Elephant Winter (15 page)

mwo~oo~mwo:
(22 Hz.) Archaic, rare. A female migration contact song.

Elephants are migratory, but we have no provision for migratory behaviour in captivity. In the wild, migration
songs may be used to keep in contact with members of a group as it moves over great distances.

I was once commissioned to bring Kezia and Gertrude on a ten-day walk protesting women’s poverty. Each day I walked with the elephants in the company of three thousand women toward Parliament Hill. Kezia and Gertrude were sometimes separated, one near the beginning, one near the end of the march, and they rumbled this song hypnotically throughout the day. The song, so effortless and rhythmic, was well suited to a long trek.

broo:
(14 Hz.) A male migration song.

Our sole male, Lear, was the only elephant to sing this unusually beautiful song while he roamed alone. I think of it as a “road song” for solitary wandering in search of food. It reminds me of a line from the Buddhist Basket of Discourses, “Better to live alone; with a fool there is no companionship. With few desires, live alone and do no evil, like an elephant in the forest roaming at will.”

Among the great tragedies of Lear’s death is that young males lose another chance to learn their wandering songs.

*waohm:
(12 Hz.) Expression of wonder or the sacred, highly varied rhythms according to context.

This was a difficult utterance to isolate because it is buried in so many other songs. I first identified it when I was hired by a group of Buddhists living in Hamilton to enact a candlelight procession for their Festival of Light. We
dressed Kezia in her gold-threaded headpiece and cape, and she carried a relic of the Buddha on her back in a candlelit procession. All through the parade she sang this syllable in a lovely modulating spondaic rhythm with little ornament or variation. I can only guess that this is her sacred song, remembered from infancy in India, when she would have been surrounded by other elephants on the Ganges during sacred ceremonies. After the procession, I began to hear it all through the Elephant songs and I realized that it is woven into many daily activities as subtly as breath.

W
hat 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 exchanges 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?”