You’re running away, Natalie. Sooner or later you need to face what has happened. Hiding with your animals will never help you learn what you really need . . . Natalie, are you listening to me? Will you ever learn how to communicate like a human being?
But I can’t stay here, Maman . . . I can’t.
Are you going to have cell reception, Nat? Will we be able to keep in touch? I want to know that you got there okay. There’s always something going on over there in those third world countries. You need to make sure we can contact you.
Ignoring the echoes from home, Natalie took a deep breath and stretched her arms skyward, yawned, and filled her lungs with Thailand’s mountain air. As she exhaled, she shoved aside yesterday’s nightmarish elephant incident with a mantra she’d invented a year ago.
Concentrate on this, she told herself. This moment. Everything begins now.
During the past year, she learned to compartmentalize. She pushed her grief aside when she was at work. Performing surgeries on horses—whether they were pets or million-dollar breeders—required her complete control. She had another compartment for the anger she constantly carried. There were days she found herself in her driveway, no idea how she’d gotten there. But somehow, she moved through her life one heart-mincing moment at a time. At least—that’s what everyone else believed.
No one knew how often the terrifying flashes of gunfire startled her at random times, or of her heart-pounding nightmares of seeing the boys slide off the edge of a cliff and being unable to reach them. No one could understand the bone-chilling shakes her body withstood whenever she imagined seeing her children on the street, then realizing they were someone else’s. And she told no one that her flight to Thailand was a last-ditch effort to cure the paralyzing stress that often left her feeling it would have been better if she’d been one of the victims rather than the boys. The only thing that kept her going was saving horses’ lives, and now, she’d be saving elephants.
She inhaled again. Slowly. Concentrate. Then exhaled. Long. Deep. This moment. She forced herself to focus and looked out on her surroundings. Beginning now.
So this is what the sanctuary looked like by sunlight.
Below the deck, a small, carefully-kept garden of yellow and orange marigolds and sunflowers bobbed with the early morning breeze. That little patch of flowers told her far more than Andrew Gordon relayed in the emails and photos he’d exchanged with her before she arrived. Obviously left by the last tenant of this cabin, the flowers spoke of the need to create a home, to care for this place and its mission. The flowers spoke of a full heart. As she stood at the door of the tiny cabin she’d call home for the next year, she knew that each day would be one of sensory overload.
She’d been to Thailand before, but she’d never really seen Thailand. Not this Thailand. Not the wild, feral jungles and open expanse of untamed meadows. Not the blinding night that thrummed with both the smallest insect songs, and the trumpet of the largest land mammal on earth. Not the steamy mist hanging over the Kwai river, creating a soft, magically green world filled with gigantic, gray ghosts.
Beyond the vibrant garden that edged the deck where she stood, rolled a verdant, lush meadow, acres and acres of gently-waving tall grasses. And beyond that, mountains. Kanchanbouri province’s Khao Kamphaeng Mountains. So many different shades of green: emerald and lime and forest and absinthe and moss and olive. Not maternal and round and black-green as those she knew in North Carolina, but instead, emerald spikes jaggedly rising toward the sky like nature’s cathedral spires. Odd angles. Sharp outcroppings. The mountains glowed an otherworldly light green, the color of Granny Smith apples, a beacon from the messy jungle that climbed up the mountains’ otherwise intractable sides.
The air felt heavy with moisture and glistened with a rich, golden sunlight so thick she could have drunk it. The light moved with the trees, changing as the wind swayed the branches. The filtered sunlight made her feel as if her body itself—every vein and muscle—reached out to respond to its sensual warmth as well as the moist touch of the breeze.
Off in the distance, she saw movement, as if the horizon undulated, the heat creating an invisible wall of steam. She shaded her eyes and focused. And then she saw them.
The sanctuary’s elephants.
The elephants moved slowly, stopping for long moments to feed on the supple, tall grasses. She counted eight, then another four, further away. The second group of elephants were smaller, the teenaged males Andrew had mentioned at the conference, she suspected. They would be less likely to stay with the herd, ostracized by the matriarch in order to prevent in-breeding. Nature’s natural selection. The line of massive, grey shadows moved closer, and she realized they were coming toward the sanctuary’s buildings. It must be time for breakfast.
Beyond her cabin, she heard the murmur of human voices rising above the birdsong and the rustling of tree leaves. She wasn’t the only one awake and ready to start the day.
“I didn’t think you’d be up so early.” Andrew’s quiet voice surprised her. He came from behind, a dark silhouette, then he moved through the shadows and became a pudgy square of white, dappled by the tree’s leaves. His silvery-blond hair lifted from his forehead in wisps and caught the sun, creating a shimmering, backlit halo. He reminded her of a benevolent grandfather, a man she’d trusted the instant she met him. He was dressed all in white as he had been when he picked her up at the airport yesterday and was, surprisingly, still clean in spite of the brown dust that seemed to creep into everything. With a heavy hand on the porch rail, he glanced up at her, a smile on his thin lips and crinkles in the corners of his bright, blue eyes. “I bet you’d love a hot cuppa tea right about now, wouldn’t you?”
His Liverpudlian accent masked the extent of his wealth and knowledge. He sounded oddly undignified, and Natalie supposed he fooled people the way some of her North Carolinian friends did. By maintaining their country accents, her friends created a persona that often worked when one of their Northern business partners wanted to negotiate a contract. “Never take my accent as an indication I’m a fool,” a friend from Carolina once told her. The same was true with Andrew.
“Come with me,” he said now, reaching out a fleshy hand. “I’ll show you around my estate.” He cackled, a humorously Draconian sound in this Garden of Eden. He reminded her of an old English version of Philip Seymour Hoffman, the brilliant American actor who’d died of a heroin overdose. Pudgy, ruddy-complexioned, and intense. The major difference between the two men was that Andrew made her feel protected. Safe.
They trekked over the same dusty path they had walked the previous evening but gone were the ominous shadows and eerie night sounds. Instead, their feet kicked up a reddish-brown cloud of dust that melted instantly back into the earth as if the humidity weighed it down, stopping it from rising more than a couple of inches from the ground. The road, smooth and packed and lined with trees, appeared shaven on each side as if by a giant set of shears.
The elephant road, she thought.
She smiled. Danny would have loved this. Stephen wouldn’t have cared less. He would have rather been behind a computer writing and drawing than dealing with animals of any kind.
In the distance, an elephant trumpeted, and a deep male voice responded in what sounded like a command. Andrew continued talking as if he heard nothing.
“Almost fifteen exact square miles by American measurements.” He waved a hand expansively and turned around, answering her unspoken question about the size of the sanctuary. “I know exactly what the bloody measurements are because we finished installing an electrified perimeter fence not a fortnight ago. About drained my supply budget, I’ll tell you, but it’s worth it. The fence protects the ellies by keeping them within a huge area where we can monitor them safely without putting them in small pens, or worse, chained. And it also keeps out human predators. Win-win situation. That scene you saw of the herd coming in from the Numong Meadow never would have been possible without that fence. Now the ellies can go wherever they want; they’re almost as free as their cousins over there.” He jerked a thumb over his shoulder, indicating the mountains behind them.
“Cousins?”
“A few thousand wild elephants living the way they should: in the jungle. Used to be more than a hundred thousand of them in Thailand, but through the years . . . well, you know how the elephant poachers work. It won’t be long before they’ll kill off the whole bloody population.” He choked back some undefined emotion. Frustration. Anger. Grief. “This country reveres the elephant, but they also use the animal for their own benefit, training ellies for battle, or to carry the royal families, or haul logs off those mountains in the distance.” He sighed. “They’ve helped farmers plow their fields and served humans in whatever other ways humans needed them until they were replaced by machinery. Then the ivory trade trumped everything. Human vanity.” He shook his head.
She nodded. “My son Danny did a project in third grade on elephants and, at one point, I had to stop him from looking at the videos online. They broke his heart.”
“Friggin’ poachers. We battle them daily—both here and in Kenya. Not many know it, but the drug trade is heavily funded by ivory.” He spat and hit the ground near a tree trunk.
Natalie hadn’t known that, yet she wasn’t surprised. Years of working with horses taught her way more than she wanted to know about the ways human greed destroyed magnificent animals. She’d had to euthanize many horses that had been pushed to the brink by owners who wanted them to run faster, leap higher, perform incredible feats. And when a horse died or was tragically injured, the owner would buy another one. Andrew was right: what happened to most animals was largely the result of human vanity.
Andrew continued, “Thailand’s elephant herds dwindled from nearly half a million, both wild and domesticated, at the beginning of the twentieth century, to a total of not quite ten thousand at the present time. Can you believe that?”
She nodded again. One of the reasons Natalie had come to the sanctuary was because of their commitment to give some of those broken, blind, and dispirited elephants a chance to live the rest of their lives with the comfort and dignity they deserved. She had privately admitted to herself on the plane coming here that working to help animals in a country where no one knew her might help her heal. Now she wondered whether she might be wrong. Maybe being here would make her grief worse.
She forced her legs to move and followed Andrew. Clouds of dust filled her nostrils and clogged her throat. Coughing into her fist, she counted to eight then backwards, as Dr. Littlefield had taught her. Concentrate, she told herself. Breathe.
“Ah, here’s the sanctuary family.” Andrew pointed beyond the trees, and Natalie spotted the main building. The open veranda held a milling group of people, some talking quietly, dark heads together, while others clustered in small groups on the porch overlooking the meadow. Maybe twenty people in all. Several elephants stood leaning against the concrete pilings that supported the sprawling structure, resting their foreheads against the iron railings.
The smell of cooking lifted Natalie’s chin. Though she couldn’t identify the food, her stomach rumbled, and she realized suddenly that she hadn’t eaten in almost twenty-four hours.
A tiny figure broke from the larger group and ran down the stairs, followed by two dogs: one large and black with long legs—a Shepherd mix, it appeared; and the other—white, fluffy, and scarcely larger than a Chihuahua. As the child sprinted toward them, raising mini, brown tornadoes in the dirt, it became clear that it was a little girl, shining black hair cut bluntly at shoulder length, barefoot and dressed in a bright orange, cotton floral dress. Her face sparkled with the largest gap-toothed smile Natalie had ever seen. The closer she came, the more Natalie realized the child was not going to slow down.
“My little whirlwind!” Andrew reached for the child as she leapt fearlessly into his arms and wrapped her legs around his waist. She hugged him tightly around the neck, chattering in a tiny, high-pitched voice. All the while, her dark eyes stared curiously at Natalie.
Natalie smiled at the child, but she simply stared back as if she’d been told not to trust strangers.
Andrew said something in Thai to the toddler then turned to Natalie. “This little darling is the camp mascot, Sivad. Her mother Mali works as one of the cooks, so this little one and her brothers live here. The mahouts and their families do, too, as well as the administrative staff. Those cabins around yours are for volunteers, but there’s another set farther downriver where everyone else lives.”
The dogs circled at Andrew’s ankles, as excitedly as Sivad had greeted him, but Andrew ignored them, so they sniffed at Natalie instead. She patted their heads and watched two more join them: a Golden Retriever mix and one that resembled a Beagle. All appeared healthy and clean. Unlike the strays she had seen on the streets of Bangkok, these were pets. Their little group grew larger by the second as more dogs arrived. By the time they reached the stairs, they had become a pack of six dogs and three humans. Buoyed by their cheerful energy, Natalie couldn’t help but smile.
She mounted the stairs behind Andrew and Sivad and realized why she hadn’t seen anyone else. This must be where everyone starts their morning, Natalie reasoned. Several groups filled the platform. People in their early twenties, probably volunteers, circled around one of the long picnic tables and spoke English, but the group of cigarette-smoking young men sitting and standing at the far end of the platform near the elephants spoke Thai. Under the overhang at the back of the building, a third group—three Thai women—bustled around an open cook-stove, clouds of steam rising above them.
No one paid attention to her arrival, which Natalie thought strange. Being ignored felt more uncomfortable than if she’d been ambushed, but perhaps they were used to seeing people arrive for daily visits and figured Andrew would take care of her.
“You’ll meet the mahouts and the elephants they care for in a little bit,” Andrew told her. “Each elephant has a caretaker, their mahout, and first thing in the morning, they have to feed the ellies, then take them for a mud bath. It’s the busiest time of day. I’m sure you’ll get right into the swing of things once you see how everything works.” He reached for some overripe bananas and tossed them to one of the elephants. “You have so many skills we need, but you’ll probably find there’s lots to learn, as well. Like feeding these giant eating machines. These guys eat sixteen to eighteen hours a day, and most of them have special diets because of their advanced age or the various injuries they’ve suffered at human hands. We’re too damn cruel.” He shook his head, but it was a momentary pause before he grabbed her elbow and spun her around to face the group of people at a picnic table.
“Everyone, I want you to welcome Dr. Natalie DeAngelo just over from America. She’s a fabulous vet with lots of big animal experience in North Carolina. She’ll be here for the next year, so make sure to make yourself available. Answer her questions and all that.” He smiled at her and patted her shoulder. “Now, let me introduce our crew. This,” Andrew gestured to his right, “is Dr. Peter Hatcher. Been the resident vet for, what, eight years, Peter?”
Hatcher was a pale, blond man, tall and thin. When he shook her hand, his knobby wrists belied the strength in his grip.
“Welcome to the sanctuary,” he said, his British accent far more clipped than Andrew’s. “You here for the month or are you staying more permanently?” He gave her a tight-lipped smile, or at least she thought it was a smile. His eyes didn’t light up at all.
“Clean the dust out of your ears, Peter! We’re lucky to have Dr. DeAngelo with us. One of the brightest in equine surgery, she is. Not one of our university volunteers, though she certainly looks young enough, doesn’t she? A bright little brown bird!” Andrew reached over and wrapped an arm around her shoulders like a great uncle. “She trained in North Carolina. Fulbright scholar for North Carolina State out of Raleigh. One of the best programs in the States. I respect what they’ve done with their husbandry program. Great work. I suspect she’ll be a great help to us in the year she’s here. I’m quite excited about having her.”
“I’m surprised you didn’t say anything to me, Andrew. We usually discuss such things.” Hatcher’s words dripped icicles as brittle as his pale blue eyes.
Andrew’s grip tightened on Natalie’s shoulder. “We can talk about this another time.”
“Maybe we need to talk about it before Dr. DeAngelo—that’s the name isn’t it?—gets settled in.” He nailed Natalie with a penetrating stare that made her pull her chin back as if he’d slapped her face. “You wouldn’t have known that I know Dr. DeAngelo, unless you’d told me she was coming, Andrew, but since you didn’t bother saying anything, I’ll just tell you now.” He turned to Natalie. “Do you have any idea who I am, Doctor?”
Shit, should I? Natalie felt her cheeks redden. She should have done more research, she thought, but getting everything wrapped up in the past month had left her little time to do any kind of research at all. Closing the clinic, getting the house ready, packing for the trip. That was enough. She flipped through the business cards in her mind. Had she met him at a conference? Had he written a book or an article recently? Made a breakthrough of some sort? She came up blank.
“Obviously, you have no idea.” He drew himself up, straightened his shoulders, and huffed like a discontented Oxford professor. “Let me introduce myself. Peter Hatcher of Yorkshire. Trained at the Royal Veterinary College. Ring any bells?”
Everyone had begun listening to the conversation. A small group had gathered. All silent.
She shook her head, feeling absolutely clueless. “I’ve been to the Royal Vet, but that was many years ago when I was a Fulbrighter.”
“And after you came home and continued your surgical work, did you have any connections with the school?”
“Peter, is this really necessary?” Andrew forced a smile but placed a warning hand on Peter’s arm. Andrew glanced at the redness around Peter’s hairline and the accompanying beads of sweat. For some strange reason, the man appeared ready to lose control.
“Yes, as a matter of fact, I did.” Natalie pushed harder to remember a Hatcher from the school, but she couldn’t place him. He was distinctive looking, tall with stringy muscles and a face quite sharp in its angles. She wouldn’t have forgotten him.
“And you were one of the final readers for dissertations, weren’t you? Never mind, you don’t have to answer. I can tell by your face that you’re starting to put two and two together.
“Listen closely, Andrew, because this is the kind of person you’ve just hired. I did my research work on formulating a cement we could inject into a horse’s broken leg. It worked. It did.” He pointed a finger into the air, as if to add an exclamation point to his comment. “We had plenty of studies to prove it, but when the dissertation got to Dr. DeAngelo, well, she became the fly in the ointment. She questioned everything we’d done. Every blessed report. Every statistic. Basically said we had not been able to validate our research and debunked my work completely.” He laughed sharply. If possible, his eyes hardened even more.
He stared directly at her as he continued. “I had to start again from scratch! Different topic. New study. Hours and hours and hours of work. And years of my time. Years! And you know what was so damned ironic? The cement worked. She started using it—my cement—in her clinic a year after she read my dissertation. A year after! And did she ever give me one ounce of credit? She never admitted to the academics who credited her with the glue that it wasn’t her invention. This is the woman.” He pointed at her and looked at Andrew. “This is the cheat you’ve hired.”
As Hatcher ranted, some of the volunteers walked away, looking over their shoulders. Natalie remembered the dissertation. Yes, it had needed work, but she hadn’t realized until much later that her questions had caused such an uproar. She remembered the research about eight months later when she was approached with a new product, much like the one discussed in the dissertation.
“Yes, I used the cement,” she told Hatcher, “but I never claimed I invented it. Someone else sold it to me—a pharmaceutical rep from South Africa. The rest of the surgeons in the field had the option of purchasing it, as well. I was just the first to use it. I would never steal anyone’s research, Dr. Hatcher. That’s not the way I work. Honestly.”
His eyes narrowed as he looked at her. “I don’t believe you, and Andrew, I don’t want to work with her. Period.”
Someone gasped. Natalie felt a burning in the pit of her stomach and wanted desperately to escape, but the small group of people who were left tightened around her, as if in suspense about what Hatcher might do next. No one spoke for half a minute. Natalie glanced at Andrew, the only person at the table that she knew, and she didn’t really know him all that much. Why would he believe her when Dr. Hatcher had worked here for years? She held her breath, wondering whether she would be on the next truck back to Bangkok, heading home.
Andrew twisted his mouth and let his hand drop from Peter’s arm, as if disgusted by his actions. Obviously, they had some history. “We’ll talk about this later, Dr. Hatcher,” he said in a voice low enough that only the three of them could hear. “For right now, you’ll welcome Dr. DeAngelo. You and I will discuss your concerns after lunch. My office.”
Though Natalie hadn’t known the philanthropist personally for very long, Andrew Gordon had a reputation for being in control of his own ship. To her, that translated to keeping a close eye on his subordinates, especially those in charge of running any of his sanctuaries in Asia and Africa. But it appeared he was being challenged, and years of watching for signs of aggression in animals told her the two men could very easily have been facing off against each other as wolves often did. Years of experience also told her that this wasn’t the first time these two men had confronted each other.
Andrew grabbed Natalie’s shoulder, turned his back on Hatcher, and led her to an empty table in the middle of the expansive ten-foot-high concrete platform. “I’ll get us some tea. You can take a peek at our residents.” He swung an arm around, then retreated to a table where everyone had gathered to dispense their morning drinks.
All around the edges of the platform where she sat, elephants stood patiently waiting for their breakfast. Occasionally, one would grunt or snort or flap its ears, but otherwise, they were as quiet as apparitions. For a few moments, she studied the elephants’ heads, noting the differences in their ears and their coloring. None of them were totally gray. Several were freckled, some pinkish, and others nearly white. Andrew returned with two cups of tea, as well as some nam tao-hu, a hot soy breakfast drink, and pa tong go, the deep fried bread sticks Danny had developed a taste for when he had tried them in the hotel in Bangkok.
“So, the story. Our story. We founded the sanctuary in 1989,” Andrew began, a proud smile on his face. “Took this ten-thousand-acre trust, determined to make it home for abused elephants. The whole region is a mountainous jungle, as you can see, and the Kwai river gives us a headache when it regularly overflows its banks, but here and there, pockets of deep springs feed the river even during dry season and that gives us a constant source of water for the sanctuary and our elephants, which is incredibly important. Wish we had this river in Kenya. Water’s always a problem there.”
He took a sip of his tea and looked out into the distance, thoughtfully, as if seeing past the jungles and the river and its challenges. It was a few moments before he started again.
“That first year, when the sanctuary smelled of wet and rotten vegetation, a storm left the old-timers talking for months. That damn storm was so strong the river created new tributaries and moved buildings as though a colossal hand lifted them and plopped them—kaput!—right smack down somewhere new like they were the tiniest of frogs. God, that was bloody awful.” Andrew screwed up his mouth and shrugged his shoulders as if disgusted by the memory.
He pointed to where Natalie guessed the buildings were and turned back to her, his mouth open, ready to speak, when a blood-curdling scream rent the air. She dropped her cup. A thousand prickles of fear brought every inch of her skin to life.
__________
The elephant, the one they call Sophie, wants air. She gasps for it. Her life depends on it.
But she can’t. She can’t breathe, and the fear pounds in her chest, drums in her middle ear, clouds her vision.
It’s the pain that has taken her breath.
Her leg burns as if she’s stepped into a giant fire ant mound, as if thousands of the biting creatures have crawled under her skin, snapping and burning at every inch of her leg. She tears at it with her short tusks, doesn’t care that she’s ripping the skin. She wants the pain gone. All of it. Now.
The elephant screams, vocalizing her pain with the trumpet, feeling the power of her own voice as it rides up from her belly to her abdomen to emerge in full force through her opened mouth. She lets the roar of her scream ripple into the jungle, climb up the mountainside, into the fish-scale clouds hanging low in the sky. And once the echoes stop, she screams again, and the sound acts as the key that opens up every other sensor in her body.
She opens her eyes and sees the crowd of humans around her. Feels their tension, their fear of her.
She smells the men. Their anger. Their distress. And something else. Something threatening. Cruel.
She hears voices yelling, the high-pitched sounds of human screams, the inconsistent orders from the mahouts. The sounds color the air with fiery streaks of crimson and orange that mimic the sizzling anger burning Sophie’s eyelids.
She screams again, and this time, a glint of brightness catches her eye and stops her mid-bellow. A sharp pain in the wound steals her breath. A searing agony creates a fire from her knees up into her chest, into a set of lungs still tight, still unwilling to let her breathe.
She stumbles.
Her lips part. She feels her tongue loll. She stiffens her legs, forces herself upright again, because she’s used to being strong. She’s afraid of what will happen if she collapses to the ground.
The men. She fears the men.
Everywhere she looks, a human. Everywhere, the glint of that sun-dagger that split her skin. Everywhere, the acrid scent, the human life colors and sounds.
Now, they all jumble. The smells, the sounds, the colors. Too many men. Too much noise.
And the pain. Daggers of pain as large as mountains.
She bellows and lunges, snapped back instantly by the large rope at her ankle.
She wants to run into the rivers where the tide rises as high as the arms of the river trees. She wants to rut her tusks along the edge of the soft thick forest, ripping ravines into the mud that smells of other elephants’ traces and thickens the air with its burnt and spicy odor. She wants to feel the strength in the legs that once could travel dozens of miles a day without a muscle quiver.
She wants the pain to stop.
For a very long time, she has lived with the burning flame in her leg. It engulfs her body with a heat that makes it possible to feel every pump of blood moving through her veins. The pain gives her no respite, no moment when she can breathe freely without the ever-present burn, no time when she can close her eyes and sleep for more than fifteen minutes without a jabbing reminder of the sore that has festered on her leg for all the days and nights of her time among humans.
She shakes her head, her giant ears flapping so hard that her teeth snap shut.
The men. The men cause the pain.
She tilts her head back to the sky, lifts her trunk and screams once more. A long, murderous scream designed to keep the men, those men who caused her pain, at a distance. A scream designed to warn.