On Trails (14 page)

“Elephants are obviously much more long-lived than zebras,” she said, “so when the fence went down, it's very possible that some elephants remembered that old historical pathway that they
used to take. Elephants could have easily re-created game trails, and zebras may well have just followed them.”

Of course
, I thought.
Elephants
.

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I once spent three weeks hiking across the grasslands of Tanzania, through the Ngorongoro Crater, to reach an active volcano called Ol Doinyo Lengai. During the day, we would occasionally spot surreal animals grazing in the distance: giraffes, buffalos, a dozen kinds of antelope, their horns twisting upward like Chihuly glass. At night, hyenas rubbed up against the walls of our tents, giggling menacingly, their bitter musk seeping through the nylon.

The walking was hard. The land was covered with tall yellow grass and corrugated with deep trenches, called drainages. Fortunately, elephants had created a convenient system of trails for us to follow. They proved remarkably clever route finders. On many occasions, after following an elephant path down yet another steep drainage, I marveled at the fact that the elephants had somehow selected the shallowest gradient available for at least a hundred yards in either direction. I wondered:
How does the elephant know
where to go, when even we, with our maps and compasses, do not?

Descriptions of the elephant's topographic genius—a cherished gift when the land is barbed with thorn bushes and aflame with stinging nettles—lie sprinkled throughout colonial literature. “The sagacity which they display in ‘laying out roads' is almost incredible,” wrote Sir James Emerson Tennent about the Ceylonese elephant. “The elephants invariably select the line of march which communicates most judiciously with the opposite point, by means of the safest ford.” The same is true of African elephants, wrote the poet Thomas Pringle. Their trails always seemed to have been cut “with great judgement, always taking the best and shortest cut to the next open savannah, or
ford of the river; and in this way they were of the greatest use to us, by pioneering our route through a most difficult and intricate country.”

The trail networks of elephants can often cover hundreds of miles, connecting distant food sources and salt licks, while expertly avoiding whatever obstacles—canyons, mountains, dense forests—might stand in their way. But how did elephants figure out exactly where their trails should go? What allowed them to find the far-off mineral deposits they needed or the shallowest ford across a river?

I went in search of an answer to this question. And fortunately, I knew just where to start. My old AT thru-hiking buddy “Snuggles” (real name: Kelly Costanzo) happened to work at a place in rural Tennessee called The Elephant Sanctuary. There, nineteen female elephants, which had formerly been held captive in zoos, circuses, and backyards, now roam free across 2,700 acres of open forest.

One summer afternoon I traveled to the sanctuary to pay Kelly and the elephants a visit. I drove down a dirt road and then pulled up to a password-encoded steel gate, which bore a sign that read
WARNING: BIOHAZARD
. The whole property was surrounded by two rows of tall steel fences, one topped with barbed wire. At first glance, the place had the feeling not of a sanctuary, in the holy sense, but of a top-secret compound where monsters are made.

Kelly met me on the other side of the gate in her car and led me inside. She showed me to her home, a sunny, one-story ranch house on the sanctuary property. She shared it with two dogs, four cats, and one ingenious gray parrot (who had learned to bark, meow, trumpet like an elephant, and chime like a cell phone). From her backyard, off in the distance an elephant with a crippled trunk could be seen ambling along the fence line. This juxtaposition between the warmly familiar and the eerily exotic was one I would experience often during my stay at the sanctuary.

Kelly and I sat up late that night, drinking beer and reminiscing about the AT. She recalled one darkly comical morning we'd spent to
gether in Erwin, Tennessee: We were sitting at a greasy lunch counter, eating breakfast before hitching back to the trail, when a local man turned to Kelly and began recounting, with evident pride, Erwin's claim to fame—the fact that in 1916 they had “lynched” a mad elephant, named Mary, before a crowd of thousands. He gestured to a framed black-and-white photo on the wall immortalizing the event. The man—having no way of knowing that Kelly had been working intimately with elephants for years—waited for her reaction, expecting, perhaps, coos of intrigue. The best she could manage was to stare back at him wordlessly, her face fixed in open horror.

The next morning she gave me a tour of the grounds. We began at the first “barn,” where the African elephants were housed on cold days: a vast, echoey shed with diaphanous polycarbonate walls, heated floors, and a corrugated steel roof. The elephants' stalls led out onto a cropped lawn and, beyond it, a vast forest. Outside, the elephants' turf was surrounded by a fence made up of rectangular steel arches, like a row of gigantic steel staples, that were large enough for a human to pass through, but too narrow for elephants. I asked if we could walk through to the other side. Kelly gravely shook her head.

On the other side of the fence, twenty or thirty yards away, hulked a giant creature the color of unglazed Japanese pottery. We drew closer, but not too close. The giant had two nubby white tusks and a trunk like a crocodile's gray tail. Her name, Kelly said, was Flora.

Flora's trunk reached out to sniff us, slithering bonelessly over the fence. That one organ, I had read, could pluck a blueberry, uproot a tree, jet gallons of water, or catch a scent from miles away.

“What an amazing animal,” I said.

“I know, they're really amazing,” Kelly sighed. “But she's one that would, like, kill somebody if she had the option.”

“So if I were to walk up to the fence . . .” I trailed off.

“Oh gosh. She'd probably swing her head over it and try to grab you and kill you.”

In the two decades since it first opened, the sanctuary has suffered only one deadly incident, in 2006, when a caregiver was stomped to death by an elephant named Winkie. In the aftermath of that event, the caregivers pared back their contact with the elephants; no more are the days when people could stroll through the fence to pat their favorite elephants on the trunk. Kelly suspected that many captive elephants grow unusually aggressive toward humans as a result of the trauma they suffer in captivity. “There are some that just have such deep, deep scars that they'll never trust humans,” she said.

Flora, for example, had almost certainly witnessed the slaughter of her parents as a young calf. (Many scientists now believe that elephants understand the concept of death; elephants have even been seen grieving over the gravesites of family members.) Flora was subsequently abducted, put in chains, sent overseas, broken by trainers, and forced to perform for the amusement of paying customers. In the circus where she had performed, she was billed as “the world's smallest and youngest performing elephant.”

Flora bent back her trunk until it touched her forehead, forming a bubble-letter
S
. The inside of her mouth was shell pink. It curled softly in on itself like the bloom of a snapdragon. “She's so pretty,” Kelly said. “Look at that mouth!”

We stood and stared until Flora lost interest in us and sauntered off across the yard and into the trees. “This whole area used to be pines when I first came here,” Kelly remarked. “The elephants just knocked them all down.”

I asked her why.

“They're savannah makers,” she shrugged. Many experts believe elephants act as what biologists call “ecosystem engineers.” Research by zoologist Anthony Sinclair has shown that elephants take advantage of wildfires to clear patches of forest and convert it to grassland. The elephants let the fire do the hard work of burning down most of the trees, and then they pluck out the tender green
shoots that spring up in the wake of the fire, to prevent the trees from growing back. Along their trails, elephants have also been known to “garden”—­pulling up saplings of encroaching trees and dispersing the seeds of the fruit they eat. In dense jungles, where wind cannot disperse seeds across long distances, elephants play Johnny Appleseed; their dung spreads the pits of large fruits like mangos, durian, and (fittingly enough) so-called elephant apples. As a result, the trails of elephants are often lined, conveniently, with their favorite fruit trees.

A young caregiver named Cody shuffled over, wearing a frayed baseball cap and a T-shirt emblazoned with skulls. I asked him something I had been wondering since I arrived there: Do the sanctuary's elephants make trails, as they would in the wild?

I half expected him to say no. It appeared to me that whatever reasons elephants might have for following trails in the wild were absent at the sanctuary: they did not need trails to help them navigate long distances; there are no swift rivers to cross, no mountains to climb. However, Cody and Kelly both nodded; the elephants seemed to love making trails, they said. Cody pointed out a faint elephant trail that ran across the yard and along the fence line. There were others; narrow two-lane tracks that crisscrossed all over the property. Neither of them knew where most of the trails came from; most had simply appeared years ago. One elephant, named Shirley, had created a trail that led to the grave of her former companion, Bunny. (Today, the caretakers call it “Bunny's Trail.”) They said that some of the elephants would stick to certain trails even if those trails did not provide the fastest way to get from one point to another.

I asked Kelly why she thought they were so trail obsessed, even now, after a lifetime of captivity, when trails weren't necessary for their survival.

She smiled and shook her head.

“I'm guessing it's deep-rooted,” she said.

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Later in the day I began piecing together more clues. Kelly and I were visiting the Asian barn, on the other side of the property. Outside the barn sat two dust-yellow elephants named Misty and Dulary. They were smaller and pudgier than the Africans. Misty was lying on her side on the ground, while Dulary stood guard. Spying us, Dulary walked slowly over to the edge of the fence and stared. The shape of her forehead resembled a bull's skull: a pair of bulging orbits hourglassing into deep, hollow temples. Her trunk hung like the hose of an old gas mask. Where the whites of her eyes should have been, there was black.

Misty rolled over onto her stomach, tucked her knees underneath her, and, in a toddlerish motion, stood up, front legs first. Her face was noticeably chubbier and wrinklier than her companion's. Kelly described it as “smushy,” like a marshmallow. Misty walked over to Dulary. The two stood side by side: the embodiment of cuteness, the visage of death. They began feeling each other with their trunks, sweetly. Then, as if on cue, they both pissed a torrent.

Cody soon stopped by on his rounds to check in on Misty, which set in motion a smoothly choreographed routine. He walked up to the edge of the fence. Misty turned around and stuck out her knobby tail. He pulled on it gently. Then she lifted her foot. He gave it a hug.

Kelly told me that the caregivers trained the elephants to lift their feet so that they could provide medical treatment. The caregivers dedicated hours each week solely to mending damaged feet—cracked toenails, abscesses, infections—which were common among elephants that, in their former life in captivity, once spent much of the day standing on hard concrete. Making matters worse, a few of the elephants, during their former lives in captivity, had developed odd tics—some rhythmically swayed their bodies from side to side; others tossed their trunks forward and back—which zoologists call “ste
reotypic behaviors.” Elephants are magnificent long-distance walkers; in the wild, they can travel up to fifty miles per day. So when they are confined, they will often begin fidgeting to release the excess energy. Because the movement releases endorphins, it can become ingrained as a form of self-soothing, which over time can lead to joint and foot injuries. Foot problems, Kelly pointed out, were the leading cause of death among captive elephants.

Despite its stump-like appearance, an elephant's foot is an oddly delicate appendage. Hidden within that fatty cylinder lies a bone structure resembling a kitten-heeled shoe. This tiptoed design allows elephants to be surprisingly nimble climbers; one hunter in colonial Africa described finding elephant trails leading up the face of a cliff he considered “inaccessible to any animal but a baboon.” In the circus, elephants have even been trained to walk tightropes.

On flat ground, a disc of fat on the sole of each foot dampens much of the impact of walking—a nine-thousand-pound elephant exerts less than nine pounds per square inch of pressure underfoot—giving them a soft, quiet tread. Their tendency to clear paths further facilitates silent creeping. Dan Wylie, the author of a cultural history of the elephant, recounts the story of a group of rangers in the Zambezi Valley of Zimbabwe who, while camping out one night, unwittingly fell asleep in the middle of an elephant path. In the morning, they realized that an elephant had walked directly over their bodies without waking even a single one of them. Its footprint was stamped into the groundsheet between where they lay.

Yet more incredibly, it appears that elephants may also use their feet to listen for messages from distant members of their herd. An elephant researcher named Caitlin O'Connell-Rodwell—who previously studied the way Hawaiian planthoppers communicate by sending vibrations through a blade of grass—found that elephants can use what she called their “giant stethoscope feet” to detect distant alarm calls transmitted through the ground. She theorized that elephants' feet
could also detect the rumble of thunder from up to a hundred miles away. If so, this would help explain their mysterious ability to travel across vast distances to the precise location of newly rain-fed land.