The elephant didn’t know much about the ways of humans. She’d been born in the concrete confines of what she knew the little pale creatures with flattened noses, tiny eyes, and mousy little bodies called the “Intercity Zoo.” The older elephants trumpeted stories about savannas and fields of grass and enclosures that stretched out over the horizon and not just to the walls at 15th street and Main Cross. She just thought of it as home.
She had no name the khaki ones would recognize, like Mark, or Stephanie, and certainly no last name matched to some long dead occupation. If one had to put it to words, she would have considered herself ‘Pacing Child of the Enclosure Queen Green Grass,’ as elephants use their favorite food as a naming convention. And Green Grass found the actions of one particular adorable little human (as elephants find all humans cheek-pinchingly cute in appearance, so tiny and frail that they are) somewhat confounding.
The human’s sound name was ‘MMMMHAAAAAMDDD’ and he often came to watch the elephants. Enough that Green Grass came to notice him.
She watched as he opened a figure-eight shaped case with those nimble little fingers that reminded Green Grass of miniature bony trunks, and pulled out some strange human contraption of shiny wood. Then out came a stick, which the little man began to slide it back and forth.
Green Grass was familiar with music, what elephant wasn’t? But this… was something different than what the metal trees blasted out all over the extra hard paths between the enclosures. Here, the strings on the object danced, and the sound felt warmer, more soulful.
It felt like the human was trying to say something through the sounds.
Green Grass had often wondered if it was a way of speaking, like elephant foot stomps, but the going theory among the Intercity elephants was that the humans mostly jabbered at each other with mouth sounds. And unlike their jabbers, the music sounds were mathematical forms and waves of emotion and feeling, feeling being something the elephants debated whether humans had the capacity for given their frequent atrocities and predations on elephant-kind.
But even the most horrified elephant knew there was tremendous variation among humankind, and that it was the sign of a tiny mind to imagine that the actions of some can be extrapolated through to the whole. Elephants generally were not down with racism.
They saw this as simple math, and though most humans might be unaware of it, elephants are masters of the maths and spend long days examining and turning over complex proofs and elegant formulas in their minds as they stand in place and sway. They did not evolve themselves into mighty giants with massive brains just to focus on survival. The elephant’s mind is a mind-palace of memories, advanced theorems, and imaginative daydreams about fantastical stories of hero-elephants of generations past.
Green Grass mostly ignored humans, but when MMMMHAAAAAMDDD played, the elephants all crowded to the corner of the enclosure to watch him play through the fencing to them.
They swayed softly to the music, lauded the 3/4 tempo amongst themselves, and then wondered why he’d played them music as he packed up.
“Fifteen dollars in the bank,” he told them, though they couldn’t understand his crude, simple tongue as elephants had long since designed and adopted an advanced dialectical linguistic language of trumpeting, grunting, snorting, pounding the ground, and shaking their ears.
But he looked sad, the elephants decided, so they picked up on that, at least. To cheer him up they told him a joke about two lions and a jackrabbit that had Mother Rotten Logs laugh so hard she had to go lay down for a bit. But MMMMHAAAAAMDDD sort of jumped at the braying and stomping, and hurried off. So it was a source of surprise and excitement when he came back seven days later (a number sequence that humans really liked, the elephants noted. Some of them thought it was because it was a prime number, and some said they may be mathematically inclined given their engineering abilities), and played the elephants another haunting song on vibrating wires.
This one evoked planets wandering the cosmos, and deep time, and the infinite emptiness in between. Music is, after all, a universal language, so elephants know it’s subtleties well.
Green Grass felt almost overcome as she listened, and when he was done, MMMMHAAAAAMDDD bowed to the great, ancient, and wise elephants standing in front of him in the enclosure, the concrete barriers and metal fencing keeping them from crowding any closer.
“Gustav Holst,” MMMMHAAAAAMDDD said, and took a deep bow.
So the elephants all bowed back.
There was a lot of curious elephant chatter about the man and his music.
Some of the enclosure elements thought he did this to try and communicate with elephant-kind. Many humans had clearly been trying to make contact, by taking them into their cities, talking to them, even, oddly, riding them. Though riding humans tended to be cruel. Other elephants theorized that MMMMHAAAAAMDDD was lonely, and came to play in the hopes of some sort of connection.
“I guess,” MMMMHAAAAAMDDD said one day while packing up his musical device, “it isn’t as bad as when my great-grandfather fought in Sicily.”
The music man went on to tell them his great-grandfather had boiled his leather boots after slicing them apart with his shaving razor to make a stew with a moldy potato shared by ten other men hiding in the basements of a bombed out library. That was after gnawing the last of the boiled rat, cracking their tiny little legs to suck the marrow out from the center like a little straw.
But the elephants didn’t understand.
They just liked the little music man.
Who kept coming back.
Elephant Anecdote # 1
In some national parks, where elephants room freely, they notice that trash goes into trash cans, and will pick up trash discarded by careless, uncaring tourists who act as if the world is their trashcan. Cameras have footage of elephants carefully placing the trash in the appropriate receptacle, making them more arguably more civic-minded than many humans.
Does the elephant know what a dick move littering is? It is their environment as well, and any decent-minded creature wouldn’t want to pollute its own immediate surroundings.
Any decent minded creature.
And no one had to shame the elephants into doing this, or teach it to them.
Days passed. The moon ran through its phases. As time went on, MMMMHAAAAAMDDD’s clothes began to look more… tattered and full of creases. The bushy hair on his face grew longer. Crickets Are Tasty told Green Grass that she could see the man was becoming gaunt and bony, not fleshy and rosy-cheeked like the other humans who passed anonymously on by (yesterday there was a human with blue and green hair, like a parrot, Green Grass wanted to say, but it didn’t feel like the right time).
“The man is not eating,” said Mother Rotten Logs. “I can smell the starvation. His body is breaking itself down.”
And then, one day, MMMMHAAAAAMDDD didn’t show after his seven day break.
And another.
A whole lunar cycle came and went, and when MMMMHAAAAAMDDD next came he wore heavy, long clothes and gloves. His eyes didn’t look warm, and brown, and understanding. He was empty. Hungry.
“Too many raids,” he told the elephants. “I keep moving, living under the Smithwell bridge tonight.”
There was no music, just specks of sadness that swirled around in the air like ashy motes.
The elephants didn’t understand capitalism, as such, as they were so obviously more matriarchal anarchists in their leanings. However, they surmised their music man had been forced to abandon his instrument to survive, and they were overcome with emotion. They stood in a circle and trumpeted their sadness. Mother Rotten Logs went on a hunger strike, and the Intercity staff worried themselves sick trying to get her to eat.
“Poor mother,” Green Grass said. “Poor mother. She feels so strongly.”
They grieved their new friend, human though he was, so when he returned again after such a long absence, one must imagine just how excited the elephants were to see him. They shoved against the enclosure gate, trumpeted loudly, and pushed each other way to get the best spot nearest to MMMMHAAAAAMDDD.
“Where have you been?” they shouted.
“Why did you go?” they all asked.
But, as per usual, MMMMHAAAAAMDDD did not have a grasp of the elephant’s tongue, so mostly he stared in confusion and just a little fear at seven elephants all trying to get his attention.
And he took a few steps back. The concrete looked solid, but not to an elephant. It was not a bad idea, given how excited they were.
In the distance, Mother Rotten Logs noticed some new humans running down the hard pathways. They were dressed in black uniforms, and wore mirrors on their faces, and carried weapons to hurt and maim. They were shouty as they surrounded MMMMHAAAAAMDDD, like angry children on a school trip they didn’t want to be on, and in addition to the adrenaline the elephants could tell the abuse put some of the uniform-men into some kind of estrus, as their faces were flushed with sexual excitement at being able to dominate and hurt their fellow humans. The elephants would later discuss this among themselves, trying to understand why so many humans hated each other, but they didn’t fully care to comprehend the full spectrum of human depravity.
The elephants watched, in consternation, as the violin player lay on the hard, hot concrete pathway and whimpered.
“What do we do?” Mother Rotten Logs asked. “What do we do?”
The angry men in uniforms dragged MMMMHAAAAAMDDD away, and Green Grass screamed at them to stop.
“Your hunger strike didn’t work, because we can’t explain to them why you did it,” Green Grass said. “We have to show them our displeasure in a language they understand.”
“Oh,” said Mother Rotten Logs, “I see.”
“You see what?” Green Grass asked.
“How to communicate.”
Mother Rotten Logs, all ten thousand pounds of matronly anger, reared up as much as she could, struck the ground hard, and pointed to the concrete wall. “We are elephants, and that is but a mere wall. We have agreed to the enclosure pact, as we are fed, and treated fairly, and know almost nothing beyond its walls. The engineering marvels of the humans are a maze, we are ensconced deep in their lands. But this violence, it mars our peaceful kingdom, so we must speak out. To be silent would be complicity.”
And if there was one thing that morally disgusted elephants, it was complicity.
“I say we charge,” Mother Rotten Logs said.
“There must be strength in numbers,” said Green Grass. “It will take the whole herd.”
“Then we shall take a vote,” Mother Rotten Logs said.
Elephant Anecdote # 2
In India, there is an elephant that stakes out a road where trucks trundle down the asphalt loaded to the point of axles groaning with sugarcane. The elephant will block the road and force the trucks to stop, take its toll of sugarcane, and allow the truck to continue. Pure highway robbery!
Most elephants are law-abiding, but that is not to say that elephants aren’t clever, industrious, and not above a bit of petty banditry if needed.
So much has been taken from them, can they be denied setting up a toll road in their own environment?
The herd broke through the retaining wall en-masse, thudding their way out into the pathways as people scattered and screamed. Tons of muscled gray animal casually pushed aside booths, trees, and anything else in their way. The herd moved with all the purpose of a seal team, their large, dark eyes and lashes focused at the scrum of uniformed men ahead of them and the man now bloody and limp dragged between them.
“Give us back the music-giver!” they trumpeted, as people poured out of the gates to get away from them. The uniformed men were knocked down by panicked zoo patrons fleeing for their lives at a herd of stampeding elephants that brayed at them to “get the fuck out of the way!” But the humans didn’t understand, and the elephants had to be careful about stepping over, around, and past people sprawled on the ground and screaming.
But the elephants only had eyes for the black uniforms and mirrored faces, who turned around comically late to see a gray wall of elephantine anger trumpeting toward them.
They cried out to their deities and ran, and Green Grass shouted orders. The elephants split up and began to track their quarry.
Of course the uniform men shot at them. But not for long. Mother Rotten Logs had warned them about this, and the elephants knew: it was them or the men. Before most of the men could fire their metal slugs, they fell underfoot, and the elephants stomped and stomped and stomped until all that was left was a stain on the pathway.
Elephant Anecdote # 3
Elephants don’t just hold memories, they hold grudges.
In India’s Odisha province, an elephant killed a 68 year old woman who people suspect was a poacher that killed the elephant’s daughter. That’s some serious John Wick level revenge.
But the level of an elephant’s grudge was demonstrated when the elephant and its herd appeared at the woman’s funeral, where it trampled her grave and scattered those holding a ceremony, just to make sure. Then it destroyed her house, and the homes of two other relatives.
Elephants don’t play.
As some of the uniformed men realized they were being targeted for who they were by the elephants, they panicked. What the hell was this? But their outrage and shock did not register to the elephants, it felt hypocritical. Here they were, beating on people for who they were, taking them off the streets, and housing them in human zoos, but upset when something like that happened back to them. There were many in the world who liked to dish it, the elephants had come to realize, but shattered like fragile glass when it was served back to them.
Some men threw their clothes away, and tried to hide.
The elephants found them by their scent. They destroyed the little structures to get at the men inside.
There was a lot of screaming, and a lot of blood, but in the end, there were just mangled bodies, a herd of elephants surrounding a violinist, and an empty zoo.
The elephants sang for MMMMHAAAAAMDDD. Songs of savannas long lost to the herd, and tales of forests and lakes their ancestors once claimed as their territory. They sang of meteors, planets, and beauty, just like he evoked for them. And then, after their performance, Mother Rotten Logs lead MMMMHAAAAAMDDD to the edge of the zoo.
“You probably shouldn’t come back here,” she told the man. “There will be more looking for you.”
And, although visibly bewildered, MMMMHAAAAAMDDD understood the most basic thing that had happened. He nodded, thanked the elephants, and ran.
Elephant Anecdote # 4
After the shocking, brutal elephant stampede that saw several ICE agents die at the City Zoo while apprehending a suspect, the elephants voluntarily returned to their enclosure. A city-wide debate kicked off about what to do with the elephants, protests spontaneously occurred, and even a vigil as people argued about the event. Some insisted the elephants were antifa traitors, others called them heros. Throughout it all the elephants only watching, swaying, and muttering to each other. They exhibited no further signs of violence, or attempts to break out.
Eventually, animal behavior experts testified that the animals must have been panicked by the violence that happened in front of them, and spooked.
They were not scheduled to be executed for their crimes, but new policies about arrests in the zoo were enacted, and the elephants were cheered to learn that the zoo would be a place that all could come and be together at, and not be be harmed in front of the elephants. However, there were no more instruments played, much to their disappointment.
Mother Rotten Logs said it was a fair price to save a person from involuntary enclosure, or worse.
The elephants decided to renew their contract, and stay with the zoo. After all, you don’t think a ten thousand pound animal really needs to stay put, let alone a herd?
The walls were raised, and thickened, and assurances were made, and the even had fallen off the public consciousness when the funerals were held. The elephants broke out again, tracked down the cemetery, and while police frantically tried to cordon the area off, trampled the graves and left giant mounds of shit on them before returning to the zoo.
By that moment, everyone understood what the elephants were trying to communicate.