Larger Than Life (Novella) Read Online Free Page A

seen as wonder.
     I think of the concept of object permanence, how even human babies think a thing no
     longer exists when they can’t see it. “There,” I say. “Better?”
    She lifts her trunk and hoovers along the edge of the bed, over my ankle.
    At some point, I do fall asleep again. I wake when the sun comes up, when the hornbills
     start their morning gossip. For one blissful moment, I remember none of yesterday.
     And then I feel it: a tug, a tickle. The calf is half-sprawled across the mattress,
     sucking on my foot.

    You cannot force a family. I learned this firsthand when I was doing research with
     the elephants at Madikwe. The translocated youngsters were all roughly the same age.
     Without a matriarch—a mother figure—they developed behavioral issues that we researchers
     had never seen.
    In the wild, the older cows chase bulls out of the herd when they get to be about
     thirteen or fourteen years old. Normally, those teenage bulls then roam in small herds
     of male elephants, learning from their elders, until they are ready to mate. In Madikwe,
     however, without older cows to set limits, the young bulls remained in the herd, acting
     aggressively and forcing themselves on the juvenile females. In normal conditions,
     a young cow won’t mate till she’s around twelve years old, and she will give birth
     at age fourteen. She will spend years being a good auntie or sister to the newborn
     calves, so that when it is her turn to have a baby, she knows what to do. She will
     have all the guidanceand structure she needs to learn how to become a mother.
    In
this
dysfunctional herd, though, cows were getting pregnant at age eight. Two cows gave
     birth at age ten. They didn’t know what to do with newborn calves. They didn’t act
     protectively, like mothers. They didn’t nurture; they didn’t react when the babies
     cried out. Not long after their birth, a slightly larger female killed both calves,
     and the mothers didn’t even try to intervene.
    I had initially come to Madikwe to study elephant memory. My postdoctoral research
     was full of experiments that proved elephants could use smell to differentiate between
     individuals, to recognize those they had not seen in a long time, and to track those
     who had traveled a distance away. But I was becoming less interested in the reunions
     of separated elephants and getting more curious about the forces that prevented them
     from staying together as a family unit in the first place. I studied the aberrant
     behavior of the young mothers and wondered if there was more to it than just stress
     or the lack of a proper hierarchy. They had all seen their own mothers murdered by
     government hunters during the culls. Could that incident have scarred these young
     elephants so deeply that they were unable to form meaningful relationships—with others,
     or with their own offspring?
    By suggesting some sort of pachydermal post-traumatic stress disorder, I knew I was
     straddling a very fine line between science and anthropomorphism. Science was about
     magnification—examining an organism in such detail that you understood it on a cellular,
     biological, evolutionary level. Although it was widely accepted in the field that
     elephants exhibited signs of cognition—studies had proven their mental acuity and
     memory time and time again—no scientist would go on record to say that these great
     gray animals
felt
as deeply as we did. Emotions were not quantifiable—not in humans, and not in elephants.
     For science to say something was true, it had to be measurable.
    And yet.
    The bond between a mother and a child weighed nothing on a scale; it took up no room
     in a test tube. But most of us would have a hard time saying it didn’t exist.
    I kept my hunch to myself but put aside my notes on herd migration and instead began
     filling fresh notebooks with the research I wasn’t supposed to be doing: cataloging
     the behaviors of elephants in as scientific a way