Leaving Time(38)

There was one unusual response in this experiment. During its course, one of the older female elephants that had been recorded died. They played back her contact call three months after her death, and again at twenty-three months postmortem. In both instances, her family responded with their own contact calls and approached the speaker—which suggests not just processing or memory but abstract thought. Not only did the family of the lost elephant remember her voice, but for just a moment as they approached that speaker, I bet they hoped to find her.

As a female elephant gets older, her memory improves. After all, her family relies on her for information—she is the walking archive that makes the decisions for the herd: Is it dangerous here? Where are we going to eat? Where are we going to drink? How are we going to find water? A matriarch might know migratory routes that have gone unused for the life span of the entire herd—including herself—yet somehow have been passed down and encoded into a recollection.

But my favorite story about elephant memory comes from Pilanesberg, where I did some of my doctoral work. In the nineties, to control the South African elephant population, there had been massive culling, in which park rangers shot adults within the herds and translocated the babies to places where there was a need for elephants. Unfortunately, the juveniles were traumatized and didn’t behave the way they were supposed to. In Pilanesberg, a group of translocated young elephants didn’t know how to function as a legitimate herd. They needed matriarchs, someone to guide them. And so an American trainer named Randall Moore brought to Pilanesberg two adult female elephants that, years ago, had been sent to the United States after being orphaned during a cull in the Kruger National Park.

The young elephants immediately took to Notch and Felicia—the names we gave these surrogate mothers. Two herds formed, and twelve years passed. And then, in a tragic accident, Felicia was bitten by a hippo. The bush vet needed to clean and dress the wound repeatedly while it healed, but he couldn’t anesthetize Felicia each time. You can only dart an elephant three times a month or the M99 drug builds up too much in its system. Felicia’s health was at risk, and if she died, her herd would find itself in jeopardy once again.

That’s when we thought about elephant memory.

The trainer who’d worked with these two females more than a decade ago had not seen them since they were released into the reserve. Randall was happy to come to Pilanesberg to help. We tracked the two herds, which at this point had merged because of the injury of the older female.

“There are my girls,” Randall said, delighted, as the jeep shuddered to a halt in front of the herd. “Owala,” he called. “Durga!”

To us, these elephants were Felicia and Notch. But both of the stately ladies turned at the sound of Randall’s voice, and he did what no one did with the fragile, skittish Pilanesberg herd: He got out of the jeep and started walking toward them.

Now, look, I’ve worked in the wild with elephants for twelve years. There are some herds you can approach on foot, because they’re used to researchers and their vehicles and they trust us; and even so, it’s not something I would do without carefully thinking it through. But this was not a herd that was familiar with humans; this was not even a stable herd. In fact, the younger elephants immediately stampeded away from Randall, identifying him as one of those two-legged beasts that had killed their own mothers. The two matriarchs, however, came closer. Durga—Notch—approached Randall. She stuck her trunk out and gently snaked it around his arm. Then she glanced back at her nervous young adoptive charges, still snorting and huffing on the ridge of the hill. She turned to Randall again, trumpeted once, and ran off with her babies.

Randall let her go, then turned to the other matriarch and said softly, “Owala … kneel.”

The elephant we called Felicia walked forward, knelt down, and let Randall climb on her back. Although she’d had no direct contact with people in twelve years, she remembered not only this individual man as her trainer but all the commands he had taught her. Without being given any anesthetic, she allowed Randall to direct her to stay, lift her leg, turn—commands that made it possible for the bush vet to scrape away the pus from the infected area, clean the wound, and give her an injection of antibiotics.

Long after her infection healed, long after Randall had returned to training circus animals, Felicia went back to leading her patchwork family in Pilanesberg. To any researcher, to anyone at all, she was a wild elephant.

But somewhere, somehow, she remembered who she used to be, too.





JENNA