Larger Than Life (Novella) Read Online Free Page B

as possible. I was able to recordaggressions between elephants. I marked down incidents where juvenile cows turned
     to an older one for security or comfort and were roundly ignored. And then one day,
     another unnaturally young female delivered a calf and deliberately stepped on top
     of him.
    This time, a bush vet intervened, and I volunteered to accompany him as he treated
     the calf’s injuries. The newborn’s hind leg was broken; even in a wild herd with an
     attentive mother, he would probably not survive. The decision to patch him up as best
     as possible and return him to the wild was made, and two hours later I accompanied
     the vet when we reunited the calf with his mother. I wanted to see whether this young
     cow would again reject her newborn.
    From the safety of our vehicle, we watched the cow approach. Instead of reaching out
     to touch him the way a mother in the wild would—checking her calf from tip to toe
     to make sure he was all right—the elephant charged. Immediately I revved up the engine
     and lurched forward, driving her away from the frightened calf.
    “Alice,” the vet said to me, “if the calf dies, it dies. And if you can’t handle that,
     you’re in the wrong business.”
    I drove him back to camp in silence. But once he’d been dropped off, I loaded blankets
     into the Land Rover and returned to the spot where we had left the calf. I covered
     him in black fleece as he lay on his side, weak and bleating, and that’s when I saw
     something I had never seen in all the years I had been studying elephants.
    This baby was crying.
    The jury was still out on whether or not elephants could shed tears. Charles Darwin
     believed that humans wept as a result of grief, and animals largely did not. But he
     did cite a report of an Indian elephant that had tears flowing from its eyes after
     its capture. Elephant researcher Iain Douglas-Hamilton had reported injured elephants
     that cried. There were anecdotal accounts from circus trainers saying elephants shed
     tears when reprimanded, from hunters who saw a bull they’d shot weep as it fell to
     the ground, from naturalists claiming they’d seen female elephants cry while in labor.
    I knelt beside the calf, staring at the moisture that dripped down his face, trying
     to come up with a scientific explanation. Elephants routinely had
temporal
secretions—wetness that ran not from the corners of the eyes but from the sides of
     the head. They secreted in times of stress, excitement, sexual attraction, fear—any
     emotionally chargedsituation. But I touched my finger to the calf’s temple, and it came away dry. I touched
     my finger to the inside corner of his eye, and it came away wet.
    It was possible that the calf’s eyes were watering due to heat or dust. After all,
     there was no doubt that elephants could
produce
tears. The problem was in suggesting that those tears were a result of sadness.
    It has been shown that when humans cry, the chemical makeup of “sad” tears is different
     from that of tears shed in happiness or anger. I wished for a way to conduct such
     an experiment on elephants.
    That whole night, I kept a vigil over the newborn. Shortly after dawn, because he
     could no longer nurse from his mother, the calf died.
    I was with him when he passed. And yes, I cried.

    Calling in sick the next morning is really not a lie. It is just that the inhabitant
     of my cottage who is suffering from severe gastrointestinal issues is not me but the
     elephant.
    Granted, I am not firing on all pistons myself. I had not realized that the calf would
     get up at regular intervals for more sweetened water, which didn’t sate her in the
     least. There is a reason people say being a mother is the hardest job in the world:
     You do not sleep and you do not get vacation time. You do not leave your work on your
     desk at the end of the day. Your briefcase is your heart, and you are rifling through
     it constantly. Your office is as wide as the