immediately. But this time, when my mother stepped Koni aside, we did not understand at first what she was trying to tell us.
This bull was not a member of our herd, Mother tried to convey, and so we needn’t mourn him as if he were. She told us simply to return to our grazing.
Manami and the others pawed the ground uncomfortably, not knowing what to do. Our instinct, once we understood the new danger signified by this death, was first to mourn the bull, then to flee this country, to return at once to the relative safety of our old and original grazing land.
As the elephants moped in passive confusion, Koni responded aggressively. She did what not even the oldest and most revered of cows would think to do. She turned and trumpeted defiantly at my mother. Then she approached the bull and laid her trunk over him, taking mother’s place, as it were. Koni would not leave without mourning this bull, for this bull, her actions clearly stated, had been her mate.26
Now Iala fluttered her ears and emitted a nervous whistle. The rest of the herd pawed the ground and lowered their heads as if to escape association with Koni’s unprecedented insolence. And my mother, indeed, spread out her ears and widened her eyes in response to the insult implied by the younger cow.
It did not matter that Koni had only expressed the truth. My mother knew—they all knew—that a bull does not mate with only one cow. But to voice this one truth was to violate another: the necessary wisdom of my mother’s leadership, the unquestioned and unquestionable unity that guaranteed our survival.
We waited to see if Amuta would reestablish her dominance, if Koni would suffer for her thoughtless impudence. Mother stepped toward Koni, and the younger elephant turned to face what she may have believed would be her bloodying.
But instead of charging Koni, my mother relaxed her posture. She paused and considered the younger elephant. Then she lifted her trunk to Koni, and we all drew our breath, fearing an attack. But Mother only made soft noises, flicking her ears, lifting up her feet and placing them back down softly, firmly.27
Mother spoke to Koni, but Koni didn’t respond. She couldn’t. I could see in her face the intensity of her emotion; her grief—and her anger at Amuta—was too much to bear. By her posture, it was apparent that Koni was still prepared to fight, eager to show her mettle, come what may; but Amuta refused to engage her in this way. Then my mother edged closer to Koni, touching her from the side, laying her head and neck against the smaller cow and draping her trunk over her back, and although Koni tried to move aside, bridling at my mother’s caress, my mother would not let her go, until Koni finally calmed down.28
Then Amuta looked to see if any others wished to express themselves. No one did. And just like that, it was settled. Amuta began to walk back toward our grazing field, with Manami and Iala and all the others falling with easy obedience into line, Koni’s small moment of rebellion forgotten, her very opinions seemingly altered by the redirected consensus of the herd. Koni’s insurrection had not, in fact, been real. Mother had not allowed it to be.
And so we lived again content in our new hills. The rains that came thereafter were dense, cooling. In the mornings we fed on the new thriving of greenery, and in the afternoons we wallowed in mud, we sank under the shade of trees and slept. New bulls visited our camp, and my aunts played gladly with them, and there was no new sign of danger; and Koni never mentioned—nor even seemed to remember—the moment when she voiced an opinion different from Amuta’s. That incident seemed, by the evidence of the herd’s behavior, not an actual difference of opinion, but only and completely a misunderstanding—of each other, and of our own intentions. Those peaceful days were the last of my first green life.29
My second life began with a hole.30 No, wrong, that’s in retrospect. A lush expanse. Fallen branches and leaves, torn twigs. The ground it was. Just the ground under my feet. Then not.
I was nearly eleven now and fed on grass, not milk. I pulled my own food from the ground. I tussled with my cousins and ran with the exuberance that we had during those full times. I ran to keep close to my fast-moving mother in the bright sun. And then there was pain and darkness.
I was in pain and felt the weight of something large upon me. It was dark and there was nothing I could see. I smelled my mother and there was another there, and the world was gone.
My mother stood up now, tall (and as she rose, I heard the cracking of bones—not hers but those of the body on which she was lying). I felt my way with my trunk, seeking to cower beneath her, but she swung her body in frantic movements and did not recognize my form, and her seeming confusion terrified me.
As the light returned to my eyes, I saw that there were three of us here, myself, my mother, and my youngest brother (he lay still on the ground, his eyes rolled up in his head). My mother calmed down and recognized me now, and arched her trunk to sniff the air. The sky had risen high above us, a small blue circle in the middle of darkness.
We heard the rumble of the returning herd in the earth and blackness that surrounded us, coming toward us from all around.31 And then we saw their faces in the space of sky above, looking down at us, bewildered. They kneeled on the ground and reached with their trunks but they could not nearly touch us. Iala wept and thrashed the ground. Others ran off to pull down branches and came back and held them down to us, hoping somehow to pull us up. And my mother pawed up the walls, unclimbably steep, only to slip back onto her haunches. One of my frantic little sisters tried to leap into the hole to join us, but another caught her by the tail, just barely.
I don’t remember how long we stayed here, what other efforts the herd made in trying to rescue us.32 After some time (hours? days?), all returned to quiet. I slept, and awoke in a delirium, hungry. In the circumscribed space of sky above us, my family members continued to gaze down, despairing.
And in the quiet, my mother spoke.
She gave the others an order. She told them to go away and leave us to our fate. She ordered them to leave.
The elephants responded by scratching the ground uncertainly. They looked about as if dumb, as if they hadn’t heard; because what they heard would require them to do what could not be countenanced.
Go away without me, Mother told them again; you must survive now on your own. She knew that whoever set this trap would surely return. The only thing to do was to leave, and leave immediately. Mother was alrea
dy as good as dead; and for the herd to remain with her to the end would mean the herd’s end as well. To drive home her point, Mother rammed the side of the hole with her head, sending the ground above into shivers, bringing a shower of dirt on our own backs.
But the elephants only exchanged frightened glances. They looked down at us33 and bellowed incoherently, and then looked to each other again. And still they did nothing.
Perhaps they did not know how to move, how to translate even the simple command from head to legs, to turn around and walk away, without Amuta physically there to guide them. Their confused faces ringed the circle of blue. My cousins, playful youngsters and graceful young women; my stately aunts, strong and imposing, reduced now to an extreme of helplessness and agitation; my younger brothers and sisters pawed the ground madly and shook their heads, calling out to us, tears streaking their faces.34
My mother was resolute. She understood the situation perfectly. She bellowed to them and spoke clearly, she tried to persuade them in a hundred ways, but they would not listen.35 For Mother was the herd. Without her, they could not function.
Did they finally leave? I didn’t know. Their sad, beautiful faces receded from view, away from the circle. I was thirsty. My brother, my unnamed infant brother, lay still, barely breathing. My mother sat on her haunches in the darkness as the quiet of night set upon us.
We would never see the herd together, alive, again.
In the final stillness, Mother was quiet, making noises only on occasion. It was a hopeless time, and Mother, so powerless, could only try to comfort me.36 She believed we would all die; she no longer resisted it. Her despair had become quieter but also more total. Our chance for choice was over, our fates clear, our actions fit for judgment; and it was obvious to her that she had failed. I feared her hopelessness more than I feared my own personal doom; I feared her grief, her final, unassailable sorrow, palpable even in its silence, in the darkness of that hole during those last hours.37
The light came in the morning, and the sounds were like the morning sounds. And as we did in the morning, I emptied my bladder, moved my bowels, there on the ground where we stood, on the body even of my dying brother. I could not help myself.
The cries of alarm came first, then the pounding of our sisters’ feet vibrating through the earth. These sounds told us they had not traveled far during the night, had not really traveled at all. Confused, chaotic gallops. And then came the screams. From a distance and close by: terrified, pained screams. We could not, of course, see what was happening, what the danger was, who was dying. We could only imagine.
For seeming hours it lasted, their horrible, helpless cries. These were the most terrifying moments of my life; I was more frightened than I am even now. Mother stared down, her eyes bearing a terrible intensity, fully attuned to the destruction of her herd and her own inability to stop it.
When the screams finally quieted, we heard indecipherable noises, footsteps of elephants or of other animals, calls and cries of beasts unknown to us.
Rough vines were thrown down into our hole, maneuvered with sticks around my body and my mother’s. The vines were hoisted about us and pulled tight, cutting sharply into our hides, and we were lifted bodily upward until we rested on our hind legs alone, our front feet dangling helplessly. Then a rain of dirt came down on us, great heapfuls, from all directions, on us and around us, covering my brother’s body even as he slept. For hours the dirt fell until the ground filled up to the level of our feet, and we were able to stand squarely again. And then the vines again were tightened, and again we were lifted painfully up, and again the dirt began to fall.
For days this process repeated itself, until the dirt in our hole had filled up nearly level with the ground. I was famished and delirious, almost too exhausted to be afraid, to be curious any longer about what was happening and who was doing this. But when we could glimpse finally over the lip of our hole, I was excited and comforted to see that the world was filled again with elephants. Not our family, no one we could recognize. Elephants fitted out in strange coverings, pulling at the vines that lifted us, accompanied by strange gibbering animals. But the world was filled again with elephants.
1 My discovery of this document establishes, despite your most vehement protests, the existence of Englaphant, that strange tongue native to all places of elephant-human contact, which I understand now intuitively, having spent most waking hours for the past twenty-three years in conversation with elephants in captivity. My translation—of which eventually there will be thirty parts—is therefore precise, placing Shanti in a long line of great Englaphant writers, starting with the master Ganesha, who wrote the entire Ramayana in an Indo-European precusor of Englaphant, with the ink-dipped, broken-off tip of his right tusk.
2 Unless one is well grounded in Shanti’s main tale, this bottom text might seem bumptious. I suggest you stop reading these footnotes, and instead give the above story a read, straight through. On your second run, allow yourself a lot of time. Better prepared to appreciate them, let your eyes wander down to these elucidating asides.
3 The obvious? We will never forget the images of the magnificent beast, seated on her haunches in the middle of our great park, her head bent intently down, seemingly oblivious to the commotion she was causing. In the middle of the park she sat! Nothing could have been more “obvious,” or at the same time more incomprehensible. It is indeed the obvious that merits our most intense scrutiny. Shanti knew this, and so, despite this alarming disclaimer, she does not dispense with that which is most important to her narrative, which is to say that which is in the center, which is to say that which is right before our eyes and which yet we cannot see. And so at the outset already we know one thing which we saw and yet did not see, the answer to the question: What was Shanti doing there for so long, calmly, in the middle of a meadow meant for sheep, while all around the world people watched transfixed, while all around her crumbled a city she had inadvertently reduced to chaos? The authorities have been afraid to share it with us, this simple yet amazing truth: she was writing.
4 And guns, Shanti!
5 “Jumbo on the Run,” quipped the News. “Rampage!” screamed the front page of the alarmist Post. “Had an elephant escaped?” worried the foolish Bengal Ming, remembering.
6 “Rampage!” screamed the Post, see footnote 5 supra, beneath a full-page picture of Shanti’s enormous self. To capture his dramatic snap, the photographer from the Post dashed into Seventy-second Street just inches from her feet, looking up and clicking, clicking, clicking, clicking. Alas—that lump under your feet, Shanti, that squirming, screaming, unexpected, far-beneath-you thing—did you feel it? Reading this we have to assume, sweet unassuming creature, that you didn’t.
7 It is hard to get comfortable, because my left foot always feels like it’s asleep. Elephant tranquilizers are not to be trifled with.
8 I hope you hadn’t forgotten, Shanti, the least of those people, who had observed you from the very beginning; who cared for you and loved you when you were at the most hopeless point on your hopeless journey. Why couldn’t you have mentioned him here by name?
9 But will her story be a singular and bizarre anomaly, a blip in the stream of popular culture, a moment of pure novelty? Or will her tale bear a meaning beyond its facts? Will it become a culture-shifting event, a watershed in the conjoined histories of our two species?
10 “Break free” suggests incorrectly that freedom can be found simply by escaping captivity—Shanti sadly stands corrected. Neither is it true (as she also should have known) that all circus workers and zookeepers are intent on enslavement. There are some who work within that world in order only to subvert it. At any rate, have others “broken free”? The recent evidence:
In Houston, this past October, a 700-pound Balinese wild boar unlatched the door of an improperly locked zoo vehicle with its tusk. It roamed the finer residential districts, entered a large, air-conditioned shopping mall, slid across the mall’s indoor ice-skating rink (
scattering skaters but harming no one), exited through the ladies’ department at Saks, and disappeared for four days, until it was shot and killed while snacking on a stray dog behind a 7-Eleven.
A gibbon in Cincinnati stole keys from its sleepy keeper, escaping its enclosure only to take up residence in the glass well of the popcorn maker at the zoo concession stand. It was captured and returned to its confines; the popcorn was discarded.
An ostrich in San Diego disappeared without explanation; it was found three days later hiding in the back of an automotive store, having garlanded itself evidently in a stack of radials.
A Galápagos-style Komodo dragon turned up in a swimming pool in Los Angeles. The owner of the pool failed to report the wonderful lizard, hoping to keep it as a pet. Sanitation workers discovered it in the trash weeks later. It had died of what was later determined to be a vitamin D deficiency attributable to the sudden absence of rodents from its diet. The owner of the pool had attempted to raise the dragon as a vegan.
Recall, again, that infamous tiger, Ming, who terrorized another city for days. Man-eater and murderer, he ruled that city as his kind has always thought was its right, until he was, like all the others, tranquilized. He lay on the asphalt, tongue lolling, black lips pried back into a mock snarl for gums to be examined, the deadly ivory of his daggered teeth as vital now as unhammered nails, tapped and tugged by emboldened, human fingers; the very killing room of his mouth mute and empty, and violated by a plastic tongue depressor; his insensate, soggy mattress of a body, lifeless, unwieldy, shoveled finally onto a caged truck; and, dull eyes blinking, head pounding, awoke—sad groggy hungover Ming, erstwhile king—right back where you started, in the zoo again.
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