Leaving Time(70)

As I helped Grace organize breakfast for the elephants in the barn kitchen, I thought—again—how much easier my job was at the game reserve. All I had to do was show up and take notes and analyze data; and every now and then help a park ranger or vet dart an elephant or administer some sort of medication to one who was injured. I wasn’t running the wild. And I certainly didn’t have to fund it.

Grace told me that she never intended to live this far north. She had grown up in Georgia and couldn’t stand the cold. But then Gideon had come to work for her mother, and when Thomas asked for their help starting this sanctuary, Grace went along as a silent partner. “So you weren’t working at the circus?” I asked.

Grace dropped potatoes into individual buckets. “I was going to be a second-grade teacher,” she said.

“They have schools in New Hampshire.”

She looked at me. “Yes,” she said. “I guess they do.”

I got the feeling that there was a story there, one I didn’t understand, much like my silent conversation with Dionne. Had Grace followed her mother here? Or her husband? She was good at her job, but lots of people were good at their jobs without actually enjoying what they were doing.

Grace worked with ridiculous speed and efficiency; I’m sure I was only slowing her down. There were greens and onions and sweet potatoes and cabbage, broccoli, carrots, grains. Some elephants needed vitamin E or Cosequin added to their diets; others needed supplement balls—apples hollowed out with medicine inside and peanut butter on the top. We hauled the buckets into the back of the four-wheeler, heading out to find the elephants, so that they could have breakfast.

We followed dung and broken branches and prints in mud puddles to track the elephants from the places they were last seen the night before. If it was colder in the morning, like it was now, they’d be more likely to have moved to a higher elevation.

The first elephants we located were Dionne, who’d left the barn when we went in to prepare the food, and her best friend, Olive. Olive was bigger, although Dionne was taller. Olive’s ears draped in soft folds, like velvet curtains. They stood close enough to touch, and their trunks were entwined, like young girls holding hands.

I was holding my breath, and I didn’t realize it, until I saw Grace looking at me. “You’re like Gideon and my mother,” she said. “It’s in your blood.”

The elephants must have been used to the vehicle, but it was still amazing for me to be this close while Grace hefted the first two buckets and dumped them out about twenty feet apart. Dionne immediately picked up a Blue Hubbard squash and crunched the entire thing in her mouth at once. Olive alternated food choices, following each bite of vegetable with a palate cleanser of straw.

We continued this, going on a treasure hunt for the other elephants. I met them all by name, taking note of which elephant had a cut in one ear, which had an odd gait from previous injuries, which ones were skittish, which ones were friendly. They congregated in twos and threes, reminding me of the Red Hat ladies I saw once in Johannesburg, celebrating the good fortune of old age.

It wasn’t until we reached the African elephant enclosure that I realized Grace had slowed the ATV down and was idling outside the gate. “I don’t like going in there,” she admitted. “Gideon usually does it for me. Hester’s a bully.”

I could see why she felt that way. A moment later, Hester came charging out of the woods, her head shaking and her massive ears flapping. She trumpeted so loudly the hair stood up on my arms. Immediately, I felt myself smile. This, I knew. This, I was used to.

“I could do it,” I suggested.

From the look on Grace’s face you would have thought I’d suggested that I sacrifice a goat with my bare hands. “Dr. Metcalf would kill me.”

“Trust me,” I lied, “if you know one African elephant, you know them all.”

Before she could stop me, I hopped off the ATV and lugged the bucket with Hester’s food through the gap in the fencing. The elephant lifted her trunk and roared. Then she picked up a stick and whipped it at me.

“You missed,” I said, my hands on my hips, and I walked back to the ATV to get the bale of hay.

Let’s not even begin to make a list of all the reasons I should never have done this. I didn’t know this elephant or how she reacted to strangers. I didn’t have Thomas’s permission. And I certainly shouldn’t have been lifting heavy bales of hay, or putting myself in danger, if I had any thoughts of keeping this baby.

But I also knew never to show fear, so when Hester came at me as I was carrying the hay, her feet flying in the dust and creating a cloud around me, I stood my ground.

Suddenly I heard a loud bellow, and I was lifted off my feet and hauled outside the gap in the fencing. “Jesus,” a man said. “Do you have a death wish?”

Hester lifted her head at the sound of the voice, then bent over her food, as if she hadn’t been attempting to scare the hell out of me a moment before. I squirmed, trying to get out of the iron grip of this stranger, who was staring with confusion at Grace in the ATV even as he held me in a vise. “Who are you?” he asked.

“Alice,” I said, my voice clipped. “Lovely to meet you. Can you put me down now?”

He dropped me on my feet. “Are you an idiot? That’s an African elephant.”

“Actually, I’m the opposite of an idiot. I’m a postdoc. And I study African elephants.”