Leaving Time(58)

“That’s the matriarch,” I told him, pointing to Boipelo. “And that’s Akanyang, with the folded ear. She’s Dineo’s mother. Dineo’s the cheeky one, tripping his brother, over there.” I introduced Thomas to each elephant by name, ending with Kagiso. “She’s due to deliver in about a month,” I told him. “Her first calf.”

“Our girls play in the water all the time,” Thomas said, delighted. “I figured they picked that behavior up at the zoos where they used to live, as distraction. I assumed that, in the bush, it’s always life or death.”

“Well, yeah,” I agreed. “But play is part of life. I’ve seen a matriarch slide down a steep bank on her butt, just for fun.” I leaned back, propping my sneakers on the dashboard, letting Thomas watch the antics. One calf threw herself sideways in the mud, displacing her younger sibling, who squealed his distress. Just like that, their mother trumpeted: Enough, you two.

“This is exactly what I came here to see,” Thomas said softly.

I looked at him. “A watering hole?”

He shook his head. “When an elephant is brought to us at the sanctuary, she’s already broken. We do our best to put her back together again. But it’s all guesswork, unless you know what she looked like when she was whole.” Thomas faced me. “You’re lucky, to see this every day.”

I didn’t tell him that I’d also seen calves orphaned by culling, and droughts so severe that the skin of the elephants stretched over their hip bones like canvas on a frame. I didn’t tell him how, in the dry season, herds would split up so that they didn’t have to compete with each other for limited resources. I didn’t tell him about Kenosi’s brutal death.

“I told you my life story,” Thomas said, “but you haven’t told me what brought you to Botswana.”

“They say people who work with animals do it because they’re no good around other people.”

“Having met you,” he said drily, “I’ll refrain from commenting.”

The elephants were nearly all out of the water by now, trudging up the steep slope to dust their backs with dirt and amble into the distance, wherever the matriarch led. The last female pushed her baby’s rump, giving him a boost uphill before scrambling up herself. They moved away in a silent, syncopated rhythm; I’ve always thought elephants walk as if they have music being piped into their heads that no one else can hear. And from the roll of their hips and their swagger, I’m going to guess that the artist is Barry White.

“I work with elephants because it’s like watching people at a café,” I told Thomas. “They’re funny. Heartbreaking. Inventive. Intelligent. God, I could go on and on. There’s just so much of us in them. You can watch a herd and see babies testing limits, moms taking care, teenage girls coming out of their shells, teenage boys blustering. I can’t watch lions all day, but I could watch this my whole life.”

“I think I could, too,” Thomas said, but when I faced him he was not looking at the elephants. He was staring at me.


It was the habit of the camp not to let our guests walk unescorted through the main camp. At dinnertime, rangers or researchers would meet guests at their huts and lead them by flashlight to the dining hall. This wasn’t meant to be charming; it was practical. I’d seen more than one tourist run in a panic after a warthog crossed the path unannounced.

When I went to get Thomas for dinner, his door was ajar. I knocked, and then pushed it open. I could smell the soap from his shower hanging in the air. The fan was turning over the bed, but it was still beastly hot. Thomas sat at the desk in his khakis and a white tank, his hair damp, his jaw freshly shaved. His hands were moving with quick efficiency over what looked like a tiny square of paper.

“Just a second,” he said, not looking up.

I waited, jamming my thumbs into my belt loops. I rocked back and forth on the heels of my boots.

“Here,” Thomas said, turning around. “I made this for you.” He reached for my hand and pressed into my palm a tiny origami elephant, crafted out of a U.S. dollar bill.


In the days that followed, I started to see my adopted home through Thomas’s eyes: the quartz glittering in the soil like a handful of diamonds that had been tossed outside. The symphony of birds, grouped by voice part on the branches of a mopane tree, being conducted by a distant vervet monkey. Ostriches running like old ladies in high heels, their plumes bobbing.

We talked about everything from poaching in the Tuli Circle to the residual memories of elephants and how they tied in to PTSD. I played him tapes of musth songs and estrus songs, and we wondered if there could be other songs passed down, in low frequencies we could not hear, to teach elephants the history they mysteriously accumulated: which areas were dangerous and which were safe; where to find water; what the most direct route was from one home range to another. He described how an elephant might be transported to the sanctuary from a circus or a zoo after being labeled dangerous, how tuberculosis was a growing problem in captive elephants. He told me about Olive, who had performed on television and at theme parks, who one day broke loose from her chains, and how a zoologist was killed trying to catch her. Of Lilly, whose leg was broken in a circus and never reset. They had an African elephant, too—Hester—who was orphaned as a result of culling in Zimbabwe, and who had performed in a circus for almost twenty years before her trainer decided to retire her. Thomas was in negotiations, now, to bring in another African elephant named Maura, who he hoped would be a companion for Hester.