I take the lens cap from my camera and glimpse a tiny reflection of myself in its mirror. Is this what she sees: another one of those small humans, with its odd aura of scents? Does she see details: my hat, my camera, my idiotic grin?
Morula stands square on, keeping her eyes upon me. Her cobbled forehead broadens from her nose upward in a triangular shape. The top of a tree is visible over her right shoulder, as if she has a giant nosegay tucked behind her ear. Short bristles like an old man’s buzz cut outline the top of her head. Because of the way she’s standing, ears flattened against her shoulders, Morula seems slim, her skull almost hollowed. The tip of her trunk flops over itself in a loose coil and points down like a curved arrow. It begins to twitch in an irregular rhythm.
I take a goofy photograph of Morula – like she’s bored and playing with the only thing at hand – her trunk.
Morula poses. I take her photograph.
Behind us, around us, for 360 degrees, the Botswana landscape surrounds us. And in that moment neither one of us pays it a bit of attention.
Jabu and Thembi take advantage of the break forage with gusto, as if they hadn’t eaten all morning. Thembi reaches into the shoots of a palm seedling, using the fingers of her trunk like a pair of pliers to extract a single shoot, ridged with sharp thorns. Ignoring the thorns, she crunches the shoot as if it’s a piece of sugar cane. Supposedly it tastes like a coconut. Due to its saw-shaped edges, I’m not about to try it.
Doug joins Sandi and me. He asks, “Have you ever seen an elephant’s nictitating membrane?”
No, I haven’t. Not many chances to do that, where I live.
“Steady Morula.” He puts both hands up by her left eye and uses them to hold it open. An opaque, reddish membrane slides from the corner of her eye toward the front of her face, toward her trunk.
“It helps protect the eye from sand,” Doug says, “or when she sticks her face in a bush.”
Morula stands perfectly still.
Such trust, I think. I hate it when a doctor holds my eye open, shines a bright light into it and causes tears to course down my cheek.
Doug releases Morula’s eyelid. She blinks several times, and then knuckles her eye with the tip of her trunk curled as tight as a fist. As she rubs, a dark smudge, a triangle of tears, spreads like a delta from the corner of her eye.
Morula and I face each other, watchers watching, measuring each other. Steadfast, she looks down her nose at me. I gaze upward into an iris of liquid oak with sun flecks and shadows in it.
I remember the camera hanging from my neck and lift it. I feel the earth breathing, the air turning older; each moment caught, and then left behind.
“Hello,” I whisper.
The light from her eye just now reaches mine.
Based in Port Townsend, Washington, CHERYL MERRILL has had essays appear in Fourth Genre, Pilgrimage, Seems, South Loop Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Adventum and Isotope. “Singing Like Yma Sumac” was selected for Best of Brevity, Creative Nonfiction #27, and Short Takes: Model Essays for Composition. “Trunk,” was chosen for Special Mention in Pushcart 2008. She’s currently working on a book, Larger than Life: Living in the Shadows of Elephants.