Leaving Time(69)

“A hundred and thirty-three thousand dollars,” Thomas answered.

“Each year?”

“Each elephant,” he told me, and laughed. “God, I wish it were per year. I sank everything into securing the land, when I saw the property advertised. And we let Syrah sell herself, by inviting all the neighbors and the press to come see what we were doing. We get donations, but that’s a drop in the bucket. Produce alone costs about five thousand bucks per elephant.”

My Tuli elephants had years of drought, where you could see the macramé knots of their spines and the grooves of their ribs beneath the skin; South Africa was different from Kenya and Tanzania, where the elephants always looked comparatively fat and happy to me. But at least my elephants had some food. The property of the sanctuary was vast and verdant, but there would never be enough brush and vegetation to support the elephants here; and they did not have the luxury of roaming hundreds of miles along elephant corridors to find more—nor did they have a matriarch to lead them there.

“What’s that?” I asked, pointing to what looked like an olive barrel, strapped to the steel grid of the stall.

“A toy,” Thomas explained. “There’s a hole in the bottom, and inside is a ball that’s stuffed with treats. Dionne has to put her trunk in and move the ball around if she wants to get the treats out.”

As if he’d called her, at that moment an elephant swept through the whispering straps of the doors into the barn. She was small and speckled, with a dusting of hair on the top of her head. Her ears were tiny, compared to those of the African elephants I was used to, and ragged around the edges. The bony ridges over her eyes were pronounced, a hooded cliff. Those eyes were big and brown, so thickly lashed that they could have put a model to shame, and they were riveted on me—the stranger. I felt as if she was trying, intensely, to tell me a story, yet I was not fluent in her language. Suddenly, she shook her head, the same in-your-face warning behavior I was used to seeing at the game reserve when we inadvertently invaded the space of a herd. It made me smile, because her smaller ears didn’t quite have the same intimidation factor. “Asian elephants do that, too?”

“No. But Dionne was raised in the Philadelphia Zoo with African elephants, so her attitude’s a little bigger than those of most of the other Asian girls. Isn’t that right, gorgeous?” Thomas said, sticking out his arm so that she could sniff at it with her trunk. From nowhere, he produced a banana, and she delicately took it from Thomas’s hand and tucked it into the side of her mouth.

“I didn’t know it was safe to keep African and Asian elephants together,” I said.

“It isn’t. She got hurt during a shoving match, and after that, the zoo staff kept her segregated. But they didn’t have the space for that, so they decided to send her here to the sanctuary.”

His cell phone started to ring. He took the call, turning away from Dionne and me. “Yes, it’s Dr. Metcalf,” he said. He covered the receiver, glancing back, mouthing: The new elephant.

I waved him away and then stepped closer to Dionne. In the field, even with the herds that were used to seeing me, I never forgot that these elephants were wild animals. Wary, I held out my hand, the way I might have approached a stray dog.

I knew Dionne could smell me from where she was, across the stall. Hell, she could probably smell me from outside the barn. Her trunk lifted in an S, its tip swiveling like a periscope. The fingers pinched together, then snaked through the bars of the stall. I stayed very still, letting her brush my shoulder, my arm, my face; reading me by touch. With each exhalation I smelled hay and banana. “Nice to meet you,” I said softly, and she traced her way down my arm, until her trunk found the cup of my palm.

She blew a raspberry, and I burst out laughing.

“She likes you,” said a voice.

I turned to find a young woman behind me, with a flaxen pixie haircut and pale skin, so delicate that my first thought was of a soap bubble destined to burst. My second thought was that this woman was too tiny to do the heavy lifting necessary to take care of elephants. She looked young, hand-blown, fragile.

“You must be Dr. Kingston,” she said.

“Alice, please. And you’re … Grace?”

Dionne began to rumble. “Oh yes, I’m not paying attention to you, am I?” Grace patted Dionne on her brow. “Breakfast will be ready shortly, Your Majesty.”

Thomas walked back into the barn. “I’m sorry. I have to run up to the office. It’s about Maura’s transport—”

“Don’t worry about me. Seriously, I am a big girl and I’m surrounded by elephants. I couldn’t be happier.” I glanced at Grace. “Maybe I can even help.”

Grace shrugged. “Fine with me.” If she saw Thomas give me a quick kiss before he left to jog up the hill, she didn’t comment on it.

If I had believed Grace to be weak, however, she proved me wrong in the next hour, as she told me what her day was like: The elephants were fed twice, at 8:00 A.M. and then again at 4:00 P.M. Grace had to pick up the produce and make the individual meals. She would sweep out manure, pressure-wash the stalls, water the trees. Her mother, Nevvie, restocked the grain for the elephants and picked up the food left behind in the fields, which was delivered to the compost field; she also tended the garden that grew produce for the elephants and their caregivers, and did office work for the sanctuary. Gideon took care of gate maintenance and landscaping; oversaw the boiler, the tools, and the four-wheelers; mowed the grass; stacked the hay; hauled boxes of produce; and did rudimentary elephant health care and maintenance. All three of them took turns doing training, and being the overnight caregiver. And that was just on an ordinary day—one on which nothing went wrong or when an elephant did not need some special attention.