I look at her. “Anything?”
Jenna takes a deep breath. “No.”
What would make Alice Metcalf, wherever she is, stop and listen?
Sometimes the universe gives you a gift. You see a girl, terrified that her mother is gone forever, and you finally understand what needs to be done.
“Jenna.” I gasp. “Can you see her?”
She jerks her head around. “Where?”
I point. “Right there.”
“I don’t see anything,” she says, near tears.
“You have to focus …”
Even Virgil is leaning forward now, squinting.
“I can’t …”
“Then you’re not trying hard enough,” I snap. “She’s getting brighter, Jenna—that light, it’s swallowing her. She’s leaving this world. This is your last chance.”
What would make a mother pay attention?
Her child’s cry.
“Mom!” Jenna shrieks until her voice is hoarse, until she’s bent forward in the field of violet mushrooms. “She’s gone?” Jenna sobs, frantic. “She’s really gone?”
I crawl forward to put my arm around her, wondering how to explain that I never really saw Alice at all, that I lied to get Jenna to pour her heart into that one desperate word. Virgil gets to his feet, scowling. “It’s all crap, anyway,” he mutters.
“What’s this?” I ask.
I reach for the sharp object that has poked into my calf, making me wince. It’s buried under the heads of the mushrooms, invisible, until I dig through their roots and find a tooth.
ALICE
All this time, I’ve said that elephants have an uncanny ability to compartmentalize death, without letting grief cripple them permanently.
But there is an exception.
In Zambia, a calf that had been orphaned by poaching began to hang around with a bunch of young bulls. Just as teenage males will walk up to each other and punch each other on the shoulder to say hello while girls hug, the behavior of these male elephants was very different from what a young female elephant might have experienced otherwise. They tolerated her hanging around because they could mate with her—like Anybodys in West Side Story—but they didn’t really want her there. She calved when she was only ten years old, and since she had no mother to guide her and no practice being an allomother in a breeding herd, she treated that baby the way she had been treated by the bulls. When the baby fell asleep beside her, she would get up and walk away. The calf would wake up and start bellowing for its mother, but she would ignore the cries. By contrast, in a breeding herd, if a baby squeals, at least three females rush to touch it all over and see if it is okay.
In the wild, a young female is an allomother long before she bears her own offspring. She has fifteen years to practice being a big sister to the calves that are born to the herd. I’d seen calves approach young female elephants to suckle for comfort, even though the juveniles did not have breasts or milk yet. But the young female would put her foot forward, the way her mother and aunties did, and proudly pretend. She could act like a mother without having any of the real responsibility until she was ready. But when there is no family to teach a young female to raise her own calf, things can go horribly awry.
When I was working in Pilanesberg, this story repeated itself. There, young bulls that had been translocated began to charge vehicles. They killed a tourist. More than forty white rhino were found dead in the reserve before we realized that these subadult males were the ones who’d attacked them—highly aggressive behavior that was far from normal.
What is the common denominator for the odd behavior of the young female elephant that didn’t care about her own calf and the belligerent pack of teenage bulls? Certainly there was a lack of parental guidance. But was that the only issue at play? All those elephants had seen their families killed in front of them, as a result of culling.
The grief that I have studied in the wild, where a herd loses an old matriarch, for example, must be contrasted to the grief that comes from observing the violent death of a family member—because the long-term effects are so markedly different. After a natural death, the herd encourages the grieving individual to eventually move on. After a mass killing by humans, there is—by definition—no herd left for support.
To date, the animal research community has been reluctant to believe that elephant behavior might be affected by the trauma of watching one’s family being killed. I think this isn’t scientific objection as much as it is political shame—after all, we humans have been the perpetrators of this violence.
At the very least, it is crucial when studying the grief of elephants to remember that death is a natural occurrence. Murder is not.