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  Captive elephants have repeatedly demonstrated their ingenuity at overcoming human constraints on their freedom. They have dropped large rocks on electric fences to short them out. They’ve piled branches on similar barriers, knocked large trees onto them, even picked up smaller elephants and thrown them, just as they used Mbali as a battering ram in the boma. One morning in January 2004, not long before Brian caught Msholo reaching for the oak, an elephant named Burma hoisted a log from her paddock at the Auckland Zoo in New Zealand and dropped it onto an electric fence, shorting it out, and then broke through a gate. A married couple walking in a nearby park saw the elephant amble by and tried to talk to her, but she ignored them, possibly because they were speaking English and she only responded to commands in German, Maori, and Sri Lankan. Burma munched on leaves for about fifteen minutes before her keepers returned her unharmed, but not before she had proven once again that elephants had mastered at least the fundamentals of electricity.

  “They’re so smart,” said Brian, gazing with admiration at Msholo and the others. He understood Lee Ann’s allegiance to the chimps, but he had trained primates, too, and had no doubt that elephants surpassed them. It was awe-inspiring to watch their minds process information, work out problems, experiment with solutions. The four orphans from Africa weren’t just probing the zoo’s security measures. They were testing every aspect of their new lives—the routines, the equipment, their keepers, even one another. By now, several months had passed since the four of them had been loaded off the 747 and stepped out of their crates into their stalls. For weeks, Brian had stayed with the elephants around the clock. In the other departments, his superhuman vigilance immediately entered him into the urban lore of the zoo. Noting how rarely he was seen in the rest of the zoo, people began to talk about him as though he were some phantom hybrid of the Elephant Man and Mary Poppins.

  If PETA’s propaganda was right and the elephants were Brian’s prisoners, then he was their prisoner too. When he couldn’t keep his eyes open any longer, he would turn off every light and crash on the cot in the hall, plummeting into unconsciousness even as he listened for movement from the stalls on the other side of the double doors. Some nights his sleep was interrupted by trumpet blasts; other times he woke to rumbles that he felt as much as heard. Whatever roused him, he would force himself out of the cot and shuffle into his office, no matter the hour, to stare bleary-eyed at the feeds from the night-vision cameras. In front of him, in the dark, a new herd was forming.

  In those first days, wildness radiated off the new arrivals. Msholo and the others didn’t act like circus elephants or zoo elephants such as Ellie. Though they allowed their keepers to draw near, they were restless and uncertain. Brian kept them in separate stalls so they wouldn’t take out their anxieties on one another. Three of them—Msholo, Sdudla, and Mbali—had grown up together in Hlane. Matjeka came from Mkhaya and was relatively new to the others, though they had spent months together in the boma. Ellie didn’t know what to make of any of them and kept her distance. When they drew close to the thick bars that divided their stalls and extended their trunks to smell her, she’d cry out and back away. Who could blame her? Though they were from the same species, Ellie and the Swazi elephants spoke entirely different languages. She was attuned to humans and to their commands, while they communicated as though they were still on the savanna. After a few days, though, they all began to relax. Soon Brian was putting the two bulls together at night, giving them a chance to bond like other young males in a bachelor herd back in the bush, and pairing Matjeka and Mbali in a single stall too. He tried different configurations, looking to see which was the most harmonious. As Ellie calmed down and got to know the others, Brian tried putting her with Mbali, and then with Matjeka. Brian was already memorizing everything about the elephants—the way each of them moved, the way they thought, the sounds they made when they were hungry or irritated. He didn’t need to peer up at their faces to know who was who. By now he recognized them from the curve and color and length of their tusks, from their posture and attitude and the notches and veins on their ears and the way they held their trunks.

  “I can tell ’em apart,” he said, “even by looking at their legs.”

  When Brian wanted to read their mood, he didn’t look to their faces first. The anatomy of an elephant’s face renders it much less expressive than, say, the face of a human or a chimp or even a dog. Their eyes are small and not particularly revealing, although an experienced handler or trainer can judge the level of alertness by how wide the eyes are open. Because elephants have no tear ducts, excess secretions flow down their cheeks, often giving the mistaken impression that they are crying. Any facial expression is typically overshadowed by the movement of the elephant’s ears and trunk. Elephants that are excited or angry tend to flap their ears with more vigor. When they relax, their ears relax as well. They signal wariness by raising their heads, spreading their ears and holding them open, and extending their trunks in a “J” shape, with the tip pushed forward to gather olfactory information about whatever or whomever has raised their guard. When they want to show slight irritation, they tap their trunks on a smooth flat surface, similar to how humans drum their fingers when they’re bored.

  Day after day, Brian pieced together the clues, gaining traction on the personality and character of each elephant. Msholo, the big bull, was strong and already showed interest in breeding. Whenever possible, he gravitated toward the females and sniffed their urine to see if they were in estrus. Early on, though, Brian noticed that Msholo deferred to the other bull. Sdudla was extremely smart and a fast learner. Already he was finding his way through the routines of the zoo and the expectations of his keepers. As the dominant bull, Sdudla was more aggressive and did not let Msholo or any of the elephants boss him. Everywhere he went, his presence carried an extra charge.

  “There’s a little more pressure around,” said Brian. “He pushes back.”

  Msholo and Sdudla had been competing almost since the day they arrived. In elephant herds, only the dominant male has breeding privileges. Out in the yards, the two bulls would butt heads to impress the females. The contest swung back and forth. Sdudla ruled at first, but then one day he pushed his rival too far. They got into a brawl, and Msholo stood up for himself, and suddenly the balance of power tipped in his direction.

  Mbali provided comic relief to the male posturing. At first she acted shy, almost demure. In the mornings, when the staff opened the gates to the yards and the other elephants hurried forward, Mbali hung back. She’d take a step or two out into the sunlight, then change her mind and turn around. For hours, she would stand at the doorway, reluctant to either venture out or return to her stall. She soon got past her timidity and assumed the role of the group’s spoiled and slightly mischievous teenager. She liked to snatch things out of the keepers’ hands and sometimes out of the other elephants’ trunks. When the bigger animals were browsing on a tree branch that had been cut for them, she would sneak up and grab the branch and run away.

  As the only elephant from Mkhaya, Matjeka was having trouble fitting in. When she stood near the others, she almost always positioned herself with her tail facing them, a sign of submission. Even though she was bigger and older than Mbali and should have outranked her, Matjeka had been relegated—or had relegated herself—to the bottom of the hierarchy.

  “An outcast,” Brian called her.

  Ellie, so accustomed to humans, was the easiest to read. Brian kept a mental inventory of her likes and dislikes. Ellie didn’t like female keepers. She quavered if a grasshopper landed near her feet. If she heard a truck driving by, she was fine. But the sound of a tractor set her on edge. As the months passed, Brian had also noted an empathy in Ellie not unlike what the primate keepers had observed so often with Herman. Perhaps this was not surprising, given that both the elephant and the chimp had been raised by humans and had imprinted on them instead of their own species. Herman’s empathy had led him to reach out to the lowly Bamboo.
Now Ellie’s declared itself in the kindness she offered to the most woeful member of her group. The keepers saw Ellie browsing beside Matjeka, standing close to her, even looking out for her. When little Mbali grew feisty and tried to take advantage of Matjeka, Ellie would step in to defend her companion.

  Although Ellie still had a great deal to learn about being an elephant, the keepers could see her confidence surging, especially with Matjeka. Though they had come from opposite corners of the world and had known each other only a short time, the two females were rapidly growing into sisters. Every day they walked out together into the sun-drenched yards. At night, they were content when the keepers placed them in adjoining stalls and allowed them to sleep side by side. One had been in exile all her life. The other was an outsider. It was possible that they recognized something in each other—a social awkwardness, a sense of not belonging. Lifelong friendships had been built on less.

  Ellie was guiding Matjeka and the others through the basics of zoo life, showing them how to stay calm when the humans touched their trunks or exfoliated their skin with brushes. For captive elephants to remain healthy, skin care was almost as important as their foot care. One of the most crucial things Ellie demonstrated was how to relax inside the ominously named Elephant Restraint Device, better known as an ERD. Located in the back of the elephant building, behind the stalls, the ERD was an updated version of the handmade equipment the behavioral specialists in San Diego had used to work safely with Chico. A giant metal box with thick bars and moveable walls, the ERD looked a bit like a big cage, except that nobody at the zoo uttered that word out loud anymore. The staff preferred to call the ERD by its more common nickname, the Hugger. To help the elephants grow accustomed to the Hugger, Brian and the other keepers made it an inescapable part of their daily routine. The elephants ate some of their food while standing in it. They walked through it to reach the yards and back through it again to return to their stalls. Every time an elephant entered the Hugger, a keeper pushed a green button, and the side walls closed in so that the elephant couldn’t make any big movements. Keeping the animal relatively still was essential if the staff was to safely work up close, reaching through openings in the bars to bathe it, to train it with conditioning, to draw blood and urine and work on its feet and skin, to teach it how to inhale water into its trunks and then exhale it back again so that the fluids from inside could be tested for tuberculosis. Elephants are at special risk for TB. Over the years, several have died from it in captivity.

  In a few weeks the zoo would use the Hugger to hold Ellie in place while the German specialists performed her artificial insemination. To some, it might have seemed odd to go to such lengths to produce another elephant calf in the United States when southern Africa overflowed with elephants. But Lowry Park’s recent experience, importing the four juveniles from Swaziland, had shown just how complicated and controversial, not to mention expensive, that process could be. For months, the zoo had been monitoring the level of luteinizing hormone (LH) in Ellie’s blood. Many female mammals experience an increase in LH just before they ovulate. Female elephants are unusual because their menstrual cycle, which lasts from fourteen to sixteen weeks, is keyed to a double LH surge. When the first surge hits, the second wave typically follows twenty-one days later, triggering ovulation and preparing the uterus for implantation of a fertilized egg. Researchers do not yet fully understand the function of the first LH surge; possibly it alters the cow’s scent to alert bull elephants that she will soon be ready to conceive. Whatever function nature intended, the first surge was tremendously useful to any zoo hoping to schedule an artificial insemination. Once the initial surge showed up in the blood tests, it was almost certain that the cow would ovulate exactly three weeks later.

  Ellie’s first LH surge had declared itself that January. The Berlin boys had been notified and had already booked their flights for mid-February. Soon they would bring their scopes and their ultrasound equipment and arrange to gather DNA from a bull at Animal Kingdom outside Orlando. They didn’t want to collect the sample too far from Lowry Park, if possible; it was extremely difficult to freeze elephant semen without damaging it. Once they had the DNA, they would bring it directly to Ellie.

  In the meantime, Brian and his staff prepared Ellie for her appointment with the Germans. Every day, they called her into the Hugger and rehearsed, so she wouldn’t be startled or scared during the actual procedure. Ellie seemed fine. In fact, she seemed to like standing in the Hugger, because her keepers always gave her more hay to distract her. As Ellie waited patiently, wrapping her trunk around another mouthful of feed, Brian French would stand in front of her, stroking her leg and praising her. It was one of the few times he got to be so close to the elephants, and it felt good.

  Brian had grown up with free contact, first training with elephants as a child and then later at Ringling Bros. Like so many other veteran keepers, he missed the intimacy of those days. When Brian had been hired at the zoo, Lex had already decided that the handlers would only work with the elephants in protected contact. Brian had agreed. He knew that for Lex it was personal, because on the day Char-Lee Torre had died, Lex had stood with the paramedics, waiting for the helicopter to take her to the hospital. Though Brian had only worked at the zoo for a year, he knew that once Lex made up his mind about something, almost nothing would change it. Accepting these things did not mean that Brian had to love protected contact.

  One way or another, he was happy to be working with elephants again. He had known so many over the years that the stories flowed out of him. He still talked about a circus elephant he’d known who recognized commands in four languages: English, German, French, and Hindi. Sitting in his office, he recalled the time when he was six, performing in Japan, and he and his family rode out a typhoon in a railway car with their elephants.

  As a boy, Brian’s best friend was an elephant, owned by his family, named Shirley. “She was my elephant.” When he was only three or four, Shirley would raise him up with her trunk, and he would climb onto her head and then wrap himself around her neck. Against his face, she felt warm. His body moved up and down with the rise and fall of her breathing. Often, he would nod off.

  “Some kids ride in cars and they fall asleep right away. For me it was elephants.”

  So many years later, Brian would return to Shirley and the other elephants in his dreams. In these visions, he was small again, so light on their sloping backs. Sitting on high with a child’s hands, touching their thick skin as the great beasts carried him forward.

  All that power, fluid and effortless, rippling underneath.

  In the elephant barn, the sacred and the scientific were being united. The two specialists from Berlin had arrived and were now trying to spark a new life inside Ellie.

  She stood inside the Hugger, munching hay. By now she was accustomed to humans sticking her with needles and probing her body. Brian and another keeper, Steve Lefave, stood close by and reassured her.

  “Steady,” they told her. “It’s all right.”

  Brian and Steve were up front, near Ellie’s trunk. The two specialists, Drs. Hildebrandt and Göritz, were behind her, wearing helmets outfitted with ultrasonic goggles and plastic protective gear that covered their entire bodies. They looked like astronauts embarked on a perilous journey. Which was about right.

  They had already inserted a catheter and an endoscope equipped with a light and a miniature video camera deep inside the opening of Ellie’s ten-foot-long reproductive tract; in female elephants, this is called a vestibule. They had also inserted an ultrasound probe into Ellie’s rectum, to follow the catheter’s path toward Ellie’s cervix on monitors positioned nearby. Early that morning, they had collected the DNA from the bull at Animal Kingdom. Other vets sometimes advocated gathering elephant semen by means of an electric shock to the rectum—a technique originally developed to allow paraplegic men to father children. Dr. Hildebrandt preferred not to rely on this technique, because he had learned from experience that t
he bulls sometimes were injured, either by the procedure or by the accompanying anesthesia. He found it more humane, and more effective, to reach a gloved arm inside the bull and manually stimulate the elephant until he ejaculated into a plastic sleeve.

  Some would no doubt have snickered to even imagine such a thing. But for Dr. Hildebrandt, a boyish-looking thirty-nine-year-old with tousled brown hair, it was just another day in a remarkable career. Working with Göritz and other colleagues at the Institute for Zoo Biology, Hildebrandt specialized in reproductive medicine not just for elephants but hundreds of other species around the world. Known for his pioneering work in the use of ultrasound, he had probed the ovaries of Komodo dragons, tested the morphology and motility of rhino sperm, and evaluated the chemical signals transmitted in the urine of giant pandas. On the night the Berlin Wall fell and the streets of his city filled with ecstatic celebration, Hildebrandt was at the East Berlin Zoo, injecting a fertility drug into a rare yak.

  “He’ll ultrasound just about anything that lives or crawls,” another zoologist once said.

  Hildebrandt and his colleagues were best known for their unprecedented success at helping captive elephants deliver calves through AI. For years, no one else had managed to pull it off. Captive elephant populations in the United States were slowly dying off. Using ultrasound equipment and probes they designed themselves, the Berlin boys had radically advanced the scientific understanding of elephant reproductive anatomy and developed new procedures that highly increased the chances of a pregnancy.

  Obtaining the DNA from the male elephant, it turned out, is the easy part. Delivering the semen to its destination is much more tricky. The opening to an elephant’s vagina is smaller than a dime—the mechanics of elephant reproduction do not require vaginal penetration by the male—and that opening is flanked by two false holes. “Blind pouches,” Hildebrandt called them. The opening to the female’s bladder is also nearby, complicating things even further. If the catheter doesn’t reach the right hole, neither will the semen. Sometimes the procedure took hours. But Ellie was fairly calm. The two vets from Berlin worked quickly, adjusting their instruments, reaching deep inside Ellie to accomplish what no bull had ever attempted. The lights in the elephant barn were turned low to make it easier for the team to study the ultrasound and video feeds. Everyone who was gathered around Ellie worked quietly so as not to startle the patient. If Ellie suddenly shifted or took a wrong step, the humans behind and underneath her could easily have been injured.