Larger Than Life (Novella) Read Online Free PDF Page A

world, and your punch card is measured
     not in hours but in a lifetime.
    I would trade just about anything right now for an academic library that could offer
     me resources on what to feed an elephant calf. But all I have is the experience from
     my years in the field: that this orphan won’t survive for very long unless I find
     her some milk.
    I slip down the road to the rangers’ village, leaving the calf inside my hut. The
     door to their small communal kitchen facility is ajar, and I duck inside to raid their
     cupboards. Like us, they use powdered milk, because nothing keeps for very long in
     the bush. But unlike ours, their tin is half full.
    I look around the space, which is scrubbed and clean—not at all what I’d expect for
     the living quarters of six men. In the corner is a small blue bucket filled with wooden
     pull toys and stuffed animals; these must be for the children who come to visit their
     fathers. The men who become rangers lead lives like those of soldiers—going off to
     do their tours of duty for weeks at a time; working long, intense, dangerous hours;
     enjoying rare conjugal visits from their wives. But there is rarely turnover among
     the rangers; the job is steady and pays well. In Botswana, such occupations are difficult
     to come by.
    I arrange the pile of toys as neatly as I can and wash the bucket in the sink with
     soap and water. Then I dump the contents of the powdered milk tin inside, adding warm
     water. I mix it up with my hand, trying to get the powder to dissolve.
    When I hear a voice behind me, I startle and nearly upend the bucket. “I can’t wait
     to see the size of the bowl of cereal.”
    The ranger is smiling, his teeth blindingly white against his dark skin. His hair
     is shaved close to the scalp, and he wears the tan khaki uniform that all our rangers
     wear. His voice sounds like music, the mark of a man who has spoken Setswana his whole
     life and learned English only because he had to.
    He also has a bloody bandage wrapped around his right hand.
    “What are you doing here?” I say.
    “I
live
here,” he replies. “What is your excuse?”
    I have seen him around but have not been at camp long enough yet to be assigned to
     ride with him into the bush. I do not remember his name. “The researchers ran out
     of milk for our coffee.”
    He looks at the bucket, amused. “I am guessing you take it very light?” He smells
     of cloves, of soap. “Excuse me,” he says, and his shoulder bumps against my arm as
     he reaches into the cabinet above me. He pulls down a roll of gauze and some tape,
     and begins to patch up his wound. After watching a few failed one-handed attempts,
     I offer to hold the gauze in place so that he can secure it. “Damn lions,” he mutters.
    My eyes fly to his face. “You were
mauled
?”
    There it is again, that smile. “Yes. By only a piece of barbed wire that was cutting
     into a baobab tree.” He holds out his uninjured hand. “I am Neo.”
    “Alice,” I say, giving a perfunctory shake. My arms circle the bucket, and I thinkof all the damage a baby elephant can do in five minutes. “I need to go.”
    “I can give you a ride into the bush, if you like.”
    “No. I’m … sick today.”
    He inclines his head and crosses to the pantry on the other side of the room. For
     a moment he rummages, only to emerge with another tin. “This was left behind by the
     wife of one of the other rangers. It should work for … indigestion.”
    As he opens the door, I squint into the sunlight. It swallows him whole.
    It takes my eyes a minute to adjust, so that I can read the label more carefully.
    SMA Gold Cap. Neo has handed me a tin of powdered baby formula.

    I did not always work with elephants. In fact, when I started my doctorate in neuroscience,
     I experimented on primates. My research involved running behavioral protocols on adolescent
     macaques. Each of the subjects wore a plastic collar, which allowed us to affix a
     straight