Elephant Winter - By Kim Echlin Page 0,47

watching the elephants and aching. My baby kicked and turned upside-down in the waters and I curled around my own stomach.

When a monk enters a monastery he must answer a question from the community. They chant to him, “What do you ask?” and the monk answers, “Mercy.”

But I was alone in a place without chanting. The elephants rumbled only to each other their customary greetings. At bathtime, feeding time, and shackled up for the night, they swayed restlessly, scenting at the door of the barn and at Jo’s bed. I went about his tasks as best I could. They tolerated my inexperienced hands and my inability to understand the subtle language they had with Jo. They’ll teach you what you need to know, he’d said. I turned to Kezia to show me, to show the others to listen to me. I was in her power as she was in mine. I stroked her trunk and leaned on her, day after day. At night I could smell elephant all over me.

The Safari directors put me in charge of the elephants and asked me to do Jo’s work. I told them I didn’t know enough, didn’t want so much work, couldn’t do it, but they shook their heads and said, “There is no one else.” I couldn’t submit and I couldn’t leave and I couldn’t die. There were elephants hungry and needing exercise. There was Kezia, pregnant, and the Safari would open soon. I didn’t know all I needed to know to take care of them. Slowly Kezia accepted me as her keeper and I felt her wondering, What do you ask? I often didn’t know what to answer but I pretended. I want you not to hurt me. I want you not to kill me. I want you to hold your foot ready to work on. I want you to walk out into the elephant yard with me. I want you to stand while I bathe you. I want you to eat and to sleep. I want you to allow me to put the howdah on you, to bear weight, to raise your trunk, to walk beside me and safely carry small children. She had the power to do all these things. When I was too tired to go on I stood among them and felt their graceful acceptance of a life they had not chosen. I made our daily routine as simple as I could. More and more I recorded their silence, took the tapes back to my mother’s house and when she was sleeping I listened to their low rumbles. One afternoon while I recorded, not knowing if they were speaking or quiet in the dark barn, I whispered to them, “What do you want?” And on the tape I heard for the first time the lowest of all their calls, aaaaaaaaaaaa, a sound I have come to understand as mercy.

ELEPHANT-ENGLISH DICTIONARY PART FOUR

Nurturing

After survival, the single most important concern of female elephants is the care and nurturing of the young. Elephant, more than many languages, has specific nurturing utterances, everything from lullabies to “Don’t bother me now, dear.” They are uttered by all members of the group. A rite of passage for a seven- or eight-year-old female comes when she stops hearing such language directed at her and begins to use it herself. I have heard elephants as young as three and four begin to verbalize nurturing language and I consider it a sign of great emotional and intellectual health.

A Note on Vocabulary: Elephant Pi Factor

There are 52 Prime Utterances in Elephant, by which I mean sounds that cannot be broken down any further. The feature in the language that counterbalances this small vocabulary is the Pi Factor. Elephant discourse, similar to pi, expands without settling into predictable patterns. It remains comprehensible but not repetitive, altered by rhythm, and context. Because the language is strongly oriented toward communal expression, any individual’s utterance may be joined at any time in unison, harmony, counterpoint, and finally (though rarely) in interruption. This makes the vocabulary more rich than the identification of 52 Prime Utterances might at first suggest.

aah: (18-20 Hz.) A birthing chant, made during the delivery and after the baby is born. The more inexperienced the mother, the longer the chant.

One of the things I am proudest of at the Safari is our live births. Each of our females has given birth, with the exception of Gertrude, who shows no interest in mating.

After a stillbirth in my first months at