Elephant Winter - By Kim Echlin Page 0,10

too low for humans to hear. Still, when I brought in a powerful microphone and recorded the silence among the elephants, he didn’t stop me. I played it back to him sped up and we listened together intently, hearing for the first time the distinct low rumble that is Elephant. We identified the roar of the electric light and the thudding flap of elephant ears. Their breathing sounded like long slow wheezes, but wound into all that din of background noise was Elephant, like a rhythmic double bass, theirs alone to hear.

“Do you think they know we don’t hear it?” I asked Jo after the first time we listened.

“Hear what?” he said.

“Their language.”

“Could be their bellies rumbling for all you know.”

He knew it wasn’t, I could tell by the intent way he listened, but he was a resistant thinker, careful and slow and not given to leaps or dreaming. He knew what he discovered through his own experience and that he knew exquisitely.

“I want to record more, Jo, see what I can find out.”

“Suit yourself,” was all he said, undoing the buttons on my sweater.

Of course I nearly always did. Each day after mucking out I recorded the elephants and I kept reading. I started fiddling with putting the sounds they made into some kind of order, translating them, arranging them like a dictionary. Elephant is a peculiarly difficult language because they communicate most richly in “paunsing,” low-frequency sounds we can’t hear. Sometimes I can feel pressure changes in the air when they are rumbling and I can see vibrations under the skin on their foreheads. They paunsed whenever Jo came into or left the barn. They paunsed to each other when they woke in the morning, as they walked, when one of them was outside and the others in. I could feel them when we were in Jo’s cot together. They appeared to be standing silently when they were, in fact, talking together.

Before Jo got back, I always put the recorder away with my sketching and the pitchfork and shovels. Each early twilight, when I got up from his cot and made ready to return to my mother’s, I could already feel the prints of Jo’s hands on my body wearing off and my yearning beginning all over again. I wanted more of him, and on the next cloudless winter day, I came in from the sun-planished snow and said to him, “I’m not staying inside today, I’m coming with you.”

Jo walked into the back of the tack room and came out with two pairs of snowshoes. “We’ll go to the north fields then,” he said, “they’ll like the change.”

He helped me adjust the straps and laughing I walked bowlegged out into the fields. I learned to sway a little, taking longer, lighter strides. We snowshoed beside the elephants away from their usual path, away from my mother’s back windows, and excited by the change in routine they tossed snow over their necks and lifted their faces to the sun. We followed the back fences and slid down into a gulley where no one could see us. Jo’s face was bright and boyish in the cold. He lifted his hands unconsciously to me. Under the elephants’ tutelage, we too had become a species of touchers, tangled up together. I could feel him through our layers of winter clothes, thick coats and mitts squashed between us, lips warm, cheeks nipped and white. The cold held us out naked and we wrapped ourselves up in our own warm breath. Lying side by side in the snowbanks watching the sky, listening to dead leaves crick at the ends of their branches, I wrapped Jo’s hair round and round my fingers, his body round and round mine until, too soon, the sun fell and the temperatures dropped and the elephants got hungry. We got up and in the shock of not touching we began to run back.

I watched Jo leading the elephants, nimble and disappearing. The muscles of my legs ached and I fell behind. Kezia slowed and touched her trunk to my arm to encourage me through my weariness. We followed the others and alone out there in the waning light I looked beyond to the jut of the great escarpment with its old gnarled fir trees. Then Kezia touched me again and I shifted my attention back to the confines of the electrified fences, to the corrugated steel barns where the animals endured our long winter. I couldn’t help but think,