Leaving Time(53)

If anyone had ever asked me to defend my work, here’s what I would have said: The more complex a behavior is, the more rigorous and complicated the science behind it. Math, chemistry, that’s the easy stuff—closed models with discrete answers. To understand behavior—human or elephant—the systems are far more complex, which is why the science behind them must be that much more intricate.

But no one ever asked. I’m pretty sure my boss, Grant, thought this was a phase I was going through, and that sooner or later, I’d get back to science, instead of elephant cognition.

I had seen elephants die before, but this was the first time since I’d changed my research focus. I wanted every last detail to be noted. I wanted to make sure I didn’t overlook anything as too mundane; any action that I might learn later was critical to the way elephants mourn. To that end, I stayed there, sacrificing sleep. I marked down which elephants came to visit, identifying them by their tusks, their tail hair, the marks on their bodies, and sometimes even the veins on their ears, which had patterns as unique as our own thumbprints. I cataloged how much time they spent touching Mmaabo, where they explored. I wrote down when they left the body, and if they returned. I cataloged the other animals—impala, and one giraffe—that passed through the vicinity, unaware that a matriarch had fallen. But mostly, I stayed because I wanted to know if Onalenna would come back.

It took her nearly ten hours to return, and when she did, it was twilight and her herd was off in the distance. She stood quietly beside her mother’s corpse as night fell, immediate as a guillotine. Every now and then she would vocalize, to be answered by rumbles from the northeast—as if she needed to check in with her sisters, and to remind them she was still here.

Onalenna hadn’t moved in the past hour, which is probably why I was so startled by the arrival of a Land Rover, the headlights slicing through the dark. It startled Onalenna, too, and she backed away from her dead mother, her ears flapping in threat. “There you are,” Anya said, as she pulled her vehicle closer. She was another elephant researcher, who was studying how migratory routes had changed because of poaching. “You didn’t answer your walkie-talkie.”

“I turned the volume down. I didn’t want to disturb her,” I said, nodding toward the nervous elephant.

“Well, Grant needs you to do something.”

“Now?” My boss had been less than encouraging when I told him about shifting my focus to elephant grief. He hardly talked to me at all now. Did this mean he was coming around?

Anya looked at Mmaabo’s body. “When did it happen?”

“Almost twenty-four hours ago.”

“Have you told the rangers yet?”

I shook my head. I would, of course. They’d come down and cut the tusks off Mmaabo, to discourage poachers. But I thought, for a few more hours at least, her herd deserved to have time to grieve.

“When should I tell Grant to expect you?” Anya asked.

“Soon,” I said.

Anya’s vehicle slipped into the bush, becoming a tiny pinprick of light in the inky distance, like a firefly. Onalenna blew out, a huffing sound. She slipped her trunk into her mother’s mouth.

Before I could even record that behavior, a hyena trotted into the space in front of Mmaabo. The spotlight I had on the scene caught the bright white incisors as he opened his jaws. Onalenna rumbled. She reached out her trunk, which seemed too far from the hyena to do damage. But African elephants have an extra foot or so of trunk length that, like an accordion, can punch out at you when you least expect it. She popped that hyena so hard it went rolling away from Mmaabo’s corpse, whimpering.

Onalenna turned her heavy head toward me. She was secreting from her temporal glands, deep gray streaks.

“You’re going to have to let her go,” I said out loud, but I am not sure which one of us I was trying to convince.

I woke with a start when I felt the sun on my face, the first shards of daylight. My first thought was that Grant was going to kill me. My second thought was that Onalenna was gone. In her place were two lionesses, tearing at Mmaabo’s hindquarters. Above, a vulture swam through the sky in a figure eight, awaiting its turn.

I didn’t want to go back to camp; I wanted to sit by Mmaabo’s corpse to see if any other elephants would continue to pay their respects.

I wanted to find Onalenna and see what she was doing now, how the herd was behaving, who was the new de facto matriarch.

I wanted to know if she could turn grief off like a faucet, or if she still missed her mother. How long it took for that feeling to pass.


Grant was punishing me, plain and simple.

Out of all the colleagues that my boss could have picked to babysit some New England * that was coming here for a week’s visit, he chose me. “Grant,” I said. “It’s not every day we lose a matriarch. You have to recognize how critical this is to my research.”

He looked up from his desk. “The elephant’s still going to be dead a week from now.”

If my research wouldn’t sway Grant, maybe my schedule would. “But I’m already supposed to take Owen out today,” I told him. Owen was the bush vet; we were collaring a matriarch for a new study that was being done by a research team from the University of KwaZulu-Natal. Or in other words: I am busy.

Grant looked up at me. “Fantastic!” he said. “I’m sure this fellow would love to see you do the collaring.” And so, I found myself sitting at the entrance of the game reserve, waiting for Thomas Metcalf of Boone, New Hampshire, to arrive.