How elephants mourn their dead

Adeel could see the General’s diamond-cutter eyes flashing in the flickering flames of the camp fire. He had said nothing all evening except to order Adeel to light the fire and cook the food, and now he was simply staring into heat with a strange smile playing at the edges of his wrinkled old face. Every night since they’d started the expedition Adeel had promised himself he would leave, but every night he found himself failing to do so. The five-hundred dollars a day probably had something to do with that but, if the park rangers found him leading this old white man through the jungle on the trail of India’s oldest elephant, no amount of money would save his skin. There was no tolerance left for ivory smugglers. Yet he felt a strange fatalism about it all.

The whole business had begun months ago when the old man, whom locals had nicknamed “the General” because of his martial airs, had started to pay him and a few other men to keep an eye on the old elephant and tell him if he should leave the herd. When the animal, named the Great Father because of his age, did mysteriously part from the group and start to move away alone, the General had paid Adeel to help him follow the elephant’s trail. Of course, the money also made him the old man’s servant, and ensured that it was he who carried the heavy old chest that must surely contain some kind of elephant gun.

But now they were four days in, and could there be any turning back? This latest camp site was the worst yet. For all of that afternoon they had come across more and more gigantic bones, and the General had had them stop inside what must have once been an elephant’s rib cage. At least, Adeel reasoned, if this was where the creatures came to die, his employer may not need the gun after all, and was it smuggling to sell ivory from elephants that had died from natural causes?

They broke camp shortly after dawn. Adeel shouldered the chest and heard the object inside rattle about. How old was this gun? It would have to be pretty powerful to get through an elephant’s skull, and he would probably need more than one shot too. And the Great Father was big even by pachyderm standards, with massive tusks. If the first shot didn’t wound him enough, he would charge. So if the wardens didn’t get him, the elephant would. Yet still Adeel didn’t turn back. They trekked through the thick jungle all day and then, that night, they caught up with their quarry.

It was a weak moon, a ghostly candle nearly out, but Adeel could make out the shape of the great tusker some distance away in another large patch of elephant bones, and he could see it kneeling down, collapsing into the earth before him.

The General reached out a hand towards the chest and gently worked Adeel’s fingers free. Adeel let them drop. He said nothing as he stepped out towards the Great Father, pulling his cargo slowly behind him. Adeel let him go, whatever he would do now, he would do.

He watched as the General made his way closer and closer to the elephant. The creature was still kneeling, its trunk caressing the remains of a great pachyderm skull before it. It did not stir, even as the General stopped only six feet short of it and, with a key from inside his shirt pocket, unlocked and opened the chest. Adeel was aware that, should the General produce a rifle from his luggage, he would only have seconds to stop him, if this indeed was what he wanted to do. Yet still, he did not move.

He watched as the General began to unload a series of objects from the chest; first, a small statue of the Virgin Mary. He took this and, holding it out before him, made the final few steps to the elephant and placed it gently before the animal’s eyes. Was he trying to convert the creature? Then he returned to the chest and produced a chess board and a leather bag. He took both objects back to the Great Father and, after placing the chess board down next to the Madonna, he upturned the bag and out clattered some chess pieces. Again, he returned to the chest, this time pulling out what looked like several necklaces and laying then before the creature. Then he produced another figurine of some kind, and then a small decorative box and after that he knelt down beside the ancient pachyderm and began softly weeping with his head in his hands.

Adeel watched the scene from the edge of the clearing for about half an hour, until the General’s crying had ceased and the old man had lain down beside his strange treasure trove. Only then did he feel able to intrude on the scene. When he reached the General he could see the objects he had produced more clearly, and that’s when it clicked – they were all made of ivory. Before him, the Great Father’s eyes had closed. He could hear the elephant’s breaths – long and lost and final – and could almost feel the mighty creature’s heart slowing, its energy spent, entropy victorious. Yet still the great trunk gripped onto the skull before it.

For a while longer Adeel stood surveying the scene, then he touched the General on the shoulder. He could not leave him there. “Sir, it is time to go.” The General shrugged him off angrily. “Not yet, not yet.” Then he gathered the ivory objects in his arms and pushed them closer to the elephant. Still the creature did not stir. The General began to weep again, but then the Great Father released its trunk from the skull and moved it down towards the statue of the Virgin. It inspected each object in turn, slowly twisting its trunk around each one, until it seemed satisfied of something, and allowed the appendage to the fall to the ground. With a last sigh that was deeper than the deepest well, the Great Father died. The General let out a few heaving sobs, then his shoulders slumped and he fell on his side. But he was still breathing, albeit faintly, when Adeel picked him up from the ground and took him back to the bones of his own kind.