Elephant Winter

by Kim Echlin

  This is the last sound uttered before dropping off to sleep. I have also heard young elephants utter this sound when they finally complete a difficult task. It is a single, arrhythmic utterance, a crossing into stillness.

  aaaaaaaaa: (lowest possible range, 0-4 Hz.) Empathetic understanding, acceptance in the community.

  This is an utterance made at the lowest end of discernible vibrations. It is a sound more intuited than heard. When one elephant chants aaaaaaaaa to another, it is expressing its profoundest acceptance, archaic and full of promise.

  BREAKING an ELEPHANT

  Saba was the first elephant I ever broke.

  In India wild elephants are lured in from the forests by tame elephants. Once they’re brought back to a human compound they’re bound, back legs together, front legs splayed, to trees or posts. Their trunks are tied down. They’re neither fed nor watered for a few days. Elephant men badger them with chants and talk, and they’re touched all over with branches and sticks. When they grow quieter the men approach and slap their sides, legs, heads, trunks with their hands. If they’re calm they’re fed a little and the men keep slapping and chanting. If they’re not calm they’re starved again. This goes on and on until the animal submits. To the human voice. To the human touch. This is what horse people would call “green broke” and it takes a few weeks.

  Then begins the long training, to move forward, backward, to kneel and stand, to carry loads, to wear a harness, to do work, to live with humans in their community. “Full broke” is when the elephant acquires a new purpose.

  The mystery is that no living creature is predictable. Anything has wild in it and anything can go wild again.

  The only tool an elephant-keeper carries is an ankus, which has a history as exotic as the story of domesticating the great animals. The nineteenth-century ankus tells tales of colonialism—one with a hollowed-out place for a concealed flask, one with a built-in knife sheath. I have seen a collapsible ankus designed to fit into a memsahib’s headband. I’ve seen a rough ankus fashioned from the broken haft of a harpoon. I’ve seen them made of polished steel, pernambuco, and ivory carved with erotic reliefs. I’ve seen pictures of the gold ceremonial ankus used by King Ianmeiaya to break the virgin women in his Burmese court. I’ve read about a stained ankus cut from the tree Christ bore on the Via Dolorosa, with inlaid mother-of-pearl, fourteen Stations of the Cross and three views of Calvary.

  My own ankus is a simple thing, about eighteen inches long like a rider’s crop, with a metal hook at the bottom. Jo taught me how to carry it and to use it with respect. He said, “I’ve seen elephants use sticks to scratch, to dig, to knock things out of trees. But I’ve never seen an elephant use a stick to hit or prod another creature.”

  Saba was born in captivity so she was green broke quite easily. Alice taught her to accept us and to accept our touch. Saba watched us working the other elephants and learned our simple voice commands. When she began to eat solid food, Alice taught her to take grain and hay, but we brought her treats—oranges and grapes and ice.

  Jo showed me how to work with ideas elephants have themselves. Saba was curious about balls and Jo taught her to play catch with him.

  “You have to get rid of the idea that they play ball to please you,” said Jo one day as we worked with Saba. “She’ll kneel to please you, but even if she wanted to she couldn’t really play ball to please you. She plays ball because she loves to, the same way she loves to toss dirt over her shoulders, or reach and grab for leaves in the trees. The best ball-playing comes from loving to play ball, not wanting to please us.”

  I thought of my early art lessons as a child. I had wanted to please my mother, to be like her, and after every stroke I’d looked over my shoulder to see if she approved. My work was competent, but after I got away from home and started mucking around with sculpture and oils and collage I discovered that I loved doing it whether she was looking or not. Everyone steals ideas and techniques. Watching Saba snag balls Jo tossed just out of reach and toss them back with perfect accuracy, I understood that Saba got ideas from Jo but how well she played ball had nothing to do with wanting to please Jo and everything to do with her own passion.

  The most difficult moment in Saba’s training was the first day I hung two small sacks of sand over her back to get her used to the idea of weight. She kept flinging them off. I had to shackle her and tie her trunk. It was the first time I’d ever feared her strength. Until then I’d always wanted her near me. Her eyes looked at me as if I’d gone mad. Neither of us liked what was happening and neither of us understood why we were doing this.

  Jo said, “If you are unclear, she will be too.”

  Everyone is unclear sometimes while learning to live with their elephants. After that the harmony of discipline sets in.

  Our interest in what we were doing together became our passion. I asked her to admit me, to be respected by me, to be my passion. Many animal trainers think love is irrelevant to their work. Not many think passion is. It is a difficulty of language. Elephants have no word for love. I think getting close to your gods means trust, interest and passion. Some people call this faith. I call it being broken.

  Living with elephants broke me.

  My mother and I were sitting in her bedroom watching television when we heard a knock on the door. Evening visitors were so rare that she said, “Don’t bother going, it’s probably Bible-thumpers.”

  I got up to look and when I opened the door, there stood Alecto.

  “I’m surprised you didn’t just walk in,” I said.

  He pulled his slate out of his pocket and wrote, “I tried to. It was locked.”

  “Do you want to come in?”

  “I want you to come out.”

  I shook my head and said quietly, “I don’t go out in the evenings.”

  “She won’t mind.”

  My mother called from the bedroom, “Who’s at the door?” Alecto walked past me into the house.

  “Well, Dr. Rikes, it’s late, but come in, come in.” My mother sat up and pointed to the chair I had been sitting in.

  Alecto always knelt for a moment beside her bed, taking her hand and smoothing it with his own while he held her eyes in his. My mother called it his mute trick.

  “He can’t walk in and say, ‘Nice day,’ or ‘How the hell are you?’” she said, “so he connects that way. It’s melodramatic, but so is he.”

  He got up and sat in my chair and didn’t take off his coat. He wrote on his slate, “I need to borrow your daughter.”

  She read, showed me and said to him, “Well, ask her, then.”

  Before he could finish writing on his slate I said, “I’m not going out. It’s late.”

  “I don’t mind, Sophie,” said my mother, “if that’s what you’re worried about.”

  “I’m not. Tea?” I said.

  She laughed and said, “Go on, Sophie, I’ll be fine for a few hours.”

  He held out his slate. “I just wanted to ask you about some new research.”

  My mother turned up the volume on the TV and said, “Do you both good to get out of the sick room. I’ll be here tomorrow, I hope. You come in the afternoon, Dr. Rikes, I’ll receive you in bed.”

  He nodded in his parody of a laugh and I frowned at her.

  Alecto’s truck was in the driveway where the snow was piled high. I hadn’t had time to shovel and Lottie and the other nurses had been parking on the road since the snows had got so deep. Alecto’s four-wheel drive lifted us over the snow and he backed out onto the long country road toward Highway 6. He flipped on the radio and I didn’t talk because he couldn’t write and drive at the same time.

  He pulled up to a hotel called The Coronation at the corner of the highway and Safari Road. We jumped down from the warm truck into that peculiar bite of late-night cold. We pushed through the door and the tangles of our own frozen breath, stamping our feet, shedding our coats in the overheated, stale air. There are two kinds of drinking in these small hotel bars—th
e quick drink of a pass-the-evening traveller and the long reiterating drink of the local regular. We took a small pedestal table with a couple of wooden chairs, and before we were settled a skinny waitress in tight jeans and a red ribbed sweater dropped a pitcher of draft and two slim draft glasses on the table.

  “I guess we’re having draft,” I said.

  “He always does,” she answered, nodding toward Alecto. “You want something different?”

  I shook my head, Alecto handed her some bills and she didn’t bother to make change. The place was coated with a film of smoke and the smell of stale beer, the kind of place where toilet doors don’t stay closed and the graffiti in the stalls is scratched in. I’d had my first sip of beer, heard my first country and western band, played my first game of shuffleboard in a bar like this. When I was younger I never left hotel bars until they turned the lights on.

  Alecto held up his glass briefly heavenward and scribbled quickly, “Cheers, to our first drink together, and to the decor.”

  I held up my glass and drank too.

  “Isn’t it cold. It’s a bit obscene to bring tropical animals to a climate like this, isn’t it?”

  Barroom banter has an insistent pace that was slowed by Alecto writing. I settled in for a little debate, tossing out the subject like a bowl of peanuts with the beer.

  “No more obscene than you visiting the arctic,” he wrote.

  “And being put on display?”

  He shifted happily. “The animals make do, they have leisure, an easy life.”

  “They make do. They have no choice.”

  “Who has choice? If you had a choice wouldn’t you be in Africa? Is duty a choice?”

  Point.

  “But I came out of love.”

  “And what is the love that brought you, duty or choice?”

  I paused. Both? Neither?

  “I don’t know, but the fact is animals have no choice once they’re put in these places. They get depressed or they get domesticated.”

  It was fertile ground for a good drinking night. Animal rights. Animal intelligence.

  “Do you think if they could talk it would make a difference?”

  He stared at me, challenging, a dangerous debater, not afraid to use my discomfort with his muteness to win, not afraid to use anything to win. I decided not to temper myself tonight. If my advantage was my voice, I’d use it.

  “It was the serpent’s speech that tempted Eve, much more than the fruit. And it wasn’t what the serpent said but that he could talk at all. She was amazed by his ability to talk. If animals spoke we might be tempted to many things.”

  He smiled and wrote, “So it was speech, not knowledge, that led to the Fall?”

  “It was animal speech that led to knowledge and freedom.”

  “And it caused the Fall?”

  “It led to knowledge.”

  “And freedom?”

  “Fallen freedom. ‘Without choice, what profits inward freedom?’”

  “God has perfect knowledge, therefore perfect prescience. If he knew what would happen why did he allow the serpent speech?”

  It was a dance we’d both danced before and we enjoyed it. Banter, cheap talk of rights and freedoms, providence, foreknowledge absolute. I enjoyed reading his side. It made me feel quicker, smarter.

  Alecto drank fast. I thought of my baby and slowed down. The waitress picked up our pitcher, expertly dripped its last drops into each of our glasses and dropped down another. I went to the washroom, where two young girls putting on mascara were joking about some men at the bar. “I know all of them,” one girl said. “And only half of them’s worth knowing.” I wandered back up through the smoke and felt Alecto appraising me across the gloomy room. When I sat down I said, “Alecto, where are you from?”

  “The south. You?”

  “From around here. How do you know Jo?”

  “We met at a zoo years ago. Didn’t he tell you?” He watched my eyes, peeled off his board and continued, “Jo was the only one who could get elephants to do what I wanted.”

  “What did you want?”

  “I was researching sensory points. I had an old map from India made by the mahouts.”

  “I read that article.”

  His bright eyes caught mine, looking to see if I was mocking him, and reassured, he continued writing. “No zoo would give me access. Jo was in a Florida petting park and all he wanted to do was take care of elephants in a decent place like this. I told him I could arrange this job if he’d help me do my experiment.”

  “And he did it.”

  Alecto nodded.

  “What did you do?”

  “Jo kept the elephant down. I beat the sensitive spots and recorded the pulse and external reactions.”

  “How did he keep him down while you were hitting him?”

  “Voice commands.”

  “That must have been an amazing elephant.”

  “Amazing keeper.”

  “I don’t see what kind of evidence you were looking for when you already had the map.”

  “I wanted to see for myself. Refine the chart.”

  “What for?”

  He looked down at his glass, then wrote quickly, “It was a long time ago.”

  “I’ve read your physiology articles too—you’ve killed a lot of elephants.”

  “I was a good shot. I usually could get them with one bullet through the brain. There weren’t so many tourists in those days. The villagers lined up to help to get the meat. It was fascinating—I did all ages, both sexes. You’d never get permission to do that kind of study now. Everyone uses my studies. Even the vet schools.”

  I shook my head and watched him studying my face. He took my hands, the way he took my mother’s hands, and tried to look into my eyes. I didn’t like the feeling but out of shame I didn’t pull away. He turned my hands palms down on the table, covered them both with one hand and wrote with the other, “I never noticed how beautiful your forearms are.”

  I laughed. There is no new language.

  He looked at me, his lips turned up ironically, his eyes angry. “Why is it all the words seem to have been said before?”

  “They haven’t. Why is it we think in clichés? Why is it we think it should always feel like the first time?”

  He shrugged and let me go.

  “What did you want to talk about?”

  “Maybe you won’t like it.” His knuckles were clenched white on his pen and he wrote from injured merit.

  I waited.

  “I need your help. If Kezia’s baby dies, or is born dead, I want to do an autopsy. The Safari says I can, but only if Jo agrees. They say it’s his baby. I need you to help me persuade him.”

  “If Jo doesn’t want it, I can’t do a thing.”

  His body was tight with anger, still. “You underestimate your influence.”

  “Believe me, I don’t. Why doesn’t Jo want it?”

  “He thinks it’s bad luck,” he wrote glibly.

  “What makes you think it won’t survive? Jo’s never said that.”

  “The odds are against her. There aren’t many live births in captivity.”

  “You’ve already done this kind of autopsy. I remember reading about it.”

  “That’s what Jo said.”

  “I don’t know.” I was tempted. It would be an interesting thing to see.

  He leaned forward charmingly, his jaw still stiff, and wrote, “No need to answer now, just keep it in the back of your mind.”

  I erased his slate and said that I thought I should be going. The beer was making me feel tipsy and I shouldn’t have been drinking anyway with my baby. I wanted to get home before he said anything else. I shouldn’t have let his hands linger on my arm. I shouldn’t have enjoyed the touch. I shouldn’t have laughed at him. Nothing had happened. But I still wanted to get home. I should have known that even though nothing had happened, something had.

  The sicker my mother got the more I wanted from her. I pulled out boxes of
old photographs to get her to tell me our story. The boxes were a jumble of three generations of family, dozens of my mother’s friends, places I’d never seen, my old school pictures, holidays and sketching trips we’d taken. We sat sorting and talking and she took up handfuls of my baby pictures and said, “Look at you, you were such a gorgeous baby, it was like falling in love, Soph.”

  There were dozens of snapshots of me growing up. She didn’t like posed pictures. I was usually dirty, mucking in her paints, digging in her gardens, arms wrapped around our various dogs and cats, holding out frogs and snakes and grasshoppers.

  “Why aren’t there any pictures of me dressed up?” I laughed.

  “You never were,” she said. “You loved these outfits, skirts with ruffles and rubber boots. You put them together and that’s what you’d wear.”

  There were pictures of her at her openings, with red fingernails and bright red lips. She favoured tight cocktail dresses that pushed up her small breasts and nipped in her waist. There was only one picture of her working. She wore her hair pulled back and a blue apron covered with small flowers over her trousers. I was already older than she was in those photos. How young she did everything. As if she knew.

  There were no pictures at all of some of the things I remembered, of her sitting smoking on the porch for hours when the critics tore through her shows, of her when her own mother died, of her when my father came for his only visit then left again, of her wandering through the house the day we heard he died in a car crash when I was still a child, drunk with another painter, smashed against a linden tree, across the ocean.

  She met my father in France where she’d gone as a student. I fingered the half dozen photographs of my mother and father in Paris, my mother with her arm around a statue of Montaigne, his lips painted red by the students, my father smoking in a café, shot through a steamy window, my mother sketching with him at the caves of Lascaux.

  “Why didn’t you stay together?”

  My mother left him when I was eighteen months old. I hoped there might be a few new details in those cardboard boxes, in the stories I’d heard before. She’d left and my father had tried to follow her to Canada and live with her. My only memory of him was from that visit. I was about two years old and he gave me an ice cream cone. I bit into it and screamed with the fiery shock of cold in my head. I wasn’t sure if I remembered or if the story was family lore. He was a dark, laughing man, clowning for the camera, someone I would have liked to have known. They touched in every photo. There was a picture of him towering over the little Austin he’d bought when he arrived in Montreal. They took drawing trips together in the little car, slept in northern motels and drank in barrooms with signs that read Ladies and Escorts. There was a picture of my young mother sitting on his shoulders under one of those signs. Her hands were thrust up in the air exuberantly, but she was very thin.