There is one entry in my mother’s journals that feels like a hairpin turn, a moment where, if she hadn’t reversed direction, she would have become someone entirely different.
Maybe even someone here.
She was thirty-one, working in Botswana on her postdoc. There is a vague reference to some bad news from home, and how she had taken a leave of absence. When she returned, she threw herself into her work, documenting the effects of traumatic memory on elephants. Then one day, she came across a young male that had gotten its trunk caught in snare wire.
This was not uncommon, I guess. From what I’ve read in her journals, bush meat was a staple for some villagers, and every now and then that necessity was ratcheted up into a business. But traps meant for impala sometimes wound up entangling other animals: zebra, hyena, and, one day, a thirteen-year-old bull named Kenosi.
At his age, Kenosi wasn’t part of his mother’s breeding herd anymore. Although his mother, Lorato, was still the matriarch, Kenosi had gone off with the other young bulls, a roving teenage bachelor gang. He’d play-fight with his buddies when he came into musth, like the stupid boys in my school who shove each other in front of girls to try to get noticed. But like with teenage humans, these were just practice runs of hormones, and other males could upstage them simply by showing up and being older and cooler. This happened in the elephant community, too, when older males knocked the young ones out of musth, which was biologically perfect, since they wouldn’t actually be ready to breed until about age thirty, anyway.
Except Kenosi wasn’t ever going to get it on with a lucky female, because the snare had practically severed his trunk, and an elephant without a trunk cannot survive.
My mother saw Kenosi’s injury in the field and knew immediately he was going to die a slow and painful death. So she put aside her work for the day and went back to camp to call the Department of Wildlife, which was the government agency allowed to put the elephant out of its misery. But Roger Wilkins, the official assigned to that game reserve, was new there. “I have a lot on my plate,” he told her. “Just let nature take its course.”
The job of a researcher is to do just that: to respect nature, not to manage it. But even if these were wild animals, they were also her elephants. My mother would not stand by idly and let an elephant suffer.
There’s a break in the journal. She changes from pencil to black pen, and there is an entire page filled with blank lines. Here’s what I’ve imagined happening in that gap:
I walk into the main office at camp, where my boss is sitting with a tiny box fan blowing stale air. Alice, he says. Welcome back. If you need more time off—
I cut him off. That isn’t why I’m here. I tell him about Kenosi, and about that asshole Wilkins.
It’s an imperfect system, my boss admits, and because he doesn’t know me very well, he thinks I will just go away.
If you don’t pick up that phone, I threaten, then I will. But I’m going to call The New York Times, and the BBC, and National Geographic. I’m going to call the World Wildlife Fund and Joyce Poole and Cynthia Moss and Dame Daphne Sheldrick. I am going to unleash a swell of bleeding hearts and animal lovers on Botswana. And as for you: I’m going to bring so much shit raining down on this camp that this elephant research study funding is going to dry up before the sun sets. So you can pick up that phone, I say. Or else I will.
Anyway, that’s what I imagine she would have said. But when my mother actually starts writing again, it is a detailed account of how Wilkins arrived holding on to a knapsack and a grudge. How he sourly rode beside her in the jeep, clutching his rifle, as she located Kenosi and his homeys. I knew from reading my mother’s journals that the Land Rovers did not get closer than forty feet to bull herds—they were too unpredictable. But before my mother could explain this, Wilkins raised his gun and cocked the trigger.
Don’t! my mother screamed, grabbing the barrel of the rifle and pointing it at the sky. She threw the Land Rover into gear, driving forward to push the other young bulls out of the way first. Then she pulled off to the side, looked at him, and said, Now. Shoot.
He did. Through the jaw.
The skull of an elephant is a mass of honeycombed bone, made to protect the brain, which sits in a cavity behind all this infrastructure.
You cannot kill an elephant by shooting it in the jaw or the forehead, because although the bullet will do damage, it will not hit the brain. If you want to humanely kill an elephant, you have to shoot it cleanly behind the ear.
My mother wrote that Kenosi was bellowing his heart out, in pain, worse off than he had been before. She used curse words she had never used in her life, in multiple languages. She was contemplating grabbing that gun and turning it on Wilkins. And then something remarkable happened.