Leaving Time(89)

I feel Serenity stiffen beside me. This is news to her, but I vaguely remember Gideon saying during the investigation that his wife was gone. Losing one family member is a tragedy. Losing two, back to back, seems like more than a coincidence.

Gideon Cartwright had been the very picture of anguish when his mother-in-law was killed. But maybe I should have looked more closely at him as a suspect.

“You have any idea where he went after the sanctuary closed?” I ask. “I’d love to reconnect with him. Offer my condolences.”

“I know he was headed to Nashville. That’s where the elephants were going, to a sanctuary nearby. It’s where Grace was buried, too.”

“Did you know his wife?”

“Sweet kid. She certainly didn’t deserve to die young.”

“Was she sick?” Serenity asks.

“I suppose she was, in a fashion,” Gordon says. “She walked into the Connecticut River, with stones in her pockets. They didn’t find her body for a week.”





ALICE




Twenty-two months is a long time to be pregnant.

It is an enormous investment of time and energy for an elephant. Add to that the time and energy it takes to get a newborn calf to a point where it can survive on its own, and you can begin to understand what is at stake for an elephant mother. It does not matter who you are or what kind of personal relationship you’ve forged with an elephant: Come between her and her calf, and she will kill you.

Maura had been a circus elephant that was then brought to a zoo as the mate of a male African elephant. Sparks flew, but not the way the zookeepers had intended—and small wonder, since in the wild a female elephant would never have lived with a male in close proximity. Instead, Maura charged her paramour, destroyed the fencing of the enclosure, and pinned a keeper against the fence, crushing his spinal cord. When she came to us, she was labeled a killer. Like any animal coming to the sanctuary, she had dozens of veterinary tests, including one for tuberculosis. But a pregnancy test was not part of the protocol, and so we didn’t know she was going to have a calf until very nearly before it happened.

When we figured it out—the swelling breasts and dropped belly—we quarantined Maura for those last couple months. It was just too risky to guess how Hester, the other African elephant in the enclosure, would react, since she had never had a baby of her own. We also didn’t know how much practice Maura had had as a mother until Thomas was able to locate the circus she had traveled with and learned that she had given birth once before, to a male calf. It was one of a bevy of reasons that the circus had classified her as dangerous. Not wanting to risk the maternal aggression of a female elephant, they had chained her during birth so that they could take care of the newborn. But Maura had gone crazy, trumpeting, roaring, throwing her chains, trying to get to her baby. Once she was allowed to touch him, she was fine.

When the calf was two, they’d sold him to a zoo.

When Thomas told me this, I’d gone out to the enclosure where Maura was grazing and sat down with my own baby playing at my feet. “I won’t let it happen again,” I told her.

At the sanctuary, we were all excited for our own reasons. Thomas saw the moneymaking potential a calf would bring to the sanctuary—although unlike a zoo that saw ten thousand more visitors as a result of a newborn elephant addition, we would not be showing the calf off. People were just more likely to give funds to support a baby. There was nothing cuter than photos of a baby elephant, the comma of its trunk dangling like an afterthought, its head poking from between the columns of its mother’s legs—and, we hoped, our fund-raising materials would be full of them. Grace had never seen a birth. Gideon and Nevvie, on the other hand, had seen two during their time at the circus, and were hoping for a happier outcome.

And me? Well, I felt a kinship with this giant. Maura had made the sanctuary her home at approximately the same time I had, and I had delivered my own daughter six months later. Over the past eighteen months, as I went out to watch Maura interacting, I would sometimes catch her eye. It’s unscientific and anthropomorphic of me to say so, but off the record? I think we both felt lucky to be there.

I had a beautiful baby girl and a brilliant husband. I had been able to gather data using some of Thomas’s audiotapes of elephant communication that I was cobbling together into an article about grief and cognition in elephants. I got to spend every day learning from these compassionate, intelligent animals. Given that, it was easy to concentrate on the positive rather than the negative: the nights I found Thomas poring over the books, wondering how we could keep the sanctuary open; the pills he had started to take so that he could sleep at all; the fact that I had not yet documented an actual death at the sanctuary and I had been there a year and a half; the guilt I felt over wishing for an animal to die, just so that I could further my research.