Africa – Page 28 – ABOUT ELEPHANTS

A Morning Walk with Elephants, Part Two

Posted on January 26, 2012February 20, 2012 by Cheryl Merrill

An excerpt from my book:

Morula stands around fidgeting, if an elephant can be said to fidget. She lifts her right leg and swings her foot. Puts it down, backs up two steps. Lifts her leg and swings her foot again.

Sandi is quick to notice.

“Morula, here,“ Sandi commands and Morula complies, touching Sandi’s leg with her trunk. I join them.

Sandi has the calm face of a mother with large, exuberant children. Her eyes have white creases at their corners from squinting into the sun. She wears a huge, floppy cloth hat with a brim longer in back than in front. It’s black under the brim and light green on top.

“How many commands do they understand?” I ask.

“Verbal? About a hundred. And that’s limited only by our imagination, not theirs.”

Morula leans in like an eager teenager.

She’s a little too close for Sandi’s liking. “Morula, over and back.” Sandi taps on Morula’s leg. Morula backs up a step. “Over and back.” Morula is carefully responsive. When you’re as big as she is, every movement has consequence. Each step backward is slow, deliberate, and precisely placed.

Once Sandi has her positioned, she gestures to me. I step forward and place a hand on Morula’s trunk. Studded with sparse bristles, her trunk feels like a stiff old brush. I look up.

Three-inch lashes cast shadows down Morula’s cheeks. She blinks and her lashes sweep against her skin like small brooms. A bit of matter is clustered in the corner of her lower eyelid.

Each of the more than 200 lashes around 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.

Africa, Elephants, Jabu, Morula, Thembi, Uncategorized

A Morning Walk with Elephants, Part One

Posted on January 21, 2012February 20, 2012 by Cheryl Merrill

An excerpt from my book:

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. Bare, wood-muscular branches of a jackal-berry tree stretch above my head, tips ablaze with light. Crisp and clear, the air tastes of damp sage mixed with cold sand.

Doug sets down his coffee cup and leaves to fetch the elephants. Skirting a tree-line filled with purple shadows, he crosses an open field of grass.

Sandi and I wait, our hands wrapped around steaming cups.

Half an hour later Doug returns. Jabu, Thembi and Morula are right behind him.

Sandi whispers, “Let’s go, Jabu,” and he turns away to follows her down the dusty road in front of camp.

Plain-Jane Morula is next to saunter past, her broad, honest face etched with a network of creases and wrinkles, the tip of her trunk canted in my direction. Thembi lags behind, with Doug at her side, but soon catches up to Jabu, picking up a stick like he does, stashing it between her trunk and tusk like he does, dropping it just as soon as he does.

The order in which they assemble never varies. First Jabu, then Morula, and finally Thembi. Yet, when we set off on our morning walks, it is always Morula, the oldest, who brings up the rear.

We mosey away from camp at a slow ramble, all in a line – Doug and Sandi, three elephants, and me.

Yesterday I traveled by jet. Today I fall into place behind an elephant. My mind is having a hard time keeping up with a change greater than eight time zones and two hemispheres.

I’m clumsy in this new world. The old discarded one of concrete and cell phones 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.

Tufts of grass nods gently in the wind of our passing. Isolated clumps of finger grass wave six-digit tassels at us. The fingers of a slight breeze hold my hair up to the sun.

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 know Morula is not wild, not truly. I know she has spent half her life with Doug and Sandi. Nevertheless, I’m paralyzed. I forget how to breathe. Everyone else is up near the front of the herd, as far away as another continent.

Morula stands in half-profile, stares at me with one nut-brown eye. A feathery tuft of hair sticks out from her ear canal. Her mottled forehead glistens like cracked mud.

Slowly she blinks her eyes, flaps her ears, and a lifetime later swings around to overtake Thembi. I exhale as they entwine trunks.

Cicadas chirr, stirring up the morning. 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 every cell in my brain, as I scramble to catch up with the herd, take my allotted slot in the order of march.

Africa, Elephants, Jabu

Jabu by Moonlight

Posted on January 19, 2012February 20, 2012 by Cheryl Merrill

An excerpt from my book:

Leaves from mopane branches litter the ground around my feet, discarded by the elephants as they strip bark. In the daylight the leaves are reddish-colored and striped with green. But tonight they are bleached to the color of tinsel by the moon, a hundred silver butterflies.

I look up at Doug. “Is it true that one night you slept curled up in Jabu’s trunk?”

“Not very comfortably.” His grin broadens. “Hey, here comes Jabu. Here’s my boy.”

It’s hard to believe an elephant weighing six tons with a huge, restless trunk could sneak up on us. But Jabu has. Like tires with low air pressure, his cushioned feet smother twigs, branches and the sound of his own footfalls. He is amazingly silent as he stands before us. He shifts his weight from one side to the other.

As if it was a curious eye on the end of a long, snaking probe, the tip of his trunk hovers two inches from my nose. And I’ll bet he’s pleased he’s making me nervous.

He sucks my scent out of the air as delicately as picking petals from a daisy.

Trunk raised. Trunk dropped. Trunk raised. Trunk dropped.

He loves me. He loves me not.

His massive head is a continent, wrinkled by tectonic plates of life. Tufts of hair stick out of his ears, an old man’s ears.

Doug motions me closer.

Standing on night-cooled sand, I lean my cheek against Jabu’s leg. The chalk of my bones softens. As the weight of night drapes across my shoulders, we warm each other, both of us children made from the dust of stars.

Africa, Elephants, Morula

Morula by Moonlight

Posted on January 15, 2012February 20, 2012 by Cheryl Merrill

An excerpt from my book:

As if the night air has muscle, it flexes, then strengthens, when a bulky umber apparition condenses out of darkness. Doug moves away from Thembi as another elephant backs blindly toward us, lifting first the sole of one foot and then another for our inspection, carefully feeling her way. It is an oblong moment, stretched by suspense.

“No, no, Morula,” Doug says, and then turns to me. “It’s the way elephants greet each other, but I’m trying to get her to greet us face-to-face.”

Enchanted by the thought Morula might consider me a fellow elephant, I have no qualms about putting the flat of my palm against her trunk.

Her skin contracts like a giant slinky under my hand. I gently rub up and down, up and down. The nerves at the tips of my fingers tingle.

Astonishing warmth.

Crumbles of mud.

Bristling hair.

The massive dome of her head blocks the stars. Her forehead is cobbled; my eyes follow its boulevard up to the night sky.

She exhales. A gentle rumble flows past my fingers and stirs the dust at my feet. In the distance a hyena slouches through its whoop. Then it is quiet again and the stars lean in to listen to her breathing.

Africa, Elephants

Where the Elephants Live

Posted on January 9, 2012February 20, 2012 by Cheryl Merrill

An excerpt from my book:

In the atlas on my desk there’s a satellite photograph of a giant bird footprint pressed into the southern part of Africa – an inland river delta the size of Massachusetts. Swollen by November rains in Angola, Botswana’s Okavango River floods south, arrives in May or June, fans out and terminates at a fault line that stops the river in its tracks. Most of it evaporates or sinks into the Kalahari sands. Not a single drop reaches the sea.

But as the river pushes south, it filters through a 5,500 square-mile-delta, the largest in the world, an unparalleled ecosystem with an ark-full of animals. And as the river dies, it leaves behind orphans: ponds no bigger than puddles, abandoned lagoons that shrink into brackish waterholes, and four main dead-end channels – the bird’s footprint.

Doug and Sandi’s camp is on Chief’s Island, about thirty-seven miles, or fifteen minutes flying time from Maun – rhymes with “down.” Maun is an outpost, the last town before venturing into the Delta.

The pilot let me sit up front. As his chattering Cessna lifted north I saw many haphazard dirt streets crossed by a few thin, barely-paved roads. Dusty paths led to round bomas fenced by thornbush. Shaded by an occasional acacia or mopane tree, each boma contained a tiny hut plastered with mud. Some corralled a cow or a goat. As we flew higher, Maun’s taller, three-story buildings flattened and disappeared. The town melted into the desert.

Meandering two-rut tracks lost their way and vanished. A waterhole appeared, left behind by last year’s flood. Another came into sight and then another.

Soon a thousand or more blue eyes hypnotized me, stared upward, unblinking, as the shadow of our Cessna crossed them. Etched in the sand by countless hooves, game trails meandered through the dry landscape, all headed to pockets of water stained cornflower blue by the sky.

We dropped lower. A thousand mirrors signaled the sun. Lower still, and the mirrors turned blue, became waterholes again, puddling the Okavango Delta as far as I could see.

Right before we landed on a strip of dirt near Stanley’s Camp, the pilot and I glimpsed a cheetah sprinting for cover. With that single spotted blur, my life divided between home and Africa.

Africa, Elephants, Morula

Morula

Posted on January 7, 2012February 20, 2012 by Cheryl Merrill

An excerpt from my book:

Morula stands square on. Her cobbled forehead broadens from her nose upward in a triangular shape. Her eyes are nearly hidden, tucked behind the curve of her forehead. She raises her head to focus on me. She’s motionless, concentrating. I can’t even hear her breathing.

I have this odd feeling that she wants me to like her as much as I want her to like me.

I take the lens cap from my camera and glimpse a tiny reflection of myself in its mirror. Is this what she sees – another one of those small humans, with its odd aura of scents? Does she see details: my hat, my camera, my idiotic grin?

The top of a tree is visible over her right shoulder, as if she has a giant corsage tucked behind her ear. Short bristles like an old man’s buzz cut outline the top of her head.

Because of the way she’s standing, ears flattened against her shoulders, Morula seems slim, her skull almost hollowed. The tip of her trunk flops over itself in a loose coil and points straight down like a curved arrow. It begins to twitch in an irregular rhythm. I take a goofy photograph of Morula – like she’s bored and playing with the only thing at hand – her trunk.

Behind us, around us, for 360 degrees, the Botswana landscape surrounds us. And neither one of us pays it a bit of attention.

Africa, Elephants, Thembi, Uncategorized

Thembi

Posted on January 6, 2012February 20, 2012 by Cheryl Merrill

An excerpt from my book:

With a low throaty rumble MmmmRRRRRrrrrrr, his own elephant greeting, Doug slips under Thembi’s jaw and stands by her side. He reaches up and strokes the skin just in front of her ear.

“Steady, Thembi,” he says, “you’re a pretty girl, aren’t you Thembi?” He pronounces her

name “Tem-bee.”

She nods Yes. Later I will learn Thembi always nods Yes at the word “pretty.” But she is a beautiful elephant, all her proportions flawless. And Thembi knows she is pretty. She holds herself perfectly still in half-profile, the way beautiful women do all over the world when under regard by an admiring eye.

But her pose does not last long. She turns her attention to a pile of mopane branches. She picks up a single branch, strips its bark and stuffs the curled peelings into her mouth. Thembi is after the sweet, green inner bark of the smaller branches. Dessert first, the main course later.

Africa, Elephants, Jabu, Travel

Jabu

Posted on January 5, 2012February 20, 2012 by Cheryl Merrill

An excerpt from my book:

There is nothing like him on earth. His head alone is more immense than an entire gorilla. Jabu is one hundred times larger than I am. His trunk is larger than I am. A single leg is larger than I am. He fills my entire range of vision.

He reaches out with his trunk and rests it on the ground in front of my boots. The tip of it lifts, opens, inhales my scent.

Do you recognize her, Jabu?” Sandi asks him. Gently he swings his trunk to tap lightly against Sandi’s shoulder bag.

What’s in there?” I ask.

Sandi shows me a little mound of pellets cupped in her hand. “Pressed alfalfa, wheat bran, salt, ground corn and sunflower hulls.” Elephant candy, immediately vacuumed into Jabu’s trunk and transferred to his mouth.

Jabu turns his head toward me. And You?

I hold out empty hands. His trunk hovers over them for less than a second and then drops down to rest near my feet. As I run my fingers along his warm tusk he snorts out a huge exhale, CHUFFFFFffffffff.

Africa, Doug, Elephants, Jabu, Sandi, Thembi, Writing

The Elephants Who Accepted Me as Part of Their Herd

Posted on January 3, 2012April 28, 2012 by Cheryl Merrill

An excerpt from my book:

Jabu, Morula and Thembi live in Botswana’s Okavango Delta. I don’t need radio collars or binoculars or even 4-wheel drive vehicles to study them. They are companions, who allow me to walk alongside them, close as an eyelash. Adopted as orphans from culling operations by Doug and Sandi Groves, they spend their days as most wild elephants do: strolling and eating. But they are also willing ambassadors between the elephant world and the human world.

Walk with me. Stroll with three unfettered and unfenced elephants in a world where the thin-skinned sky is a bare reminder that the earth is covered with air, where clouds stampede as if chased by lions – a world without asphalt, without cell phones, without that strange human notion of time.

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