About the Author

Translated into nine foreign languages, Dale Peterson’s books have been named Best Book of the Year by Boston Globe, Denver Post, Discover, The Economist, Globe and Mail, Library Journal, and Village Voice. Two titles have been named Notable Books of the Year by the New York Times. Peterson is the author of the definitive biography Jane Goodall: The Woman Who Redefined Man, as well as The Ghosts of Gombe: A True Story of Love and Death in an African Wilderness, The Moral Lives of Animals, Giraffe Reflections, Chimpanzee Travels: On and Off the Road in Africa and Visions of Caliban: On Chimpanzees and People, which he coauthored with Goodall. He is on the executive board for PEN New England. He lives in Arlington, Massachusetts.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

[Short essay prefacing the readings in Chapter 1] Elephants and their ancestors, all members of the order Probosicidea--the proboscideans--emerged from the mammalian line some 60 million years ago in the form of such exotic creatures as the Moeritherium--a Latinized coinage honoring "the Wild Animal of Moeris." Moeris was the name of an ancient lake at the bottom of a vast sinkhole in Egypt where, at the start of the twentieth century, the British paleontologist Charles Andrews found fossil remnants of that particular beast. The Wild Animal of Moeris was about the size of a pig and the shape of a hippo, with eyes and ears situated high in an elongated skull that ended with four front incisors extended forward into four small tusks. The tusks guarded, it seems, an extended and flexible snout: a proboscis. Other comparable fossils more recently discovered in northern Africa suggest that early proboscideans may have wallowed in warm and shallow waters: the opening actors in an extended, successful, and remarkably diverse evolutionary drama that produced 8 families, 38 genera, and more than 160 species of trunked and tusked creatures who became dominating inhabitants on every continent except Antarctica and Australia. Not long after modern humans learned to make penetrating stone tools and developed the skills of group hunting, a wave of large-animal extinctions swept the planet, wiping out half the genera of mammals weighing more than 40 kilograms including all but a few of the dozens of large terrestrial proboscideans then alive. The extinction of a remnant group of mammoths surviving on the Wrangle Islands off the coast of Siberia, completed around 4,000 years ago, left only three final species. Those three are Asian elephants (Elephas maximas) and the African savanna (Loxodonta africana) and forest (Loxodonta cyclotis) elephants. Elephants are still alive, and with some effort you and I can still see and even, under special circumstances, touch them. We can experience them in the waking reality of the present. But they are going fast. For most people in most parts of the world, they are already gone. They are no longer present in the wild or part of the reality of people's daily lives, represented pathetically by a few isolated prisoners in zoos and circuses, remembered dreamily in a debased iconography as winsome Dumbos and Jumbos. In those parts of the world where wild elephants are still alive, in scattered patches of Africa and Asia, they are encountered as real, actual creatures who provoke fear and distress as well as awe. When we wonder about the meaning of elephants, we are asking a human-centered question: What is their meaning to us? It is common, of course, to speak of their meaning to us in crudely pragmatic terms--as a source of meat, ivory, wealth, power, and so on. But they can also mean something deeper, more complex and more elusive. As the grandest terrestrial animals on the planet, they may serve as icons or symbols or types. We might imagine them as kings of the forest, mighty representatives of authority, or the dark embodiments of danger and death. They dominate the landscape with their size, power, and destructive capacity; and, in Africa, even in those many parts of Africa where they once were and no longer are, their echoes remain, culturally expressed in sculpture and painting and carving, in masks and masquerades and songs--and perhaps above all in the narrative arts: folk tales. Chapter 1 provides a trans-continental sampling of contemporary and traditional elephant folk tales from Africa. The opening piece of that sampling is a fragment from a longer Chadean tale that describes how a hunter once spied on several young women bathing in a river. After they emerged from the river, the hunter saw, the women slipped into elephant skins and, thereby transformed back into the original elephant selves, ran off to join the rest of the herd. The hunter returned the next day to hide the skin of the most beautiful of the bathing women. Unable to return to her elephant self she was left behind, a mere woman, whereupon the hunter revealed himself and married her. Years later, after she had discovered her old skin and thus understood her husband’s trick, she took her revenge. “How Elephants Came to Eat Trees” is a Samburu story, while the one following that, “The Bride Who Became an Elephant,” was told by a member of the Maasai tribe. The Samburu and the Maasai are both East African pastoralists, and both maintain a cultural taboo against eating elephant meat. They sometimes speak of recognizing a special affinity between people and elephants based partly on the logic of physical and psychological continuity. “The Pygmies and the Elephant” and “Why Elephants and People Can Never Be Friends,” come from the Mbuti people (or BaMbuti) of the Ituri forest in the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo. The BaMbuti are part of a larger association of people living in the Congo Basin who are known collectively and commonly as Pygmies. Pygmies are forest specialists, skilled in extracting the necessities of their daily lives from the forest by hunting and gathering; the BaMbuti are particularly known as net hunters. Net hunting for the BaMbuti --driving game into long nets--takes place on most days of the week. On the days when they are not hunting, the men repair the nets, make string for the nets from vine fibers, and relax. Women gather vegetables and cook on every day of the week. But there is also the honey-gathering season, a time when everything inessential is foregone and when BaMbuti camps in the forest are, according to anthropologist Colin Turnbull, “filled with singing and dancing day and night.” This is also the time for telling stories. The Pygmies live in a social world frequently burdened by precarious relationships with neighboring Bantu tribes, people who are gardeners rather than hunters and gatherers, and who may fear the forest and despise their physically smaller neighbors, the forest people. In the tale “The Pygmies and the Elephant,” this social tension is one aspect of the problem with the MuBira man (a member of the neighboring Bantu tribe known as the BaBira), who turns into an elephant in order to attack his wife. Finally, “The Origin of Mankind,” a long narrative from which I have presented a brief fragment, comes from the Ngbandi people living in Equateur Province of the northwestern Democrat Republic of the Congo. It is worth noting that one of the complexities of this tale derives from multiple puns potentially embedded in the name Tondo-lindo. Ngbandi is a tonal language, which means that the word tondo, referring at first to a “nicely ripe and red” fruit, can be broken apart syllabically and played with tonally to indicate father (to), forest (ndo), testicle (toli), clitoris (linda), seed or fruit (li), or the verb to enter (li). All narratives express the dance between dream and waking. Even the most prosaic of stories, presented as an honest and rational recounting of some real event in the waking world, represents in fact one person’s fleeting impressions passed through the baffle of perspective, memory, and language. A story may be “true” and have “meaning,” but how true and which meaning? Stories repeated become tales. Tales dramatized beget fables and myths. And in Africa, where spoken narrative is an important art form, the words, the very words here pressed and dessicated on the page, will be expanded by gesture and mime, enlivened with song, and invigorated through repetition and spontaneous improvisation. “Domei o domeista!” (Story, stories!) a Mende audience in Sierra Leone shouts gleefully, and the storyteller steps forth to perform. Nothing is perfectly scripted, nothing told the same way twice, and why should it be otherwise?