A Million Years with You (33 page)

 

Many people were horrified to hear that I'd left a good job to take a chance on writing. I should have kept the job and written in the evenings, they said, to find out if my work could be published. But I knew my work would be published. I felt sure of my decision. I loved every minute of my working time and earned more money than I did from teaching or even from working for the Kuwait embassy. True, my pay rate was about twenty cents an hour, but I didn't need much sleep and I didn't take vacations. I just wrote.

14

M
OST OF WHAT I WROTE
was informed by the natural world and the Old Way, not only by the Bushmen who lived it, but also by wild animals who continue to live it. This required research, much of which I had done, beginning when I was five and watched the cats in my parents' basement. Ever since then I've watched animals and tried to learn from them.

What seems to go on in their minds enthralls me. One day one of our dogs was having a bad dream, twitching and crying, so I stroked her gently to soothe her. Instantly she jumped up and attacked the other dog. Why was that interesting? Because the other dog tries constantly to dominate her, which she resents. The most interesting part is that to her, the dream seemed real.

In Namibia I loved to watch sleeping lions. They usually sleep in the shade of a tree, and often the patch of shade isn't big enough for all of them, so the latecomers lie down on top of those who got there first, creating a pile of lions. Unlike many animals who must always be vigilant, lions sleep soundly. After all, who is going to bother a large number of lions? Or even one lion, for that matter? As they sleep, their eyelids move, each lion in his or her own world, dreaming.

One day my friend Sy told me that she had been in the Boston Aquarium with the aquarium biologists, watching an electric eel. The exhibit provided a light that flashed when the eel discharged electricity. But now and then the light would flash although the eel was sleeping. He too was dreaming, said the aquarium biologists. I'd give all I possess to know his dream.

I think of my own dreams. From the time I came back from the Kalahari to the present, I've had recurring dreams of African lions. They come out of the woods at the edge of our field and I watch them, often with some concern, but they never come right up to the house and never try to hunt me. They seem not to know I'm there. The dream combines many of my experiences and most of my feelings—lions, the Kalahari, my love of my fields, my ambient anxiety as symbolized by unrestrained lions, and my desire to know what animals are doing. Dreaming piles things together for people. Possibly it also does for dogs, lions, and eels. Why dream if it does nothing for you? I have always been impressed by the oneness of the vertebrates.

 

I think of the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, who famously said that if a lion could talk we wouldn't understand him. This is far from true. We might not understand everything he said, but some of us—the Ju/wasi, for instance—would certainly understand most of it. After all, every creature who lives in the natural world spends most of its time trying to get enough to eat. The lions and the Bushmen did so by hunting the same animals with many of the same techniques, the only important difference being the time of day when they did it. Animals need to understand other species, if only to prey on them or escape from them. The concept of commonality is far from wrong, and can be a powerful tool.

Some of my observations came about because a friend named Katy Payne discovered that elephants communicate with infrasound. During a visit to the elephant barns in the Washington Park Zoo in Portland, Oregon, she felt a strange sensation that I cannot describe, but it struck her that the elephants were causing it. She had been among the first to discover and record the songs of humpback whales, so she knew about sound waves, and she wondered if the elephants were making sounds she could not hear. She told me she was going to explore that question and asked if I would join her and Bill Langbauer, a graduate student, to do the research. I was delighted to join them.

We went to Portland, Katy with a recording device that captured very low frequencies. When she speeded up the recording, she could hear what the device had captured. From this she learned that the elephants were making extremely loud calls that none of us were aware of, even though the sound waves went right through our bodies. Elephants have been in the service of people for more than two thousand years, and all that time they've been making these calls. But Katy was the first to notice. Before this, no land mammal was known to make infrasound, so hers was among the most important biological discoveries of the twentieth century.

 

As for me, I gained some insight into an elephant named Tonga. He had been a circus elephant, but while his owner was riding him around the circus ring, he yanked her off the back of his neck and crushed her to death with his forehead. People said he was angry from having lost a fight with another elephant and he took it out on her.

After that he was transferred to the Portland zoo, where, understandably, he was considered dangerous. He was therefore alone in his pen, which had an outdoor area but was within reach of another pen containing another male elephant, the tip of whose trunk Tonga had managed to seize and bite off. One day as I was walking past his outdoor enclosure, he took exception to my presence. He glued his eyes on me as he tried in every way he could to climb over his elephant-proof wall and get at me. I could not have escaped from him. Not only could he outrun me, but he could also demolish almost any structure in which I might take refuge.

What I liked most about the elephant barns was being there at night, just me, Katy, Bill, and the elephants. In the semidark silence, we'd inhale their elephant odor and listen to their shuffling and breathing. Ears forward, body stiff, Tonga would glare at us. We kept out of his reach.

One night a three-legged rat came through a hole in the wall of Tonga's enclosure. I thought he'd kill the rat, but instead, ears loose, shoulders relaxed, he just looked down at her. She went right up to his feet, where a few morsels of his food had fallen. He blew a little air at her, which I thought might be a greeting. For about fifteen minutes she limped around his enclosure while he kept turning slowly and carefully, mindful of his feet so he didn't step on her. This way he kept her in view, as if he liked to look at her. Elephants, of course, are very social, but Tonga had no one, and surely he was lonely. He seemed to welcome her presence.

But he liked her more than she liked him. After collecting every morsel, she went back in the wall without looking at him. Tonga went over to the hole and blew a little air in behind her.
Remember me
, he might have said.

 

My next project included a study of zoo and circus tigers. I went to Illinois, to the Hawthorn Corporation, a facility where groups of tigers were trained for circus performances. As a child, all I ever wanted was to shape-change into a cat and I would have loved to be a tiger. This never happened, but from the tigers at the Hawthorn Corporation I learned how to sound like one. Later I went to the Brookfield Zoo and noticed two adolescent tigers lying on the grass of their enclosure, comatose with boredom. I said, “Aaaaaaaong!” The two youngsters leaped to their feet and looked all around, ears up, tails stiff, eyes wide, all excited. Where was that tiger? But they saw only me, whom they disregarded. So I said it again. This time they saw who did it and seemed disgusted.
Blast, it's one of them
, their manner said.

Elephants were also trained at the Hawthorn Corporation, and among them I saw an elephant who looked like Tonga. In fact, he
was
Tonga. But he was with some other elephants in an enclosure that consisted of no more than a few cables strung up to make a fence, nothing like the fortress that had contained him in Portland. He seemed relaxed, as calm as any other captive elephant might be under the circumstances, taking exception to no one, threatening no one. That evening when he was brought to his indoor enclosure, one of the elephant keepers, a woman, went right in with him. Tonga seemed fine with that. I told the keeper I'd met Tonga in Portland. She told me that as soon as he had company, his whole demeanor had changed. He pretty much did what was expected of him, and although people were cautious, no one was truly afraid of him.

I believe I'd observed a short part of an elephant's psychological history, and the tool that helped me was empathy. I know how it feels to be lonely—who doesn't? For that I was named Kothonjoro. Like some of us, Tonga dealt with emotional stress by blaming others. In Portland I would watch his angry gray face, his restless, twitching movements, knowing he would kill me if he could and even that wouldn't help him. So it made me happy to know that he at last was happy. I thought of the three-legged rat in Portland and hoped she was doing as well.

 

The Hawthorn Corporation has long been under attack by animal rights activists, especially by PETA, for mistreatment of animals, but over a two-year period I visited many times, spent many months there, and saw nothing of the kind. The elephants were more or less okay, except that captivity and circus performances are never appropriate for elephants, but the tigers were in great shape—up and about in their big cages. All cats like to watch things, and in the two huge barns that housed them there was plenty to watch—meat arriving on a rolling table, the veterinarian making an inspection, other tigers going through a chute to the training ring, the trainers stopping by to greet their tigers and be greeted by them. Research has shown that circus tigers are healthier and happier than most zoo tigers because zoo tigers are all but anesthetized by boredom and circus tigers have plenty to watch and meaningful work.
¹
They live longer too. I learned that the average age of tigers in most zoos was about nine, while circus tigers regularly lived into their late teens and some lived well into their twenties.

The atmosphere at the corporation was due largely to the head trainer. He came from Holland, and his name was Roelof de Vries. While there I would stay with him and his wife, Elke, and would spend my days watching him at work, because his ability to work with animals, his methods too, made me think of Francis of Assisi, the saint whom we honor on October 4 when we hope that God will bless the animals. The tigers would brighten when Roel came to get them, chuffing greetings and rubbing their faces on the cage as housecats rub us when we stroke them. While training the tigers, Roel carried only a pole with a pointed end and a wand with a string attached to it, the pole to deliver small rewards of meat to the tigers' mouths, the wand to flick the string under a tiger's chin as a cue to back up. Roel trained his tigers with praise and pleasures. They liked him.

At the Hawthorn Corporation, perhaps seventy or eighty tigers were caged in the barns, one to a cage, each cage with a shelf for the tiger to sleep on. Often the gates between some of the cages were open to let compatible tigers socialize. Also every day in fine weather the tigers could spend time outdoors. Normally the barns were noisy, with tigers moaning at each other (making the
aaaaaong
sound that I learned) or chuffing greetings as their keepers or trainers passed by. Usually a lot was happening—cages being cleaned, food being brought in, the floor being washed with a fire hose.

This was the routine, but I witnessed two exceptions. The first took place because circus acts were sometimes boarded at the Hawthorn Corporation, and one day a lion was brought in. He had been there before and didn't like it. While still in his cage in a trailer, he realized where he was and started roaring. Inside the barn, the tigers looked up and seemed anxious. The lion was then made to run down a passage between the rows of tiger cages, and he roared every step of the way. The tigers stopped moving, as if they hoped he wouldn't notice them. But their effort was useless. As soon as he was in his own cage he sprayed the tigers on either side with urine.

I was watching this with surprise and interest when my glasses went blank like a windshield when the car ahead splashes through a puddle. I felt warm and wet inside my clothes. He had sprayed me too. But who can blame him? Whenever possible, lions live with other lions and stand together in times of adversity. He was alone with dozens of enemies all around him, as he saw it. His only hope was to keep them intimidated, so while he was there he had a roaring session every fifteen or twenty minutes, making thirty or forty roars each time. During these sessions the tigers kept still but looked in his direction, their ears ringing. The lion left after a week or so, and when he did, the barn returned to normal.

The second exception took place one day when I entered the barn and was surprised by its perfect silence. The tiger in the corner cage had gotten to know me and would chuff a greeting, but that day she was up on her shelf, looking at something at the far end of the barn. I chuffed at her, but she paid no attention. The tigers in the next cages were also on their shelves, all tense, all in more or less the same position, all looking in the same direction, heads up and ears high.

Obviously they were looking at something important. I climbed a ladder to the top of the cages to see what it was. Ordinarily the tigers below would have reached for me (a wire netting prevented them from catching me), but they didn't come after me this time, so I climbed higher and I saw—what? The barn was almost a hundred feet long, every tiger was up on a shelf, and at the far end four men were standing in a doorway. Nothing more.

I knew three of the men—a trainer and two keepers. The tigers saw these men every day. It was the other man on whom they focused. Then, in a kind of gestalt, as often happens when I'm with animals I know, I got it. The fourth man was John Cuneo, the president of the Hawthorn Corporation.

I was right. That's who he was, although how I knew is hard to explain because I had never seen him before, not even a photo. How the tigers knew is even harder to explain, because Cuneo lived about thirty miles away and came to the barns only on rare occasions. Roel told me that he never interacted with the tigers so they had no experience with him. But their fate was in his hands, and evidently they knew it. Soon enough Cuneo turned and left, although the other men stayed. And when he was gone the tigers got down off their shelves and resumed their normal activities.