Elephant Winter (5 page)

“I want to record more, Jo, see what I can find out.”

“Suit yourself,” was all he said, undoing the buttons on my sweater.

Of course I nearly always did. Each day after mucking out I recorded the elephants and I kept reading. I started fiddling with putting the sounds they made into some kind of order, translating them, arranging them like a dictionary. Elephant is a peculiarly difficult language because they communicate most richly in “paunsing,” low-frequency sounds we can’t hear. Sometimes I can feel pressure changes in the air when they are rumbling and I can see vibrations under the skin on their foreheads. They paunsed whenever Jo came into or left the barn. They paunsed to each other when they woke in the morning, as they walked, when one of them was outside and the others in. I could feel them when we were in Jo’s cot together. They appeared to be standing silently when they were, in fact, talking together.

Before Jo got back, I always put the recorder away with my sketching and the pitchfork and shovels. Each early twilight, when I got up from his cot and made ready to return to my mother’s, I could already feel the prints of Jo’s hands on my body wearing off and my yearning beginning all over again. I wanted more of him, and on the next cloudless winter day, I came in from the sun-planished snow and said to him, “I’m not staying inside today, I’m coming with you.”

Jo walked into the back of the tack room and came out with two pairs of snowshoes. “We’ll go to the north fields then,” he said, “they’ll like the change.”

He helped me adjust the straps and laughing I walked bowlegged out into the fields. I learned to sway a little, taking
longer, lighter strides. We snowshoed beside the elephants away from their usual path, away from my mother’s back windows, and excited by the change in routine they tossed snow over their necks and lifted their faces to the sun. We followed the back fences and slid down into a gulley where no one could see us. Jo’s face was bright and boyish in the cold. He lifted his hands unconsciously to me. Under the elephants’ tutelage, we too had become a species of touchers, tangled up together. I could feel him through our layers of winter clothes, thick coats and mitts squashed between us, lips warm, cheeks nipped and white. The cold held us out naked and we wrapped ourselves up in our own warm breath. Lying side by side in the snowbanks watching the sky, listening to dead leaves crick at the ends of their branches, I wrapped Jo’s hair round and round my fingers, his body round and round mine until, too soon, the sun fell and the temperatures dropped and the elephants got hungry. We got up and in the shock of not touching we began to run back.

I watched Jo leading the elephants, nimble and disappearing. The muscles of my legs ached and I fell behind. Kezia slowed and touched her trunk to my arm to encourage me through my weariness. We followed the others and alone out there in the waning light I looked beyond to the jut of the great escarpment with its old gnarled fir trees. Then Kezia touched me again and I shifted my attention back to the confines of the electrified fences, to the corrugated steel barns where the animals endured our long winter. I couldn’t help but think, “It’s such a tawdry place.”

It might have been that afternoon that I got pregnant.

I didn’t know what to tell Jo, what he might think. I had no intention of staying with him and sleeping in a barn for the rest of my life. But the more I thought about this baby the more I wanted it. I knew that babies and men and work don’t go together very well, but you have them all anyway. You can’t wait forever. I thought I’d just take my baby wherever I went. I’d made a habit of moving around, of leaving men, and I figured as soon as my mother was dead I’d leave again.

Prepared by Sophie Walker

Preface

It is the fate of those who toil at certain employments to be driven by inner yearnings more than buoyed by the world’s approbation, and to be exposed to censure with little hope of praise. Among these I count myself, a humble elephant-keeper and amateur lexicographer of the Elephant language.

A dictionary of the Elephant language is to some extent different from that of other dictionaries in so far as the uses and pleasures of Elephant differ from those of French, English, Ojibway or even Latin and Greek. The study of Elephant has the added difficulty that our human limitations (no trunk) prevent us from communicating fluently in Elephant. And so I stand before this task in the melancholy knowledge that whatever I may do to illuminate the Elephant language, an elephant will never speak my language and I will never speak hers.

The vocabulary of this dictionary is drawn uniquely from
the elephants at the Ontario Safari who come from Thailand, India and Florida, and have no doubt been influenced by their contact with Africans. What has transpired at the Safari, I believe, is a unique Creole, a result of transplanting, blending and mixing.

Elephant is a highly adaptable language.

Transcription and the Elephant Spectrogram

Human speech is created by combining the physiological possibilities of the nasal cavity, hard palate, teeth, lips, tongue (blade, front and back), soft palate, teeth-ridge, uvula and vocal cords. Elephant infrasound is created by vibrations at the top of the trunk, which can be seen in the thin layer of skin fluttering in the forehead. High frequency (322-570 Hz.) screams, bellows, trumpets and calls can be heard by the human ear, but the low dominant frequency (18-35 Hz.) of their rumbles was first picked up as the upper harmonics of
intense infrasonic communication and cannot be heard without the enhancement of sped-up recordings. The most accurate means to transcribe Elephant is by use of a spectrogram. For the general reader I have adapted the more familiar roman alphabet since the International Phonetic Alphabet (
IPA
), even with its wide analysis of sound, resists certain Elephant sounds—rumbles, screams, whistles and trumpeting. Immediately after each vocalization I record the hertz range, which indicates if it is audible to the human ear.

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.

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.