Leaving Time(54)

It was always a hassle when visitors came. Sometimes they were the fat cats who sponsored a collar for GPS monitoring, and wanted to come with their wives and their business buddies to play the politically correct version of the Great White Hunter game—instead of killing elephants, they watched a vet dart one so it could be collared, and then toasted their magnanimousness with G & T sundowners. Sometimes it was a trainer from a zoo or a circus, and when that was the case, they were almost always idiots. The last guy I’d had to squire around in my Land Rover for two days was a keeper at the Philadelphia Zoo, and when we saw a six-year-old bull secreting from its temporal glands, he insisted the baby was coming into musth. No matter how I argued with him (I mean, really? A six-year-old male just cannot come into musth!), he assured me that he was right.

I’ll admit, when Thomas Metcalf pried himself out of the African taxi (which is an experience in and of itself, if you haven’t been in one before), he did not look the way I expected. He was about my age, with small, round glasses that steamed up when he stepped into the humidity, so that he fumbled to grab the handle of his suitcase. He looked me over, from my messy ponytail to my pink Converse sneakers. “Are you George?” he said.

“Do I look like a George?” George was one of my colleagues, a student none of us ever thought would finish his PhD. In other words, the butt of all the jokes—that is, until I started studying elephant grief.

“No. I mean, I’m sorry. I was expecting someone else.”

“Sorry to disappoint you,” I said. “I’m Alice. Welcome to the Northern Tuli Block.”

I led him to the Land Rover, and we started winding along the unmarked, dusty paths that looped through the reserve. As we rolled along, I recited the spiel we give visitors. “The first elephants were recorded here in roughly A.D. 700. In the late eighteen hundreds, when guns were supplied to local chiefs, it affected the elephant population dramatically. By the time the Great White Hunters arrived, the elephants were almost gone. It wasn’t until the game reserve was founded that the numbers increased. Our research staff is in the field seven days a week,” I said. “Although we are all involved in different research projects, we also take care of core monitoring—observing the breeding herds and their associations, identifying the individuals in each, tracking their activity and their habitat, determining home range, doing census once a month, recording births and deaths, estrus and musth; collecting data on bull elephants, recording rainfall—”

“How many elephants do you have here?”

“About fourteen hundred,” I said. “Not to mention leopard, lion, cheetah—”

“I can’t imagine. I have six elephants, and it’s hard enough to figure out who’s who if you haven’t been with them day in and day out.”

I had grown up in New England, and I knew that the odds of there being wild elephants there were about as high as me spontaneously growing another arm. Which meant this guy ran either a zoo or a circus—neither of which I endorsed. When trainers tell you that the behaviors taught to elephants are things they’d do in the wild, they’re lying. In the wild, elephants do not stand on their hind legs or walk grabbing each other’s tails or skip around in a ring. In the wild, elephants are always only a few yards away from another elephant. They are constantly stroking and rubbing and checking in with each other. The whole relationship between humans and elephants in captivity is about exploitation.

As if I didn’t already dislike Thomas Metcalf for being my punishment, I now disliked him on principle.

“So,” he said, “what do you do here?”

God save me from tourists. “I’m the local Mary Kay cosmetics salesgirl.”

“I meant, what research do you do?”

I glanced at him from the corner of my eye. There was no reason for me to feel defensive toward a man I had met a minute ago—a man whose knowledge of elephants was far less comprehensive than mine. And yet I was so used to the raised eyebrows when I talked about my new research that I had become accustomed to not talking about it.

I was saved from replying by a waterfall of horns and hooves bolting across the path. I grabbed the steering wheel and braked at the last moment. “You’d better hang on,” I suggested.

“They’re amazing!” Thomas gasped, and I tried not to roll my eyes. When you live here, you get jaded. To tourists, everything is new, worth slowing down for, an adventure. Yes, that’s a giraffe. Yes, it’s extraordinary. But not after you’ve seen one for the seven hundredth time. “Are they antelope?”

“They’re impala. But we call them McDonald’s.”

Thomas pointed to the rump of one animal, now grazing. “Because of the markings?”

Impala have two black lines running down each hind leg, and another line streaking their stub tail, which does look a little like the Golden Arches. But their nickname comes from being the most prevalent meal in the bush for predators. “Because over one billion have been served,” I said.

There is a difference between the romance of Africa and the reality of it. Tourists who come on safari excited to see a kill, who are then lucky enough to witness a lioness taking down its prey, often become quiet and queasy. I watched Thomas’s face go pale. “Well, Toto,” I said. “Guess you’re not in New Hampshire anymore.”