Elephant Winter

by Kim Echlin

  Speech Acts

  Western language is about “naming things” (nouns), “doing things” (verbs) and all the ways in which those two activities are amplified (conjunctions, adjectives, adverbs, pronouns, objects, etc.) In contrast, Elephant is about “being” and “being together (surviving) in community.” Since language and behaviour are inextricably linked, this single idea is fundamental to understanding not only Elephant language but also Elephant culture.

  Few human languages place as great an emphasis on communal well-being as Elephant, but there are traces. For example, in the African language, Shona, it is awkward and impolite to enter into any social interchange without first asking after the health of the interlocutor’s spouse, children, mother, father, aunts, uncles and other extended family. Ritualized verbal concern for the other is also clear in the Shona morning greeting, “Hello, did you sleep well?” and the standard response, “Hello, I slept well if you slept well.”

  A typical Elephant speech act is characterized by a high level of repetition and formality. Greetings and empathetic enquiries and responses are repeated often throughout the day. Much Elephant discourse is aimed at members of the group keeping in harmonious contact with each other and is woven into chants, songs and communal rumbling.

  All this said, the communal nature of Elephant does not preclude the use of the language in a solitary way for the purer pleasures of language. I wish to emphasize that a verbal elephant is perfectly capable of a soliloquy, an apostrophe, a meditation, a prayer or, if you will, talking to herself.

  More Sense Less Syntax

  Cicero, in 46 B.C., advised us never to translate verbum pro verbo (word for word), and almost twenty-one centuries later the advice still holds. In each definition I have tried to identify a corresponding range of human feeling, sensation or thought. Wherever translation questions have arisen I have opted for sense over strict adherence to a particular word or etymology.

  Language is a continually shifting thing. Let it not be forgotten when omissions and errors are found that the Elephant-English Dictionary has been written with little assistance or patronage, far removed from academic shelter, amidst the inconvenience and exigencies of a commercial safari in an obscure corner of Ontario, in sickness, sorrow and the distracting joys of pregnancy, birth and child-rearing. I offer it up then to the interested reader with little to fear or hope.

  Words slip and slide.

  PART ONE

  Formal Greetings

  In Elephant, Formal Greetings are vocalized at many times during the day—upon waking in the morning, before eating and after any separation, even those of short duration. They are uttered frequently, known and used by all members of the group and articulate a strong group coherence.

  I have seen our matriarch, Kezia, train elephants new to the group in these greetings. In one case, an elephant who had been isolated for many years was billeted with us for three months. For the first few weeks she was afraid of the others, stayed away from them, and though she didn’t talk she listened intensely. Kezia cornered her in the yard one day, greeted her with the formal greeting rumble, then forced her trunk into the stranger’s mouth (which is part of the greeting speech act). She kept repeating this until the newcomer extended her trunk into Kezia’s mouth. After she had learned this most basic of Elephant civilities, she was able to browse in the yard and sleep in the barn with the others.

  Signs and Other Conventions

  ^ sharp intake of breath to break a rumble

  ~ slow, steady building of sound into lengthened paunsing

  * indicates a word or form combined with another to create a new locution

  ~ah: (14 Hz.) Dawn greeting to the sun, usually with the trunk stretched up and out toward the east.

  The Romans believed that the elephant worshipped the sun, moon and stars. They minted a coin showing an elephant with its head lifted to the heavens. Aristotle, Alexander the Great’s tutor, described the elephant as “the beast that passeth all others in wit and mind . . . and by its intelligence, it makes as near an approach to man as matter can approach spirit.”

  ~am: (7 Hz.) An evening salute.

  This sound is made precisely at dusk if the day has been a contented one, expressing harmony with nature (see ~ah). The feeling of this utterance is captured in the story of Pu K’ung, a Tantric monk who joined in meditation with elephants in order to shift the clouds. Most elephant-keepers, including me, hold in disdain people who romanticize elephants, but I have seen my elephants singing this evening song into the grey Ontario winter twilight. Their bodies appear to soften and shift like clouds on the rocky fields.

  mrii: (20-30 Hz.) Greeting rumble.

  In all the hours of Elephant I have heard, I love this rumble best. Elephants are big animals who like to do things in a big way. Though they may have been apart only a half hour they greet each other loudly using a combination of the mrii rumble with various expletives (see *grht, *whit, *rii). They rumble and put their trunks in each other’s mouths, shake their ears, urinate and defecate and stamp their feet. Watching them together makes me feel whole. When I see them greeting each other so exuberantly, celebrating each other’s lives daily, I know love is possible.

  mrii~ahah: (18 Hz.) Morning greeting rumble.

  Adult elephants sleep only a few hours at a time. But through the night there is a slowing of activity and they take turns dozing and sleeping more deeply. In the morning, they greet me and each other with this morning rumble and touch each other (and me) with their trunks. It is a moment of great sensual and emotional pleasure and sets a wonderful tone for the day.

  grht: (20-35 Hz.) A greeting for a special friend or family member.

  All members of the group tend to like each other, and they nurture their bonds of affection with constant and caring attentiveness, but they do not love each other indiscriminately.

  hrhrhrhr: (20 Hz.) An expression of longing.

  When our elephants used to be taken away for several weeks to the circus, those left behind would stand where the trailers were and rumble this. If an elephant-keeper is separated from the elephants, they often rumble hrhrhrhr throughout the day. The call is deeply rhythmic, as if pulled by forces beyond life. It reminds me of Pound’s translation of “The River Merchant’s Wife: A Letter.”

  If you are coming down through the narrows of the river Kiang,

  Please let me know beforehand,

  And I will come out to meet you

  As far as Cho-fu-Sa.

  Ooo ahahah~whoo aaoh: (15 Hz.) Deep rumble which probably means, “I’m here, I’m for you (as nature would have it).”

  This greeting is used when elephants have come to help one another. Gertrude rumbled this to Lear when he was sick. I have also heard it rumbled to babies who are afraid or uncomfortable. When I hear it I think of Emily Dickinson’s rhythms and her poem,

  Love—is anterior to Life—

  Posterior—to Death—

  Initial of Creation, and

  The Exponent of Earth.

  PREPARATION

  Lear went down for seven days in early February. He lay on his side and wouldn’t get up. That is always a bad sign with elephants. In the wild the others try to lift the sick one up. They lean against him, one on each side, like a pair of elephant crutches. Jo worried over Lear, hand-fed him and dragged a water trough beside him. His wrinkled skin stretched over his legs and broad sides, folds of it hung around his belly. He kept his trunk curled in close to him as if it felt tender. Lear was drained of his great strength and lay with frightened eyes, tended by Jo.

  I ordered books from the library but what they had was old: G.H. Evans, Elephants and their Diseases (Rangoon, 1910), W. Gilchrist, A Practical treatise on the treatment of the diseases of the elephant, camel, and horned cattle, with instructions for preserving their efficiency (Calcutta, 1851), F.A. Rikes, Elephant Physiology (Massachusetts, 1968), J.H. Steel, A manual of the diseases of the elephant and of his management and uses (Madras, 1885) and a
series on their anatomy by L.C. Miall and F. Greenwood in the Journal of Anatomy and Physiology (London, 1877–78). A little more is known today than a century or thirty centuries ago, but not much. What I discovered was what Jo already knew. With most non-mortal diseases, given fluid and sleep, they heal themselves, and with mortal diseases, they die.

  When Lear still hadn’t got up after three days, Jo went into the Safari office and telephoned Dr. Yu, a veterinarian originally from Burma, who worked in the large animals section at a nearby university. Dr. Yu was a gentle and sad-voiced man. Though elephants were not his specialty, Jo liked him because he had grown up in a country where elephants and people have lived together for centuries, where elephants eat and work in city streets. I had talked to Dr. Yu once to ask him what he knew about elephant infrasound. He said he’d read about it but the old elephant men had never spoken of it. He asked me if I knew an elephant can read a man’s thoughts, and then he laughed. He was full of folk talk of elephants. He told me that pregnant women pay money in the city streets to walk under an elephant’s belly three times, a charm to protect their babies. Then he added, “That’s all superstition, we don’t believe in things like that here, do we?”

  I was stroking Lear’s head when Jo came back from the office. “What did he say?”

  “Not much.”

  “He must have said something.”

  “He said he didn’t know much we could do.”

  “Did you try anyone else?”

  “I left a few messages.”

  “What did you tell Dr. Yu?”

  “I said, ‘Lear won’t stand up.’”

  “And what did he say?”

  “He said, ‘That’s bad.’”

  This was the first day that we didn’t make love. We sat together with Lear until I had to go. I asked Jo if he wanted me to stay and he said, “No, you’ve got your mother to look after too.”

  I left him peeling an orange and feeding it to the elephant bit by bit. His shoulders were slumped forward. He looked as if he were already in mourning. I was annoyed by his resignation. I wondered how anyone could be so arrogant as to give up so quickly. I wondered who had beaten the hope out of him.

  The next day was a bitter, windy twenty degrees below zero. Jo asked me to keep all the elephants in while he went to see Dr. Yu. The elephants were restive, shuffling together, ears up. Saba was tucked well in under Alice, and Kezia pressed herself against the two of them. Gertrude, who’d been rolling on a tire, stopped and lifted her trunk toward the loft. I was shovelling and hauling dung in a wheelbarrow when I heard a movement in the hayloft and strains of thin harmonica music that rose like an exhalation. I climbed the ladder to look. In the north corner, I could see a strange man leaning against some hay, partly obscured by a wall of bales. I called over, “What are you doing in here? No one’s allowed up here.”

  The stranger twisted his body around without moving his hips. He smiled casually across the tips of his fingers, cupped his harmonica against his chin, and didn’t speak. All my senses stood on end as he approached me; I was trying to smell him out, feel him out, the way a woman on an empty street at night listens to quickening footsteps behind her.

  The stranger’s azure eyes were flecked with grey and his teeth the clean white of someone who doesn’t smoke or drink coffee or wine. He wore a felt hat and his leather jacket was the colour of groats. His beard had the bluish tinge of a few days’ growth and the hair poking out from under his hat lay in snaky clumps. He stared at me and then averted his gaze with a disarming shrug. He walked loosehipped over the scattered hay, barely disturbing the dust. I couldn’t tell how old he was. There were cocky smile lines at the corners of his eyes. He looked down, assessing me, and when he stepped into the light at the top of the ladder he brought his boots close enough to my fingertips that I slid them back. He squatted down so that his face was too close and I leaned back as far as I dared and froze again. He dropped his harmonica into his breast pocket and flipped open his palm to hand me a little white card embossed with gold. It read:

  I am mute.

  I stared at him. And then I said, “You’re not allowed up here. You’ll have to leave. I’m going to call the police. Can you hear?”

  He slipped a blue plastic board out of the front pouch of his knapsack. Attached to it was a plastic cover and a writing stick. He wrote on the board and passed it to me, “I play music don’t I?”

  He took back the board, snapped up the plastic cover and the words disappeared.

  “I’m sorry. But you’ll have to leave. We have dangerous animals here.”

  He smiled and wrote, “I am a friend of Jo’s.”

  I leaned in closer to read in the dim upstairs light. As soon as I’d finished, he lifted the screen to erase his words. He smelled of warm leather.

  “Does he know you’re here?”

  The stranger shook his head, turned around the board and wrote, “I didn’t tell him I was coming.”

  He showed me the board, erased and wrote upside down, as quickly as he wrote right side up, “You are very pretty.”

  I laughed, embarrassed.

  He paused and wrote again, “What is the little one’s name?”

  We both looked down into the barn below where the elephants waited in the hay.

  “Saba.”

  He pursed his lips, frowned and wrote, “That’s what you get when you let school kids name your loxodonta.”

  I couldn’t help but laugh. I’d heard about the elephant-naming contest. It was a way of getting people to the Safari.

  “These elephants are indicus. My name’s Sophie.”

  “I know,” he wrote.

  I waited for him to introduce himself but he didn’t.

  “What were you playing?”

  He smiled, pulled out his harmonica and played a strain of melody. I felt a familiar and welcome shiver inside my stomach. He wrote as quickly right to left as he did forwards.

  “Jo told me you liked music.”

  I made a move to go back down and he wrote quickly and thrust the board at me, “My great-grandmother used to sing it. I don’t know the words. Doesn’t matter anyway,” then he opened his mouth and his head rocked up and down silently as if he were laughing. I thought I could hear air squeezed out between his vocal cords.

  I backed down the ladder. He followed me and the elephants turned to us, trunks raised. When Saba came forward, trunk extended in curiosity, he stepped back nervously, arms tight to his ribs, his body arched away from the little elephant. I moved between them and Kezia lifted her trunk innocently to scent him but he ducked backwards and to one side out of her way. None of the others tried to touch him. Lear shifted in his stall and Kezia was fretting, wagging her head back and forth. I could see she was rumbling to the others, the skin on her forehead vibrating. A rough chaos disturbed the barn and I kept myself between the stranger and the elephants. He wandered to the side stalls and craned over the great elephant lying on his side. “What’s wrong with Lear?”

  “We don’t know. He just lay down a few days ago and won’t get up. Maybe we should go out front . . . how do you know his name?”

  He looked grave and didn’t acknowledge me but kept staring down at Lear.

  “I’ll help you find Jo,” I said.

  “Don’t bother, he’ll find me.”

  The awkwardness of talking to him was that I couldn’t move very far away because I had to read his board. He sauntered along the wall to Jo’s corner, familiar with the barn. His back to me, he wrote on his board, “My name’s Alecto,” and held it up.

  He picked up the flashlight beside Jo’s cot, flicked it on and off, tested the pillow with the palm of his hand and lifted back the coarse blanket Jo and I had left crumpled there earlier that afternoon. He sank into the sagging mattress, twisted against the wall, pushed his hat away from his eyes, put his boots up on the bed and crossed his ankles. Then he stuck his hand into his pocket, pulled out his harmonica and played that music again, his eyes rest
ing on me, his mouth obscured. I could not tell if he was looking at me or if his gaze was absorbed in something beyond. He played the music of wandering people, unresolved dominants sliding up from his lungs, down from his irretrievable first breath. I should have closed the doors and walked home across the snowy field but I lingered in the barn, pretending to be busy. I liked the feeling of his eyes on me. I knew I should go but my body had different ideas. I warned my body sternly but it kept stirring. It wanted his heat, it wanted to act without conscience, it wanted, and I told it to stop.

  The next afternoon Jo came into the barns with some horse blankets for Lear.

  “Did you see Alecto?”

  “Who?”

  “Alecto.”

  “Is he here?”

  “Yes, you didn’t see him?”

  “No. How’s Lear?”

  “No change . . . I hand-fed him some grain and he drank a little. Isn’t Alecto a friend of yours?”

  “Is that what he said?”

  “No, only that he’s known you for a long time.”

  “Is that so? Help me cover Lear up.”

  We laid the blankets over his exposed side, stroked his head and his legs, which pushed forward, as if to get up. Elephants breathe poorly lying down because much of their enormous weight rests on a transverse diaphragm. We’d talked about trying to raise him a little and managed to get a few rolled blankets as bolsters under him. They didn’t raise him but cushioned his side at least. I was frustrated that we seemed to be doing nothing, but Jo was even terser than usual.