Larger Than Life (Novella) Read online

  “Alice,” the vet said to me, “if the calf dies, it dies. And if you can’t handle that, you’re in the wrong business.”

  I drove him back to camp in silence. But once he’d been dropped off, I loaded blankets into the Land Rover and returned to the spot where we had left the calf. I covered him in black fleece as he lay on his side, weak and bleating, and that’s when I saw something I had never seen in all the years I had been studying elephants.

  This baby was crying.

  The jury was still out on whether or not elephants could shed tears. Charles Darwin believed that humans wept as a result of grief, and animals largely did not. But he did cite a report of an Indian elephant that had tears flowing from its eyes after its capture. Elephant researcher Iain Douglas-Hamilton had reported injured elephants that cried. There were anecdotal accounts from circus trainers saying elephants shed tears when reprimanded, from hunters who saw a bull they’d shot weep as it fell to the ground, from naturalists claiming they’d seen female elephants cry while in labor.

  I knelt beside the calf, staring at the moisture that dripped down his face, trying to come up with a scientific explanation. Elephants routinely had temporal secretions—wetness that ran not from the corners of the eyes but from the sides of the head. They secreted in times of stress, excitement, sexual attraction, fear—any emotionally charged situation. But I touched my finger to the calf’s temple, and it came away dry. I touched my finger to the inside corner of his eye, and it came away wet.

  It was possible that the calf’s eyes were watering due to heat or dust. After all, there was no doubt that elephants could produce tears. The problem was in suggesting that those tears were a result of sadness.

  It has been shown that when humans cry, the chemical makeup of “sad” tears is different from that of tears shed in happiness or anger. I wished for a way to conduct such an experiment on elephants.

  That whole night, I kept a vigil over the newborn. Shortly after dawn, because he could no longer nurse from his mother, the calf died.

  I was with him when he passed. And yes, I cried.

  Calling in sick the next morning is really not a lie. It is just that the inhabitant of my cottage who is suffering from severe gastrointestinal issues is not me but the elephant.

  Granted, I am not firing on all pistons myself. I had not realized that the calf would get up at regular intervals for more sweetened water, which didn’t sate her in the least. There is a reason people say being a mother is the hardest job in the world: You do not sleep and you do not get vacation time. You do not leave your work on your desk at the end of the day. Your briefcase is your heart, and you are rifling through it constantly. Your office is as wide as the world, and your punch card is measured not in hours but in a lifetime.

  I would trade just about anything right now for an academic library that could offer me resources on what to feed an elephant calf. But all I have is the experience from my years in the field: that this orphan won’t survive for very long unless I find her some milk.

  I slip down the road to the rangers’ village, leaving the calf inside my hut. The door to their small communal kitchen facility is ajar, and I duck inside to raid their cupboards. Like us, they use powdered milk, because nothing keeps for very long in the bush. But unlike ours, their tin is half full.

  I look around the space, which is scrubbed and clean—not at all what I’d expect for the living quarters of six men. In the corner is a small blue bucket filled with wooden pull toys and stuffed animals; these must be for the children who come to visit their fathers. The men who become rangers lead lives like those of soldiers—going off to do their tours of duty for weeks at a time; working long, intense, dangerous hours; enjoying rare conjugal visits from their wives. But there is rarely turnover among the rangers; the job is steady and pays well. In Botswana, such occupations are difficult to come by.

  I arrange the pile of toys as neatly as I can and wash the bucket in the sink with soap and water. Then I dump the contents of the powdered milk tin inside, adding warm water. I mix it up with my hand, trying to get the powder to dissolve.

  When I hear a voice behind me, I startle and nearly upend the bucket. “I can’t wait to see the size of the bowl of cereal.”

  The ranger is smiling, his teeth blindingly white against his dark skin. His hair is shaved close to the scalp, and he wears the tan khaki uniform that all our rangers wear. His voice sounds like music, the mark of a man who has spoken Setswana his whole life and learned English only because he had to.

  He also has a bloody bandage wrapped around his right hand.

  “What are you doing here?” I say.

  “I live here,” he replies. “What is your excuse?”

  I have seen him around but have not been at camp long enough yet to be assigned to ride with him into the bush. I do not remember his name. “The researchers ran out of milk for our coffee.”

  He looks at the bucket, amused. “I am guessing you take it very light?” He smells of cloves, of soap. “Excuse me,” he says, and his shoulder bumps against my arm as he reaches into the cabinet above me. He pulls down a roll of gauze and some tape, and begins to patch up his wound. After watching a few failed one-handed attempts, I offer to hold the gauze in place so that he can secure it. “Damn lions,” he mutters.

  My eyes fly to his face. “You were mauled?”

  There it is again, that smile. “Yes. By only a piece of barbed wire that was cutting into a baobab tree.” He holds out his uninjured hand. “I am Neo.”

  “Alice,” I say, giving a perfunctory shake. My arms circle the bucket, and I think of all the damage a baby elephant can do in five minutes. “I need to go.”

  “I can give you a ride into the bush, if you like.”

  “No. I’m … sick today.”

  He inclines his head and crosses to the pantry on the other side of the room. For a moment he rummages, only to emerge with another tin. “This was left behind by the wife of one of the other rangers. It should work for … indigestion.”

  As he opens the door, I squint into the sunlight. It swallows him whole.

  It takes my eyes a minute to adjust, so that I can read the label more carefully.

  SMA Gold Cap. Neo has handed me a tin of powdered baby formula.

  I did not always work with elephants. In fact, when I started my doctorate in neuroscience, I experimented on primates. My research involved running behavioral protocols on adolescent macaques. Each of the subjects wore a plastic collar, which allowed us to affix a straight pole to jump them from cage to cage without having to fear the piercing canine teeth that grew in as they became adults.

  There were two types of scientists in the lab, I realized. First were the ones who used the pole, but only to put it near the collar, gently tap the macaque, and open the cage so that the monkey could leap inside. The second kind yanked the macaque to the floor and pinned it until the monkey stopped resisting, at which point the researcher released it to take refuge in the cage. Monkeys that had been treated that way required extra caution, because they were more likely to swat at any human who came close. They had long ago stopped differentiating between those of us who might be kind and those of us who weren’t.

  In the four years I worked with primates, I was only mildly hurt once or twice. I slapped my monkey’s hand accidentally, and he decked me; I turned my back and was scratched on my shoulder. And then there was the day I turned down the offer of a tenure-track position in neurobiology at Harvard.

  I remember because it was the only time my mother ever visited me in the lab. She came in white-faced and shaking at the end of the day, when I was the only person in in the room with a group of cages filled with tiny preadolescent macaques. One, which I’d named Hawkeye because of his inadvertent Mohawk hairdo, had a reputation as a difficult animal because he’d struck out at other scientists, who in turn would be more punishing when they worked with him to keep him under control. I took another approach—rewarding good behavior wi
th food instead of penalizing him for an infraction he hadn’t yet committed. Hawkeye and I got along just fine.

  I saw my mother enter the lab just as I opened the door of Hawkeye’s home cage to jump him into it. I nodded at her, trying to mime that I’d be able to talk in a minute, but she was having none of it. She walked into the room, where no one but research personnel was supposed to be.

  “I could get fired if someone sees you in here!” I hissed, locking the latch on Hawkeye’s home cage.

  “That’s an empty threat,” my mother said, “given that you’ve already quit.”

  The little monkey rattled the metal bars. Home cage meant food, and I was being delinquent. “Who called?”

  “Dr. Yunque. She couldn’t reach you at your apartment so she tried my house. She asked me to try to convince you to change your mind.” My mother was staring at the macaques with a strange expression, as if she were seeing a scene from what should have been her own life. “How come this is the first I’m hearing about your consuming passion for studying elephants?”

  “I’ve always wanted to study elephants, Mom. Since I was a kid. You know that. And I can’t study them at Harvard.”

  “But you could be a professor at the most prestigious Ivy League university in this country, Alice. And it’s not like you can’t keep doing research.”

  “With monkeys,” I sighed. I didn’t tell her that I had hit a wall last week, when I had to euthanize yet another infant macaque just to examine its brain at a certain stage. I couldn’t tell her that monkeys were selfish and petty, that for all the DNA we shared with rhesus macaques, I believed our brains had more in common with those of elephants, who exhibited communication, problem-solving skills, and empathy—all clear signs of cognition.

  What I truly wanted to study was the memory of elephants. That old adage about an elephant never forgetting was not a myth, but it was only just beginning to get traction as a scientific fact. I’d read a paper recently published by scientists from Amboseli that proved elephants could identify and differentiate between over a hundred voices—including those of elephants they had not heard for decades. I had devoured research from a 1981 drought in Namibia, during which 85 percent of herbivores in the area succumbed to starvation, but not a single elephant did—because the matriarchs led their herds to distant watering holes they had not visited in years.

  I believed there was a biological basis to this skill that lay somewhere in an elephant’s enlarged hippocampus and cerebral cortex. We already knew that animals with relatively larger brain-to-body ratios had a greater ability to learn, and a stronger memory. The question was: Did those parts of the brain grow large because they were exercised frequently, or were they exercised frequently because they were so relatively large? What did elephants choose to remember, and why? In science, we called these sorts of queries low-hanging fruit. When so little work had been done on a question or a species (although there was compelling reason to do so), the scientist was bound to learn something meaningful just by putting in the time and effort.

  Exploring that question excited me in a way I had not been excited for years studying macaques. And wasn’t that what science was supposed to be? Not just preparing slides for the sake of getting the next research grant but pushing the envelope and broadening one’s own leading edge? It was even possible that the research I would do in Africa would be transferable, offering critical information about memory that could be applied to Alzheimer’s or traumatic brain injury in humans.

  My mother was still in the room, exuding palpable waves of disappointment. The macaques jumped nervously in their cages, as if the tension between us was a fire being stoked beneath their feet. “I have a PhD from Harvard. Isn’t that good enough?”

  Through the bars of his cage, Hawkeye pulled my hair, and I plucked him away from my ponytail.

  “Exactly. No one goes from Harvard to the University of KwaZulu-Natal.”

  “I’m going to South Africa. But the program in KwaZulu-Natal is willing to sponsor my research.” By now the animals were rattling their cages, jumping up and down, doing head threats—jutting their faces forward with their teeth bared. “You’re getting the monkeys agitated. Can’t we discuss this later?” Hawkeye swatted the top of my head. “Stop,” I said, wheeling around to smack the macaque’s hand away.

  My mother stood her ground. “You shouldn’t go.”

  I met her gaze for only a breath, a heartbeat. But it was enough time for Hawkeye to grab the leather of the glove I wore and twist hard enough to pull it off. Ignoring the sting of pain, I rounded on my mother. “How can you, of all people, tell me not to study what I want to study? After you made sure that lesson was drilled into me every fucking day?”

  My mother blanched, her lips pressed tight together, and I felt a surge of triumph that I had finally rendered her speechless.

  Then she swallowed. “Alice,” she said, “you’re bleeding.”

  I looked down. There was blood on the floor, on my lab coat, on my jeans. It had been spraying in an arc as I gestured to hammer home my point. When Hawkeye twisted my leather glove, he’d managed to grab a good chunk of my skin with it.

  The macaques were howling, slamming against the bars of their cages. “Get out,” I yelled at her. “Just get out!’

  My mother slipped into the anteroom of the lab. I stripped off my lab coat and wrapped it around my hand, a makeshift bandage.

  One of the first things I was taught when I came to the lab was that if I got hurt, it was my mistake—never the monkey’s. Most humans treat animals the way too many tourists treat the rest of the world—uninterested in learning the local language and culture. Like those travelers, they usually end up the worse for it. As a scientist, I was responsible for understanding the animal’s communication, not the other way around. If I didn’t pay attention, something about my own behavior might trigger the monkey to act out, fearful of being injured.

  To Hawkeye, I was now just another asshole who had mistreated him.

  I stepped into the anteroom, closing the door behind me, cleanly cutting off the chatter and screams of the monkeys. My mother was sitting on a chair, her hands folded in her lap. I noticed for the first time how narrow her shoulders were. How deep lines bracketed her mouth, like parenthetical whispers.

  “I’m going to Africa,” I told her. “Whether or not you think it’s a good idea.”

  She glanced up. “Alice, it’s a mistake.”

  I thought of Hawkeye ripping off the skin from the back of my hand when I let down my guard. If you get hurt, it’s always your own fault. “Maybe. But it’s still mine to make.”

  My mother took a step forward, firmly putting one hand on my elbow and unwrapping the cotton of my lab coat from my hand to get a closer look. “You need stitches,” she said. Her fingers were cool and efficient as she probed the flap of hanging skin and blotted the pool of blood.

  Suddenly I felt dizzy, and the room buzzed. I swayed forward and found myself caught in her arms. “You’re fine,” she said, as if that was all it would take to heal me. She pivoted so I could sit down before I fell.

  I thought of skinned knees, of tipped bicycles. Of being hoisted onto the kitchen counter for a spray of Bactine and a Band-Aid.

  Over my mother’s shoulder, I looked at the macaques.

  A mistreated monkey was biologically programmed to avoid situations where he might be put in danger again, or to lash out before it could happen. That was the whole point of encoded memory. We could literally see the places in the brain where the past was etched, to encourage caution in a similar circumstance.

  And yet, 99 percent of the time, the monkey did not lash out. Somehow, although he did not forget the last time he was hurt, he still managed to forgive.

  The elephant calf drank liters and liters of the powdered milk I’d mixed up. She drank until she fell asleep from the effort of sucking, the rubber glove nipple slipping out of her mouth. But then she woke, tossing and turning, and everything she’d eaten
passed through her in a green liquid stool.

  My clothes are spattered. I am covered in shit.

  I’ve tried to clean it up. I’ve poured so much bleach on the floor and walls of my cottage that I am afraid of asphyxiating from the fumes. There is a knock on my door just after 7:00 P.M., when the vehicles come back from their day in the field. “Alice?” Anya calls softly. “I brought you some soup.”

  The elephant picks that moment to squeal.

  “What the hell?” Anya says.

  “I’m listening to audiotapes!” I lie. “Trying to get at least a little work done.” Glaring at the calf, I will her to be quiet.

  “Do I smell bleach …?”

  The knob turns, and my heart hammers. We don’t have locks here; there is no way for me to keep Anya out. “Don’t come in,” I moan. “You don’t want to catch this, believe me. I’m sterilizing every surface I touch.”

  “But you have to eat …”

  “Honestly, I still can’t keep anything down.”

  There is a silence as Anya weighs the responsibilities of friendship against the symptoms of this plague. “Well,” she says. “You’ll yell if you need anything, right?”

  I listen for her retreating footsteps as she leaves my porch. She will join the other researchers for cards and wine, and she’ll tell them I feel like hell. The tourists will be getting ready for dinner in the boma. The rangers will go to sleep. My secret is safe, for the moment.

  I lie down beside the calf on the floor. I look at the smooth slope of her forehead, the long lashes framing her eyes. Her cheeks are sunken, her skin the color of ash. As I trace the road map of blue veins in her ear, she lifts her trunk and tries to curl it around my wrist like a bracelet.

  She’s getting weaker. I have spent the day mixing up the powdered milk in various strengths, trying to find the magic recipe that will settle in the calf’s stomach. But so far, any type of nutrition I attempt to provide runs through her like water. I can see the light dimming in her eyes just as surely as she can see the hope fading in mine.