LIVING WITH ELEPHANTS by Cheryl Merrill

As sunrise smolders I begin, slowly, to thaw. Shivering, I stick my

fingers in my armpits to warm them. I kick at a useless fire. Beyond

a swath of purple grass the blurry outline of a knobthorn resolves

into a solid tree. Doug left a couple of minutes ago to fetch the

elephants. I stomp my feet as I wait.

The sun rises with spokes on her head like the Statue of Liberty.

She rises into an immense lemon sky that almost turns green

before it turns blue. She ignites the tops of trees with her torch.

Above my head a jackal-berry thrusts up bare, wood-muscular

arms. The tips of its fingers blaze with light.

Doug returns. Jabu, Morula and Thembi are right behind him.

Jabu stops just a trunk-length away. Ten feet tall at the

shoulder, he fills my entire range of vision. He vacuums my scent

from head to toe, reminding himself of who I am. The tip of his trunk

wavers in my face then falls to my feet. He snorts out a huge

exhale, CHUffffffffffffffffff, then turns to follow Doug down a sandy

path.

Thembi doesn’t even bother to greet me. She hurries after her

big brother, crowds up behind him. Morula lingers to make sure I

will follow along behind her.

Botswana’s Okavango River disappears each year, disappears

into the Kalahari sands beneath my feet. Swollen by April rains in

Angola, it floods south, arrives in May or possibly June, fans out,

and sinks or evaporates. Not a single drop reaches the sea. Half

the time the river is here; half the time it is not. Yet its inland delta,

at 5,500 square miles, is the largest in the world, an unparalleled

ecosystem with an arkful of animals.

Last week, sitting at my desk on the other side of the world, I

studied a satellite photograph of the river – a giant bird footprint

pressed into the southern part of Africa, a footprint the size of

Massachusetts. Doug and his elephants live between two of its

toes, in a world without asphalt, without cell phones, without that

strange human notion of time.

Last night, as moonlight roared in my ears, I rubbed crumbles of

mud from Morula’s trunk.

Today, I am somewhere between the bird toes, strolling behind

three unfettered, unfenced elephants, going nowhere and

everywhere, all at once.

Clumsy in this new world, I stumble over each moment. The old

discarded world of concrete and telephones trails me like a lost

dog. I kick at it, but it circles back to nip at my heels. It just won’t

leave me alone.

Am I really bumbling along behind an elephant?

Morula stops, turns, and takes a single step toward me.

Somehow she doubles in size.

My heart leaps, captive within its ribs, desperate to flee. I forget

how to breathe. I know these elephants are not wild, are supposed

to be tame. Yet everyone else is up at the front of the herd, as far

away as another continent.

Morula stands in half-profile, stares at me with one nut-brown eye.

Spiders run up and down my spine.

Slowly she flaps her ears and blinks her eyes. A lifetime later

she swings around to overtake Thembi. I exhale as they entwine

trunks.

My eyes deflate. My heart calms and climbs back into its cage.

I stare down at huge round footprints in the dust. I look up; the

elephants are receding. Last in line, I’ve been left behind.

Wait for me! shouts my primate brain and I scramble to catch up

with the herd, take my allotted slot in the order of march.

Doug is a wiry man, only a little taller than I am. His stained

wide-brimmed hat covers dark unruly hair. He wears a short-

sleeved cotton shirt, ankle-high boots and khaki shorts that have

cargo pockets on the side of each leg. Black glasses give his face a

serious look. On the streets of Johannesburg he could be mistaken

for an accountant on holiday. But he has been working with

elephants since 1972, first in wildlife and zoological parks on the

West Coast of the United States, and then in Africa with various

research, educational, film, and eco-tourism projects. In 1988 he

adopted Jabu and Thembi, who were orphaned by a South African

culling program. In 1994 Morula joined the small, unique human-

elephant herd.

I got invited to join them by email: Hi Cheryl, We are excited to

hear about your book project . . . It is possible that you could stay in

our camp for a week and it would definitely involve roughing it a bit.

. . .

So far, roughing it is a cluster of canvas tents at the edge of a

grassy floodplain, where last night loud roars woke me several

times as a lion roamed the periphery of camp. Exactly the Africa of

my dreams.

This morning I washed my face in a basin of icy water and

wondered, not for the first time, why I didn’t have sense enough to

pack gloves for temperatures that dip below freezing at night. Now,

under a cold, chalk-blue sky, I stick numb fingers in my pockets and

watch as the elephants browse.

Enticed by a nearby tidbit, Thembi sniffs at a Simple-Spined

Num-Num and daintily picks a leaf to taste-test it. Morula and Jabu

join in, not so daintily, ripping entire branches from the bush. In six

months, when the fruits of the Num-Num ripen, baboons, monkeys

and birds will go to war over them.

Deft as magicians, the elephants pluck leathery leaves from

between sharp, three-inch thorns. Jabu smacks his lips as he wads

up a pile of leaves and crams it into his mouth. He drags one foot

and stirs up a gauzy curtain of powdered sand, ash, and dried mud.

From his belly up, Jabu is slate; from his belly down, seen through

the gauzy curtain, he’s a bit rosier, more dove.

Morula moves away from the bush and stops near a patch of

sand. She inhales dust, squeezes together the accordion folds of

her trunk, and powders herself again and again across her back,

using the same sandy spot with its talcum of soft dirt.

Doug has been standing aside, watching all three elephants

with a paternal smile. He walks over to Morula and passes beneath

her chin. She stops powdering. He rubs the edge of her ear.

Ears of African elephants resemble huge maps of Africa. But no

two edges of those maps are ever the same. As pliable and soft as

worn canvas, an elephant’s ear is often caught and torn on

branches. In Zimbabwe I once saw an elephant with a pie-shaped

wedge sliced from her ear. In Kenya my gulping camera swallowed

frame after frame of a huge, huge bull. Only later, with the film

developed and the prints in my hands, did I notice that the bottom

of each ear was as scalloped as an old lace tablecloth.

Morula’s ears slap flatly against her shoulders as she walks

Thwack . . . Thwack . . . Thwack . . . She has outsized ears, even

for an elephant. As air whooshes over the network of raised arteries

on the surface of each ear, it cools her blood, regulating her body

temperature. Thwack . . . Thwack . . . Thwack . . . Elephant air-

conditioning.

I take off my cap and fan my own neck.

My teeny, itsy ears are shaped somewhat the same as

Morula’s, with an upper rim of cartilage and a fleshy, lower lobe.

But I don’t have an auriculo-occipitalis – an ear muscle the size of a

weightlifter’s bicep. I can’t flap my ears. I can’t even wiggle them.

I put my cap back on. I hear a tiny hiss spin through the air,

echoes of a sound that already passed me by. I look up and see a

jetliner, a small silver cross on its way to a different part of the

world. A world as far away as another lifetime.

We pass near a burnt area – a brush fire set by seasonal

lightning.

Fire is an annual visitor to this part of the Delta. Blackened,

skeletal trees stand sentinel over the charred ground. Miniature

tornados, dust devils, suck gray ash-twirls up into the air.

“We used the road here as a fire break,” Doug tells me.

The fire provided access to a feast of toasted treats. The

elephants tore apart toppled knobthorns for the mistletoe hidden

among their branches. Roasted acacias, leadwoods and palms

were ravished and relished for their new gourmet taste.

But wandering over a crust of ash has its hazards.

“I think Morula got her hotfoot right over there,” Doug points.

While foraging for crunchy twigs, Morula broke through the crust

and stepped on a smoldering root. She did what any sensible

elephant would do and bolted, causing Jabu and Thembi to

contagiously flee from the unknown threat. Once everyone settled

down, Morula investigated her right heel with the tip of her trunk,

giving Doug a clue as to the cause of all the commotion. After a

soak in a nearby waterhole, her foot was just fine, due to the thick,

hard flesh on her soles.

As we pass the burnt area, Morula cross-steps sideways,

perhaps remembering her adventure. A family of warthogs trots

across the road behind us in single-file, each child an exact replica

of its mother. Their tails twitch like stiff flagpoles, a single tuft of hair

at the top. The last in line stops and stares at us before he dives

into a curtain of grass.

Grass drowns the seasonal floodplains of the Delta. Dry

corduroy spikes of bristle grass rustle with our passage, each stalk

an individual bottlebrush. Three-foot-tall stems of torpedo grass

thrust up cannon bursts, spikelets that remind me of the trajectory

of fireworks. We wade all morning long through lakes of golden

lace. Isolated clumps of finger grass wave six-digit hands at us, as

if we’re on parade.

I reach down and pick seeds from my socks. Studded with

microscopic lancets, bristle grass sticks to my shoelaces. Six days

from now the seeds will hitchhike all the way home with me, from

Botswana to South Africa to Atlanta to Seattle.

As we walk, I’m mesmerized by Morula’s tail, which ticks like a

pendulum with each footstep, brushing aside tall skewers of grass.

Her tail is longer than I expected and round as a bullwhip, ending

with a whisk of sparse, wiry hairs. It’s also kinked, broken, no one

knows how. We all carry visible and invisible scars upon our bodies

and sometimes we forget how they came to be; though on most

days we can count each one of them in chronological order.

Orphaned at the age of two by an elephant cull in Zimbabwe,

Morula is a victim of domestic abuse, a battered wife, having lived

with a rampaging bull in a South African game park. When he was

destroyed, she faced the same fate. But Doug stepped in, adopting

her at the age of seventeen.

As might be expected, Morula was, at first, extremely

submissive to Jabu and Thembi. It took years to build her self-

confidence, years when she vented her frustrations by creating

twisted sculptures from living trees.

Now she is the most willing, the most likely to be curious, and

the one who will wave at you for no reason in particular. She curls

her trunk onto her forehead in an S-shape, then nods the tip, a

finger wave, You-hoo, as if she’s trying to get my attention. When I

feel something large behind me, it’s usually Morula, the girl looking

in from the edge of the playground. When I turn, as big as she is,

we often make eye contact.

Hanging around with giants, I also feel like a girl at the edge of

the playground, looking in. While Morula stuffs the leaves of an

acacia into her mouth, working the bush from one side to the other,

I lean against a leadwood, a tall thin tree hard as a rock.

Leadwoods are heavy and extremely dense. They don’t even float.

Tattered scraps of clouds evaporate above us. A high insect

whine fills my ears, a million voices on a single frequency. The sun

no longer has spokes on her head. She is simply a blazing torch.

My bones lose their moisture; my blood dries out. The scent of

hot sage rises out of the cracked soil.

Doug calls out from beside me, “Morula. Here.”

Taking a few giant steps she halts in front of us.

I look into a face unlike mine, yet a face with a mouth, a nose,

two ears and two eyes, recognizable as a face.

Her eyes, like mine, are protected by bony sockets and

eyelashes and eyelids and tears. Her eyes, like mine, sit high on

her skull and light the darkness within.

The face that is like mine looks back at me.

Three-inch lashes cast shadows down her cheeks. She blinks

and her lashes sweep against her skin like small brooms.

Each of the more than 200 lashes of my eye is shed every 3 to

5 months. Has anyone ever done research on the shed rate of

elephant eyelashes?

I could.

I could stand here forever looking into the oak burls of her eyes.

Jabu, acting like a huge hayseed, decorates the top of his head

with several stalks of grass, a few pebbles and miscellaneous bits

of twigs that he carries up in his trunk and blows on with one soft

fooof. A single stalk hangs rakishly over his left ear.

I step on a fallen leaf and it crackles into powder. I look down.

In dun-colored sand as finely ground as cake flour, Jabu leaves

behind footprints the size of small moons.

I stop and plant a boot inside one of the moons. The brand

name of my boots imprints within the outline of my soles – a clever

advertisement made with each step.

My footprints are deeper, more pressure per square inch, all of

my weight on two tiny points of contact. His weight spreads over

four huge footpads. Large as he is, Jabu can step on a snake and

not squash it.

As I contemplate the outline of my boot, I hear the unmistakable

wet flat splat of fresh dung.

Kneeling down, I take a closer look at the fragrant pile of feces.

An elephant defecates fifteen to seventeen times per day, up to 250

pounds of droppings. If Jabu used the same spot each time, as pigs

do for their privies, the resultant tally of his daily dump would be

taller and heavier than I am. Luckily, elephants leave their leavings

wherever they happen to stand.

A lot of those leavings contain seeds. Thirty species of African

trees rely on dispersal through an elephant’s intestine. Passing

through the gut, their seeds emerge in the feces, instantly fertilized.

As I watch from grass top level, a dung beetle barrel-rolls in and

lands on top of Jabu’s output. Tightly rolled bits of it are already

making off into the grass, propelled by industrious hind legs. In less

than an hour, most of this splatted pile will be gone, buried in tiny

birthing chambers, each ball of dung containing a few seeds and a

single egg.

There are 1,800 species of dung beetles in southern Africa –

1,800 tribes of sanitary engineers cleaning things up. One study

found 22,000 dung beetles on a single elephant plop. Dung beetles

enrich the soil, prevent the spread of parasites and disease, and

provide food for their young, night and day, day and night – finding

their way around at night by polarized moonlight.

I bend closer. Tiny grooves in the sand mark where the beetles

have rolled off balls of dung. Even tinier footprints dot each groove.

In the surrounding underbrush cicadas sizzle all around me, as my

nose nearly touches the sand.

Listening to them, I imagine bacon in a hot pan. Above the

sounds of frying are the tympanic calls of a ground hornbill as he

prowls the edges of the mopane thicket just ahead – the sound of a

thumb rubbed across a kettle drum: Hmmmmph . . . hmph-hmph. . .

. . . Hmmmmph . . . hmph-hmph . . . He is a satiny, Satan-y black

bird, bigger than a fattened goose, with an inflated air sac red as a

bleeding throat and a beak like a pickax, an executioner stalking

mice and snakes.

The insects keep on sizzling. A dozen LBJs twitter through the

grass. Mousy little birds, they’re hard to identify at a glance – so

they’re often named LBJs, “Little Brown Jobs.” They spend their

lives kibitzing over the back fence of a leafy branch, chattering

across the clothesline of a twig.

Three years ago, on my first trip to the Delta, I heard its sounds

change when the Okavango River arrived. The clinks of reed frogs

joined the rasp of crickets. Hippos jostled for elbowroom, grunting

and burbling like a band of drowning tubas. Mindless wildebeest

questioned their daily survival from the jaws of lions with

overlapped musings: Hmmmmh? / Hmmmh. Hmmmmh? / Hmmmh.

The shrill cries of fish eagles skipped and rang across deepening

lagoons as they tangled talon to talon in their mating dance,

spiraling down, down, down, down, down.

And intersecting each sound, as the river arrived, the quaking

air of elephant calls.

Morula greets me as she would another elephant, with a

reassuring rumble RRRRRRrrrrrrrrrrrrrummmmmmmmmmmmm.

My heart swells. Her vocalization recognizes me as a friend, a

fellow herd-mate . . . but it’s a rumble I cannot reciprocate. I reach

out, rub her trunk and lower my voice: “Hellooooo, Morula,

hellooooo.”

We stand together for awhile until she turns away to pluck a

branch from a bush-willow, a favorite browse of all elephants. She

holds the stem in her teeth, wraps her trunk from right to left, and

rips off the leaves. Morula is right-trunked, as I am right-handed.

Thembi is also right-trunked, but Jabu’s a lefty. An elephant’s

dominant tendencies can be determined by inspecting the

underside of its trunk on the right or left for grass stains. But before

you do this, make sure you know the elephant and the elephant

knows you.

Morula discards branch after branch. Shredded bushes mark

her path. She pauses next to a candle-pod acacia with its upright

seedpods. It reminds me of a giant candelabrum, holding a hundred

or more candles in leafy tiers. Sharp, curved thorns protect each

pod.

Morula strips the acacia of a branch then puts it in her mouth

and eats it, thorns and all. The underside of her trunk curves close

to my face. I see crushed grass between its ribbed muscles and

bristles like a giant centipede before it drops like an afterthought at

my feet.

A tectonic tremor sweeps across her shoulder, a shudder to

dislodge flies. I lean against her leg.

The background sizzle of cicadas ratchets up a notch:

Szzzzzzzzzz-zzzzzzzzzzzzzzz!

Nebulous clouds scrawl an Arabic alphabet across the sky,

blurry glyphs with curlicues and tails, the megaprints of ice crystals

marking the passage of the wind. The fat, fuddled afternoon finally

wheezes to a stop, backs into her overstuffed chair and puts her

feet up.

Morula drowses, lying on her side, falling asleep in the sun. Her

head is pillowed on an eroded termite mound. She sucks the tip of

her trunk as Doug rubs the bottom of a front foot. Her eyes droop

and her mouth slackens with pleasure.

Except for their gray color, Morula’s toenails look pretty much

the same as mine do, only bigger and thicker. Human and elephant

nails are made of tough, insoluble keratin, a semi-transparent

protein that is the major component of hair, hooves, horns and

quills. The toenails on her front foot are jagged and torn from

stubbing out roots.

She has five nails on her front feet and three on her hind feet.

They grow at a rate that might be expected from an animal that

walks twenty to thirty miles a day. In captivity, an elephant’s nails

must be constantly trimmed, often on a daily basis; otherwise they

become infected and ingrown.

As Doug continues to rub her foot, the tip of Morula’s trunk slips

from her mouth. Her eyes nearly close. She drools a bit.

Then Doug scrambles to his feet and gives a command.

“Morula, Alllll-Right!”

Groggily, she heaves herself into a sitting position. Like a giant

dog she lifts her chin high and shakes her head. Her ears flop back

and forth. As Morula rocks forward to stand up, I get smaller and

smaller and smaller.

Open, close. Open, close. With each thwack dust rises from

Morula’s ears. I raise my camera and take a photograph of one

earflap in the midst of many, a photograph that will be fixed to a

piece of paper at home, on the other side of the world.

When I take the lens cap from my camera I glimpse a tiny

reflection of myself in its mirror. Is that how Morula sees me –

another one of those small, two-legged humans, diminished by the

landscape around me? Does she see details: my hat, my camera,

my idiotic grin?

She stands square on, keeping her eyes upon me. Her cobbled

forehead broadens upward from her nose. Short bristles like an old

man’s buzz cut outline the top of her head. When she flattens her

ears against her shoulders, I see the tufts of hair sticking out from

each ear canal. The tip of her trunk flops over itself in a loose coil

and begins to twitch in an irregular rhythm.

She looks goofy, like she’s bored and playing with the only thing

at hand – her trunk.

Morula poses.

I take another photograph.

Photographs are moments caught instead of left behind,

moments that last less than three-hundredths of a second. I lift my

camera over and over, trying to capture details of Morula’s face.

Those eyes, wrinkled as any grandmother’s – what do those eyes

see?

I remember, from reading it somewhere, that elephants see the

world in yellows and blues, like color-blind humans. I fasten a

yellow filter over my camera lens, then a blue one. Morula turns

aquamarine. From far, far away, she snaps a branch from a shrub

the color of kelp, chomps, munches, drifts closer. Her slow motions

make perfect sense underwater.

I wade into a lagoon of grass. Ankles, knees, waist, chest, neck.

Some of the grass stalks bob over my head. My hands, my body,

my thoughts, move slowly, as if I am swimming.

Immersed, my ears fill with a pure hum. The sound of my

passage whispers in seashell voices.

As Morula floats by, undertones of blue and gray shimmer

against her flanks, reflections of seaweed and kelp. I follow,

subaquatic, at the bottom of air. Carried by the current of my

imagination, I am about to tumble downstream.

Then the breeze kicks up again, feels as if it comes all the way

up from the bottom of the Kalahari, feels red, feels gritty, feels dry

as a hundred-year-old skeleton left in the desert. It sucks every bit

of moisture from under me and lands me, beached and gasping.

I lower my camera. Red invades yellow and the world greens.

Qualities of color could keep me musing for the rest of my life.

But we’re on the march again, headed for the sweet relief of

evening. Doug falls back to the rear of the line.

He calls out, “Morula. Beak.”

She lifts her trunk and places the tip in his outstretched palm.

He cups it carefully, just behind the sensitive hairs at its opening.

They stroll together, in front of me; Morula tethered by her trunk.

He grins over his shoulder and points at her trunk tip. “It looks

kinda like a duck beak. We use ‘Trunk’ for a different command.”

Doug stops. “Here, you try it. Morula, beak.”

My feet refuse to touch the ground. I float – are we both float-

ing? – as I walk, Oh Lord, hand-in-trunk with an elephant. The

fingers of a slight breeze hold my hair up to the sun.

The air flowing around us cools the sweat above my eyes. I

smell myself: saltish and smoky. Morula is redolent of hay and mud

and dung.

My heart detonates with small, constant thumps in a sweet, slow

trance. Side by side, we mosey along – as if nothing magical has

just happened.

Years pass as we wander down this innocent path. But the

magic only lasts as long as Morula wants it to. Unable to resist a

nearby acacia, she takes her trunk from my hand and quicksteps

forward.

Beneath my feet I feel the huge bones of the earth. I shiver like

a leaf under a hummingbird’s wing.

Rich, viscous, melted-milk-chocolate mud trembles next to

Morula’s ponderous footfalls. On the far edge of the afternoon, one

behind the other, the elephants cross a dried-up lagoon, following a

compressed path the width of overlapped elephant footprints. As

we make our delicate traverse, a congealed odor, the fusty,

brackish essence of dung, rises from under our feet. Pea soup mud

quivers. Goulash mud slops.

“Stay on the path,” Doug warns me, “Stay behind Morula.”

Several weeks before someone stepped off the path and sank

up to his armpits.

“He had to strip to his shorts.” Doug says with a grin.

Across the lagoon, globs of mud stack against the shoreline like

giant chocolate squares. Above the shoreline baboons scamper

across the sand. One baboon baby rides atop its mother’s

haunches like a perfect little jockey, while another is upside down,

clutching his mother’s belly with desperate hands.

The baboons halt to watch us. Some sit with their legs straight

out, arms crossed on their round bellies, a row of scowling

grandmothers on their front porch. They’re bracketed by a couple of

shotgun grandfathers scratching themselves. Dismounted and

bored, the kids begin a game of tag. One of the grandfathers

yawns, shows us long, knife-edged canines.

Despite all the distractions, I stay on the path.

“Squhweeek, Jabu.” Doug’s voice rises an octave between

“Squh” and “weeek.”

Trunk tip squeezed together, Jabu obliges, emitting a series of

squeaks that sound similar to rubber tires leaving skid-marks on

pavement.

“It’s an inhalation,” Doug comments.

Standing shoulder to shoulder with Jabu, Thembi joins in. And

over in the brush, with her back to us, Morula squeaks too. Like a

kid in a corner, she keeps on practicing. Her squeaks sound more

like a finger rubbed across a balloon.

“Talk,” Doug says to Jabu and Thembi.

First one “talks” and then the other. They rumble, leaning back

and forth, abdomens filling and emptying like bellows, sounds made

by exhalations. Jabu and Thembi’s low bass tones carry layer upon

layer of vibrations. I close my eyes and imagine giant, reverberating

oboes. Oboes having a bit of fun.

Silly humans. They get so pleased over just the littlest things.

Morula saunters by. The tip of her trunk curls against her

forehead, waves Hello.

She drops a huge present of dung. Sharp bits of uncouth odors

burr into my instantly attentive nose – a chamber pot of swilled

grass, crushed flowers, and leavings of leaves. Fumes glow and

bloom and waddle off on fermented, flatulent feet.

Thembi, she of the evenly matched ears, long-lashed eyes, and

diamond-shaped scar on the bridge of her nose, farts as she walks.

Big, burbling farts.

Between her small and large intestine is her cecum, filled with

uncountable numbers of microbes that help her digest food. They

break down the cellulose of the trees she eats into soluble

carbohydrates and give her enough methane gas each day to

power a car at least 20 miles. In return, the microbes are provided

with a free lunch.

Percolating along, Thembi farts again. It’s a stupendous

displacement of air. In this just-right light, I can actually see this fart.

It looks like heat waves blasting from the back of a jet engine.

I wonder, as I walk behind Thembi, downwind, just how one

could harness this natural resource. I live at the edge of a small

town. Twenty miles would more than cover my daily errands. I

imagine exhaust fumes smelling like fermenting grass, freeways

with the scent of mulched trees.

I wonder, as I walk, why I think of such things.

Under Jabu’s head, I am completely shaded. The tip of his trunk

curls beneath his chin and hovers in front of my face. I blow into it,

gently. He blows back, gently. My lungs fill with the fragrance of

crushed leaves mixed with saproots and spearmint-scented bark. I

think of the stagnant air that surrounds my daily life, air that is

conditioned, filtered, deodorized, air that is bland. Elephant’s breath

is said to cure headaches. And it just might, if I had one.

I step out from the shade of Jabu’s head and into a boiling sun. I

pull the brim of my cap down to the bridge of my nose to shield my

eyes.

Something like a huge beanbag touches the top of my head,

knocks my cap askew. I take it off. A warm, wiggly, drooling and

breathing nose snorfs and rubs slime into my hair.

“Earth,” Doug commands and Jabu withdraws his trunk from re-

coifing my hair. He relaxes it, a thick rope coiled just once against

the ground between his front legs.

The scents he massaged from my head tumble up two seven-

foot-long nostrils – nostrils surrounded by nerves, arteries, veins

and a staggering array of longitudinal and transverse muscles, the

world’s biggest, longest and certainly most flexible nose. There are

639 muscles in the human body, 150,000 muscle units in an

elephant’s trunk alone.

A trunk is the most useful appendage that ever evolved. A

proboscis par excellence. A prehensile, extensile, limber,

stretchable schnozzola.

Imagine having a nose like a battering ram, one that knocks

down trees. With such a nose you could also pluck, rip, tear,

excavate, whack, and blow bubbles. You could steal with your

nose, suck on it, squeal with it, nuzzle, manipulate, swat, poke and

siphon with it. You could take a shower with your nose. Scratch

your back with it. Whistle with it. You could even arm wrestle with

your nose.

Morula strolls over, waves Hello with her nose.

Voracious vegetarians, the elephants eat and eat and eat,

browsing away the day. Two of Doug’s employees spend the last of

the afternoon following the elephants through the bush before

circling back to camp.

Trees turn golden, then bluish, and begin to smudge at their

edges, as if lightly erased. As darkness deepens, stars begin to

populate the Milky Way.

The sound of gurgling drainpipes draws Doug away from his

dinner. I follow. Night rolls out lemon, then violet, then purple. We

walk through warm bowls of air as heat dissipates from the sand.

The elephants are in mid-drink, trunks curled into mouths,

heads tipped back, eyes closed. As they siphon water they mimic

the sound of rain in gutters, only the water is going up, not down.

Three elephant trunks reach toward us, sniffing the violet air.

Jabu thonks the ground, as if testing a cantaloupe for ripeness.

We are content to stand with them, wordless, and rub their

trunks. The moon rises from behind a screen of trees. It illuminates

clouds piled into rows, ripples in the sky.

It’s an oceanic, leviathan sort of night. The beginning of time is

up there, somewhere.

When the elephants head for their enclosure, the prows of their

great heads plow into the gray waves of dusk, dipping and rising,

breasting the night. Their ears flap and snap like the sails of boats

as they luff into the wind. At their feet sharp, brittle grass hisses

with their passage.

After dinner I walk to my tent, encapsulated in the bubble of

illumination created by my flashlight. I walk down a short trail and

around a few trees, to the back edge of camp. Forty steps and I am

out of everyone’s sight. Under an unreachable net of stars I find

myself, for one of the few times in my life, not witnessed by human

eyes.

A bone-deep peace spreads through my body. I’m only here for

6 days, but I’m beginning to wish I could do this for the rest of my

life.

I wipe dust from my face and arms, and lie on my cot. Elbows

out, hands behind my head, I stare up at the canvas ceiling of my

tent. Half-awake, half-asleep, I see Morula frozen in a sepia

photograph, strolling down a dirt path. I walk slightly to one side.

Her trunk is shaped like a J around her left leg, its tip pointed in

my direction. Deliberately mindful of her own movements, she’s

keeping track of the human scent mingling with that of the herd.

Then – am I asleep? – I see her following me, as if I were another

ele-phant, although where we were going I do not know.

X is the unknown quantity, the number of our dreams. When I

dream, I change from a verbal being that talks and talks and talks,

to a speechless being, whose body just is and whose mind speaks

without words.

Tonight when I dream, I dream of familiar bodies, large and

gray.

X-rays of elephants reveal an outline as large as the frame of a

small house. In my dreams I trace an x-ray – follow skull, spine,

ribs, out to the very end of the tail, the smallest of bones. In my

dreams I peel back layer after layer of elephant anatomy until I am

left holding a beating heart in my arms, a heart as big as a medium-

sized dog.

Yellow suns rise and fall in my dreams. I dream I am once again

in the belly of a 747, Africa receding behind me. I ascend higher,

higher, past the gaping gold pits of Johannesburg, up beyond the

coast of Namibia, flying into night. Specks of light edge the

continent, extinguish. It’s black down there, utterly black. On the

edge of a wing a single light blinks and blinks and blinks.

I travel counter-clockwise, accelerating backwards into the life I

left, back into words strange as hieroglyphs. Words like “seatbelts”

and “passports” and “luggage.”

My gaze never wavers from the window. I keep my eyes on the

blinking light at the tip of the airplane’s wing. Even in my dreams I

do not want to leave these elephants.

Zebras run to the horizon, to the curvature of the earth. They

run without sound. The world has gone silent, or deaf. One of the

zebras gallops next to me, flashes his teeth, tries to nip my haunch.

I fall back and watch as species after species silently disappear

over the edge of the earth, the zebras among them, their stripes a

blur, their hocks flashing white.

Closeby a lion roars. UNNNGGHHHHH . . . ungh . . . ungh . . .

ungh . . . ungh.

Ripped awake, I peer out the mesh window of my tent. My heart

back-flips. Breathless, I listen for carnivorous footsteps.

Silence. A long, long silence, empty except for a single,

persistent cricket. I can almost hear stars crackle static overhead.

Moonlight rains through the uplifted arms of trees. It falls though

the mesh window and patterns my blanket with tiny delicate

squares. As I stare through the screen I hear Morula’s far-off

rumble, a cousin to thunder. My heart calms. I burrow into my

blankets and fall asleep again under a moon as round and cratered as an elephant’s footprint.

---

Cheryl Merrill’s nonfiction has appeared in Fourth Genre, Creative Nonfiction,
Pilgrimage, Brevity, Seems, and Isotope: A Journal of Literary Nature and Science
Writing.