by Kim Echlin
A SLICE of ELEPHANT
What do you do with a dead elephant?
When I was in Africa, I went out with a ranger in a Land-Rover to look at the bones of an elephant killed by poachers two days earlier. Lions and vultures had already stripped the skeleton clean and as we approached we saw a small group of elephants gathered there. We stopped upwind and watched them circle the bones, scuff at, push and scatter them, then spread dust over them with their trunks. After several hours the group moved off leaving a small elephant, about four or five years old, behind. The driver, no longer afraid, reached to his keys to turn on his engine, but I begged him to stay a little longer. And so we sat and watched. The small elephant mimicked her elders, smelling the bones, pushing them, trying to spread dust over them. The driver said softly, “Go back little one, there are lions.”
It is eerie to see a small animal alone in the open in Africa. There are so many threats. I kept checking the bushes and the trees for hyenas and lions. I asked the ranger why the usually protective herd would let this little one stay alone, and he said, “They have to eat and drink. They don’t have any choice.”
“Why?”
“That little one won’t go. She did this yesterday, too. They came back for her at night. Perhaps tonight she’ll give it up.”
“But why does she keep staying?”
“The bones are her mother’s.”
“I wonder if I’ll want to stay with my mother’s bones when she’s dead,” I said.
The ranger, a young man who had spent his life in the bush silently watching, answered drily, “I wonder, would you risk your life to do it.”
Jo’s body survived the accident with Lear. He’d been courageous during the battle and he had lived. His jaw was broken, his face a mass of bruises. His shoulder was dislocated and he had a concussion. His spleen was ruptured but he was stable.
When I came into his room Alecto was there, sitting in the corner and Jo lay, his hair shaved, head wrapped, shoulder strapped, an IV in one arm and oxygen in his nostrils. He was conscious but his jaw was wired closed. I went to the side of his bed and gently lifted his hand. He opened his eyes and he could not smile or reach for me. His brother had already been contacted and he’d asked that they transfer him to a hospital in Florida. I told the doctors that we could take care of him but they only said, “Are you next of kin?” and then, “He has indicated he will go.”
I was afraid to stroke his face and afraid to touch his head and hands. All of him was battered. I took some hair they had not shaved and I held it lightly, wrapping it around my finger. I thought I saw the tightening at the corner of his mouth that came before his familiar smile, and his eyes softened.
“Jo.”
There was nothing but his name.
We sat together quietly as nurses came in and out checking monitors and IVs. Jo dozed off. Alecto had brought some food from the cafeteria and he offered me a coffee and a piece of sandwich.
“Thank God you were there.”
He nodded. His board was on the floor.
We sat until Jo stirred and this time I held his hands, touched his face. In the late evening we watched other visitors leaving down the echoing hallways and the ward quietened and darkened. A nurse came in to check his blood pressure and said, “The visiting time is over. We’ll be settling everyone for the night now.”
“Won’t you be waking him once an hour for his concussion?”
“Yes, that’s the routine.”
“Well then it doesn’t much matter if I’m here, does it?” I was impatient with hospital rules those days. “Jo, can you hear me?”
He opened his eyes and clearly saw me, recognized me.
“You’ve had a concussion. Did they tell you? They’re going to keep waking you up tonight. Too bad it’s not me. We’d have more fun.”
He moved his finger on my palm.
“I’ll check the elephants when I go back. I phoned the circus to cancel for you. They were fine about it.”
I avoided talking about Lear. I hadn’t really thought about that great body lying there.
Jo blinked wearily.
“They want me to go now, I’ll come again first thing in the morning. Jo, you don’t have to go away. We can manage here.”
But he’d closed his eyes.
Alecto stepped up to the bed. He held out his board to me, and to Jo. “I have to go. I’m doing an autopsy overnight. The rendering truck comes in the morning.”
Jo half opened his eyes, read it slowly and looked at me for help.
Alecto wrote on his board and handed it to me. “The Safari gave permission in Jo’s absence.”
“Jo doesn’t want you to do one. Who’s going to control the other elephants? We can’t risk any more problems.”
Alecto shrugged and headed for the door.
I followed him out into the hall and pulled at his sleeve. He turned to face me, his body tight with pleasure, and wrote, “You should come, you’re really going to see something.”
“You know Jo doesn’t want you to do this. It upsets the other animals. It’s pointless. We already know the cause of death. Why would you?”
He wrote quickly on his board, “Why do you keep asking why? It is settled.”
Then he left.
When pain is extreme for people ill like my mother, one of the last things they can do is block nerves so nothing at all is felt. They blocked my mother’s brachial plexus, cutting off feeling through her right arm and hand. She could still move them but she could no longer feel them. She had to be protected from burning, bruising and cutting herself. She joked that she wanted all her morphine injections in her right side. It didn’t feel safe any more to leave her in the house by herself.
“The worst part of dying is you never get to be alone,” she complained.
But when I left the room she’d call out for me.
I got back late the night Jo was attacked. I came in through the door quietly and tried to settle myself before I walked into the bedroom. I had telephoned from the hospital to ask Lottie to stay late. She was dozing on a big chair beside my mother’s bed and didn’t waken when I came in. The two Grays were perched cosily on the arm of her chair. Lottie was the only person besides my mother they weren’t skittish with. I touched Lottie’s arm and she woke up quickly.
“I’m sorry Lottie, I hate waking people up.”
“That’s all right dearie, nurses don’t sleep that soundly,” and she stretched and smiled under her flattened crown of wiry grey hair.
“Did she take her morphine this evening?”
“Yes. She was on oxygen most of the day. She had a lot of pain this evening.”
I wondered if my mother was taking her morphine or hiding it. I knew she’d been lying about how many breakthrough injections she gave herself. She had four extra vials in a locked box in the bathroom closet.
“Can you come tomorrow, mid-morning? They’re going to need me over at the Safari to get things organized, with Jo off.”
Lottie shook her head empathetically and said, “You’ve got a lot on your plate now, dearie.”
The outside world seemed so distant once Lottie was gone and I stood over my mother’s bed. I stared down at her sleeping and she opened her eyes and seemed awake, the difference between waking and sleeping growing less and less. I think people who are sick for a long time grow used to being asleep. They rouse and if the pain is not too much they drift back into a dream or a conversation wherever they left it.
“Lottie, did you see Moore trying to lift me away?”
“Mom, it’s me.”
“Sophie, you’re back . . .” I felt her waking now.
“How are you?”
“Lottie said your elephant man got hurt.”
“Yes. Did anyone manage to open a window in here today?”
We had fallen into these gentle predictable jokes, teasing words meant to soothe and fill in the silence. We spoke less than we ever had in our lives, but the most mundane of our exchan
ges were charged with compassion.
“What happened?”
I sat on the edge of the bed. I told her briefly about the attack.
“Jo’s in the hospital. He’s going to make it but he got a concussion.”
“What happened to the elephant?”
“They shot him.”
“Oh.”
“They’re doing an autopsy tonight.”
“My God.”
She lay looking at me and then she said, “I wonder why he attacked?”
“Jo’s been pushing him hard . . . I don’t know.”
My mother smiled lightly. “It is hard to imagine pushing an elephant.”
“Africans get unpredictable at his age, that’s what Jo said. But how do you retire an elephant?” I could see Lear falling onto the field, Jo lying in blood.
“Why are they doing an autopsy?”
“I don’t know, to find out more about them.”
“Did your elephant man order it?”
“No. His jaw’s broken.”
“It’s Alecto, isn’t it?”
I nodded and could hear the hum of the clock beside her bed.
“Did you try to stop it?”
“I couldn’t. He went over my head.”
“You should try.”
“It’s futile.”
From the still throne of her bed, my mother’s face was translucent and drawn.
“You want to go see, don’t you?”
I hadn’t admitted it to myself. “Yes. I’m curious.”
“Sophie, I wouldn’t go.”
“Why?”
Her grey eyes were grave and piercing. All my life I had the feeling that she saw beyond me.
“You’ve always thought Jo has a sixth sense about these things.”
“He thought he knew Lear, too.”
“Why would you want to see such a thing?”
“I don’t know. I may never have the chance again.”
“Alecto will be in his element. Stay out of his way. What do you think your elephant man will say?”
When I was growing up, we often looked together at anatomy books about the small birds and animals she was painting. She had a skeleton of an owl that she kept on the kitchen counter for weeks. We examined the bones together and she showed me how the joints worked. We looked at how its magnificent head could turn around and where the wide, powerful wings joined the body. She told me the tales of Michelangelo secretly dissecting human bodies to see inside how they worked. But tonight she advised me not to look at the animal I’d grown to know most intimately. I could not understand. After she’d eaten a bit of soft egg and drunk a few sips of water, she drifted off to sleep again. She usually relaxed when I was home, a thought that exhausted me even more. I settled myself into my own bed on the other side of the wall and fell into a light sleep.
I woke at 4:30 because of her awful wheezing. I put her on the oxygen tank and I gave her a shoulder rub and some water to drink and she fell back to sleep. I wandered in the darkness out to the kitchen. The budgies were all still, half asleep on their various perches around the house. Through the back window I could see lights hanging from trees in the paddock, above where Lear’s body lay splayed on the ground.
I watched shadows moving below the lights and wondered what was going on there. I told myself I was just going to pay my last respects. It took nothing to decide. She’d sleep another hour and a half. That was all I needed. I was her witness and her comfort but I could not lose myself in her dying. I needed to check the elephants. I listened to her breathing once more then slipped away from her room, through the back door and across the field.
It was a new moon, and as I got closer I could see beams of artificial light through the winter darkness. In the shadows the great skeleton lay wet and gleaming, large flaps of skin rolled back, a row of enormous organs laid neatly out on the ground beside heaps of hacked-off flesh. They’d suspended two floodlights from the trees and had a row of lanterns illuminating the primary organs—liver, lungs, stomach, intestines, spleen, heart—all carefully displayed on a tarp. Alecto was working with three young men from the rendering plant who helped him cut and drag and weigh and stack. They were soaked with blood, their gloves glistening. Each man had a towel hooked in his belt to wipe his hands on so they wouldn’t slip on the next cut. All night they’d been hacking and pulling and sorting. Great squares of elephant flesh were stacked knee high, surrounding the work area like a grey igloo. They’d sawed the tusks off the head and unfurled the skin of the trunk to look at its complex muscles. Poor Lear’s eyes were open, still staring out. The air smelled of the stench of things torn limb-meale. The men were soaked to their ankles in spring mud and elephant blood and body fluids. They worked in T-shirts despite the cold, their arms bulging with the night’s cutting and hauling.
Alecto was inside Lear, under the great arch of his ribs, carefully measuring each one. His face was serene, his lips lightly together, his breathing easy and concentrated. I watched him in the half-light before he knew I was there, in his face deep scars of thunder, absorbed in lists of numbers. When he saw me his mask of irony slipped back down and he came over and wrote on his pad, “You’ve missed it, we’re done.”
He showed me a second clipboard with a slim light taped on the top, where his stacks of paper were clamped down. They’d been working for eight hours and they’d weighed and measured every bit of that elephant. The top sheet was a simple chart:
LEAR
Organ or part
Weight
(Kilo)
Liver
42.2
Blood, small part
47.6
Heart
15.6
Lungs (including muscle and other tissue)
157.9
Stomach, intestines, etc. (washed out — empty)
220.4
Hide, whole
69.4
Trunk musculature (estimate from section)
610.1
Muscle (loose)
1651.6
Bones (roughened out), not all
608.5
Front and hind legs (right)
601.4
Right testicle
1.6
Left testicle
1.8
Right kidney
3.6
Left kidney
4.1
Intestinal contents
337.9
Spleen
18.1
Urine
30.5
Faeces
51.6
Hoof (right front)
19.0
Hoof (right rear)
25.9
Tail
0.2
Total Weight
Under the top sheet was a sheaf of stained paper, short forms and numbers and arrows scratched at odd places, observations that would later appear as autopsy notes.
Loxodonta africanus
Habitat: Florida, southern Ontario
App. 21 years old, adult male
Cause of death: gunshot
Height at shoulder (alive): 3 metres
Weight (alive) app.: 5.5 tonnes
Died: 3 p.m. April 26.
Lung: flaccid, soft; gray and red mottled. Bronchi firm and stand open. Around one in upper lobe of right lung, large area of cheesy degeneration, a zone of connective tissue formed around. This extends above the bronchus in a sheath-like manner. The trachea appears normal. Tubercle bacilli could be demonstrated in the cheesy nodules.
Heart: 15.6 kg. 56 × 32 cm. empty. Left ventricle wall varies in thickness from 6-8 cm. Right ventricle 1.5-2 cm. Muscle firm in consistency and normal in colour. Peri, epi and endocardia pale, smooth, transparent. Valves normal. Mitral is slightly rough on superior surface, smooth and normally resilient. 10 cm. above the valves it measures 2.5 cm. Pulmonary artery measures 2 cm. at the same place. Three areas of thickening, with pale fibrous zone around them in the sinus around the opening of anterior coronary artery, proximal to the
semilunar fold of the wall at the origin of the left lateral branch.
Joints: swollen, in right, hind, second joint there is especially large accumulation. Tip end of right femus ulcerated at the edge where cartilage joins the bone.
All the carpal and tarsal joints and the articulations of these with the phalanges, cartilages are irregular and hard. Evidence of long-standing arthritis in every joint. No calcareous deposits.
More pages described the condition of the liver, spleen, kidney, adrenals, but I had no more heart to read it.
The rendering men stood, waiting for Alecto’s orders. He checked his watch and wrote, “2 hours until the truck comes. Clean up. Go to the office and wait. I’ll come and get you.”
They ran hoses over their shovels and pitchforks and crouched around buckets of cold water cleaning their long knives and saws. They piled them neatly on a feed sack and then they turned off the floodlights, swung them down from the trees and rolled up the extension cords they’d run from the barn. As the lights disappeared I stared at the piles of organs until it was too dark to see. We watched the three young men disappear into the darkness of the Safari and when they were gone Alecto turned to me and wrote, “I’m surprised you came.”
“I wanted to see.”
“You still can.”
“Anything unexpected?”
He shook his head proudly. “I’ve done so many of these. I’ve seen it all.”