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Moonlight
By Cheryl Merrill
In my atlas at home, there’s a satellite photograph that
shows a giant bird footprint pressed into the southern part of Africa.
Right now I’m somewhere between two of its toes, in a river delta the
size of Massachusetts, standing
on night-cooled sand under a sky thick with stars
Swollen by April rains in Angola, the Okavango floods
southward, crosses into Botswana in May or June, fans out, and eventually
evaporates or sinks into the sand. It’s an ambiguous river, one without a
definitive ending or a dependable course, like the ebb and flow of our lives.
Half the time the river is here; half the time it is not. Yet its
inland delta, at 5,500 square miles, is the largest in the world, an
unparalleled ecosystem with an arkful of animals.
If Angola builds a
dam on the Okavango, as they threaten to, the huge bird
footprint that can be seen from space will dry out and blow away.
I’m a nomad on a spring migration, dropping in to join a
human/elephant herd: Jabu, Thembi,
Morula, and their herdmates,
Doug and Sandi Groves.
Tonight, in the pewter moonlight, the smell of dust and dung deposits an
organic, gritty taste at the back of my throat, as if I’ve been chewing on
warm barnyard sand. Palm trees fan black silhouettes against the stars.
Soft rustles in the waist-high dried grass are unseen snakes or mice or
birds. Puffs of dust stir as I walk, pale
little clouds that settle around my feet. Moist as a swamp cooler,
musty and bacterial, the soft air condenses into cold puddles that send my
fingers into my pockets. Blankets of warm air bring them back out
again.
Under a bold African moon, shadows are starkly clean.
Uncountable stars populate the blackened sky. The giant,
gem-studded belt of the Milky Way girdles the full belly of the night.
By its light alone I could pick my way back to my tent.
My night vision is elemental, full of shapes without fine
details, and pools of texture. Silver sparks flicker from each leaf;
tree trunks are whitewashed in ash. As I walk, shifting slabs of moonglow keep rearranging the trees as if they are pieces
on a giant pearled chessboard. On a night like this I can almost see
the pages of a book, can almost read eyes.
Just ahead a huge smudge of charcoal broadens. Elephant.
Hushed and gaping, I am tugged like a blank comet into an immense
gravitational presence. I orbit a little to the left in a cautious arc.
With a low throaty rumble that mimics the elephant, Doug
slips under her jaw and stands by her side.
“Steady, Thembi,”
he says. “You’re a pretty girl, aren’t you Thembi?”
She nods Yes. I will learn that Thembi
always nods Yes at the word “pretty,” but now, in the moonlight she is
beautiful, a well-formed elephant, all her proportions flawless.
And Thembi knows she is pretty. She
holds herself perfectly still in half-profile, the way beautiful women do all
over the world when under regard by an admiring eye.
Then she turns her attention back to her pile of mopane
branches. She strips their bark, ignoring the butterfly-shaped leaves.
In this wintry, dry season, with the Okavango flood a
month away, the leaves are autumnal, reddish-colored, and striped with green.
Tonight they are bleached to the color of tinsel by the moon. Thembi’s after the sweet, green inner bark of the smaller
branches. Dessert first, the main course later.
I pick up a shred and try it. It tastes lightly sugared, nearly
spearmint in flavor, but is too fibrous for my teeth to chew.
As if the night air has muscle, it flexes, then
strengthens as a bulky umber apparition condenses out of darkness. Doug
passes again under Thembi’s chin as another
elephant backs blindly towards us, lifting first the sole of one foot and
then another for our inspection, carefully feeling her way. It’s an
oblong moment, stretched by suspense.
“No, no Morula,” Doug says, then
turns to me. “It’s the way elephants greet each other, but I’m trying
to get her to do it face-to-face.”
Enchanted by the thought that Morula thinks of me
as a fellow elephant, I have no qualms about putting the flat of my palm
against her trunk. Its astonishing warmth gives me pause, awakens me, a
pinch to verify whether or not I am dreaming.
Her skin contracts under my hand; ridges and wrinkles hold their own
landscapes of mud. Even as she sways a little we maintain contact,
moving in concert. Fascinated with her huge patience, filled with
wonder at what she might be thinking, I gently rub up and down, up and down.
Three-inch lashes screen the glint of moonlight in her eye. The dome of
her forehead is cobbled; my eyes follow its boulevard on up to the night sky.
She drops her head and my hand is left in mid-air.
I hear Doug murmur from behind me. “Sometimes when
my hands are cold I warm them in her armpits.” He demonstrates.
“Put your hand in here.”
I slide my palm into the space where Morula’s front
leg, a corrugated column, meets the bulk of her body. Protected by
thick skin, she doesn’t even twitch. My marsupial hand enclosed in a
smooth warm pouch, I peer around her trunk at Doug’s grin, his teeth turned
metallic by the moon.
“Is it true that one night you slept curled up in Jabu’s
trunk?”
“Not very comfortably.” His grin broadens.
“Hey, here comes Jabu. Here’s my boy.”
It’s hard to believe that an elephant weighing six tons
with a huge, restless trunk could sneak up on us. But Jabu has. Like tires with low air pressure, his
cushioned feet smother twigs, branches and the sound of his own footfalls.
He’s amazingly silent, standing next to us, as he shifts his weight
from one side to the other. A dusty dignity mirrors the moon over his
shoulder.
It’s been six years since I last saw these elephants, six years and only
briefly, in a different part of the Delta. Six years creates an immense
difference. Now fifteen, Jabu fills my entire
range of vision. He’s as tall as he will probably grow, but lean as any
other teenager is, and just as full of quirky humor. As if it’s a
curious eye on the end of a long, snaking probe, the tip of his trunk hovers
two inches from my nose. And I’ll bet he’s pleased that he’s making me
nervous.
He sucks my scents out of the air as delicately as picking petals from a
daisy. Trunk raised. Trunk dropped.
Trunk raised. Trunk dropped. He
loves me. He loves me not.
His massive head is a continent, wrinkled by tectonic plates of life.
Tufts of hair stick out of his ears, an old man’s ears. If the
eye is a cavern into the mind, then Jabu’s eye is
dark, bottomless. He blows into my face, perhaps inviting me to speak,
but I am wordless, in awe at the vastness of life in such a creature.
Doug motions me closer.
An out-of-focus, opalescent moon stares over Jabu’s
shoulder, a moon aged by memories of hot gases and bone crushing weights,
memories of when this world was new.
My voice is gone, muted forever. I have forgotten even my own name.
I lean the moonburned skin of my cheek against Jabu’s leg. The chalk in my bones softens. As the
cold weight of night drapes across my shoulders, we warm each other, both of
us children made from the dust of stars. Every atom we breathe was
generated in stellar engines, white-hot blossoms that pollinated the
universe.
I step away and Jabu swings around to his own pile
of mopane branches, strips their bark, smacks his lips. His ears flap back and forth, back
and forth, each a perfect replica of a map of Africa.
Under the cold clean moon he concentrates on eating. Broadside,
he is a dark living wall, his eyes half-lidded, only his restless trunk
searching, probing for the best morsels.
Taking my time, elephant time, I amble a few steps away,
then turn to measure Jabu’s silhouette against the
stars. He inhales, exhales, eight times a minute, a slow corkscrew
vibration that has the comforting sound of a snore.
By moonlight he is a great gray phantom, knowing more about me than I can
possibly ever know about him. The topology of his brain carries a map
made of scents and resonances and tastes. If I knew Jabu’s
world as well as he knows mine we could share an intelligence
as old as the ice ages.
Doug settles the elephants for the night, murmuring his throaty rumble into
their ears. The enormous eyes of the stars stare down at us without
blinking. The night air is old, strong and familiar.
Inflated like the moon, I float alongside Doug on our way back to camp, my
feet silent in the thick dust. The dimensions of my heart swell and contract, swell and contract. Enlarged beginnings
course through my veins like adrenaline. Lifted and roaring inside, I
can see the curve of the world with each step.
Out there somewhere in a night the color of gunmetal a lion coughs up hunger
and loneliness from the depths of his belly.
Moonstruck and unafraid, I drift back to my tent and burrow into my dreams.
In their soft brooding warmth I stretch and flap in my fetal skin,
hatch under an eggshell-blue sky. In my dreams I spread wings and fly
over an earth rounded and wrinkled as an elephant’s hide.
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