I Am an Executioner (25 page)

Ania left us during the long drought, when my aunts’ skin hung loose on their jutting, angular hip bones, and the hard, ugly shapes of their skulls protruded from behind their kind faces. Ania always had faith in the old grazing fields. We all did. But one day she left us, and Mother remained the dominant female in the herd.
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We had all seen our cousin herds stay in their old grazing fields and die, Mother reminded us. She convinced us to abandon our ancient land. She led us into distant unknown hills
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where,
with less competition for the bark of the baobab trees and the sparse, sweet grasses, she promised us, we would thrive.

Elephants died on this uncertain journey. My great-aunt Thoosha didn’t survive the climb. She was ninety-four, and one morning along the long way, awake and lolling on her side, she calmly refused to stand up.
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Manami’s nameless, still-suckling
son—he had been lively once, a rambunctious boy, but during the drought, when Manami’s breasts grew shriveled and suckling became painful, when her milk dried up, this boy was the first among the children to slow his play, to reveal his weakness—he also didn’t live to see the new hills. (Poor Manami struggled to bring him along. When the calf’s pace slowed, Manami also slowed, the two of them trailing behind us a full day’s journey. Mother did not stop the herd to wait for them, nor did Manami ask her to, and when Manami finally joined us again, she was alone. We touched her face with our trunks and rubbed our heads on her haunches, but Manami would not face our gaze or return our greeting. This happened before I was born, but I remember it clearly.
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)

In our new hills, striped with slow and steady mountain streams, we struggled and lived, but the memory of our old home lingered always in our bones like an ache. I was born in this new place, and lived here in these green hills until the age of eleven.
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And although we were relieved here of the immediate
threat posed by the lowland drought, the new land brought its own difficulties. There were hungry times here, too, but also new and unforeseen dangers.

Koni discovered the first disquieting sign. Koni was older than me by seven years, a teenager on the cusp of womanhood. My mother treated her almost like her own daughter, and for many years, in fact, I believed Koni was my true sister. I followed her in everything she did. When she waded in the lake and curved her trunk back over her body to spray herself, I did the same and choked as the water flowed back down my trunk into my throat. When we grazed, I would leave my mother’s side only to follow behind Koni, to admire the deft way she handled the grasses with her trunk, nimble and precise; how she effortlessly held her own among the elders. Her eyes were larger than those of other elephants, depthless and black.
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I did not know yet who Koni was. I could not have foretold the ways in which her actions would change my life.
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Koni’s confidence and tendency to solitude distinguished her from the other adolescents, especially when from time to time our group was joined by a clutch of noisy young bulls from the
outlying jungles. These boys would camp a short distance from us and saunter into our herd by day, draping their trunks over their small tusks in feigned nonchalance, but quickly revealing themselves as overeager novices. Fancying themselves clever, they tried surreptitiously to sniff our undersides and taste our urine, to determine who among our older sisters were least likely to reject their rude attentions. When they approached an older elephant, one of our mothers, they would be greeted with a roar or a feinted lunge, to send them scurrying back to their cohorts. Our mothers had no time for these juveniles. But the adolescents and younger cows were curious about the newcomers, and some eager girls became positively giddy with excitement. The interest of men was still a novelty to them, and so, giggling and indiscriminate, one of my cousins might follow a boy elephant into the forest for days together.
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Upon her return, her friends might surround her, cooing and fawning, eager to mark the ascension of one of their own into the ranks, they imagined, of womanhood.

Koni, I thought, was different from the other girls. Even when she reached maturity, she stayed aloof from the attentions of boys. She held close to the elders of our group, modeling her comportment on theirs. Some of the other elephants found such behavior haughty—a cow, they thought, should behave like a cow, but a calf like a calf. They felt Koni had not earned the right to carry herself as though she were superior to other elephants her age, to dominate and command those elephants.
But to my child’s eyes, Koni was not behaving as though she were superior to others her age. She simply
was
superior. It was abundantly clear.

But some months later Koni surprised us. We were grazing on trees on the grassless side of a hill, eating leaves, bark, and even the thin ends of branches, stripping down the trunks. In loose and fluid order we grazed, straying occasionally out of sight of each other, keeping our bearings by bellowing out loudly and then waiting to hear the rippling replies of our sisters. But then Koni called to us from somewhere distant, and the sound of her call was unformed and open, and we could not fathom its meaning. Her voice bellied out over the forest, an implacable ululation. Our stomachs dropped, our ears pricked out rigid and quivering with alarm, and we froze. Old Iala emptied her bladder in a rush of distress, then turned around as if to flee—we all saw her. But my mother sent forth a long, deep rumble that rolled over the forest floor, flattening grass: a reassurance, a reply to Koni, and an indisputable command to the rest of us. We rushed forward then, everyone, even flustered, shame-faced Iala, her ears flapping in agitation, with children like me struggling to stay close to the dust-clouded behinds of our mothers. And we rushed as elephants rush—splintering trees, obliterating the small, unfortunate mammals who people the forest floor—until we came across Koni in a forest clearing, standing watch over a gruesome sight, a massive and familiar carcass.
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I knew the dead bull. Once a year he would visit our group, and I dreaded this visit in the pit of my stomach. His smell preceded him by an hour: a black, pungent odor that arrived not gradually but all at once, like a wet-season cloud. My aunts and cousins lifted their trunks to sniff the air and, receiving the smell, fell into an unseemly frenzy, braying at each other, urinating excitedly into the bush.

When he arrived, he broke through the surrounding trees without ceremony, his chin tucked in, his trunk extended, his eyes wild and intent. Black rheum ran down the sides of his face and along the insides of his thighs, and his penis hung low, enormous, dribbling some cloudy serum. Two massive tusks weighted his head, arcing down almost to the ground, the left one broken off and jagged at the tip.

The younger elephants who had reached maturity could not contain themselves; they bowed at him and shuffled with nervous, eager submission. Even Manami and Iala and my other usually dignified aunts excitedly circled this powerful bull, turning their backsides toward him in embarrassingly frank invitation. But he ignored them. His interest was already focused on a muscular cow, my mother, who stood some distance away, peeling the branches from trees, nonchalantly flapping her ears, turning only a casual glance at the visitor. The bull walked toward her, but my mother only walked away. He trotted faster, but my mother outpaced him, leading him deep into the trees. I watched the shivering of the treetops that marked their progress
as they receded deeper into the cover of the forest. And then the forest was still.

About four days later my mother would return alone, weary and calm. She trotted directly to me, reassured herself of my well-being, offered me her breast, which I accepted, bewildered, but famished and grateful. My aunts reverted to their conditioned or inborn hierarchies, obeying Amuta’s commands reflexively, none of them remarking on her absence. But if my aunts didn’t resent him, I certainly did, this mysterious bull who was the only thing that could separate my mother from her daughter and her herd.

Now this same bull lay mangled on the forest floor, massive and bleeding.
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Pink cavities marked the spots on his face where
once his tusks grew, and his belly pulsed with the movement of maggots.

The sight of the carcass had an instantaneous effect on our herd. My aunts and cousins screamed in distress. They nudged the body with their feet, and when this did not wake it, they thrashed the ground with their trunks and threw dirt violently on their own backs. Some of the younger of us ran hysterically away from the site and back again, repeatedly, as if hoping each time to be greeted by some less terrible scene, while Koni, her breath gone, her screams reduced now to whimpers, shook her head with continued disbelief while her trunk evinced a growing acceptance, softly caressing the decayed body.

Amuta, my mother, stood at some distance from the others, and from this terrible elephant that she had loved, absorbing the herd’s dismay and Koni’s familiar caresses. Finally she approached the body, nudging Koni aside. With her trunk, my mother probed gently the wounds in his belly, the bloody craters in his face, smelling and occasionally tasting his blood. She voiced no emotion, but these attentive explorations of her trunk, I see now, revealed her profound care and patient concern.
When she had completed her investigations, my mother turned to the herd and spoke.

Now, when my mother “spoke,” more often than not she articulated the intention of the herd, voiced our collective mind, crystallizing it, giving it form and direction. The herd had a mind and intention, true and plain, constituted by each of us, yet larger than our individual selves, and mother’s voice would give body to this intention. And when she spoke thus, we understood her without effort, immediately. But this time, when my mother stepped Koni aside, we did not understand at first what she was trying to tell us.

This bull was not a member of our herd, Mother tried to convey, and so we needn’t mourn him as if he were. She told us simply to return to our grazing.

Manami and the others pawed the ground uncomfortably, not knowing what to do. Our instinct, once we understood the new danger signified by this death, was first to mourn the bull, then to flee this country, to return at once to the relative safety of our old and original grazing land.

As the elephants moped in passive confusion, Koni responded aggressively. She did what not even the oldest and most revered of cows would think to do. She turned and trumpeted defiantly at my mother. Then she approached the bull and laid her trunk over him, taking mother’s place, as it were. Koni would not leave without mourning this bull, for this bull, her actions clearly stated, had been her mate.
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Now Iala fluttered her ears and emitted a nervous whistle. The rest of the herd pawed the ground and lowered their heads as if to escape association with Koni’s unprecedented insolence. And my mother, indeed, spread out her ears and widened her eyes in response to the insult implied by the younger cow.

It did not matter that Koni had only expressed the truth. My mother knew—they all knew—that a bull does not mate with only one cow. But to voice this one truth was to violate another: the necessary wisdom of my mother’s leadership, the unquestioned and unquestionable unity that guaranteed our survival.

We waited to see if Amuta would reestablish her dominance, if Koni would suffer for her thoughtless impudence. Mother stepped toward Koni, and the younger elephant turned to face what she may have believed would be her bloodying.

But instead of charging Koni, my mother relaxed her posture. She paused and considered the younger elephant. Then she lifted her trunk to Koni, and we all drew our breath, fearing an attack. But Mother only made soft noises, flicking her ears, lifting up her feet and placing them back down softly, firmly.
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Mother spoke to Koni, but Koni didn’t respond. She couldn’t. I could see in her face the intensity of her emotion; her grief—and her anger at Amuta—was too much to bear. By her posture, it was apparent that Koni was still prepared to fight, eager to show her mettle, come what may; but Amuta refused to engage her in this way. Then my mother edged closer to Koni, touching her from the side, laying her head and neck against the smaller
cow and draping her trunk over her back, and although Koni tried to move aside, bridling at my mother’s caress, my mother would not let her go, until Koni finally calmed down.
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Then Amuta looked to see if any others wished to express themselves. No one did. And just like that, it was settled. Amuta began to walk back toward our grazing field, with Manami and Iala and all the others falling with easy obedience into line, Koni’s small moment of rebellion forgotten, her very opinions seemingly altered by the redirected consensus of the herd. Koni’s insurrection had not, in fact, been real. Mother had not allowed it to be.

And so we lived again content in our new hills. The rains that came thereafter were dense, cooling. In the mornings we fed on the new thriving of greenery, and in the afternoons we wallowed in mud, we sank under the shade of trees and slept. New bulls visited our camp, and my aunts played gladly with them, and there was no new sign of danger; and Koni never mentioned—nor even seemed to remember—the moment when she voiced an opinion different from Amuta’s. That incident seemed, by the evidence of the herd’s behavior, not an actual difference of opinion, but only and completely a misunderstanding—of each other, and of our own intentions. Those peaceful days were the last of my first green life.
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My second life began with a hole.
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No, wrong, that’s in retrospect. A lush expanse. Fallen branches and leaves, torn twigs. The ground it was. Just the ground under my feet. Then not.

I was nearly eleven now and fed on grass, not milk. I pulled my own food from the ground. I tussled with my cousins and ran with the exuberance that we had during those full times. I ran to keep close to my fast-moving mother in the bright sun. And then there was pain and darkness.