The airplane throbbed, reminding me of the faint throbbing, or thrilling, or shuddering I'd felt at that moment. It had been like the feeling of thunder but there'd been no thunder. There had been no loud sound at all, just throbbing and then nothing.
Now a recollection from more than thirty years earlier joined the first. I was thirteen years old, and I was standing not in a zoo but in Sage Chapel at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. And I was hearing was not silence but enormous chords from pipe organ that was accompanying singers, and I was one of the singers. (skip) The organist pulled out the great stop and the air around me began to shudder and throb. The bass notes descended in a scale. The deeper they went, the slower the shuddering became. The pitch grew indistinct and muffled, yet the shuddering got stronger. I felt what I could not hear. My ears were approaching the lower limit of their ability to perceive vibrations as sound.
Is that what I was feeling as I sat beside the elephant cage? Sound too low for me to hear, yet so powerful it caused the air to throb? Were the elephants calling to each other in infrasound?
Earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, wind, thunder, and ocean storms - gigantic motions of earth, air, fire, and water - these are the main sources of infrasound, sound below the range of human hearing, which travels huge distance through rock, water, and air. Among animals only the great fin and blue whales were known to make powerful infrasonic calls. No land animal approached the mass or power of these great mammals of the sea, but now I wondered: might elephants, too, be using infrasound in communication?
The field biologists in Africa had seen indications that elephants communicate with one another over inexplicably long distances.
The distance a sound travels depends on the medium it passes through, on the strength of sound, and on its frequency. High sounds travel in short waves that lose energy quickly, for they are deflected by grasses, trees, and other obstacles, and dissipated as heat. Low sounds travel in long wave that are less diminished by the same effects: the lower the sound, the less the loss. The strength of a low-frequency sound has a profound effect on its range. If you double the strength of a sound whose initial range is twenty meters, the range will increase to forty meters; if you double the strength of a sound whose initial range is two kilometers, the range will increase to four kilometers. So I saw that if we wanted to know the range of the elephants' communication, we'd have to measure the strength as well as the frequencies of their calls in the field.
The closest social unit is the "family", a group of a dozen or so related females and their offspring.
It represented, in a series of concentric circles, six levels of association of an adult female elephant. She stands, a little silhouette, in the central circle. The layer that wraps around her includes her claves. The layer that wraps around the family is the bond group. Of all the dimensions in an elephant society, this one intrigued most.
He was right, and this provided the final proof that elephants were the source of the infrasonic sounds we had been recording.
I felt touched when I saw Qasmira and her sister moving peacefully together, one of them missing a tusk and the other carrying it in her side.
He moves slowly between and within his favored drinking and feeding places, at his leisure joining and leaving families, and joining and leaving temporary aggregations of males, displaying his enormous strength but hurting nothing - he adjusts the placement of his feet to allow a tortoise to follow its course uninterrupted.
The older lifted his huge left ear and the younger moved under it. It became a sun umbrella, whose outer edge slowly settled onto the far side of the younger's head.
Other males not in musth, even males much bigger than he, hear his musth rumbling and give him wide berth.
elephants hear and respond to each other's loud calls from distances as great as four kilometers. (skip)
At dusk, a loud elephant's call might be heard by another 9.8 kilometers away; it would be heard by the listening elephants within three hundred square kilometers. At midday, the calling area might shrink to one-tenth that size.
for elephants, several kind of "we." There is the "we" in a family, whose members do everything together. There is the "we" in a bond group, whose member stay within close range of each other but maintain separate family behaviors - for example, the families of Crooked Tusk and Babe. Finally there is the "we" in a clan, whose members share the use of land but move about on it independently of each other.
Zaccheus was led by inner light, and nothing would put it out.
Like people, elephants live emphatically: the experiences of others become their own experiences, and there is no way to stop that. (skip) I do not believe that elephants have a way of ignoring the experiences of their friends and family.
But the world had failed in its relationship with him, too, for poverty is a failed relationship.
The accident was unavoidable, as we say - nobody's fault. Yet I knew that it was our fault,
14. PASSING BELLS (Best chapter I read. Memories for the elephants Katy Payne had known for her research. They are culled for Ivory and so-called population control.)
I don't know how they'd assessed the depth of water table. Bernie Hutchins, a Cornell engineer who has helped us a lot with the elephant study, suggested that elephants' low-frequency acoustic sensitivity might enable them to use a sonar system based on echoes from their footfalls. But on the day the new well area was opened, I saw no evidence that the elephants were doing anything but digging.
Late in the season, when things were exceedingly hot and dry, we also saw what may have been competition at the oxbow pools. (skip) We'd see three or four families waiting in the nearby forest - one day they waited in a line - while others were drinking and bathing.
In Shouna the two English words "god" and "nature" are both translated as "mwari."
In each well-less area we had found the water table deeper beneath the sand than an elephant trunk could reach. Somehow the elephants knew.
We count the wells and there are one thousand.
- Katy Payne의 'Silent Thunder'를 만난 것을 어떻게 설명할 수 있을까? 그것은 우연이기보다는 필연이었는지도... '코끼리의 귓속말'이라는 단편을 써 나가면서 찾아본 코끼리의 '말'에 대한 자료를 찾다가 만난 이 책에서 저자가 이타카에서 자랐고, 연구의 상당부분이 코넬에서 이루어졌기에 책 속에 등장하는 너무도 익숙한 지명과 이름들에 오히려 놀라게 되는 것.
코끼리에 대해서 점점 많은 것들을 알게 되면서 경이와 감탄. 그들의 점쟎은 행동과 서로에 대한 배려, 가족/친척/이웃과의 공동체로서 살아가는 육지에서 몸집이 가장 큰 무리 동물.
사람의 발자국이 아프리카 땅에 점점 늘어가면서 자신의 설 자리를 잃어버리고, 상아때문에 살육되고, 가족과 동료의 죽음을 경험하는 코끼리들. 우리는 어떤 말로서 용서를 구할 수 있을까? 코끼리는 감정적으로 다른 코끼리의 경험을 사람처럼 같이 느낀다고 한다. 한번 살육을 목격한 코끼리는 같은 코끼리가 아닌 것이다.
언니의 부러진 상아를 들어주고, 피가 섞이지 않은 어린 코끼리 머리에 쬐는 햇볕을 큰 귀로 가려주고, 구덩이에 빠진 모르는 어린 코끼리를 구해 자신의 무리에 받아들여 키워주고, 건조한 시기에 우물을 파서 가족과 친척, 다른 동물들과 나눠쓰고... 그들에게 경외심을 느낄 것은 너무도 많은데, 사람에게 코끼리는 상아와 경제적 값어치로 밖에 보이지 않는 것. 혹 다른 사람에게는 과학이라는 무기를 앞세워 그들의 삶의 패턴을 방해해고 혼란시키는 것. 코끼리가 대량살육된 날, '개체수가 더 적으니 모든 코끼리에 모니터를 부착할 수도 있겠다.' 라는 무자비하게 두려운, 그러나 너무나 쉽게 내뱉어질 수 있는 과학자의 생각...
'아는 만큼 사랑하게 된다.'라는 고대 그리스 철학자의 말이 다시금 생각나는 날이다. 이 책을 읽은 만큼 코끼리에 대해 더 사랑하게 된 것 같다. 그러나, 무엇이 바뀌기 위해서 무엇이 필요한 것인가를 다시금 절실히 생각하게 됨.
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