Tag: Jabu

Posted in Africa, Death, Elephants, Heart Break, Nature

Heart Break

Posted on by Cheryl Merrill

I was working on this piece for my writing group when I got the news on March 13th that Thembi (the elephant in the middle of this photograph) had died from colic and a heart attack.   I can’t imagine how their guardians, Doug and Sandi Groves, must be feeling.  Thembi had been a part of their human/elephant family group since she was two years old.  It is hard to lose any family member……

L to R: Jabu, Thembi & Morula, photograph by Cheryl Merrill

 

Heart shapes can be found in nature, if you’re lucky enough to see one. The heart shape on Jabu’s trunk was easy to spot when I first met him – a ridged outline high up, just below the level of his eyes, about a foot tall and half a foot wide. One of his wrinkles pierced the heart, straight as an arrow, from left to right.

Now that he’s an older elephant, his trunk has grown broader, and the heart is harder to find. I can still see the outline of it, but it’s not easy to make out.

The shape of the heart on Jabu’s trunk is a Valentine’s likeness, the kind you see carved into trees. An elephant’s heart has two points at its ventricular apex – which makes it look like an apple, instead of the red caricature on cards we give to each other once a year. You’re unlikely to see an elephant’s heart carved onto a tree.

Jabu’s heart hangs between his breastbone and ribs, a little to the left, like mine does. When I stand near Jabu’s side, our hearts are close to each other, one-point and two-point, Lupp-DUPP, Lupp-DUPP, Lupp-DUPP.

Hearts have the same basic pump-like design – a design that has worked through eons -an ancient blueprint, a master timepiece, a blueprint followed by even the tiniest of creatures. A day or two after fertilization, embryos develop a pinpoint that pales, then brightens, pales, then brightens, the beginnings of a tiny pump emptying, filling, emptying, filling.

Of all the body’s organs, the heart is the only one that doesn’t get cancer. Of all the body’s organs, Egyptians mummified only the heart.

The length of Jabu’s heart is 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 humans. My heart weighs only ten ounces, less than 1% of my body weight.

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 – it doesn’t need any messages from my brain.

The cells in my heart tissue involuntarily twitch, all together, all at once, over and over, a synchronous soft perpetual-motion machine. Rip my heart from my body, chop it into pieces, immerse the pieces in a saline solution, give them a small jolt of electricity, and the remnants of my cardiac muscle will contract . . . contract . . . contract . . . for several minutes, all on their own, all at the same time. A whole undamaged heart will beat for five to ten minutes before it dies from lack of oxygen, from lack of blood.

It’s built to be strong, our hearts.

Mouse, hummingbird, elephant, human, snakes – we all have roughly two-and-a-half billion heartbeats for our lives. Species with faster heartbeats die sooner, rapidly using up their allotment within their short lives. An elephant’s heartbeat is slower than ours. Like us, elephants may suffer from cardiovascular disease and die of heart attacks and strokes.

Cardiac arrest. When the heart shudders and stops, when the light in the eyes flickers, fades and snuffs. When the heart quits beating, when 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 finished.

For those of us left behind, its silence is almost too much to bear. But somehow we do it. Somehow, the world beckons us back in.

 

Here is their Facebook page:

https://www.facebook.com/withelephants/?fref=nf&pnref=story

Posted in Africa, Elephants, Jabu, Nature

Massive Molars

Posted on by Cheryl Merrill
photograph by Cheryl Merrill
photograph by Cheryl Merrill

 

At birth, elephants have only two or three small cheek teeth. By the age of ten, big tectonic molars began to erupt in the back of their jaws, becoming part of a conveyer belt of teeth. As molars wear down near the front of an elephant’s mouth fragments of them break off in pieces and either fall out or are swallowed. Throughout its lifetime, an elephant will grow twenty-four molars in six sets – but only two tusks.

Each molar looks like a set of dishes drying edgewise on a rack, bonded together by enamel. The vertical ridges function like giant vegetable graters as an elephant’s lower jaw moves forward and back, rather than side-to-side like a cow. Each molar grows up to a foot long, has a maximum of ten ridges, and weighs eleven pounds apiece – perfect for grinding up tree branches.

Like human teeth, elephant teeth consist of cementum, dentine and enamel. Cementum holds the roots of a tooth in place, dentine surrounds the pulp and enamel crowns each tooth with a hard protective layer. Packed with nerves and blood vessels, the pulp cavities of elephant tusks extend two-thirds of the length of each tusk. Their teeth are as sensitive as mine are.

Doug asks Jabu to “Open up.” He curls his trunk back over his head and Doug stretches to his tiptoes, pulls his lower gums wide with his hands.

In his lifetime Jabu will have six sets of molars.  His sixth set will wear down by the time he is sixty.  Only ten percent of aging elephants grow a seventh set of molars.

“Very good, my boy. . . . veerrry good.”

Peering over Doug’s shoulder, I count four molars in his mouth, two on top and two on the bottom.

Doug lets go of Jabu’s lower jaw. “Allllright, Jabu, allllright.”

He drops his trunk but leaves his mouth open. Doug grabs a fistful of treats and slides his arm into Jabu’s mouth, all the way to his elbow. As he lets go of the treats he rubs Jabu’s tongue. He  flaps his ears.

“Elephants use their trunks to rub each other’s tongues. It’s kind of like a handshake,” Doug says.

Posted in Africa, Elephants, Nature, Nonfiction, Photography, Travel

The Sound of Water

Posted on by Cheryl Merrill
photograph by Cheryl Merrill
photograph by Cheryl Merrill

The sound of water splashing draws us away from camp. We leave behind dinner preparations and walk out into the sunset, our feet soft in the sand. My boots kick up dust the color and texture of crumbled parchment.

Musty, bacterial, moist as a swamp cooler, the evening air condenses into cold pools. Shreds of scent blossom. I inhale freshened earth, the damp beginnings of night.

We find the elephants in a lengthening night shadow, drinking from a metal trough. Trunks curled, heads tipped back, eyes closed – they siphon water from the trough into their mouths. The sound they make as they siphon mimics the sound of rain in gutters, only the water is going up, not down.

Three elephant trunks reach toward us, sniffing the shadowed, violet air. Jabu thonks the end of his trunk against the ground, as if testing a cantaloupe for ripeness. Then he places the tip of his trunk directly under the hose gushing into the trough. Thembi curls her trunk tight enough to be nearly round, like a tire. Morula waves a medium-sized Hello.

The honey-colored evening deepens to gold, then orange, shot through with veins of red, a saffron sunset. The elephants become a shade of rusty rose.

On our walk back to camp the last of the sun catches the top of a fan palm as the purple shadow of the earth spreads across the sky. The rim of the earth becomes the rim of the moon as it rises.

Posted in Africa, Elephants, Nature, Nonfiction, Photography, Travel, Writing

Like an Old, Old Photograph

Posted on by Cheryl Merrill
photograph by Cheryl Merrill
photograph by Cheryl Merrill

an excerpt from my book:

The elephants cross a dry lagoon abandoned by the Okavango River after last year’s flood. Enticed by a nearby tidbit, Thembi stops, sniffs at a bush willow, and daintily picks a single leaf to taste-test it. Morula and Jabu join in, not so daintily, ripping entire branches from the bush. Deft as magicians, they use the tips of their trunks to strip the soft leaves, as if conjuring playing cards from a stacked deck.

Jabu crams a wad of leaves into his mouth. He drags one foot and stirs up a gauzy curtain of powdered insects, ash, crumbled grass and dust. From his belly up, Jabu is all the colors of mud; from his belly down, seen through the dust, he’s a bit hazier, like an old, old photograph.

Posted in Africa, Elephants, Jabu, Nature, Sandi, Travel

A Proboscis Par Excellence

Posted on by Cheryl Merrill
photograph by Cheryl Merrill
photograph by Cheryl Merrill

 

Jabu’s trunk tip investigates my right boot.  Its scent swirls 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 olfactory organ.

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 that could rip, tear, excavate, whack, and blow bubbles.  You could steal with your nose, suck on it, or swat, poke and siphon with your nose.  You could take a shower, scratch your back, or whistle with it.  You could even arm wrestle with your nose.

The seven-foot septum that divides Jabu’s nostrils is made of muscle, not cartilage.  It becomes cartilage where his trunk attaches to his skull above his eyes.  Thick layers of skin and muscle protect his trunk.  It’s impossible for him to break his boneless nose, even when he uses it like a battering ram.

He picks up a wizened palm nut.

I ask Sandi, “How many of the fruits can he hold in his trunk?”

“Would you like a photo of that?”  She takes some of the fruit already on the ground and puts them one, by one in the tip of Jabu’s trunk.  “Jabu, good boy, Jabu, one more.”

Three, it turns out, but carefully placed so he can still breathe.

“Good, my boy, goooood. Okay Jabu!” Sandi tells him, and he spits out the fruits Whoooof! all at once.

Then he picks them up and gently tosses them, one by one, back to her.