still at the Safari. With a small baby it is easier to stop moving around so much. My migrations are interior wanderings as I cosy her on my back and take her walking with the elephants each day. I record the elephants chanting their nurturing songs over her and I’ve caught Saba trying to lift her up from her blanket on the barn floor more than once. Her earliest inchoate memories will be of the scent of hay, the soft brush of an elephant’s trunk. I have moved back into my mother’s house and sleep there most nights. I made a nursery for Omega in my old room but she still sleeps with me. I’m going to build a summer aviary outside and soon I’ll open up the studio. I am encouraging all of the elephants to draw and I’m going to sell their pictures instead of taking them to the circus. I suppose I have become one of those zoo people I used to find so eccentric. But when I take my Elephant-English dictionary to the university the zoologists and linguists find me odd too. I wonder, as time passes, if Jo would fit in if he ever came back. And I dream sometimes of Alecto. In the dreams he torments me, mouth agape, silently pulling me down until I awake in a sweat. Perhaps this is part of supplication, hope beyond memory.
I don’t know how long I’ll stay. When I get crumpled letters with bright yellow stamps from Zimbabwe I can smell the caves and feel the heat on my skin. But today, willing and fain, I ask the elephants to take me captive in their captivity, enthrall me and lead me hand in hand as we wander slowly through the hours watching a small baby grow, learning more and more of each other’s language. There are nights when I chafe at my duties and fall battered into bed after working all day. There are days when I’m exhausted and I wish I had no one to take care of. But my ferocious love for this child and my deep bond with these elephants draw me into life, where old furies are gentled. The Safari will open again and the elephants have to be ready to walk among tourists, to make the trek down to the pond so that on summer afternoons people can marvel at the weightless joy they take in rolling and splashing in the water. I have to clean up the howdahs for the children’s rides and get Saba’s pictures framed. I have to take care of Omega. I want her to know where she will fall asleep and where she’ll wake. Even in this small safari there is much to do. I find things to keep my heart occupied. Omega said her first word today. It was the greeting Saba makes to her, an audible brah with a light caress from her trunk. Omega waved her arms when Saba came up to us and made the sound back. Then they made the sound together and I listened and laughed to hear it. We are all each other’s Word.
COPYRIGHT ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Stevie Smith, The Collected Poems of Stevie Smith, Penguin 20th Century Classics, ed. James MacGibbon.
Emily Dickinson, The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, Little Brown and Co., ed.Thomas H.Johnson.
Every effort has been made to contact or trace all copyright holders. The publishers will be glad to make good any errors or omissions brought to our attention in future editions.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
When Elephant Winter was first published I was surprised at how many people asked whether the elephant lore in the novel is true. It is the job of fiction to give meaning to facts, and the job of language to shape the world. This being said, all of the elephant lore in the novel is drawn from extensive research into the history and mythology of elephants, accounts of their ability to communicate with each other and with humans, scientific studies on their physiology and behaviour, particularly their intense desire to learn and to nurture and teach their young.
I would like to thank Katherine Payne for her extensive work on elephant communication and a generous afternoon she spent with me at Cornell University where she described her research and played me her audio and video tapes. Katherine Payne was the first person to document elephant infrasound which she discovered by noticing a strange pressure change on her ear drums. She has continued her research on elephant communication in Africa as