Leaving Time(56)

“We’re good,” I said, and Anya and I collected all the equipment we’d brought out to the elephant and carried it back to the vehicle.

Bashi and Elvis both drove off as Owen leaned down beside Tebogo once more. “Here, pretty girl,” he cooed, and he injected the antidote into her ear, right into the bloodstream.

We wouldn’t leave until we knew the elephant was up. Three minutes later, Tebogo rolled to her feet, shaking her massive head, trumpeting at her herd. The collar seemed to fit all right as she meandered closer, rejoining them in a flurry of rumbles and bellows, touching and urinating.

I was hot, sweaty, a mess. I had dirt on my face and elephant drool on my shirt. And I had completely forgotten Thomas Metcalf was still there until I heard his voice.

“Owen,” he said. “What’s in the dart? M99?”

“That’s right,” the vet replied.

“I’ve read that a pinprick is enough to kill a human.”

“True.”

“So the elephant you just darted, she wasn’t asleep. She was only paralyzed?”

The vet nodded. “Briefly. But as you can see, no harm done.”

“Back at the sanctuary,” Thomas said, “we have an Asian elephant named Wanda. She was at the zoo in Gainesville in 1981, when there were floods in Texas. Most of the animals were lost, but after twenty-four hours someone saw her trunk sticking up in a flooded area. She was submerged for two days, pretty much, before the water receded enough for her to be rescued. Afterward, she was terrified of thunderstorms. She wouldn’t let any keepers give her a bath. She wouldn’t step in a puddle. And this went on for years.”

“I don’t know that I’d equate a ten-minute darting with forty-eight hours of trauma,” Owen said, bristling.

Thomas shrugged. “Then again,” he pointed out, “you’re not an elephant.”

As Anya bounced the Land Rover back to camp, I sneaked glances at Thomas Metcalf. It was almost as if he were implying that elephants had the capacity to think, to feel, to hold a grudge, to forgive. All of which came dangerously close to my beliefs—the same beliefs that I was ridiculed for, here.

I listened to him telling Owen about the New England Elephant Sanctuary as we traveled the twenty minutes back to the main camp. In spite of what I’d assumed, Metcalf was not a circus trainer or a zookeeper. He talked about his elephants like they were his family. He talked about them the way … well, the way I talked about mine. He ran a facility that took elephants once kept in captivity and let them live out the rest of their years in peace. He had come here to see if there was any way of making that experience more like their lives in the wild, short of bringing them back to Africa and Asia.

I’d never met anyone like him.

When we arrived at camp, Owen and Anya walked toward the research facility to log Tebogo’s data. Thomas stood, his hands in his pockets. “Listen. You’re off the hook,” he said.

“Excuse me?”

“I get it. You don’t want to be saddled with me. You don’t want to have to do the dog and pony show for some visitor. You’ve made that patently clear.”

My rudeness had caught up to me, and now my cheeks burned. “I’m sorry,” I said. “You’re not who I thought you were.”

Thomas stared at me for a long moment, long enough to change the direction of the wind for the rest of my life. Then, slowly, he grinned. “You were expecting George?”


“What happened to her?” I later asked Thomas, as we drove out into the reserve by ourselves in a Land Rover. “Wanda?”

“It took two years, and I spent a lot of time getting my clothes soaked, but now she swims in the sanctuary pond all the time.”

When he said that, I knew where I was going to take him. I put the Rover into low gear, surfing through the deep sand of a dry riverbed until I found what I was looking for. Elephant tracks look like Venn diagrams, the print of the front foot overlapping the back. These were fresh—flat, shiny circles that hadn’t had time to be covered with dust. I could probably figure out the individual whose track I was seeing if I really wanted to, by paying attention to the crack marks of the imprint. Multiplying the back foot’s circumference by 5.5 would give me her height. And I knew it was a female, because this was a breeding herd—there were multiple tracks, instead of the solitary line of a bull.

It was not all that far from Mmaabo’s body. I wondered if this herd had come across her, what they had done.

Pushing the thought out of my head, I put the truck in gear and followed the trail. “I’ve never met anyone who ran an elephant sanctuary.”

“And I’ve never met anyone who’s ever collared an elephant. I guess we’re even.”

“What made you want to start a sanctuary?”

“In 1903 there was this elephant at Coney Island named Topsy. She helped build the theme park, and gave rides, and performed in shows. One day, her handler threw his lit cigarette in her mouth. She killed him, big surprise, and was labeled a dangerous elephant. Topsy’s owners wanted her killed, so they turned to Thomas Edison, who was trying to show the dangers of AC current. He rigged up the elephant, and she died within seconds.” He looked at me. “Fifteen hundred people watched, including my great-grandfather.”

“So the sanctuary is some kind of legacy?”