Travel – Page 27 – ABOUT ELEPHANTS

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.

Elephants, Thembi

Thembi by Moonlight

Posted on January 12, 2012February 20, 2012 by Cheryl Merrill

An excerpt from my book:

We walk out to the elephant’s enclosure under the lidless eye of a full moon. Puffs of dust stir around my feet, pale little clouds that settle to the ground. The scent of sand and dung layers a gritty, farmyard taste at the back of my throat. Soft rustles in the waist-high grass are unseen snakes or mice or birds.

Moist as a swamp cooler, musty and bacterial, the night air condenses into cold pools and sends my fingers into my pockets. Warm air under the trees brings them out again.

My vision is elemental, full of shapes without fine details. As I walk, shifting slabs of moonglow keep rearranging trees as if they are pieces on a giant pearled chessboard, their trunks whitewashed the color of ash.

The elephant’s enclosure is hidden in the bush, around a few bends in the road and down a dusty path, out of view for the guests at Stanley’s Camp. The enclosure consists of two heavy cables strung high and low through seven-foot wooden posts set in concrete. A second, lighter wire is suspended outside the periphery. Cowbells dangle from it, an early-warning system for invaders or escapees. Granted, an elephant could bust out of (or into) this enclosure in less than a minute. It’s more of a security blanket for the Trio, a protected space for eating and sleeping.

Just ahead a huge smudge of charcoal broadens.

Elephant.

Hushed and gaping, tugged like a blank comet into an immense gravitational presence, I orbit a little to the left in a cautious arc.

With a low throaty rumble MmmmRRRRRrrrrrr, his own elephant greeting, Doug slips under her jaw and stands by her side. Glasses on his face are two mirrored moons. 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.

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.”

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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