White Gold

by Caitlin O'Connell

  Nigel massaged another bird’s chest, snapped its neck, and placed it in the bag with the others.

  “Why are you killing those birds?” I asked in disgust.

  Nigel pulled one out. Its loose head flopped around in his wrist as he held it out toward me. “You mean these magnificent creations?”

  “Dead magnificent creations, yes. What are you doing with them?”

  “Just one of these birds is worth a whole pile of ivory—you know, just like the piles that Kenya had burnt the other day in their terribly clever marketing scheme.”

  “Marketing scheme?”

  “They get far more from donors for their advertising than they would from ivory sales. But the donor pocket is not nearly as deep as the ivory-loving businessman. Very shortsighted, if you ask me.”

  “That’s a twisted argument. And anyway, I prefer to experience elephants alive.”

  “And there are those who think vilifying ivory as art is equally naive. But no matter, I have just the necklace that would look exquisite around that lovely neck of yours.”

  “You really are a sociopath.”

  “You must wake up every morning half in love with easeful death yourself, given the death wish you seem to have.” Nigel pulled out a .44 from the bag of dead birds and pointed it at me. “I never really wanted to kill you. You must realize that by now.” He switched the safety off. “But you give me no choice.”

  I backed away as the sudden loud noise of an explosion erupted from behind us. The remaining elephants in Nigel’s camp started roaring and pulling at their chains, trying to escape. I couldn’t imagine what could have caused the explosion, but whatever it was must have involved the others.

  The sounds of automatic gunfire broke out again, just as a stampede of seven elephants raged into camp from behind us. They upturned tables and smashed through tents and other camping gear and supplies in their path to escape the gunfire. Lu Lu was among them.

  The chained elephants in camp pulled their stakes from the ground and ran off into the forest, including the elephant carrying the nightingales and the ivory.

  “Bloody hell!” Nigel cursed as his elephant took off with his cache. He called out to her, “Mei Tai, Mei Tai, get back here.” His eyes followed her trajectory. “Shit.”

  “Lay, Lu Lu! Lay!” I called urgently in Mandarin for Lu Lu to come to me, fantasizing that I’d be able to run up the leg of a charging elephant to escape my imminent demise.

  Lu Lu heard my voice, saw me, and then saw Nigel. As soon as she laid eyes on Nigel, her demeanor changed. And I remembered what Jet had said about how brutal Nigel was with his elephants and that Lu Lu had been in his camp some years ago. I couldn’t be sure what she was thinking exactly, but she put her head down and charged.

  I was expecting her to stop in front of Nigel and maybe stamp her feet and bellow in objection to his presence, but, no, she kept coming. Her head was lower than her shoulders in a deadly charge.

  Nigel seemed to recognize that Lu Lu was charging for real and dropped his weapon and started running.

  Lu Lu course-corrected in the direction Nigel was heading and caught up with him. She reached forward and grabbed Nigel in her trunk and threw him violently to the ground. She roared angrily, bent her leg at the knee, and dropped all of her weight down onto Nigel’s chest, crushing his rib cage. Without stopping her raging roar, she kept on running straight past me and into the forest, the sound of her battle cry trailing behind her.

  In an instant, our biggest adversary was trampled to death right in front of me. Lu Lu had saved my life. It happened too quickly to feel the weight of its ramifications.

  I knew there was no way for Lu Lu to know how I felt about this man, or that she could have formed such a bond with me that would have made her want to save my life. But part of me wondered if, in the moment that I called her name, she noted the tone of my voice and understood what was happening and took action, as if we had been in this game together all along—as if she understood that each step she took along the switchback to get over that treacherous mountain was one step closer to redemption—for both of us.

  I didn’t want to look, but morbid fascination got the better of me, and I walked over to see the flattened body of the man I had been hunting for months. The look of surprise on his face was the thing that struck me most. As if he fancied himself Keats’s immortal nightingale. Death certainly didn’t look easeful for him, in that moment.

  While fleeing Lu Lu’s charge, Nigel had tossed the bag of dead nightingales. I picked it up and squeezed the chest of one of the birds, not knowing what I was looking for. I picked another up and squeezed it as well. Not having ever squeezed a nightingale, or any bird for that matter, I didn’t really know what a normal nightingale chest was supposed to feel like. But there was something. Each bird did have a hard round object deep in the chest, just where I assumed that the crop was located. Some had several of these objects.

  Ling-Ru appeared out of the bushes.

  “What happened?” I put the bag down. “What was that explosion?”

  “Lily stepped on a land mine.”

  “Oh no! Is she okay?”

  Ling-Ru shook her head. “They had to shoot her.”

  “That’s terrible. Was anyone else hurt?”

  “No.” Ling-Ru looked down at Nigel’s crushed body. “You got your wish, at least. And we’re all better off for it.”

  “What about Dim Sum?”

  “He’s fine. Jet is walking him over to a place where they are setting up camp for the night. It was hard to get him to leave Lily.”

  “Poor Dim Sum.”

  “What a shame,” Ling-Ru said as she looked into the bag of dead nightingales.

  I picked up another bird and massaged its chest, feeling the lumps again. “What was Nigel looking for?”

  Ling-Ru took the limp bird out of my hand. “Diamonds.”

  “Diamonds?” I suddenly understood Nigel’s keen interest in these birds. “How did he get these birds to swallow diamonds?”

  “The jujube.”

  “What’s that?”

  “It’s what we call the Chinese date. It’s about the size of a chickpea, prized as an antioxidant.”

  “So, Nigel stuck diamonds inside the fruit?”

  “It has a pit in the middle. You drill out the pit and place a diamond inside. Then they’d put the jujube in the nightingale’s cage so it would swallow the date.”

  “Wow, that’s pretty clever.”

  Ling-Ru palpated the bird’s chest again. “A nightingale could swallow several of them if the jujubes are ripe.”

  “Amazing.”

  “Come, let’s get back to the others.”

  I picked up the bag of birds and, as we headed out of Nigel’s camp, I realized that Lu Lu had never returned. “Why don’t you go ahead? I’m going to look for Lu Lu. I’m worried she might think she’s in trouble.”

  “I doubt that’s what’s on her mind right now, Catherine. She probably took off and got lost.”

  I handed Ling-Ru the bag. “I doubt she’s lost. I’m going to go have a look around.”

  “You should let Jet find her.” Ling-Ru took the bag. “They’re very close.”

  “I can’t leave her out there. I won’t be long.”

  “Okay, but don’t go too far. If you can’t find her now, the trainers can go out and look for her tomorrow.”

  “I promise. I won’t go too far.”

  Finding Lu Lu

  I walked along a small footpath that led out of the clearing, following Lu Lu’s tracks in the soft earth in between the broadleaf litter. “Lu Lu?” I called out into the forest, the energy of my voice immediately absorbed into the surrounding vegetation.

  “Lu Lu? Where are you, girl?” I continued to call out to her, even though it sounded as if I was speaking in a soundproof room.

  The footpath quickly disappeared and I found myself pushing through the raw jungle, the understory now well overhead with a closed canopy a
bove, making it seem much darker than it was. Tree trunks and branches were covered in moss, and epiphytic ferns grew up in the forks of branches. Orchids and other flowering plants cascaded from the bases of branches. Warbled tones of birds accented different heights of the canopy all around.

  It was a spectacular place, had it not been for the thought of land mines and my new friend Lu Lu wandering around alone and most likely traumatized. I was determined to find her and tell her that everything was all right and that she hadn’t done anything wrong.

  I knew some people had a hard time imagining that an elephant could feel remorse, but I had no doubt that they could. A number of zookeepers I knew had described the aftermath of accidents involving keepers getting crushed by an elephant. The elephant would behave as if it was confused and distraught afterward, seemingly cognizant of what it had done and had experienced a sense of regret. Often the elephant would go into a funk for several days, similar to what can happen when an inexperienced elephant mother accidentally kills her calf.

  I couldn’t bear the thought of Lu Lu thinking that something bad might happen to her as a consequence of her killing a person, when the opposite was true. I wanted to reward Lu Lu for saving my life.

  There was a sudden rustle of vegetation. “Lu Lu?” A tree branch cracked up ahead. “Lu Lu? Is that you, Lu Lu?”

  Large yellowy-green football-sized spiky fruit hung heavily from stalks in the tree canopy above me. The smell of rotten eggs in the air was the telltale sign of a durian tree. Maybe Lu Lu wasn’t experiencing remorse at all—maybe she smelled durian and made her way over to this tree for a snack.

  I stepped into the clearing made by the durian canopy. A large elephant stood below the durian tree. “Lu Lu?”

  The jungle floor was littered with durian fruit in various stages of fermentation. The smell of rotten eggs was overpowering.

  As I approached Lu Lu at the base of the tree, she rolled the tip of her trunk around, holding it just off the ground. She didn’t seem interested in eating.

  When elephants were at a loss, socially, they would often exhibit this kind of distraction behavior. Sometimes, an elephant would pick up pods, grass, bark, or even a branch, twist it around in the tip of their trunk, and then drop it. Bulls that I studied in Kruger would engage in this false-feeding behavior when they were nervous about the presence of a more dominant bull or my sudden appearance nearby. They would face the opposite direction and pretend to feed while watching me over their shoulder.

  Despite how it seemed, elephants have a surprising ability to see quite well behind them without turning their head. It’s as if they don’t want to let on that they know what’s going on and behave as if they are doing something else. To the untrained eye, it looks like they are oblivious.

  As I approached her, I felt the need to hum something soothing. I don’t know why “Amazing Grace” popped into my head, and certainly not for any feelings of my own remorse for having lost a friend—quite the opposite. But I needed to help this friend back on her footing.

  I stroked her trunk and Lu Lu rumbled and flapped her ears. I leaned into her and she wrapped her trunk around me and held me next to her chest. I leaned my forehead into her flank and kept humming and then singing, “I once was lost, but now am found.”

  Lu Lu rumbled again and I scratched her flank as she held me, absorbing my offer of solidarity. “Was blind, but now I see.”

  We stood like this for some time, me singing and her rumbling, before she bent her leg so that I could climb up. I assumed this meant that she was now at peace with what had happened and she was ready to return to camp and rejoin the group.

  Lu Lu slowly made her way out of the dense forest without me steering her with my legs. I was grateful for her lead because everything looked different than it had when I was walking, and I had trouble getting my bearings.

  Lu Lu seemed to be on autopilot, and I had complete faith in her abilities. I couldn’t have felt safer on her back and away from the jungle floor.

  The dense forest thinned out into secondary-growth forest with a lot of banana trees and low broadleaf bushes with a fairly open canopy above. The late-afternoon sun was heavy in the sky in between the large old-growth trees. The daylight was going to disappear very quickly at this time. We needed to get back to camp.

  As if Lu Lu had read my mind, she started moving her legs faster. And just as we were striking a rhythm, my thoughts were interrupted by Lu Lu’s rumblings. She was clearly disturbed by something.

  “What is it, Lu Lu?” I couldn’t see anything but banana trees and unidentified tall hardwoods. Then I heard the movement of plants in all directions.

  Suddenly, the banana trees came alive with wild elephants. There was a huge commotion just ahead of us as a cow charged us at close range. Lu Lu bellowed and ran at the charging elephant until two giant skulls almost collided. I gripped her ears so I wouldn’t fall off. If their heads clashed, there was no way I was going to be able to hang on.

  Both elephants stopped short of colliding and flapped their ears at each other in rapid succession, rumbling loudly. Then they dropped their trunks to the ground like a length of fire hose and proceeded to urinate and defecate while all the others joined in the greeting ceremony.

  I had never dreamed I’d get so close to such an interaction. But, as amazing as it was to be in the middle of this special ritual, I was also terrified. Riding bareback was all well and good within a party of trained elephants. Out here in the raw jungle with Lu Lu and a herd of wild elephants and me was entirely different.

  I had zero control over this situation and was completely dependent on Lu Lu’s goodwill. I had no choice but to remain calm and hope the mood of the group didn’t escalate.

  Mercifully, the elephant reunion ended without incident and we were back on our way again, heading toward our camp. I could only assume that Lu Lu had known these elephants during the time she spent traversing these mountains carrying illegal goods for Nigel. Or she could have been one of the elephants that had been stolen out of the wild and we had just happened upon her long-lost family.

  Lu Lu picked up the pace again as we got closer to camp and started rumbling madly. I wasn’t sure what she was picking up on and tried to calm her down, to little effect.

  Lu Lu bellowed loudly as we entered camp. And suddenly I realized why.

  At the sight of Lu Lu, Dim Sum came roaring and screaming over, and they had the most heartfelt reunion I had ever experienced in either elephants or humans. Tears of joy streamed down my cheeks. As terrible as it was that Lily was gone, Dim Sum and Lu Lu were now free to be together—free at last to express their love for each other.

  Lost Daughters

  The next morning, I had trouble saying goodbye. Lu Lu and I had formed an extremely strong bond in a very short period of time. I wasn’t ready to leave my blood sister. I was at a loss at the thought of having to say goodbye, and admittedly a little embarrassed about my fumbling, but didn’t know how to cover it up.

  I went to spend some time with Lu Lu and Dim Sum as they ate their breakfast. Dim Sum had backed himself up against Lu Lu and wouldn’t leave her side.

  “You don’t want to leave her, do you?” Ling-Ru asked.

  “Is it that obvious?”

  She laughed. “You’ve been walking around like you’ve been touched by the friggin’ Illuminati since yesterday.”

  “You’re mean.”

  “No, I get it.” She put a hand on my shoulder. “It’s totally understandable. You’ve probably never had the opportunity to have a relationship with an elephant. You’ve always been at a distance, imagining what they might be experiencing emotionally, and feeling like you understand them and want to make a connection, but you’ve been torn because the scientist side of your brain tells you to keep a professional distance. But in this extreme situation, you were lucky enough to form a bond with an elephant and it’s intoxicating—understandably so. I’m sure Lu Lu immediately realized the gift she was given by hav
ing you as her companion.”

  Tears welled up in my eyes. I had forgotten just how well Ling-Ru was able to read my emotions. “Thank you.” I hugged her.

  “You’re the one who spent her career thinking about how smart elephants are.” She gave Lu Lu a pat. “Why doubt them now? And look at it this way. You did her a favor. All that negative energy she had stored up since her calf was stolen got to be channeled to a good cause. Who knows how she would have channeled it otherwise.”

  “I appreciate your understanding.” I rubbed Lu Lu’s flank. “I also can’t help but see us as kindred spirits—that we’ve both lost our daughters over greed.”

  “Perhaps the three of us are kindred spirits.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I lost a daughter, too,” Ling-Ru confided.

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “I couldn’t tell you the whole story about Liao.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I didn’t want you to think that I was still living in that bubble. I couldn’t tell you the happy ending involving having Sam in my life, so I thought it best not to tell you that part of my past.”

  “What happened?”

  “I had just found out I was pregnant.” Ling-Ru smiled with faraway eyes. “We were so happy. We had started painting the nursery and buying baby supplies. Everything seemed so hopeful. But then one day he was called to go on a long trip. He didn’t say where. And he never called or wrote while he was gone. When he came back, he was different. I was almost three months pregnant and he could barely look at me. I couldn’t understand what had happened.

  When I confronted him as we were having a special tea he had made that night, he refused to acknowledge that something was wrong. I even tried to get him to touch the baby inside my belly but he refused.

  “And then the next night, none of that seemed to matter. I bled so badly I thought I was going to die. Liao rushed me to the hospital. After they delivered the news that we had lost our daughter, he sat in the chair next to my bed and wept like I had never seen a man cry—like the whole world came crashing down on him.”