On the far side of a large swath of golden grass the air shimmers, full of birds. As if by some sort of avian telepathy, Red-billed queleas rise and fall in curling waves, with wing-beats that sound like distant surf. Wave after wave washes across the clearing in front of us. It’s impossible to distinguish individual birds among the swell and tumble. Dust rises, perfumed by millions of feathers, hundreds of birds, each bird no bigger than my thumb. The flock settles into a tree. The branches of the tree droop as if suddenly laden with snow, then spring back up as the birds roll on.
Rouffignal – The Cave of a Hundred Mammoths, France
There is comfort in keeping what is sacred inside us not as a secret, but as a prayer.
Terry Tempest Williams, When Women Were Birds
There are certain things that can only be learned from a different perspective.
Pushing aside the darkness, a tiny, flickering lamp in hand, our ancestors crawled into the caves of Europe to paint the animals important to them. Still alive on those walls, mammoths with high, domed foreheads and a hump over their shoulders face two-legged stick hunters. Their humps held fat reserves, making them coveted prey, and dangerous prey make great stories.
Caves are potent, resonant underworlds. Tallow lamps held in a hand cast a low-level light, shadow each curve of the rock wall, suggesting a hump over there, the curve of an antler here. With red, brown and yellow soils dampened by egg white, blood, animal fat or plant juices, our ancestors recorded the vocabulary of the hunt on wall after wall. They made their brushes of hair and their sponges of moss or leaves. They inhaled the dampness of the earth that receives all, both those who eat and those who are eaten.
Escape, exhaustion, success, death, galloping bison and herds of antelope, squared jaws of lions, the arched necks of horses, and outlines of cave bears – painted by generation after generation of artists, who left their signatures in an outline of a hand or a couple of dots, who left only stick representations of themselves.
After etching the outline of a mammoth on rock and storing its spirit forever in darkness, the crawl back to light perhaps gave the world a new appearance – as if it could be conquered, controlled, illuminated, literally brought alive by an artist. Life stories painted under the ribs of the earth. Hidden knowledge. The past the present the future recorded on rocks deep in caves.
Was the crawling to light a prayer?
We are the progeny of ancestors who lived with, hunted and ate the great ones. We are the result of their lives intertwined with those they knew in the belly of the earth.
I carry in my veins a longing for turquoise-blue glaciers, a blood-red night sky and breath I can see as I breathe. Ancient memories flicker across my mind, casting shadows against cave walls. I press my hand against rock, blow pigment between my fingers. This is my signature. Look, I was once here. See how your hand fits into the outline of mine? See these hairy elephants? They were here then, too.
Imagine the smell of air freshly born from retreating glaciers, a sky cleared by melting snow. Imagine the scent of an earth newly thawed. Out there, just like you painted, a mammoth driven by a hunt has fallen over a cliff and bellows arrive in waves.
Our palm prints on cave walls, carvings on bone, the exposure of light on glass plates full of chemicals, digital cameras, electrons arranged in display across computer screens, voices tumbling through the air – is it the destiny of the human race to remember and record? Is that our place on earth?
There is a cave of light from our eye to our brain; but it is the corners of our eyes that perceive the most light; the corners of our minds where we begin to understand.
Here are the first few pages of my manuscript, Larger than Life: Eye to Eye with Elephants. Having read this much, would you go on reading the rest of the book? I’d love to have feedback. Thanks!
photograph by Cheryl Merrill
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 rests his trunk on the ground and the tip of it lifts, opens, inhales my scent. I reach out and run my fingers along his warm tusk.
Do you recognize me, Jabu, do you?
* * * * *
The pilot lets me sit up front. As his clattering Cessna lifts straight into the sun, we pass a line of small aircraft and a block-and-brick terminal only slightly larger than the Air Botswana 727 parked next to it. We leave behind a flattened land where the tallest structure is a water tower, where the olive-green scrub spreads as far as can be seen, and where footsteps have no echoes in a country mantled by sand.
We gain altitude and Maun slides under us. The last town before venturing into Botswana’s Okavango Delta, Maun is an odd frontier mix of trading companies, outfitters, curio shops, supermarkets, cattle in the streets, and an airstrip long enough for daily international flights.
We fly higher. Haphazard, barely paved roads meander to round stockades – bomas, fenced by thornbush. Each boma contains a hut plastered with mud and roofed with straw, or a small square cinderblock covered by rusty corrugated metal. Only a few corral a cow or a goat. Behind us the last buildings disappear into a curtain of shimmering haze. Maun melts into the desert.
The shadow of our Cessna passes over thin dirt tracks, which lose their way and vanish. A waterhole appears, an orphan left behind by last year’s flood. Another comes into sight, and then another. Etched into the sand by countless hooves, game trails wander through the dry landscape, headed to those life-giving pockets of water. Few animals follow the trails in the heat of the glaring sun. A small herd of zebra. A single giraffe.
Suspended above what could be considered a great emptiness, I remember the map I studied a week ago. Printed alongside the log of GPS coordinates for airstrips – some of them makeshift, many little used – I read another list of handy notations. “Tourist road, 4×4 required . . .Top road extremely sandy, takes very long.” Eighty percent of Botswana is covered by sand, some of it a thousand feet deep, but the airstrip where we’ll land is barely above water.
Swollen by November rains, the Okavango River floods south from Angola, arrives in Botswana in May or June, fans out, and then stops when it bumps into a barrier of fault lines near Maun. Landlocked, the river penetrates deeply into the Delta before it dies in the Kalahari sands. Not a single drop reaches the sea.
As the river pushes south, it creates, in the midst of a vast desert, an oasis – a floodplain the size of Massachusetts containing an ark-full of animals. Dependent upon the rainfall in Angola, the river swells or shrinks. In the dry season, it leaves behind ponds no bigger than puddles, abandoned lagoons that shrink into brackish swamps, and waterholes reflecting a cornflower blue sky.
Last week I reviewed the latest satellite photograph of the Delta – four skinny channels with several webs of water between them. The river is beginning to flood. The photograph reminded me of a duck’s giant footprint pressed into the sands of southern Africa. I located my destination, a dry spot between two of the bird’s toes.
Twenty minutes after leaving Maun, the pilot pushes in the throttle and the Cessna’s clatter mutes. We drop lower. A thousand waterholes are a thousand mirrors signaling the sun. Lower still, the mirrors turn back into waterholes, some of them connected in long braids of water.
Right before we land on a strip of dirt, we glimpse a cheetah sprinting for cover. With that single spotted blur, my life divides once again between home and Africa.
If you missed it the first time, my radio interview will be broadcast again this evening, Tuesday, November 10th, from 10-11 p.m., P.S.T., United States. Heres the live feed link: https://kptz.org
As I walk to my tent at the edge of camp, my vision is elemental, full of shapes without fine details. Shifting slabs of moon-glow keep rearranging trees as if they are pieces on a giant pearled chessboard, their trunks whitewashed the color of ash.
I enter my tent, zip it shut, and switch on the lamp. The electricity comes from batteries charged by solar panels on the other side of camp, carried by a line buried several inches below the sand. Not long after, I turn off the light and crawl into bed.
I roll on my back and blindly stare at the black canvas ceiling of my tent, looking back at the bright moments of the day. But then an unexpected memory darkens the darkness.
In 1996, on my first trip to Africa, I was in a carload of tourists rounding a corner on a sandy road in an area of Zimbabwe where elephants were recently massacred for their tusks. We rounded the corner and stopped – face-to-face with a huge matriarch.
Richly repulsive, an unnatural, confined scent rose from us – odors of food on our clothes and in our hair; flowers washed in alcohol dabbed behind our ears; dead skins around our waists and on our feet; grease, oil and exhaust from our vehicle.
With her trunk shaped into a “J,” the elephant sampled the waves of scent emanating from us, and then tossed our smell away with an emphatic flick. Unnerved by our overpowering human stench, a miasma with a deadly history, she turned and fled, while the half-shadow of dust that marked her exit collapsed to the ground.
The air around me tightens. Canvas walls crowd in, closer, and then closer.
What if our days were measured in scents rather than minutes? What if we could tell the difference between a friend and a murderer with just one sniff?
An excerpt from my book, Larger than Life: Living in the Shadows of Elephants
My eyes tired from a day spent looking into the sun, I drowsed in a Land Rover beside a waterhole in Chobe National Park. Only a few yards from our vehicle, a single-cylinder pump drew from the water table beneath the sands and sent spurts through a pipe to a square concrete trough. The bachelor elephants of Savuti congregated around the trough as they waited for spring rains and the return of female breeding herds.
The steady sound of the pump, chugga-sputter, chugga-sputter, chugga-sputter, lulled my eyes closed. They opened, closed, opened half-lidded, closed again.
“Here he comes,” someone whispered and my eyes flicked open as a huge bull strolled past. I picked up my camera.
His enormous tusk splayed out almost sideways. I focused on his great head, nodding downward with each step, as he trudged past. A thirsty pilgrim in a parched land, his trek to water was nearly finished. The clicking and whirring of our cameras didn’t alter his gait.
photograph by Cheryl Merrill
Through the viewfinder I marveled at his tusk. It was easily four feet long, stained and chipped on its end. Because of the growth pattern of his tusks – out, rather than down and up – he seemed a much wider elephant than he really was.
Mid-drink, he curled his trunk into his mouth; head tilted back, eyes closed. Extending his trunk into the waterhole, he blew bubbles before curling his trunk again and again to hose several gallons at a time down his throat. With each swallow went samplings from all the animals that drank here – zebra, wildebeest, warthog, ostrich, hyena and the occasional furtive flavor of lion.
I tried to imagine the bouquet garni of the waterhole and how its myriad fragrances might seep into the crevices of an elephant’s mind, form pools of scent they recognize, year after year, the liquid memory of Africa. Perhaps that old bull was memorizing the stories in that trough, paragraphs of taste and smell, twists of plot and character and fate.
He retraced his steps to where we were parked, and stopped close by. His skin was the color of seasoned cast iron. The waterline on his body rose just past his belly. Spatters of mud stained his ears and back.
photograph by Cheryl Merrill
After several long minutes, his eyelids drooped and his mouth slackened. Under the hot sun he fell asleep, lulled perhaps by the narcotic of a long, slow drink. The tip of his trunk coiled like a magic rope on the ground. He slept with his weight on three legs, resting a hind leg, occasionally rocking back on it as if he dreamed of his trek. Drool from his trunk slowly seeped into the sand.
I matched my breathing with his, and drowsed once again, sedated by the sun.
The giant beside us rumbled soft snores in his sleep. Other elephants shuffled by quietly on their way to and from the waterhole, as if they didn’t want to wake us.
A shoulder lifts, a leg straightens and accepts weight as the foot splays out. The back leg opposite moves forward, toenails nearly scraping sand, straightens, accepts weight, and the foot splays out. As his body shifts side to side, the bull elephant walks ponderously and gracefully towards me. Even from twelve feet away he fills my entire range of vision.
He trails his trunk, knuckling the ground, leaving smooth marks like a giant side-winding snake. A creature bigger than most monuments is on the move, yet his movements are loose and his pace casual. He reaches out and rubs the bottom of his trunk across a cow elephant’s backbone.
Shyly she turns her head away, her expressive ears folded neatly against her shoulders, a diamond on her forehead.
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.
Morula stands square on, keeping her eyes upon me. Her cobbled forehead broadens from her nose upward in a triangular shape. The top of a tree is visible over her right shoulder, as if she has a giant nosegay 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 hollow. The tip of her trunk flops over itself in a loose coil and points down like a curved arrow. It begins to twitch in an irregular rhythm. 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 upright stature? Does she see details: my hat, my camera, my idiotic grin?
I take a goofy photograph of Morula – it will look like she’s bored and playing with the only thing at hand – her trunk.
African elephants can be recognized by big ears that mimic the shape of Africa. They use them like large fans, elephant air-conditioning.
An elephant produces enough metabolic heat to warm a small house, or light two hundred sixty-watt bulbs. Elephants are pachy-dermed, thick-skinned. They don’t have sweat glands. Instead, their ears act like giant heat exchangers, regulating body temperature. As air moves over the huge network of swollen arteries covering each ear, an elephant’s blood cools as much as nine degrees before it returns to the body.
When spread open, an elephant’s ears increase its body size by roughly twenty square feet. That amount of surface area provides a huge stretch of skin that thermo-regulates its body. Every twenty minutes its entire blood supply – one hundred and twenty gallons of it – is pumped through its ears.
My teeny, itsy ears are built somewhat the same as an elephant’s ears, 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.
ABOUT ELEPHANTS 