Leaving Time(84)

When Maura arrived, the trailer was parked inside the African enclosure. Hester was nowhere nearby. She had been grazing in the northernmost corner of the property; the trailer had been dropped along the southern edge. For four hours, Grace and Nevvie and Gideon had tried to coax Maura out, bribing her with watermelon, apples, and hay. They had played the tambourine, hoping that the noise would interest her. They had piped classical music through portable speakers and, when that failed, classic rock.

“Has this ever happened before?” I whispered as I stood next to Thomas.

He looked exhausted. There were circles beneath his eyes, and I don’t think he’d actually managed to sit through an entire meal in the two days since he’d gotten word that Maura was en route. “We’ve had drama—when Olive was brought here by her circus trainer, she sauntered out of the trailer and walloped him twice before she went off into the woods. I have to tell you, though, the guy was a jerk. Olive just did what all of us were thinking of doing. But all the others—they were either too curious or too cramped to stay in the trailer for very long.”

The night was coming violently, clouds screaming with crimson throats. It would get cold and dark soon; if we were going to stay and wait, we would need lanterns, floodlights, blankets. I had no doubt this was Thomas’s plan; it was what I would have done—what I had done when I was observing transition in the wild—not from captivity to sanctuary, but at birth or death.

“Gideon,” Thomas began, about to issue instructions, when there was a rustle at the tree line.

I had been surprised hundreds of times by elephants that traveled soundlessly and swiftly in the bush; I should not have been as startled as I was by the appearance of Hester. She moved almost too quickly for an animal of her size, light on her feet and excited by this big, foreign metal object in her enclosure. Thomas had told me that the elephants became animated if a bulldozer was brought in to do excavation or landscape work; they were curious about things bigger than themselves.

Hester began to cross back and forth in front of the trailer ramp. She rumbled, a hello. This went on for about ten seconds. When she didn’t get a response, it evolved into a short roar.

From inside the trailer came a rumble.

I felt Thomas’s hand reach for mine.

Maura gingerly walked down the ramp, her body in silhouette, pausing halfway. Hester stopped moving back and forth. Her rumbles escalated into a roar, a trumpet, and then a rumble—the same cacophonous joy I’d heard when elephants that had been separated from their herd were reunited.

Hester lifted her head and flapped her ears rapidly. Maura urinated and began to secrete from her temporal glands. She inched her trunk toward Hester but still would not come fully down that ramp. Both elephants continued to rumble as Hester put her front two feet onto the ramp and turned her head until her torn ear was close enough for Maura to touch. Then Hester lifted her front left foot, presented it to Maura. It was as if she was telling her life story. Look at how I was hurt. Look at how I survived.

Watching this, I started to cry. I felt Thomas’s arm come around me as Hester finally curled her trunk around Maura’s. She let go, backing off the ramp, as Maura tentatively followed. “Imagine being part of a traveling circus,” Thomas said, his voice tight. “That’s the last time she’ll ever have to walk out of a trailer.”

The two elephants swayed in tandem, moving toward the tree line. They were so close that they seemed to be one giant mythical creature, and as the night puckered close around them, I struggled to distinguish the elephants from the thicket where they vanished.

“Well, Maura,” Nevvie murmured. “Welcome to your forever home.”

There were a lot of explanations I could give for the decision I made at that moment: that the elephants in this sanctuary needed me more than the elephants in the wild did; that I was starting to think the work I had built my scholarship around was not limited by geographic borders; that the man holding my hand, like me, had been brought to tears by the arrival of a rescued elephant. But none of these were the reason.

When I first went to Botswana, I had been chasing knowledge, fame, a way to contribute to my field. But now, as my circumstances had changed, my reasons for being in that game reserve had, too. Lately my arms hadn’t been outstretched to embrace my work. They’d been pushing away thoughts that scared the hell out of me. I wasn’t running toward my future anymore. I was running away from everything else.

A forever home. I wanted that. I wanted that for my baby.

It was so dark now that—like the elephants—I couldn’t see and had to find my way with my other senses. So I framed his face with my hands, breathed in the scent of him, touched my forehead to his. “Thomas,” I whispered. “I have something to tell you.”