Elephant Winter - By Kim Echlin Page 0,13

rumble this. If an elephant-keeper is separated from the elephants, they often rumble hrhrhrhr throughout the day. The call is deeply rhythmic, as if pulled by forces beyond life. It reminds me of Pound’s translation of “The River Merchant’s Wife: A Letter.”

If you are coming down through the narrows of the river Kiang,

Please let me know beforehand,

And I will come out to meet you

As far as Cho-fu-Sa.

Ooo ahahah~whoo aaoh: (15 Hz.) Deep rumble which probably means, “I’m here, I’m for you (as nature would have it).”

This greeting is used when elephants have come to help one another. Gertrude rumbled this to Lear when he was sick. I have also heard it rumbled to babies who are afraid or uncomfortable. When I hear it I think of Emily Dickinson’s rhythms and her poem,

Love—is anterior to Life—

Posterior—to Death—

Initial of Creation, and

The Exponent of Earth.

PREPARATION

Lear went down for seven days in early February. He lay on his side and wouldn’t get up. That is always a bad sign with elephants. In the wild the others try to lift the sick one up. They lean against him, one on each side, like a pair of elephant crutches. Jo worried over Lear, hand-fed him and dragged a water trough beside him. His wrinkled skin stretched over his legs and broad sides, folds of it hung around his belly. He kept his trunk curled in close to him as if it felt tender. Lear was drained of his great strength and lay with frightened eyes, tended by Jo.

I ordered books from the library but what they had was old: G.H. Evans, Elephants and their Diseases (Rangoon, 1910), W. Gilchrist, A Practical treatise on the treatment of the diseases of the elephant, camel, and horned cattle, with instructions for preserving their efficiency (Calcutta, 1851), F.A. Rikes, Elephant Physiology (Massachusetts, 1968), J.H. Steel, A manual of the diseases of the elephant and of his management and uses (Madras, 1885) and a series on their anatomy by L.C. Miall and F. Greenwood in the Journal of Anatomy and Physiology (London, 1877–78). A little more is known today than a century or thirty centuries ago, but not much. What I discovered was what Jo already knew. With most non-mortal diseases, given fluid and sleep, they heal themselves, and with mortal diseases, they die.

When Lear still hadn’t got up after three days, Jo went into the Safari office and telephoned Dr. Yu, a veterinarian originally from Burma, who worked in the large animals section at a nearby university. Dr. Yu was a gentle and sad-voiced man. Though elephants were not his specialty, Jo liked him because he had grown up in a country where elephants and people have lived together for centuries, where elephants eat and work in city streets. I had talked to Dr. Yu once to ask him what he knew about elephant infrasound. He said he’d read about it but the old elephant men had never spoken of it. He asked me if I knew an elephant can read a man’s thoughts, and then he laughed. He was full of folk talk of elephants. He told me that pregnant women pay money in the city streets to walk under an elephant’s belly three times, a charm to protect their babies. Then he added, “That’s all superstition, we don’t believe in things like that here, do we?”

I was stroking Lear’s head when Jo came back from the office. “What did he say?”

“Not much.”

“He must have said something.”

“He said he didn’t know much we could do.”

“Did you try anyone else?”

“I left a few messages.”

“What did you tell Dr. Yu?”

“I said, ‘Lear won’t stand up.’”

“And what did he say?”

“He said, ‘That’s bad.’”

This was the first day that we didn’t make love. We sat together with Lear until I had to go. I asked Jo if he wanted me to stay and he said, “No, you’ve got your mother to look after too.”

I left him peeling an orange and feeding it to the elephant bit by bit. His shoulders were slumped forward. He looked as if he were already in mourning. I was annoyed by his resignation. I wondered how anyone could be so arrogant as to give up so quickly. I wondered who had beaten the hope out of him.

The next day was a bitter, windy twenty degrees below zero. Jo asked me to keep all the elephants in while he went to see Dr. Yu. The elephants were restive, shuffling together, ears up. Saba was tucked well in under Alice,