She retreated to Sophie’s enclosure, slept very little that night, imagining the Pandora’s Box that had been opened and all the ills in the world being visited upon her like an upset bees nest. She dreamt of flying things that hit her body like icy projectiles, bringing up boils on her skin, blinding an eye, crippling a finger. More than once, she woke herself screaming from that time right between fully awake and deeply asleep.
Reality hit her the next morning that the truth was that the story released another type of evil upon her world. As soon as Seth’s show aired, her family would be on the receiving end of the media’s desperate need to make more of her story. They’d speculate about her life, follow the blog she’d started to write about Sophie, steal away what little privacy and normalcy she’d built. Everyone wanted to figure out what the mother of a mass shooter was like, especially a shooter who killed his own brother, her other son.
There. She said it.
She spent the day with Sophie and was grateful when no one tried to find her. She suspected Seth might have kept them away.
Now, the sunset created colors they might not yet have named, and she was exhausted. She wanted nothing more than a few hours of sleep in her own bed, but the argument with Seth marched back and forth through her mind like the foreign legion had marched through the Sahara.
Yes, she’d escaped any human interaction by spending the night in the enclosure, it was not a good place to sleep. Now, she rolled onto her right knee, enjoying the safe cave Sophie’s body made.
She thought about her conversation with Seth and it took on a different light. Had he thought she would be fine about sharing such a painful story with the world? On the other hand, why would she understand his need to add the drama of a school shooting to a story about elephants? Wasn’t the story of Sophie’s transformation enough? He was producing a TV show about animals for chrissakes, not people. No need to learn anything else. Especially about her boys. And now that he knew her story and cared about her, wouldn’t it be all the more reason to leave her personal life out of the production?
She leaned against Sophie’s leg and looked up. The elephant’s trunk and head created a dark, cool shadow against the orange-and-yellow sky.
Closing her eyes, she imagined Seth’s face as they made love. “Do you know how good you feel to me?” he’d said. “How long it has been since I’ve felt this way about a woman?” His black eyes softened as he lowered his head to take her mouth, the warm moistness of his lips on hers. And she remembered the surprising hardness of his shoulders and back beneath her hands as the magic built up in her lower stomach and exploded throughout her body.
She forced herself to inhale to the count of eight, exhale to the count of ten. Painfully. Slowly. Opened her belly with the breath. Exhaled every last wisp. Three times. Four. Her body started to relax. She concentrated on the breath, the way her yoga instructor had taught her. Tried to empty her mind.
Life is about change, she told herself. Endings are beginnings. Life is a series of cycles: birth, death, rebirth, and so on.
“Dr. Natalie! Dr. Natalie!”
Natalie heard the distant call and wanted to ignore it.
“Dr. Natalie! We must needs you!”
“Who’s there?”
“I am Khalan. Hurry, Dr. Natalie. We must needs you!”
She moved from beneath Sophie. “What’s going on?”
Coming down the road, she heard Andrew’s voice and realized the light was coming from his truck’s headlights. Khalan grabbed her arm and pulled her toward the truck, then unceremoniously shoved her inside. Andrew threw the truck into reverse and the tires spat dust as they wheeled around, then switched into a forward motion. She waited a couple of moments, then asked again.
“What’s going on?”
Andrew glanced at her. “Got a call from one of the elephant handlers we work with in the village. Some people call him Sammy. Remember him?”
She nodded. She’d treated his elephant, an ancient matriarch that Sammy and his family treasured like a family pet. Sammy, short and bow-legged, laughed about everything. She liked him and appreciated how he took such good care of his ellie, Pira.
Andrew continued. “Pira started getting upset tonight, so Sammy followed her to the edge of the forest on his plantation. He says she led him to three females and a male. All dead. The male’s tusks were gone. Sawed off.” He spoke too evenly. Calmly. Andrew spouted off regularly, his temper tantrums legendary throughout the area, but what most people didn’t realize was that it was his silence you needed to fear. When he seemed calm, he was actually at his most dangerous.
At that moment her foot hit something cold and steely. She leaned down to move it and traced it with her fingers in the dark. The long, cold barrel of a rifle. She shivered.
Poaching elephants happened regularly, but she hadn’t expected to be thrust into the middle of it. Part of her wanted off this truck right now, as strongly as another part of her wanted to hold the “Save the Elephants” banner high overhead and follow Andrew into battle. That mix of fear and anger and disgust and uncertainty silenced her. She fixed her eyes on the dark road in front of them and felt her blood pulsing in the base of her throat, a slight tremor in her hands.
She didn’t know how long they’d been driving when someone pounded twice on the hood of the cab. Andrew slowed down, then took a left down a dirt road that wove through a messy tangle of downed branches and ropes that looked like ivy. A voice that sounded like Khalan’s told Andrew to cut the lights and the engine.
Suddenly Natalie couldn’t see the trees or the dashboard or Andrew’s profile or her hand in front of her face. She heard him breathing and the stifled cough of someone on the truck bed behind them. They sat there in silence for about fifteen minutes until a thin ray of light broke the darkness to her right.
A flashlight.
Khalan jumped off the truck and into the light, greeting what sounded like a group of men. More flashlights sent cones of light into the dark. The jungle came alive with faces. Men, all wearing baseball caps and bandanas over their mouths, came to the driver’s side of the truck and spoke to Andrew. He seemed to know several of them and clasped their hands as they spoke with him urgently in Thai.
Then the truck started moving again, slowly following the streams of light as the men led them through the undergrowth and into a clearing. The faint reddening of the night sky and the horizon in the distance told Natalie it was almost dawn. They’d been out all night.
Almost time to have morning tea with Mali on the platform, Natalie thought, and the routine brought a pleasant warmth to her chest.
Andrew stopped the truck when all the lights converged in front of several greyish-black rocks. As Natalie got out her side, she was instantly struck by a smell that reminded her of low tide on a brutally hot day on the Outer Banks. The closer she came to the rocks, the more it became clear they were not rocks at all. The “rocks” were elephants. Brutally beaten elephants. Elephants sliced raggedly as if someone had taken a chainsaw to their limbs. A year ago—even a month ago—the scene would have made Natalie throw up, but now it roused a hot stream of anger in her belly. She stepped in something sticky and slipped, putting her hand to the ground to stop her fall. The blood had spilled and made small ponds around them. Her stomach flipped and brought its contents into her mouth. She blinked rapidly. Get it together, girl. Get it together.
The patriarch lay in the middle, two bloody holes where there were once a massive set of tusks.
Natalie paused, wanting to scream, but she told herself to control the anger. She fought with her emotions as she stood with the others in stunned silence. Flashlights shot unforgiving spotlights on the bodies.
Then instinct kicked in. She ran from one elephant to another, head to each chest, listening (hoping) for a heartbeat, her fingers searching the back side of each elephant’s ear flap for a pulse, her cheek to each mouth sensing for breath and sniffing for signs of life. One large male and two grown females, one with still-full teats meant for nursing. Natalie palpated the uterine area.
“There must be a young calf somewhere. She gave birth not too long ago. A week. Maybe two,” she told Andrew. “Can you check to see if the baby’s under one of these elephants? It’s either here . . . or it got away with the rest of the herd. God, I hope it’s close by.”
“I don’t know if there is more to this herd.” Andrew moved around, shining his flashlight on the ground. “We don’t see any other large footprints. All I can see are smaller ones. That baby has to be hiding. Probably petrified. Looks like it circled these larger ones over and over. Something must have scared the humans away or they would have taken the calf with them. They’re worth some serious money on the open market.”
He swung the flashlight around erratically. “Listen up, everyone! We need to find that calf and get it onto the truck so we can bring it back to the sanctuary before it dies out here. It’s probably spooked, so if you do find it, please call me and give me your location. Whatever you do, don’t scare it. Remember not to stare or to reach out for it. Let’s take it slow and easy. Got it?”
Everyone answered, then fanned out. Their flashlight beams disappeared into the dense grasses and brush.
Natalie followed Andrew, trying to walk as soundlessly as possible, but with every step, she crunched. Finally, she stopped and listened. The guys had gone off to the left, Andrew to the right, so she backtracked to the elephant carcasses, her heart breaking. She stood there and held her breath. In front of where she stood, she heard leaves move, twigs break, and the faint hush-hush-hush of something breathing. Then a cry. Quiet and scared, but a cry. She froze, wondering why she’d been left without a flashlight. In the total darkness she sensed rather than saw an animal. Something half her size.
God, a wild boar. Shit. They’re drawn by the smell of blood.
Again, she heard the cry, then realized the sound was closer and as she peered through the darkness, she saw a moving shadow and instinctively knew that it was the baby. The poor thing stood beside what she imagined was its mother. Crying.
Slowly, excruciatingly slowly, Natalie moved in the direction of the calf. She reached out her hand, searching blindly for the orphaned elephant, unsure how big it would be. With only a cursory exam of the mother, Natalie couldn’t be quite sure. Her heart beat hard. She held her breath. Again.
Then a warm wetness met her fingers. The tip of a baby elephant’s trunk. It trembled. Natalie’s eyes watered and she stood still, let the baby come to her. The trunk explored her arm. A squeak escaped, and the trunk disappeared. Natalie exhaled and said, “It’s okay.” She knew the elephant didn’t understand, but she hoped the softness of her tone and her smell would reassure the baby. Another squeak.
Natalie called out softly, “I found it.”
Relieved voices answered from all directions. The flashlights started coming closer. Natalie reached out in the direction of where she last heard the baby’s cry. It seemed like it was calling for reassurance. A hand brushed against the baby’s hide and in the ever-lightening shadows, she saw its silhouette and stood, then pressed her hip against the calf. The baby leaned against her with a deep exhale. Natalie leaned back and wrapped her arm around the little one’s neck. It shivered.
“Andrew, walk very slowly,” Natalie said, keeping her tone conversational, concerned about spooking the calf. She anchored herself, letting the calf explore her with its mouth. If she had known where they were going or what to expect, she would have brought some cream or milk or something liquid, but how could she know? “I have the baby. If you can come over to the side, we can put the baby between us. Slowly, though. This little one’s scared out of its mind.”
Andrew whispered to the other guys to go slow. Their flashlights dimmed and the circle became smaller as they all drew back to the place where Natalie stood. Within another couple of seconds, the men surrounded her and their flashlights shone on the calf in the middle of the human circle. She was small, barely a couple of weeks old, and her eyes were rimmed with fear.
Khalan came up behind Natalie and whispered in her ear, “Baby lost mama. Baby not live long.”
“You’re wrong,” she returned. “You’re wrong.” But she knew his experience proved otherwise. One of the greatest challenges to any elephant camp was keeping orphaned babies alive. Often they died for no apparent reason. Feeding them the correct formula of mother’s milk and providing a social environment as soon as possible was paramount. She wouldn’t lose this calf. She couldn’t.
Andrew and the two other locals joined Khalan and Natalie. The five of them encircled the baby, someone found a blanket and threw it over the shivering infant’s back, and they all worked together to get the baby on the back of the truck. Natalie pulled out a hypodermic filled with a tranquilizer and shot some of it into the baby’s hip, whispering, “God, I’m going by my guts here. I’m not even sure how much I’ve given this little guy. Hope it’s not too much.”
All the way home, she cradled the baby’s head in her lap, listening for her breath and praying to whatever god would listen to her to keep this infant alive.
When they arrived at the sanctuary, the sky, striped with low-hanging pink and orange clouds, felt optimistic.