Leaving Time(78)

When the calf was two, they’d sold him to a zoo.

When Thomas told me this, I’d gone out to the enclosure where Maura was grazing and sat down with my own baby playing at my feet. “I won’t let it happen again,” I told her.

At the sanctuary, we were all excited for our own reasons. Thomas saw the moneymaking potential a calf would bring to the sanctuary—although unlike a zoo that saw ten thousand more visitors as a result of a newborn elephant addition, we would not be showing the calf off. People were just more likely to give funds to support a baby. There was nothing cuter than photos of a baby elephant, the comma of its trunk dangling like an afterthought, its head poking from between the columns of its mother’s legs—and, we hoped, our fund-raising materials would be full of them. Grace had never seen a birth. Gideon and Nevvie, on the other hand, had seen two during their time at the circus, and were hoping for a happier outcome.

And me? Well, I felt a kinship with this giant. Maura had made the sanctuary her home at approximately the same time I had, and I had delivered my own daughter six months later. Over the past eighteen months, as I went out to watch Maura interacting, I would sometimes catch her eye. It’s unscientific and anthropomorphic of me to say so, but off the record? I think we both felt lucky to be there.

I had a beautiful baby girl and a brilliant husband. I had been able to gather data using some of Thomas’s audiotapes of elephant communication that I was cobbling together into an article about grief and cognition in elephants. I got to spend every day learning from these compassionate, intelligent animals. Given that, it was easy to concentrate on the positive rather than the negative: the nights I found Thomas poring over the books, wondering how we could keep the sanctuary open; the pills he had started to take so that he could sleep at all; the fact that I had not yet documented an actual death at the sanctuary and I had been there a year and a half; the guilt I felt over wishing for an animal to die, just so that I could further my research.

Then there were the arguments I got into with Nevvie, who thought she knew everything, because she had worked the longest with elephants. She discounted any contributions I had to make because she didn’t believe the way elephants behaved in the wild could translate into sanctuary life.

Some of these conflicts were minuscule—I’d prepare food for the elephants and Nevvie would change the individual meals, because she felt that Syrah didn’t like strawberries or because Olive’s stomach was upset by honeydew (although I’d seen no evidence to support either claim). But sometimes she decided to pull rank and it affected me personally—like, for example, when I put Asian elephant bones into the African enclosure to measure the reaction of the elephants, and she moved them away because she felt it was disrespectful to the elephants that had died. Or when she was babysitting for Jenna and insisted it was all right to give her honey to help with teething, in spite of the fact that every parenting book I read said not to feed it to a child until age two. As soon as I brought up the issue with Thomas, he got upset. “Nevvie’s been with me from the start,” he said, by way of explanation. As if it did not matter that I was supposed to be with him till the end.

Since neither of us knew when Maura had become pregnant, her delivery date was an estimate—one on which Nevvie and I disagreed. Based on the development of Maura’s breasts, I knew it wasn’t going to be long. Nevvie insisted that births always happened at a full moon, which was three weeks away.

I had seen one birth in the wild, although you’d think, given the sheer number of babies in the herds, I would have had the opportunity to see more. It was an elephant named Botshelo, the Tswana word for “life.” I happened to be tracking a different herd when I came upon hers beside a riverbed, behaving very strangely. They were typically a relaxed herd, but now they were bunched around Botshelo, facing out, protecting her. For about a half hour, there were some rumbles, and then a splash. They shifted enough for me to see Botshelo tearing at the birth sac and flipping it onto her head, as if it were a lampshade and she was the life of the party. In the grass beneath her was the tiniest little elephant, a female, surrounded by an explosion of sound: rumbling, trumpeting, chaos. The herd urinated, they secreted; and as they rolled the whites of their eyes at me, it was almost as if they were trying to get me to celebrate. The baby was touched from tip to toe by every member of the herd; Botshelo put her trunk around the calf and under the calf and in her calf’s mouth: Hello. Welcome.

The calf was rolling on her side, discombobulated, her legs star-fished in all directions. Botshelo used her feet and her trunk to lift the calf. The baby would manage to get her front end up, only to have it crash forward when her back end lifted, or vice versa, a tripod with the legs at odd lengths. Finally, Botshelo knelt, pressing her face against the head of the calf, and then stood, as if she was trying to show her baby how to do it. When the calf tried and slipped, Botshelo kicked up enough grass and dirt to give her more stable footing. After twenty minutes of Botshelo’s intense ministrations, that little baby wobbled along at her mother’s side, Botshelo’s trunk pulling her up every time she tipped over. Eventually the baby took refuge beneath her mother, her floppy trunk pressed up against her mother’s belly as she rooted to nurse. The whole process of birth was matter-of-fact, abbreviated, and also the most incredible experience I had ever witnessed.

One morning when I went out to check on Maura, as I had made it my habit to do, with Jenna strapped to my back like a papoose, I noticed a bulge at the elephant’s bottom. I four-wheeled to the Asian barn, where Nevvie and Thomas were talking about a fungus that one of the elephants had developed on her toenails. “It’s time,” I said breathlessly.