Leaving Time(51)
“You’re not a cop anymore,” I remind him. And that gets me thinking about how skittish he was at the police department, how we had to sneak around, instead of walking in the front door and saying hello to his colleagues. “Why aren’t you a cop anymore?”
He shakes his head, and suddenly he’s closed off, sealed shut. “None of your damn business.”
Just like that, everything changes. It seems impossible that we were laughing a few minutes ago. He’s six inches away from me and he might as well be on Mars.
Well. I should have expected it. Virgil doesn’t really care about me; he cares about solving this case. Suddenly uncomfortable, I walk in silence toward his truck. Just because I’ve hired Virgil to figure out my mother’s secrets doesn’t give me the liberty to know all of his.
“Look, Jenna—”
“I get it,” I interrupt. “This is strictly business.”
Virgil hesitates. “Do you like raisins?”
“Not really.”
“Then how about a date?”
I blink at him. “I’m a little young for you, creeper.”
“I’m not hitting on you. I’m telling you the pickup line I used on Tallulah, when she was cleaning my teeth and I asked her out.” Virgil pauses. “In my defense, I was completely trashed at the time.”
“That’s a defense?”
“You got anything better I can use as an excuse?”
Virgil grins, and just like that, he’s back, and whatever I said to upset him doesn’t crackle between us anymore. “I see your point,” I reply, trying to sound nonchalant. “That is possibly the worst pickup line I have ever heard in my life.”
“Coming from you, that’s really saying something.”
I look up at Virgil and smile. “Thanks for that,” I reply.
I will admit to you that my memory is sometimes fuzzy. Things that I chalk up to nightmares might actually have happened. Things that I think I know for sure may change, over time.
Take the dream I had last night about my father playing hide-and-seek, which I am pretty sure was not a dream but a reality.
Or that memory I have of my mother and father, talking about animals that mate for life. Although it’s true I can recall every single word, the actual voices are less clear.
It’s my mom, definitely. And it must be my dad.
Except sometimes, when I see his face, it’s not.
ALICE
Grandmothers in Botswana tell their children that if you want to go quickly, go alone. If you want to go far, you must go together. Certainly this is true of the villagers I have met. But it might surprise you to know that it is also true of elephants.
Elephants are often seen checking in with others in their herd by rubbing against an individual, stroking with a trunk, putting that trunk in a friend’s mouth after that individual has suffered a stressful experience. But in Amboseli, researchers Bates, Lee, Njiraini, Poole, et al. decided to scientifically prove that elephants are capable of empathy. They categorized moments when elephants seemed to recognize suffering in or threat to another elephant and took action to change that: by working cooperatively with other elephants, or protecting a young calf that couldn’t take care of itself; by babysitting another’s calf or comforting it by allowing it to suckle; by assisting an elephant that had become stuck or had fallen down, or that needed a foreign object, like a spear or snare wire, removed.
I did not get a chance to conduct a study on the scale of the one at Amboseli, but I have my own anecdotal evidence of elephant empathy. There was a bull in the game reserve that we nicknamed Stumpy because, as a youngster, he had lost a large part of his trunk in a noose-shaped wire snare. He didn’t have the ability to break off branches or twirl the grass with his trunk like spaghetti, cutting it off with his toenails to put in his mouth. For most of his life, even when he was an adolescent, his herd would feed him. I’ve seen elephants create a definitive plan to get a calf up the steep bank of a riverbed—a series of coordinated behaviors that includes some of the herd breaking down the bank to make less of a grade, and others guiding the baby from the water, and more still helping to pull her out. But you could argue that there’s an evolutionary advantage to keeping Stumpy or that calf alive.
It gets more interesting, though, when there is not an evolutionary advantage to empathetic behavior. When I was in Pilanesberg, I watched an elephant come across a rhino calf that was stuck in the mud of a watering hole. The rhinos were distressed, and that in turn upset the elephant, which stood around trumpeting and rumbling. Somehow, she managed to convince the rhinos that she had practice doing this, and to just get out of the way and let her take over. Now, in the great ecological sphere of things, it was not beneficial to the elephant to rescue a rhino baby. And yet she went in and lifted the baby with her trunk, even though the rhino mother charged her each time she tried. She risked her own life for the offspring of a different species. Likewise, in Botswana, I saw a matriarch come upon a lioness that was stretched out beside an elephant path while her cubs played in the middle of it. Normally, if an elephant sees a lion it will charge—it recognizes the animal as a threat. But this matriarch waited very patiently for the lioness to collect her cubs and move away. True, the cubs were no threat to this elephant, but one day they would be. Right then, however, they were just someone’s babies.