Leaving Time(66)

Kagiso was fifteen, and we had only just recently figured out that she was going to have a calf. Every day, my colleagues would try to spot her, to see if she had delivered yet. For them, it was good fieldwork. But for me, it became a reason to get out of bed.

I did not yet know I was pregnant. All I knew was that I had been more tired than usual, listless in the heat. Research that had energized me before now seemed to be routine. If I did happen to witness something remarkable in the field, the first thought to cross my mind was I wonder what Thomas would have made of that.

I had told myself that my interest in him was due solely to the fact that he was the first colleague who hadn’t mocked my research. When Thomas left, it was with the feeling of a summer romance—a trinket that I could take out and examine for the rest of my life, the same way I might save a seashell from a beach vacation or the ticket from my first Broadway musical. Even if I’d wanted to see if this rickety frame of a one-night stand could bear the load of a full-fledged relationship, it wasn’t practical. He lived on a different continent; we both had our respective research.

But, as Thomas had pointed out in passing, it wasn’t like one of us studied elephants and one of us studied penguins. And due to the trauma of a life spent in captivity, there were often more deaths and grieving rituals to observe at elephant sanctuaries than there were in the wild. The opportunity to continue my research wasn’t limited to the Tuli Block.

After Thomas left for New Hampshire, we communicated through the secret code of scholarly articles. I sent him detailed notes about Mmaabo’s herd, which was still visiting her bones a month after her death. He sent back a story of the passing of one of his elephants, and how three of her companions stood in the barn stall where she’d collapsed, serenading her body for several hours. What I really meant when I wrote This might interest you was I miss you. What he really meant when he wrote Thought of you the other day was You are always on my mind.

It was almost as if there was a tear in the fabric I was made of, and he was the only color thread that would match to stitch it back up.

One morning when I was tracking Kagiso, I realized that she was no longer walking with her herd. I began to search the vicinity, and found her a half mile away. Through my binoculars I spotted the tiny form at her feet, and I raced to a vantage point where I could better see.

Unlike most elephants giving birth in the wild, Kagiso was alone. Her herd was not there, celebrating with a cacophony of trumpets and a pandemonium of touching, like a family reunion where all the elderly aunties rush to pinch the cheeks of a newborn. Kagiso wasn’t celebrating, either. She was pushing at the still calf with her foot, trying to get it to stand. She reached down with her trunk and twined it with the baby’s, which slipped limp out of her grasp.

I had seen births before where the calf was weak and shaky, where it took longer than the usual half hour to get it up on its feet and stumbling along beside its mom. I squinted, trying to see if there was any rise and fall to the chest of the calf. But really all I needed to examine was the set of Kagiso’s head, the sag of her mouth, the wilt of her ears. Everything about her looked deflated. She knew already, even if I didn’t.

I had a sudden flash of Lorato, charging down the hill to protect her grown son when he was shot.

If you are a mother, you must have someone to take care of.

If that someone is taken from you, whether it is a newborn or an individual old enough to have offspring of its own, can you still call yourself a mother?

Staring at Kagiso, I realized that she hadn’t just lost her calf. She had lost herself. And although I had studied elephant grief for a living, although I had seen numerous deaths in the wild before and had recorded them dispassionately, the way an observer should—now, I broke down and started to cry.

Nature is a cruel bitch. We researchers are not supposed to interfere, because the animal kingdom works itself out without our intervention. But I wondered if things might have been different had we monitored Kagiso months earlier—even though I knew it was unlikely that we would have known further in advance that she was going to have a baby.

On the other hand, I myself had no excuse.


I didn’t notice that I’d skipped my period until my cargo shorts no longer fit and I had to close them with a safety pin. After the death of Kagiso’s calf, after I spent five days recording her grief, I drove off the reserve and into Polokwane to buy an over-the-counter pregnancy test. I sat in the bathroom of a peri-peri chicken restaurant, staring at the little pink line, and sobbed.

By the time I returned to camp, I had pulled myself together. I talked to Grant and asked for a three-week leave of absence. Then I left Thomas a voice mail, taking him up on his offer to visit the New England Elephant Sanctuary. It took less than twenty minutes for Thomas to call me back. He had a thousand questions: Would I mind bunking at the sanctuary? How long could I stay? Could he pick me up at Logan Airport? I gave him all the information he wanted, leaving out one very critical detail. Namely, that I was pregnant.

Was I right to keep this from him? No. Blame it on the fact that I immersed myself in a matriarchal society every day, or blame it on cowardice: I just wanted to take a careful, closer look at Thomas before I let him claim partial ownership of this child. I didn’t know, at that point, if I would even keep the baby. And if I did, clearly I was going to raise it in Africa by myself. I simply didn’t feel that one night under a baobab tree meant Thomas necessarily deserved a vote.