Larger Than Life (Novella) Read Online Free PDF

pole to jump them from cage to cage without having to fear the piercing canine
     teeth that grew in as they became adults.
    There were two types of scientists in the lab, I realized. First were the ones who
     used the pole, but only to put it near the collar, gently tap the macaque, and open
     the cage so that the monkey could leap inside. The second kind yanked the macaque
     to the floor and pinned it until the monkey stopped resisting, at which point the
     researcher released it to take refuge in the cage. Monkeys that had been treated that
     way required extra caution, because they were more likely to swat at any human who
     came close. They had long ago stopped differentiating between those of us who might
     be kind and those of us who weren’t.
    In the four years I worked with primates, I was only mildly hurt once or twice. I
     slapped my monkey’s hand accidentally, and he decked me; I turned my back and was
     scratched on my shoulder. And then there was the day I turned down the offer of a
     tenure-track position in neurobiology at Harvard.
    I remember because it was the only time my mother ever visited me in the lab. She
     came in white-faced and shaking at the end of the day, when I was the only person
     inin the room with a group of cages filled with tiny preadolescent macaques. One, which
     I’d named Hawkeye because of his inadvertent Mohawk hairdo, had a reputation as a
     difficult animal because he’d struck out at other scientists, who in turn would be
     more punishing when they worked with him to keep him under control. I took another
     approach—rewarding good behavior with food instead of penalizing him for an infraction
     he hadn’t yet committed. Hawkeye and I got along just fine.
    I saw my mother enter the lab just as I opened the door of Hawkeye’s home cage to
     jump him into it. I nodded at her, trying to mime that I’d be able to talk in a minute,
     but she was having none of it. She walked into the room, where no one but research
     personnel was supposed to be.
    “I could get fired if someone sees you in here!” I hissed, locking the latch on Hawkeye’s
     home cage.
    “That’s an empty threat,” my mother said, “given that you’ve already quit.”
    The little monkey rattled the metal bars. Home cage meant food, and I was being delinquent.
     “Who called?”
    “Dr. Yunque. She couldn’t reach you at your apartment so she tried my house. She asked
     me to try to convince you to change your mind.” My mother was staring at the macaques
     with a strange expression, as if she were seeing a scene from what should have been
     her own life. “How come this is the first I’m hearing about your consuming passion
     for studying elephants?”
    “I’ve
always
wanted to study elephants, Mom. Since I was a kid. You know that. And I can’t study
     them at Harvard.”
    “But you
could
be a professor at the most prestigious Ivy League university in this country, Alice.
     And it’s not like you can’t keep doing research.”
    “With monkeys,” I sighed. I didn’t tell her that I had hit a wall last week, when
     I had to euthanize yet another infant macaque just to examine its brain at a certain
     stage. I couldn’t tell her that monkeys were selfish and petty, that for all the DNA
     we shared with rhesus macaques, I believed our brains had more in common with those
     of elephants, who exhibited communication, problem-solving skills, and empathy—all
     clear signs of cognition.
    What I truly wanted to study was the memory of elephants. That old adage aboutan elephant never forgetting was not a myth, but it was only just beginning to get
     traction as a scientific fact. I’d read a paper recently published by scientists from
     Amboseli that proved elephants could identify and differentiate between over a hundred
     voices—including those of elephants they had not heard for decades. I had devoured
     research from a 1981 drought in Namibia, during which 85 percent of herbivores in
     the