Carved ivory thrones are mentioned in the Bible. King Solomon had one, covered with gold. Tutankhamen’s casket had a carved ivory headrest for his pillow. Cicero wrote of Roman houses where ivory doors opened onto entire rooms covered with ivory tiles. Gladiators had chariots made of ivory.
In the 1800s, in Africa, ton after ton of tusks were transported thousands of miles to Zanzibar and Khartoum, carried on the backs of slaves. An estimated two million elephants were slaughtered from 1860 to 1882, their tusks fashioned into billiard balls and piano keys.
The decade between 1979 and 1989 was the deadliest ever for African elephants. Over 691,000 died. In a line, trunk to tail, enough elephants to cover the distance between Miami, Florida and New York City: 1120 miles. Around 8800 tons of ivory was harvested in that decade. The average weight of tusks traded in 1979 was 21 pounds. Fifty-two elephants died for each ton of tusks. By the mid-1980s the average weight had shrunk to just 11 pounds – and so more elephants, 100 of them, died per ton.
In just one decade, the elephant population of Africa was halved – from 1.3 million to 650,000.
In Amboseli National Park, in Tanzania, a recessive gene is becoming dominant, occurring in 50 years instead of thousands, selected by poachers.
Against a chalk-blue sky, the smooth bare branches of a Motsheketsane tree interweave like a dancer’s arms caught in a multiple exposure. The shade it provides is full of holes, lacy as a cobweb. Embedded in the sand at its base are the hoof prints of zebras, from hooves exactly like those of unshod horses.
Morula and I seek what little shade there is underneath the tree. I take a swig from my water bottle while she searches for leftover Motsheketsane seeds. Using her trunk as a leaf blower, she corrals the ones she finds into a neat little pile whuff, whuff, whuff and transfers it into her mouth.
I pick one up. The seed is oval and has ruffled wings that divide it into 5 horizontal planes. It looks like a small paper lantern of a vaguely Oriental design. I try to pocket one, but its wings crumble as my hand close around it.
My everywhere-mind wanders off by itself, meanderings of no practical use except, of course, to me. Speculatively, I eye Morula, cloak her in long, ginger-colored, shaggy fur, shrink her ears, implant upturned, pitchfork tusks, and imagine her, well, tubbier, in a mastodon suit of hair.
She waves her trunk tip at me, neighborly, as if across a backyard fence: Hello.
With its two fingers, the tip of her trunk could argue for a close relationship with mammoths. But recent DNA research found direct genetic links only between Asian elephants and mammoths. Morula’s family tree looks like this:
Mastodons branched from the proboscidean family tree 26 million years ago. They became the first elephant cousins to leave Africa, the first to migrate through Asia and the first to arrive in North America, around 3.7 million years ago. Mammoths followed, around 2.2 million years later. Once in North America, the elephant cousins spread from Alaska to Central Mexico, from the Pacific to the Atlantic. As you might expect of distant kin, mastodons and mammoths share many characteristics with surviving elephants. They have the same basic body shape, a trunk and tusks. But they also differ in many ways.
The most striking, of course, is that suit of hair.
Morula rubs her left haunch against the gnarly trunk of the Motsheketsane. She has a relatively naked body – obviously a fur coat is useless under the brassy African sun. Her body size, thick skin and subcutaneous fat all help to keep her warm when temperatures occasionally, very occasionally, dip below freezing.
If you shaved a mammoth, or a mastodon, parked it in a zoo, and sold tickets, most people would believe they’re seeing an elephant. But if I put the three cousins on display side-by-side, almost anyone could tell the difference between them.
Of course, bringing to life two extinct species is an impossibility, unless, well . . . . I make things up. Which is an acceptable thing to do as long as I confess that I’m doing it.
So I import to Africa two distinct species that never walked the continent: Mammut americanum (the American mastodon) and Mammuthus columbi (the Columbian mammoth). Both lived exclusively in North America, where fourteen thousand years ago, they could be found, almost literally, in my backyard.
I position Morula between two cousins she will never meet – a mastodon to her right and a mammoth on her left. Oddly enough, because everyone’s related, they don’t really look that much out of place. Of course, this is all in my imagination, so anything is possible.
Columbia, the mammoth, is gigantic – at least four feet taller than Morula – with absolutely spectacular tusks. Curving out, then inward, they nearly cross each other. Even though I’m speculating about them, I don’t overdo their length. At eight feet long, they’re only half the size of the longest mammoth tusks ever recorded.
As soon as she solidifies in my fantasy, Columbia lifts the tip of her trunk and takes a discreet sniff at Morula: Who’s this?
The top “finger” of her trunk is four inches long and the bottom “thumb” two inches – a bit longer than the fingers of Morula’s trunk tip. Columbia’s could pluck out single petals from spring flowers or extract the newest, sweetest stems from the short grasses of the Pleistocene parklands.
She is completely cloaked in rich, russet fur, trunk and all, right down to her toes. Her ears are oval-shaped and small, dainty really, about fifteen inches from top to bottom. Since she lives near Pleistocene ice sheets, she has no need to dissipate heat through her ears.
She quickly loses interest in the smell of an unfamiliar elephant and strolls over to pick out dry blades from a field of African grass, leaving cratered footprints in the dust. Except for their size, I can’t tell them apart from Morula’s.
Columbia wraps her trunk around a wad of grass, from right to left, and rips out a clump. She stuffs the grass between elephant-like molars. As she eats, I hear a phantom fart. She lifts the small, triangular anal flap at the base of her short, stubby tail and drops a pile of dung, which looks exactly like Morula’s latest offerings.
I’m having way too much fun with my mammoth.
Conjuring Mammut americanum, the American mastodon, proves trickier. I can’t quite bring him into focus. Although entire frozen, mummified mammoth carcasses have been unearthed in Siberia – complete with tongues hanging out of their jaws – we know mastodons only by their bones. So when I give Americanum a chestnut-colored shag – short and tangled hair on the top of his low-crowned head, thick and matted fur along his flank – I’m just agreeing with what’s been written elsewhere. A shaggy fur coat is probably a safe bet, since Americanum ranged just south of the Pleistocene ice sheets, mingling with mammoths in the cold wet climate of North America.
Americanum is about the same height as the average African elephant. His back, instead of sloping, like Columbia’s, or saddle-shaped, like Morula’s, is straight – he has no neck. His skull is flatter and longer, without Columbia’s high-domed head or Morula’s rounded crest, and his jaws are elongated. He actually has a chin.
I give my made-up mastodon huge tusks the same length as Columbia’s. While her tusks curve out and then in, like an extravagant Bavarian moustache, his are a classic pitchfork shape. One is a full six inches shorter than the other – Americanum is a lefty. Laterality – right or left-handedness – is present in all proboscidean species.
Both mammoth and mastodon tusks grew to great lengths – a 16-foot mastodon tusk was found in Greece in 2007. The record for African elephants is 11 feet.
Americanum’s tusks, like those of all his cousins, grew as tree rings grow, with varying rates for bad years, good years, summer, spring, winter, fall. Just as African elephants do, he experienced musth after his late teens and began aggressively fighting with other males over receptive females. Fighting caused battle scars to his tooth sockets, tusks and skull. So, although Americanum is stocky, bulky and seemingly without much personality, he‘s not just some docile herbivore. He’s a bull in the prime of his life. Lucky for me, I didn’t conjure him up when his testosterone levels were elevated.
Americanum joins Columbia at a rainbush, but of course he takes no notice of her, nor she of him. How can they? They’re both just figments of my imagination.
He reaches into the bush, plucks a branch of dull green leaves, shoves it into his mouth and chews up and down, like I do, instead of forward and back, like Morula and Columbia. Each ridge on Americanum’s small molars is shaped like a woman’s torso: two breasts with pointed nipple-like chewing surfaces and a valley between them. He has only three to four ridges (sets of breasts) per molar. His common name, mastodon, is a combination of the Greek words for breast (mastos) and tooth (odõn.)
In contrast, the molars of Columbia and Morula are ridged plates: teeth that look like elongated dishes set to dry edgewise in a rack, each plate bonded to the next by enamel. Their molars work like huge horizontal vegetable graters, grinding food back and forth across sharp, upright edges. Morula’s teeth have ten ridges, while Columbia has twenty-seven, due to her exclusive diet of trees.
Doug shows me Morula’s molars. “Open up,” he tells her. She curls her trunk back over her head and he stretches to his tiptoes, pulls her lower gums wide with his hands.
Morula’s molars
“Very good, my girl.”
If there were dentists for elephants, Morula would be a patient patient.
Doug lets go of Morula’s lower jaw and she swings her trunk down but keeps her mouth open. He grabs a fistful of “elephant candy” and slides his arm into her mouth, all the way to his elbow. As he lets go of the treat he rubs her tongue. She rapidly flaps her ears. “Elephants use their trunks to rub each other’s tongues.” Doug says. “It’s kind of like a handshake.”
I re-conjure Morula’s elephant cousins and find them still eating – Columbia at the rainbush, Americanum pulling up grass. I watch them fondly; they are like old friends in new clothes. But they are rapidly becoming distressed in the African heat. They sway from side to side and flap their small ears like tiny surrender flags. So even though I’ve fallen in love with these ghosts, with elephants who no longer exist, I come to my senses and banish them back to the past, where they are extinct once again.
Standing on a termite mound, face-to-trunk with an elephant, I place the palm of my hand against Morula’s fluttering forehead, a forehead as cool and rough as tree bark. She’s burbling, a rumble that resonates like water gurgling down a hollow pipe.
She’s also making sounds I can feel, but not hear. Right at the top of her trunk, where her bulging nasal passage enters her skull, her skin pulses beneath my hand, vibrations that reverberate in my chest cavity, drum against my heart. Muscular ground swells of sound roll full and luxuriously out in the bush, bumping into hippos, giraffes, zebras, lions, hyenas, birds, snakes and tsetse flies.
But it is only elephants who raise their heads and listen.
Most of Morula’s vocalizations are rumbles, which fall partially or entirely in the infrasonic range of 5-30 Hz., throbbing, quaking air for which we humans have no auditory perception. Such low-frequency rumbles usually have harmonics and overtones, both of which can be selectively emphasized. As in whale song, each individual elephant has a signature sound, one like no other elephant – their voices as different from each other as our voices are different from each other.
Are you there?
And invisibly, from beyond an island of trees: Yes, I am here.
Speech makes us human, makes these marks on this page possible. When we speak, our vocal chords vibrate with forced, small explosions of air from our lungs. We shape words with our mouth and tongue. Expelled from a chest full of wind, words float around us like little clouds, each one a separate exhalation, creating an atmosphere of meaning, thickening language one word after another. Sounds unfold in time, in agreeable waves pulsing against our ears. When we are lost and listening to a piece of pleasurable music, time even suspends itself. Songs hang on our bones.
Standing on a termite mound, I close my eyes. The fluttering beneath my hand goes on and on and on.
I open my eyes. “MO-RU-LA,” I sing.
My voice, like hers, originates in my vocal chords. But my vocal range is barely an octave, limping through the air at 220 Hz. Morula’s range is tremendous, more than 10 octaves, from 5 Hz. To 9,000 Hz.
The most athletic human voice in history belonged to Yma Sumac, a Peruvian, who had a self-proclaimed range of five octaves and a recorded range of four and a half. From B below low C to A above high C, from about 123 Hz. to 1760 Hz. Sumac’s high range was the same frequency as an elephant’s trumpet. This is a woman who could occasionally hit a triple-trill and whose voice could sound like an upright bass.
Morula would find her vocalizations a lot more fascinating than mine are.
Like all elephants, Morula is able to produce low frequency sounds just because she is big. The larger the resonating chamber (think cello compared to violin), the lower the frequency of its sound. Morula also has long and loose vocal chords and a flexible arrangement of bones attached to her tongue and larynx. In addition to her loose voicebox she also has another special structure at the back of her throat called a pharyngeal pouch, which not only affects her low-frequency tones but also holds an emergency supply of water.
Morula can produce different results from the same basic rumble by holding her mouth open or shut, by an empty or full pharyngeal pouch, by flapping her ears rapidly or slowly, by holding her head high or low, or by the position of her trunk and the speed of air moving through it. She can combine hundreds of variables to invent thousands of sounds.
Imagine a vocal instrument equal parts cello, double bass, violin, tuba and trumpet, one whose entire body is an expanding and contracting resonating chamber, one that can sing with a throat full of water and triple-trill a rumble, a roar, and infrasound, all in one 3-second call.
Yma Sumac would be horribly jealous.
Straight-armed, I lean against Morula’s forehead. A soothing mantle of high-pitched insect noise drapes over my shoulders.
The fluttering beneath my hand has unexpected results. A soft dry scrape makes me look around. It’s Thembi’s ears whisking against her shoulders. She’s standing behind me, on the opposite side of the termite mound.
Glancing from one large forehead to another, from one set of eyes and back, I have a feeling Morula and Thembi are waiting for me to do something.
Whoosh-thwack . . . Whoosh-thwack . . .Whoosh-thwack. . . . As Morula’s ears hit her shoulder, they sound like heavy canvas sails snapping in a high wind.
Insects sizzle in the underbrush. A bleating warbler cries out Help-me, Help-me, Help-me, Help-me! The trickling call of a coucal drops like large beads into an empty wooden bucket: Doo-doo-doo-doo-doo-doo . . . doo. . . doo . . . doo. . Francolins scatter into the underbrush, a tiny mob of cackling maniacs.
Standing on a termite mound, face-to-trunk with an elephant, I place the palm of my hand against her fluttering forehead, a forehead as cool and rough as tree bark. Morula is burbling, a contented rumble that resonates like water gurgling down a hollow pipe.
She is also making sounds I can feel, but not hear. Right at the top of her trunk, where her bulging nasal passage enters her skull, her skin pulses beneath my hand, vibrations that reverberate in my chest cavity, drum against my heart. Muscular ground swells of sounds roll full and luxuriously out in the bush, bumping into hippos, giraffes, zebras, lions, hyenas, birds, snakes and tsetse flies.
But it is only elephants who raise their heads and listen.
Every desert, river, forest or sea on earth has a mix of sounds biological in origin – birds, mammals, fish – mingled with non-biological sounds – wind, rain, waves, or the blanketing silence of snow. The symphony of a place is dependent upon night, day, weather, time of year and the creatures within it. John Muir always said he could tell exactly where he was in the Sierra Nevadas just by the pine needle music. Few of us are that familiar with our home ground.
Every animal’s voice has its own aural niche within its home ground. When an ecosystem is altered, when trees are cut, ponds drained, soils covered with concrete, and structures built, the orchestra of the land and its chorus of animal voices are silenced.
Wild sounds disappear as fast as habitats disappear.
Bernie Krause, an American bio-accoustician, notes that 25% of the North American natural soundscapes in his archives are now extinct. Habitats that no longer exist. Sounds we will never hear again. Silent summers, silent autumns, silent winters, silent springs.
In this part of the Delta, in this season, the soundscape around me is filled with dry cracklings. With crickets who rasp their legs together and listen to each other with ears on their tibias. With rattling grass. With the scrape of our footsteps. With the buzz of small flies seeking moisture at the corners of my eyes.
Those sounds will soon be joined with new animal voices once the Okavango River floods into waiting channels. For Delta inhabitants, the river also serves as a unique measurement of time. Rumor has it, Doug tells me, the river is two weeks away.
When it arrives, the symphony of the Delta changes. The delicate tink-tink, tink-tink of reed frogs will join the rasp of crickets. Hippos will jostle for elbowroom, grunting and burbling like a band of drowning tubas. Wildebeest will question their daily survival from the jaws of lions with overlapped musings: Hmmmmh?/Hmmmh. Hmmmmh?/Hmmmh.
And as fields of grass submerge in the returning river, ground hornbills will stride to and fro in front of the water’s many tongues. Hornbills are satiny, Satan-y black birds, bigger than fattened geese, with inflated air sacs red as bleeding throats, and beaks like a pickaxes – executioners stalking mice and snakes in advance of the tide. Their tympanic calls sound like thumbs rubbed across a kettle drum: Hmmmmph . . . . . . hmph-hmph. Hmmmmph . . . . . . hmph-hmph.
And intersecting each sound, in each season, the quaking air of elephant calls.
Bernie Krause created a new word for the soundscapes of animal voices: “Biophony” – the combination of sounds which living organisms produce in their particular biome. And for each biome, evolutionary complexity reverberates in the music of that particular place. Millions of years condense into the current symphony I hear as I place my hand on an elephant’s forehead. Wind rustles leaves, birds teer, insects zzzzzz, a palm weevil drones by and the skin under my palm flutters on and on. Without the low bass tones of elephants, without their soft rumbling regards, the animal orchestra of the Delta would not be complete.
Morula plucks a branch from one of her favorite snacks, a bush-willow. She holds the stem in her teeth, wraps her trunk from right to left around the branch, and sheers off leaves, top-to-bottom with a single swipe. She drops the branch and transfers the leaves from the curl of her trunk into her mouth.
Morula is right-trunked, as I am right-handed, preferring to grab and wrap from the right. Thembi is also right-trunked, but Jabu’s a lefty.
One of the ways to determine an elephant’s dominant tendencies is to inspect the underside of its trunk for green stains on either the right side or the left. But before you do this, make sure you know the elephant and, more importantly, the elephant knows you.
Morula peels and discards branch after branch. Shredded bushes mark her path. She pauses next to a candle-pod acacia, easily recognizable by its upright seedpods. It reminds me of a giant leafy candelabrum, holding a hundred or more candles in ruffled tiers. Sharp curved thorns protect each pod. Morula strips the acacia of a branch, then puts it in her mouth and eats it, thorns, pods and all.
She sidles close to Doug and curls her trunk against her forehead.
“Those round bumps on her forehead might be an old skin infection,” Doug tells me, “but we really don’t know.”
Morula waves hello
A light breeze feathers the hair in her ears as she stands slightly sideways and nods the tipof her trunk in a tiny Hello. . . Ribbed muscles cross the underside of her trunk. Bristles stick out like the legs of a giant centipede.
There is no other living creature on this planet that has a trunk. If elephants were already extinct, which brave paleontologist would go out on a limb and reconstruct the trunk just from evidence of bony nostrils high on the skull? Who could imagine a nose dangling close to the ground where scents abound? A nose with the ability to pick up a single straw, rip a tree out by its roots, bench-press 600 pounds and untie your shoelaces without you ever noticing?
“Stand here,” Doug commands me.
I obey, my back to an elephant lineup.
With a little guidance from Doug, Thembi gently places the tip of her trunk on top of my head. It feels like a big beanbag up there, but one that’s warm, wiggly, drooling and breathing.
As Thembi rubs nose slime into my hair, Doug places Jabu’s trunk tip on my right shoulder and then Morula’s on my left.
Jabu has trouble keeping his trunk balanced on such a narrow ledge. He constantly fidgets and pokes my cheek with his bristles. Morula’s trunk drapes over my shoulder like a slack hose with a dripping nozzle. Her runny nose continuously drains to clear out inhaled dust – the common condition of all elephant trunks.
When I look down and to the left, I have a close-up view of the two “fingers” on her trunk. Her top finger is more pointed than the one on the bottom. The shape of it reminds me of a hooded cobra. But perhaps that’s because I think of Morula’s trunk as thinner and “snakier” than Jabu’s spectacular snout.
Which is getting heavier by the moment. With the peripheral vision in my right eye, I see two nostrils dotted with grains of moist sand, nostrils more flesh-colored than gray. Each opening is nearly as wide as the “O” of my mouth.
All three trunk tips, I can attest, are not just sheer weights. They sniff, snorf, squirm, wiggle, inhale and exhale. They create an atmosphere of elephant breath around my head.
Doug lowers my camera and pronounces, “Allll-right.”
The weights disappear. For a few steps I am oddly light, as if walking on the surface of the moon.
There is an elsewhere, somewhere, but it’s not a place I want to be right now.
Under a sun-bleached sky that is no longer blue, dry coughing barks from black-backed jackals lope in from our left . . . Wraack, wraack, wraack. . . Black-backs are scavengers, more aggressive than other types of jackals, occupying the same ecological niche in Africa as coyotes do in North America. Unlike coyotes, black-backed jackals do not howl. They often steal meat within the reach of a lion’s paw – although their main diet consists of insects, lizards, snakes, rodents, birds and ripe fruit.
Up ahead Morula slaps her ears flatly against her shoulders.
Elephant air-conditioning for a creature that produces enough heat to warm a small house.
Elephants are pachy-dermed, “thick-skinned.” Some of Morula’s blood vessels are buried as deep as one-and-a-half inches under the surface of her skin. Since she doesn’t have sweat glands, her ears act like giant heat exchangers, regulating her body temperature. As her ears open, her body size increases by roughly twenty square feet, a huge area for thermoregulation. Air moving over the swollen arteries of each ear cools her blood as much as nine degrees before it returns to her body.
I take a photograph of her ear in mid-flap. Where Morula’s ear attaches to her shoulder, wrinkles give way to he swollen vessels pumping five gallons of blood per minute across the surface of her ears. The pattern of those arteries is as unique as a fingerprint, and often used for identifying individual elephants.
The breeze she creates dies before it reaches me. I take off my cap and fan my own neck.
My teeny, itsy ears are built somewhat the same as hers are, 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.
Morula plucks a branch from one of her favorite snacks, a bush-willow. She holds the stem in her teeth, wraps her trunk from right to left around the branch, and sheers off leaves, top-to-bottom with a single swipe. She drops the branch and transfers mashed leaves from the curl of her trunk into her mouth.
Morula is right-trunked, as I am right-handed, preferring to grab and wrap from the right. Thembi is also right-trunked, but Jabu’s a lefty. One of the ways to determine an elephant’s dominant tendencies is to inspect the underside of its trunk for green stains on either the right side or the left.
But before you do this, make sure you know the elephant and, more importantly, the elephant knows you.
Morula sidles close to Doug and curls her trunk against her forehead.
“Those round bumps on her forehead might be an old skin infection,” Doug tells me, “but we really don’t know.”
A light breeze feathers the hair in her ears as she stands slightly sideways and nods the tip of her trunk in a tiny Hello. . . Ribbed muscles cross the underside of her trunk. Bristles stick out like the legs of a giant centipede.
Morula waves "Hello."
I squint against the sun, s—t—r—e—t—c—h and yawn. Back-to-back ten-hour jet flights across two hemispheres in a 48-hour-period are taking their toll. From Seattle to Amsterdam, Amsterdam to Johannesburg, and a four-hour flight from Johannesburg to Maun. My body thinks it’s 2 a.m.
The tip of Jabu’s trunk traces an arc from my toes to my heels, and back to my toes again. Did I pick up essences of jet fuel on my boots yesterday when I crossed the tarmac at Johannesburg? Can he smell the rubber floorboards of the Cessna 206 that brought me here? Or does the scent on my boots go further back, to the dandelions in my lawn half a world away?
Satisfied with my toes, Jabu starts to pat me down, sampling scents from the rest of my body almost thoughtfully. He expels air after each sampling, like a wine connoisseur clearing his palate. Of course, the smelliest parts of my body are the most interesting.
Ah, fuff, sweat, mixed with fuff armpits, and fuff, crotch. His trunk dangles over my hair, re-coifing it with a large and final Fuffff! Jabu is treating me the way he would scrutinize another elephant, determining who I am, where I’ve been and fuff what I did while I was there.
The tip of his trunk hovers in front of my face, wet with mucous, dotted with sand, nostril hairs visible.
He blows into my face, gently. I blow back, gently. We exchange breath, distillations of our own personal atmospheres, particle-swarms of changed, exchanged air, brewed though all the cells of our bodies.
Tip of Jabu's trunk
My lungs fill with the fragrance of crushed leaves, with saproots and spearmint-scented bark, all lightly fermented. 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.
Jabu’s trunk tip investigates my right boot over and over again. The scent that fascinates him tumbles 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.
A trunk is the most useful appendage that ever evolved. Imagine having an arm in place of your nose, an arm long enough to reach to the top of a tree, and pluck a single leaf from its crown. Imagine having a nose with which you could rip, tear, excavate, whack, and blow bubbles with. You could steal with your nose, suck on it, squeal, swat, poke and siphon with your nose. You could take a shower with it. Scratch your back with it. Whistle with it. You could even arm wrestle with your nose.
There is no other living creature on this planet that has a trunk. If elephants were already extinct, which brave paleontologist would go out on a limb and reconstruct the trunk just from evidence of bony nostrils high on the skull? Who could imagine a nose dangling close to the ground where scents abound? Who could imagine a nose with the ability to pick up a single straw, rip a tree out by its roots, bench-press 600 pounds and untie your shoelaces without you ever noticing?
During a visit to Botswana’s Chobe National Park in 1999, I spent part of an afternoon belly laughing at a baby elephant learning to use her trunk. First, she flopped it over her ear as she nursed, a rubbery, 10-inch nuisance dangling like a wayward curl among the bristles on the top of her head. Then, finished with lunch, she began twirling her trunk lariat-style up and down, up and down, a cowgirl learning her ropes. Tiring of that, she flung it away over her left shoulder and was absolutely amazed when it boomeranged back. Stock still, cross-eyed, she tried to puzzle out this remarkable toy and waved it up and down as if it was a hankie. As the members of her family drank, she leaned into the river and blew bubbles with her new plaything.
Blowing bubbles
Finally, she sidled over to her mother and knelt under Mom’s belly. Her knee landed squarely on her trunk. When she squealed in pain, her mother reached under and gave her a reassuring pat.
It takes six to eight months to begin to learn how to twirl your trunk, two years for it to grow all the way down to the ground. And even longer to separate out all those entrancing Fuff! scents.
I’m reposting this piece in honor of the new year. It occurred very early in my blog:
Heart shapes can be found in nature, if you’re lucky enough to spy one. There’s a heart on Jabu’s trunk, a ridge of skin that feels like fine shoe leather. One of his wrinkles pierces the lower third of this heart shape, from left to right, straight as an arrow. His real heart hangs between his breastbone and ribs, a little to the left, just like mine does. But instead of having a heart with a single point, an elephant’s heart has two points at its apex – so it’s the wrinkled outline of a human heart that Jabu carries on his trunk.
The length of Jabu’s real heart is about twenty-two inches, its width eighteen. His heart weighs around forty-four pounds, almost the same as a medium-sized dog. Still, it’s less than 1% of his body weight, a common proportion among large mammals and among humans. My heart also weighs less than 1% of my body weight: about ten ounces.
The human heart is approximately five inches long, three-and-a-half inches wide and shaped like a pulsing cone. It is the only muscle in my body that acts on its own – my heartbeat doesn’t need any messages from my brain. The cells in my heart tissue involuntarily constrict, all together, all at once, over and over, a soft perpetual-motion machine. Rip my heart from my body, chop it into pieces, immerse the pieces in a saline solution, and then give them a small jolt of electricity. The remnants of my cardiac muscle will contract . . . contract . . . contract – all on their own, sometimes for hours.
It’s designed to be strong, my heart.
In mammals, birds, and reptiles the heart has the same basic pump-like design, a design that has worked through eons – even cold-blooded dinosaurs had hearts. A day or two after fertilization, embryos develop a pinpoint that pales, then brightens, pales, then brightens, the beginnings of a tiny pump practicing emptying, filling, emptying, refilling. An old, old pattern. The master timepiece.
There are four chambers in my heart: two auricles (“little ears”) and two ventricles (“little bellies”) – named by anatomists for the external parts of the body they resemble. Spent, dark-red blood is collected in the right auricle, then dropped into the right ventricle, which constricts and pumps it out to the lungs to pick up oxygen. Bright red again, full of oxygen, blood circulates back to the left auricle and from there drops into the left ventricle. In the next twitch blood is delivered to every corner of my body.
The “little ears,” the auricles, make very little sound as they drain blood into the lower chambers of my heart, a distance of an inch or so. It’s the ventricles, the “little bellies,” that boom as each contraction forces open heart valves and blood gushes up the aorta under pressure. Lupp DUPP. Lupp DUPP. Lupp DUPP. One beat smaller, one beat larger, flush after flush.
My right ventricle has walls thin as paper – it delivers blood only as far as the lungs. If I could hold it up to the light I could see right through it. The left side of my heart is the heavyweight lifter, pumping blood all the way to my toes, moving 150,000 tons of blood in my lifetime.
Jabu’s great artery, the aorta, takes off from the left ventricle of his heart, the same as mine does. Named in the Middle Ages, aorta means, “to heave.” It’s an artery more flexible and sturdier than any manmade pipe. Jabu’s left ventricle pumps a continuous stream of blood up and out of his heart into the aorta, which then drops down into his chest and down each leg, where it branches and branches and branches all the way to his toes. Each arterial branch has less space than the artery it came from, but the sum of their volume is always greater than their mother artery. The blood moves, but more and more slowly through smaller and smaller pipes, trickling into all corners of Jabu’s body, trickling through capillaries one cell thick.
Blood’s trip back to the heart is made through veins. Millions of tiny venules drain into thousands of small veins, thousands drain to hundreds, hundreds to the one that empties back into the heart. Veins are even more elastic than arteries, can hold variable quantities of blood, and serve as a reservoir for all that moving liquid. At any one moment, 65% of my blood is contained in my veins. It’s an ancient blueprint, this branching, this heartbeat, this coming and going, a blueprint brought to life in even the tiniest of creatures.
Blood has to be literally hoisted from Jabu’s toes. Squeezed along by muscles wrapped around veins, pushed by valves in the veins, and sucked upward by the huge action of breathing, blood finally arrives in the vena cava, where it drops into the heart. Jabu has two vena cavae, possibly because of the large amounts of blood that need to be moved.The blood vessels of an African elephant reach lengths of twelve feet, a huge network of life.
Jabu’s body contains 120 gallons of blood, enough to fill an aquarium six feet long, two feet wide and two feet deep. At one-and-a-half gallons, my puny amount of blood would barely fill a birdbath.
Blood is the body’s only liquid organ, five times denser than water. It takes food and water in, removes waste and byproducts to the disposal areas of the body, the kidneys, lungs, and skin. Blood irrigates all tissue, both feeds and cleanses. It leaves the heart at one mile per hour and returns, laden with waste, at about half that speed. Construction materials move along highways of blood, demolished materials return. Blood is 20% solids and 80% water, carrying products of digestion, products made by the body, foreign intruders, the dust of stars, even cobalt from the original ocean of the earth where both of us, human and elephant, began our journeys.
We each have roughly one billion heartbeats for our lives. Mouse, hummingbird, elephant, human, all the same. Like us, elephants suffer cardiovascular disease, die of heart attacks and strokes.
Cardiac arrest: when the heart shudders and stops, when the light in the eyes flickers, fades and snuffs.
And when the heart quits beating, its resonance
Lupp DUPP Lupp DUPP Lupp DUPP
is gone. The gurgle of digestion, all the silky, sturdy, slapping noises, the blood rush, gone. The symphony of the body is finished.
For those of us left, that silence is almost too much to bear.
Under a sun-bleached sky that is no longer blue, dry coughing barks from black-backed jackals lope in from our left . . . Wraack, wraack, wraack. . . Black-backs are scavengers, more aggressive than other types of jackals, and occupy the same ecological niche in Africa as coyotes do in North America. They are bold enough to steal meat within the reach of a lion’s paw – although their main diet consists of insects, lizards, snakes, rodents, birds and ripe fruit. Unlike coyotes, black-backed jackals do not howl.
Up ahead of us Morula slaps her ears flatly against her shoulders.
Elephant air-conditioning, for a creature that produces enough heat to warm a small house. Elephants are pachy-dermed, thick-skinned. Some of Morula’s blood vessels are buried as deep as one-and-a-half inches under her skin. Since she doesn’t have sweat glands, her ears act like giant heat exchangers, regulating her body temperature. As her ears open, her body size increases by roughly one-fifth and her ears provide a huge area for thermoregulation. The air moving over swollen arteries on the surface of each ear cools her blood as much as nine degrees before it returns to her body.
The veins in Morula's ear
I take a photograph of her ear in mid-flap. Where Morula’s ear attaches to her shoulder, wrinkles give way to rising rivers of blood, pumping five gallons per minute across the surface of her ears. The pattern of arteries on an elephant’s ear is as unique as a fingerprint, and often used for identification.
The breeze she creates dies before it reaches me. I take off my cap and fan my own neck.
My teeny, itsy ears are built somewhat the same as hers are, 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.
In the late morning heat Morula’s ears are in constant motion.
Ears of African elephants resemble huge maps of Africa. Ears of Asian elephants flop forward at the top and hang like small, wrinkled outlines of India. Morula’s ears fold backward, giving them a smooth, tidy appearance, a map pressed flat. Although the ears of all elephants have a similar construction – cartilage covered by a thin layer of skin – Morula’s ears are roughly three times larger than those of her Asian kin. African elephants have the biggest external ears of all mammals, perhaps the biggest of all time. Each one weighs approximately one hundred pounds.
And no two elephant ears are the same. As pliable and soft as worn canvas, the leading edge of an elephant’s ear is often caught and torn on branches or by the tusks of other elephants. In Kenya I watched an adolescent flare her ear and trace its outline with her trunk like a matador holding out her cape. Backlit by sunlight, three perfectly round holes on its border reminded me of diamond studs. Nearby, a huge bull posed for my gulping camera as I shot an entire roll of film in less than two minutes. Only later, with the film developed and the prints in my hands, did I notice the edges of his ears were as scalloped as an old lace tablecloth.
Jabu sidles up to Morula to investigate the thorn branch in her mouth. Sandi intercepts him and reaches into her bag of treats.
“Jabu, be nice to Morula,” she says.
Jabu holds out his trunk, cups his treat and puts a handful of pellets into his mouth. While he’s busy, Sandi reaches back into her bag and transfers treats to the inside curl of Morula’s trunk. Morula fans her ears, her perfect maps of Africa, and continues munching on her thorn branch. She finishes the branch before eating her treats.
Last night Stanley’s Camp radioed Doug to inform him a guest had purchased the activity option of joining us on a foraging trek. In partnership with Doug and Sandi, the hosts at Stanley’s offer their guests the experience of a lifetime – an opportunity to walk for several hours through the bush with three unfenced and unfettered elephants, culminating in a picnic lunch at the end of the trek.
As we walk along the dusty road to the rendezvous point for Stanley’s guests, Doug tells me we will meet up with Stacey from New York City.
Rather than submitting to elephant-back safari rides, Jabu, Morula and Thembi provide one-on-one interactions with guests like Stacey, a unique chance to learn how elephants behave in the wild from elephants who accept humans as part of their herd.
The posh tents at Stanley’s Camp are located in a private concession at the southern tip of Chief’s Island, four hundred square miles of dry land in the vast wetlands of the inner Delta. Private concessions in Botswana lease exclusive tourism use of wildlife areas from community trusts, providing both jobs and taxes. A committee elected from the six villages within the community trust area NG32 leases 406 square miles to Stanley’s parent company, Sanctuary Retreats.
Exclusive use means exclusive sightings of game – no flocks of vehicles following a single lion. It also gives Jabu, Thembi, Morula – and their local wild cousins – a daily life without a huge human presence. Only one sandy pass-through road connects concession to concession. It is lightly traveled, used mainly by the occasional researcher or for overland supply trucks. Most tourists fly in.
Our rendezvous point with Stacey is an island of bush. In the surrounding lagoon of grass a few stalks shiver and crosshatch as a mouse or grasshopper nibbles at their stems. Otherwise, the lagoon is perfectly still. The island is a good hiding place for elephants. Sandi and I will step out to the road when we hear a vehicle coming.
As we wait for Stacey, Doug asks me, “Have you ever seen an elephant’s nictitating membrane?”
No, I haven’t. Not many chances to do that, where I live.
“Steady Morula.” He puts both hands up by her left eye and uses them to hold it open. An opaque membrane slides from the corner of her eye toward the front of her face, toward her trunk.
“It helps protect the eye from sand,” Doug says, “or when she sticks her face in a bush.”
Morula stands perfectly still.
Such trust, I think. I hate it when a doctor holds my eye open, shines a bright light into it and causes tears to course down my cheek.
Morula’s tears are oilier than mine are, produced by a gland in the nictitating membrane and from a modified sebaceous gland located in her eyelids. Human tears originate from large lachrymal glands located behind our eyebrows which discharge when irritated or when we are emotional. When our tear ducts (actually drains) are overwhelmed, tears spill from the corners of our eyes.
Doug releases Morula’s eyelids. She blinks several times, then knuckles her eye with the tip of her trunk curled as tight as a fist. As she rubs a dark smudge, a triangle of tears, spreads like a delta from the corner of her eye.
Morula and I stand together, watchers watching, measuring each other. Steadfast, she looks down her nose at me. I gaze upward into an iris of liquid oak with sun flecks and shadows in it.
I remember the camera hanging from my neck and lift it. I feel the earth breathing, the air turning older; each moment caught, then left behind.
ABOUT ELEPHANTS 
