Thomas stared at me for a long moment, long enough to change the direction of the wind for the rest of my life. Then, slowly, he grinned. “You were expecting George?”
“What happened to her?” I later asked Thomas, as we drove out into the reserve by ourselves in a Land Rover. “Wanda?”
“It took two years, and I spent a lot of time getting my clothes soaked, but now she swims in the sanctuary pond all the time.”
When he said that, I knew where I was going to take him. I put the Rover into low gear, surfing through the deep sand of a dry riverbed until I found what I was looking for. Elephant tracks look like Venn diagrams, the print of the front foot overlapping the back. These were fresh—flat, shiny circles that hadn’t had time to be covered with dust. I could probably figure out the individual whose track I was seeing if I really wanted to, by paying attention to the crack marks of the imprint. Multiplying the back foot’s circumference by 5.5 would give me her height. And I knew it was a female, because this was a breeding herd—there were multiple tracks, instead of the solitary line of a bull.
It was not all that far from Mmaabo’s body. I wondered if this herd had come across her, what they had done.
Pushing the thought out of my head, I put the truck in gear and followed the trail. “I’ve never met anyone who ran an elephant sanctuary.”
“And I’ve never met anyone who’s ever collared an elephant. I guess we’re even.”
“What made you want to start a sanctuary?”
“In 1903 there was this elephant at Coney Island named Topsy. She helped build the theme park, and gave rides, and performed in shows. One day, her handler threw his lit cigarette in her mouth. She killed him, big surprise, and was labeled a dangerous elephant. Topsy’s owners wanted her killed, so they turned to Thomas Edison, who was trying to show the dangers of AC current. He rigged up the elephant, and she died within seconds.” He looked at me. “Fifteen hundred people watched, including my great-grandfather.”
“So the sanctuary is some kind of legacy?”
“No, I didn’t really remember the story until I was in college and worked one summer at a zoo. They had just gotten an elephant, Lucille. This was big news because elephants are always a draw. They were hoping she would pull the revenue of the zoo back into the black. I was hired as an assistant to the head keeper, who had extensive experience with circus elephants.” He glanced out at the bush. “Did you know that you don’t even have to touch an elephant with a bull hook to get it to do what you want? You just put it near the ear, and they’ll move away from the threat of the pain, because they know what to expect. Needless to say, I made the grave mistake of saying that elephants were conscious of how badly we were treating them. I was fired.”
“I just changed the focus of my fieldwork to how elephants grieve.”
He glanced at me. “They’re better at it than people.”
I put my foot on the brake, so we rolled to a stop. “My colleagues would argue with you. No, actually, they’d laugh at you. Like they laugh at me.”
“Why?”
“For their work, they can use collars, and measurements, and experimental data. What looks like cognition to one scientist looks like conditioning to another—and there’s no conscious thought necessary for that.” I turned to him. “But let’s say I could prove it. Can you imagine the implications for wildlife management? Like you said to Owen—is it ethical to dart an elephant with M99 if she’s fully aware of what we’re doing? Especially if it’s a precursor to a shot in the head, like when we cull a herd? And if we shouldn’t be doing that, how do we manage elephant populations?”
He glanced at me, fascinated. “That collar you put on the elephant—does it measure hormones? Stress levels? Is she sick? How do you predict a death, so you know which elephant to collar?”
“Oh, we can’t predict death. That collar’s for someone else’s project. They’re trying to find out the turning radius of an elephant.”
“Whatever the elephant needs it to be,” Thomas said with a laugh. “That’s the punch line, right?”
“I’m not kidding.”
“Really? How could anyone possibly think that research matters more than what you’re doing?” He shook his head. “Wanda? The elephant that nearly drowned? She has a partially paralyzed trunk, and she needed a security blanket of sorts when she came to the sanctuary. She got into the habit of dragging a tire around with her. Eventually, she bonded with Lilly and didn’t need the tire all the time anymore because she had a friend. But when Lilly died, Wanda was pretty devastated. After Lilly was buried, Wanda brought her tire to the grave site and laid it down on top of the dirt. It was almost like she was paying tribute. Or maybe she thought Lilly needed a little comfort now.”