Elephant Winter (16 page)
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.”
I could smell elephant dung on him. His eyes were ringed black with his night’s labours and his exhausted face
was unshaven blue. He beckoned me to follow him as he walked along the animal’s viscera, astonishing in their size, intestines metres long, slices and chunks of many-hued organs spread out on plastic sheets. We stopped before the enormous heart, which had been sliced in quarters and laid back together. Alecto nudged it with his foot and pointed his light at the top left quadrant.
“Should be a fatty mantle here,” he wrote. “In the wild there’s lots.”
“Why isn’t it here?”
“Don’t know. Probably too little exercise.”
He flashed his light along the outside shape of the brain, lifting it from the front to show me the folds of the underside. “See how there are many convolutions in the fore-brain,” he wrote, “I love this,” and he quickly erased it.
“What is it you love?”
“Its brain is heavier and larger than any living or extinct mammal,” he wrote and continued, “The cerebellum has an anterior lobe, like us, and lobule I is strongly developed.”
He put down his board, knelt and showed me the folds separating the lobes. Then he wrote, “Elephant brains are small at birth and they have to grow, like humans. They’re designed to learn. It’s not all built in from the beginning.”
He pointed to the individual lobules and wrote, “Subdivided lobules. Proportionately, their lobules outnumber those in a human cerebellum.”
I read it slowly. “What does that mean?”
“We don’t know. It’s a characteristic of specialized mammals.”
Then he balanced his board again and showed me the hole where the bullet had gone in.
“Did you find the bullet?”
He ignored me and straightened, stretching his stiff knees while I continued to stare. When I finally stood, his eyes caught mine. I felt his lustful reverence for this single heart bigger than a bushel basket of potatoes, for this brain as old as the earth. He contemplated them with a fascination I’d never seen in him in the barns. I looked up and saw his mouth open and close as if he were chewing the air.
Dawn was near, snapping the branches on the trees in the ribbed cold, stirring awake the darkened minds of any Safari animals that still slept. I knew the elephants in the barn had been awake and distressed all night, scenting Lear’s blood through the walls, trying to get to him. The shadows were cracked apart by the sound of Alecto breathing, all un-smoothed air and coiled effort.
He looked at his watch, and wrote, “I have one more set of measurements on the skeleton. Can you help?”
We stepped inside the stripped bones. The great ribs arched upwards like praying hands and through them I could see a low winter sky clouded with morning snow clouds. The temperature was dropping, there would be storms that day. I might keep the elephants in, play with them in the barn, try to bury the odours of Lear.
Alecto removed his little penlight and handed it to me
with the end of his tape measure. We inched along side by side from the wide area at the collarbone behind the animal’s great neck and head. There was a terrible smell from the flesh and the great ears hung down backwards over the bones above us. I wondered whether he’d noted the structure of the eardrum or if he’d looked for the place in the forehead where they make their rumbles. I could see from the inside how the enormous arteries and veins that fed the head intersected across the skull. Alecto had scraped off enough of the flesh to measure the back of the skull’s circumference. I could look straight into the jaw. I peered up to the thin flesh that I thought must be the source of elephant paunsing.
“Hold the tape and move along toward the tail,” wrote Alecto, and he began to release the tape along the vertebrae. As I crouched back he placed and held down his end. He took a small ruler out of his breast pocket and carefully measured the depth of each vertebra, making little sketches as he went along. From standing almost upright, I bent, then crawled into the hips and tail area where the ribs narrowed. I stretched my arm out and held the tape at what I thought was the end of the tailbone. Alecto worked fastidiously, remeasuring the size of the small vertebra at the tail twice, then checked my tape placement. Now I could hear the lioness’s dawn calls, captive birds woken by wild ones, the hyenas agitated by the smell of so much blood, the elephants shuffling inside, trying to get to poor Lear.
I was overcome with pity, and before Alecto had finished
his reading I pressed the button and snapped closed the measure. I could feel his warmth beside me. We were touching hip to hip, shoulder to shoulder inside the skeleton and his body heat burned away what was left between us. He looked at me sharply, and when he saw I had pulled the tape away from him intentionally his hand shot out and twisted my jaw, his lips pressed against mine and his obdurate tongue thrust into my mouth. His unusual weight rolled heavily on me, tipping me off balance and backwards, pinning me under him. He tore at my pants and the elastic gave way easily. The ribs of the elephant pressed into my tailbone and cold mud squeezed up, soaking me. His forearm was across my chest holding me down and his other hand was struggling with his own clothes. For a few seconds I was so shocked that I did nothing. I looked through the bony cage of the elephant and lay utterly still. I saw a branch in a tree over us and then I hooked my heels into a rib and pushed myself back, jamming the top of my skull against bones. I swung my arm up and smashed the tape measure against his brow, cutting it, watching the blood spurt out over me. I raised my leg and he forced it down, driving my heel into a rock. I kicked him hard again and managed to set him off balance enough to scramble out from under him. Shining dewdrops hung from the bones and my pregnant stomach was between us, exposed and fleshy white. I got far enough sideways to squeeze through two of the ribs and I fell out into the wet, blood-soaked ground. Across the open field in the grey dawn were the barns, the fences, the paddock. Jo
had been walking there with Lear just yesterday while I stood, still innocent, in my mother’s kitchen, watching him at dawn.