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

area succumbed to starvation, but not a single elephant did—because the matriarchs
     led their herds to distant watering holes they had not visited in years.
    I believed there was a biological basis to this skill that lay somewhere in an elephant’s
     enlarged hippocampus and cerebral cortex. We already knew that animals with relatively
     larger brain-to-body ratios had a greater ability to learn, and a stronger memory.
     The question was: Did those parts of the brain grow large because they were exercised
     frequently, or were they exercised frequently because they were so relatively large?
     What did elephants choose to remember, and why? In science, we called these sorts
     of queries low-hanging fruit. When so little work had been done on a question or a
     species (although there was compelling reason to do so), the scientist was bound to
     learn
something
meaningful just by putting in the time and effort.
    Exploring that question excited me in a way I had not been excited for years studying
     macaques. And wasn’t that what science was supposed to be? Not just preparing slides
     for the sake of getting the next research grant but pushing the envelope and broadening
     one’s own leading edge? It was even possible that the research I would do in Africa
     would be transferable, offering critical information about memory that could be applied
     to Alzheimer’s or traumatic brain injury in humans.
    My mother was still in the room, exuding palpable waves of disappointment. The macaques
     jumped nervously in their cages, as if the tension between us was a fire being stoked
     beneath their feet. “I have a PhD from Harvard. Isn’t that good enough?”
    Through the bars of his cage, Hawkeye pulled my hair, and I plucked him away from
     my ponytail.
    “Exactly. No one goes from Harvard to the University of KwaZulu-Natal.”
    “I’m going to
South Africa
. But the program in KwaZulu-Natal is willing to sponsor my research.” By now the
     animals were rattling their cages, jumping up and down, doing head threats—jutting
     their faces forward with their teeth bared. “You’regetting the monkeys agitated. Can’t we discuss this later?” Hawkeye swatted the top
     of my head. “Stop,” I said, wheeling around to smack the macaque’s hand away.
    My mother stood her ground. “You shouldn’t go.”
    I met her gaze for only a breath, a heartbeat. But it was enough time for Hawkeye
     to grab the leather of the glove I wore and twist hard enough to pull it off. Ignoring
     the sting of pain, I rounded on my mother. “How can you, of
all
people, tell me not to study what I want to study? After you made sure that lesson
     was drilled into me every fucking day?”
    My mother blanched, her lips pressed tight together, and I felt a surge of triumph
     that I had finally rendered her speechless.
    Then she swallowed. “Alice,” she said, “you’re bleeding.”
    I looked down. There was blood on the floor, on my lab coat, on my jeans. It had been
     spraying in an arc as I gestured to hammer home my point. When Hawkeye twisted my
     leather glove, he’d managed to grab a good chunk of my skin with it.
    The macaques were howling, slamming against the bars of their cages. “Get out,” I
     yelled at her. “Just get
out
!’
    My mother slipped into the anteroom of the lab. I stripped off my lab coat and wrapped
     it around my hand, a makeshift bandage.
    One of the first things I was taught when I came to the lab was that if I got hurt,
     it was
my
mistake—never the monkey’s. Most humans treat animals the way too many tourists treat
     the rest of the world—uninterested in learning the local language and culture. Like
     those travelers, they usually end up the worse for it. As a scientist, I was responsible
     for understanding the animal’s communication, not the other way around. If I didn’t
     pay attention, something about my own behavior might trigger the monkey to act out,
     fearful of being injured.
    To Hawkeye, I