The Transcendental Friend | 2001-03

[ Truth ]

[ Flammable ]

[ Becomes Red ]

[ Dream of ]

[ Bone ]

[ Tooth ]

[ Matter ]

[ Nota Bene ]

Tusk and Sharp Tooth

As soon as I could break lose from the grasp of my countryman, I ran to endeavor to seize the young elephant by the trunk, and Speulman took his stand on the opposite side for the same purpose. I was astonished at the nimbleness with which the young animal ascended the steep hill. As he approached the spot where we stood, we found he was much older than we expected, and, after making an ineffectual attempt to get hold of his trunk, we were obliged to give him a free passage between us.

—Henry Davenport Northrop, Wild Sport of the Tropics

* * *

from girl/ending/world
Lindsay Ahl

           I suppose they are so busy getting Sam and Elena out that I am forgotten, not to mention invisible up in the tree.

           I know that for the hyenas, the elephant isn't enough. They want Sam and Elena also. For one instant the elephant trunk which was left lying there is pulled taut, and then devoured. The blood is flying. I listen for her camera, a sign that she might be down there still. I know they are after her and I know she would like this for a photograph, that she would be willing to lie there clicking away as they tear her apart.

           The Crocuta Crocuta is the largest and boldest species of hyena, with long front legs and a square, defiantly shaped head. They travel in packs, are considered nocturnal but are often seen during the day, and eat mostly carrion, rodents and young animals. Hyenas are actually more closely related to cats than to dogs, which may explain their odd sounds as they fight to eat, not unlike housecats in the back yard mating. The guttural scream and purring laughter are a warning for me but a celebration for them, that they are alive for one moment more to eat, to cry out, to feel the rain of blood on their backs.

           Their celebration is so loud in my ears that I vomit, down through the trees, until the sound is finished, my ears filled with humming blood. The glass sky above glitters and I am dizzy, suffocating, unable to breathe.

           When the man finally climbed up the tree he tried to make me let go of the film. The hyenas were already gone, and the silence had already taken hold. Everything was in place, the place it would be in from that moment forward.

           So that when Mick Jagger decides, for one second, to fall with his voice into some part of himself that can be expressed only with inarticulate sound, surrounded by I don't know why, he reminds me of my forgotten knowledge that the end of the world did happen after all, as I thought, in the image of a man's face. And just as easily my knowledge disappears with the next rift, so that I'm falling backward into the sound in oblivion. The reality of my knowledge instantaneously lucid and then instantly gone.

     * * *

           Nowadays they don't cull elephants with three Land-Rovers and a few guns. They look for a herd of at least 50 or more and take up three airplanes, skimming the air just above the elephants. They shoot the stragglers on the outside of the herd first, from about five to ten yards away using .458 or .308 semiautomatics. When the shooters are good, they can down 100 elephants in less than a minute. They shoot them in the brain, if they can get the shot, or in the spine if the elephant is running away.

           When they cull elephants with planes, they kill every elephant in the vicinity and take away all the meat, bones, stomachs, everything. And still—elephants come from every direction to investigate the site of the massacre. How do they know where it happened? Some heard it, through infrasound, they inform the others, they all visit, pay respects, then the area is abandoned—no one will see any elephant even near the site, sometimes for several years.

           Elena tramped alone through a wooded area with a nine year old trailing, saying, there's a photo up ahead, in her hope for something more. Her hope to fit into a world she knew nothing about. She knew what nurses know; she knew about illness and injury and how to put something together again. She did not know that most people do not like illness and injury and do not know how to put things together again, but rather how to ignore what they see, which is something I am good at. I never once saw the leprosy and sewage running down the streets, the animals with their heads cut off and the starving septic children. I saw the sun fill up the sky and the elephants fully submerge themselves in water and breathe through their trunks. I saw them wave to one another, their trunks like ribbons, like voices calling across the sky.