Morula’s feet scuff up muffled coughs of dust, and I slog along in her footprints. In sand as finely ground as cake flour, her prints barely register. With each step, she leaves behind outlines of small moons. We cross the recent, delicate hoof prints of impala and her moons obliterate them.

I plant a boot inside the crater of her footprint. The brand name of my boots is imprinted on the soles,; a clever advertisement made with each step.

My feet make deeper impressions than Morula’s feet because each one of my steps applies more pressure per square inch. All my weight transfers to my feet, two small points of contact with the earth. Morula’s weight spreads over four large footpads the size of a medium-pan pizza. Inside her shallow print, my boot print leaves behind a deeper exclamation point.

Tramping along in Morula’s wake, I’m beginning to get the hang of all this walking and browsing — less sweat, less reliance on my water bottle. Although I’m only here for six more days, I’m beginning to wish I could do this every day of my life.

Enticed by a nearby tidbit, Thembi stops, sniffs at a bush willow, and daintily picks a single leaf to taste-test. Morula and Jabu stop and not-so-daintily join, ripping entire branches from the bush.

Deft as magicians, they strip off soft leaves with their trunks. Jabu crams a wad of leaves into his mouth. He drags one foot and stirs up a gauzy curtain of powdered insects, ash, mud, and dust. From his belly up, Jabu is slate; from his belly down, seen through the gauzy curtain, he’s a bit rosier, more dove.

Thembi moves away from the willow and stops near a patch of sand. She squeezes the accordion folds of her trunk, swings it upward, and blows dust across her back. She powders herself again and again, using the same sandy spot with its talcum of dust.

Doug stands aside and watches all three elephants with a paternal smile.

He walks over to Thembi and passes beneath her chin. She stops powdering and murmurs a throaty rumble as he approaches. Creases thicken at the corners of Doug’s eyes. He pats her leg.

“Thembi’s a good girl,” Doug assures her.

She reaches sideways with her trunk and leaves a wet smear on Doug’s pant leg. Compared to the other two elephants, Thembi is relatively small. Doug can almost look her straight in the eye.

Jabu and Morula finish browsing and we get moving again. There’s a lot of languid movement packed into the word browse. Days and weeks and years of walking. Walking and stopping. Walking and stopping. In its lifetime, an elephant walks the equivalent of five times around the circumference of the earth.

Now that I’m walking at a pace that matches the world around me, I feel every inch of skin on my body. My breathing slows and I find a different rhythm to my life, one built around a new sense of time. Years pass as we cross a dry lagoon.

A faint sizzle above my head makes me look up. A pointed dart with wings moves steadily across the pale blue sky and spawns a cloud of ice behind itself for a hundred miles or more. Its contrail broadens from a sharp point into a wide cottony smudge. One of the astronauts reported from space that contrails could be seen over all parts of the world, often radiating from major airports like the spokes on a wheel.

Thembi, an evenly proportioned elephant, has matched ears, long-lashed eyes, and a diamond-shaped scar on the bridge of her nose. Doug calls her his Princess. And it’s the Princess who’s farting as I walk along beside her. Big, burbling farts.

Percolating along, Thembi lifts her tail and farts again. It’s a stupendous displacement of air. In this just-right light, I can actually see this fart. It looks like heat waves blasting from the back of a jet engine.

All the trees, grasses, and leaves Thembi eats end up in her ten-gallon stomach, which is pretty much just a holding area. From her stomach, roughage travels into her small intestine and then on into her large intestine. Joining the two intestines is a junction called a cecum, which is where digestion actually takes place. Her cecum is filled with billions of microbes, just like most mammals, including humans. The microbes break down the cellulose of leaves and trees into soluble carbohydrates and give Thembi enough methane gas to power a car 20 miles each day.

I wonder, as I walk behind her, just how one could harness this gassy natural resource. Back home, I live at the edge of a small town. Twenty miles would more than cover my daily errands. I imagine exhaust fumes smelling like fermented grass. I imagine driving down highways inhaling the scent of mulched trees. I wonder, as I walk behind her, why I think of such things.
My boots kick up dust the color and texture of crumbled parchment. Minute-by-minute, the morning simmers a degree higher. Trees lean away from the heat, curl their leaves to protect moisture, holding their breath until the cool of evening, waiting months for the clouds that will save them.

Sandi drops back to join me at the end of the line. She has the calm face of a mother with large, exuberant children. Her eyes have white creases at their corners from squinting into the sun. She wears a huge, floppy cloth hat with a brim longer in back than in front.

“Do you ever get tired of this?” I ask, swinging my arm, trying to encompass the entire scene. Four inches shorter than I am, Sandi tilts her head to look into my face.

“No. We’re family,” she says. I don’t have a reply to that simple statement so we both watch the elephants. Then she says, “Sometimes I miss makeup and movies. But not often.”

“Morula, here,” she calls out. Morula stops, turns around and faces us.

“How many commands do they understand?” I ask.

“Verbal? About a hundred. And that’s limited only by our imagination, not theirs.”

Morula leans in like an eager teenager.

She’s a little too close for Sandi’s liking. “Did you know Morula’s our lap elephant? She’d crawl in if your lap was big enough.”

“Morula, over and back,” Sandi instructs, tapping on Morula’s leg. “Over” means “to the right.” Morula backs up a step and swings right.

“Over and back.” Morula is carefully responsive. When you’re as big as she is, every movement has consequence. Each step Morula takes is slow, deliberate, and precisely placed.

Once Sandi has her positioned, she gestures to me. I step forward and place a hand on Morula’s trunk. Studded with sparse bristles, it feels like a stiff old brush. I look up.

Three-inch lashes cast shadows down Morula’s cheeks. She blinks and her lashes sweep against her skin like small brooms. A bit of matter is clustered in the corner of her lower eyelid.

Each of the more than 200 lashes around my eye is shed every three to five months. Has anyone ever done research on the shed rate of elephant eyelashes?

I could.

I could stand here forever and look into the oak burls of her eyes.

Only one and a half inches in length, her eyes are just a little larger than mine, small in relation to her body size. A zebra’s eyes are bigger. So are those of an ostrich or an impala.

I have front-facing, binocular vision. It’s hard for me to look at both where I have been and where I am going, impossible to see both the stars and the ground at once. Binocular vision sends two separate images by two separate eyes to be combined into one image in the brain. It’s a thoughtless process, totally involuntary, but miracle enough.

Morula’s vision is also front facing, binocular, but she has the disadvantage of a huge blind spot caused by her nose. Place both hands between your eyes, fingertips to forehead in the manner of prayer, and you will see what I mean.

Cross-eyed, Morula tries to look down her trunk at me. I am in her blind spot. She snorts.
Startled, I step backward without looking, without caring if the lip of the world were right behind me.

Her eyes are nearly hidden, tucked behind the curve of her forehead. She raises her head to focus on me. She’s motionless, concentrating. I can’t even hear her breathing.

I have this odd feeling that she wants me to like her as much as I want her to like me.