Leaving Time(72)

In the wild, a female elephant would not separate from her male calf until he was ten to thirteen years old. To be artificially separated, forced to see a baby in distress and unable to do anything about it … well, I thought of Lorato charging down the hill to stand over the body of Kenosi. I thought of grief in elephants, and how maybe a loss was not always synonymous with a death. Before I even realized what I was doing, I crossed my arms over my abdomen.

“I prayed for a miracle, and one day Thomas Metcalf arrived. The Bastard brothers wanted to get rid of Wimpy, because they figured she was close to dying anyway, and now that they had her calf, they didn’t need her. Thomas sold his car to pay a rental trailer to transport Wimpy up north. She was the first elephant at this sanctuary.”

“I thought it was Syrah.”

“Well,” Nevvie said, “that’s true also. Because Wimpy passed two days after she got here. It was too late for her. I like to think that at least she knew, when she died, she was safe.”

“What about her baby?”

“We didn’t have the resources here to take on a male elephant.”

“But surely you’ve tracked what happened to him?”

“That calf is an adult male now, somewhere,” Nevvie said. “It’s not a perfect system. But we do what we can.”

I looked at Wanda, delicately dipping a toe into the water of the pond, while Syrah patiently blew bubbles under the water. As I watched, Wanda waded in, splashing at the surface with her trunk, sending up a fountain of spray.

“Thomas may know,” Nevvie said, after a moment.

“About what?”

Her face was smooth, unreadable. “About that baby,” she replied. Then she picked up the bucket of rinds and slop and headed up the hill to the garden, as if she had only been speaking of elephants.


The arrival of Maura, the new elephant, had been pushed up a week, throwing the entire sanctuary into a tornado of preparation. I pitched in where I could, trying to help get the African enclosure ready to host its second elephant. In the frenzy, the last thing I expected to find was Gideon, in the Asian barn, giving Wanda a pedicure.

He sat on a stool on the outside of the stall, the elephant’s front right foot poking through an open trap in the steel grid, resting on a girder. Gideon hummed as he used an X-Acto knife on the pads on the bottom of her foot, shaving away the calluses and trimming the cuticles. For such a big man, I thought, he was surprisingly gentle.

“Please tell me she gets to pick a nail polish color,” I said, coming up behind him, hoping I could start a conversation that would erase the unfortunate way we had met.

“Foot-related diseases kill half the elephants in captivity,” Gideon said. “Joint pain, arthritis, osteomyelitis. Try standing on concrete for the next sixty years.”

I crouched down. “So you do preventative care.”

“We file down the cracks. Keep rocks from getting caught. Do foot soaks in apple cider for abscesses.” He jerked his chin toward the stall, so that I would notice Wanda’s left front foot, immersed in a big rubber tub. “One of our girls even had giant sandals made by Teva, with rubber bottoms, to help with the pain.”

I would never have imagined this was a concern for elephants, but then again, the elephants I knew had the benefit of rough terrain to naturally condition their feet. They had limitless space to exercise stiff joints.

“She’s so calm,” I said. “It’s like you’ve hypnotized her.”

Gideon ignored the compliment. “She wasn’t always like this. When she first came, she was full of beans. She’d drink up a trunk full of water, and when you got close enough to the stall, she’d spray the whole load at you. She threw sticks.” He glanced at me. “Like Hester. But with less impressive aim.”

I felt my cheeks redden. “Yes, I’m sorry about that.”

“Grace should have told you. She knows better.”

“It wasn’t your wife’s fault.”

Something flickered across Gideon’s features—regret? Annoyance? I did not know him well enough to read his expression. At that moment, Wanda pulled back her foot. She snaked her trunk through the bars of the stall and overturned the bowl of water sitting beside Gideon, soaking his lap. He sighed, righted the bowl, and said, “Foot here!” Wanda lifted her leg again for him to finish.

“She likes to test us,” Gideon said. “I guess she’s always been that kind of elephant. But where she came from, if she acted out like that, she’d get beaten. If she refused to move, she got pushed around by a Bobcat. When she first arrived, she’d bang on the bars, making a huge racket, like she was daring us to punish her. And we’d all cheer her on, and tell her to make even more noise.” Gideon patted Wanda’s foot, and she delicately pulled it back inside the stall. She stepped out of the cider bath, lifted the tub with her trunk, dumped the liquid down a drain, and handed it to Gideon.

Startled, I laughed. “I guess now she’s a model of propriety.”

“Not quite. She broke my leg a year ago. I was tending to her hind foot when I got stung by a hornet. I jerked my hand up, and something about the way I hit her on the bottom must have spooked her. She reached through the bars with her trunk and smacked me against them over and over, like she was having some kind of bad trip. Took Dr. Metcalf and my mother-in-law both to get Wanda to put me down so they could tend to me,” he said. “Three clean breaks in my femur.”