I ate a strawberry, “There’s this woman who’s spent the last couple of years in the Congo or whatever. She’s been making recordings of the calls and putting together an enormous library of them. This past year she started playing them back.”
“Playing them back?”
“To the elephants.”
“Why?” I loved that she asked why.
“As you probably know, elephants have much,much stronger memories than other mammals.”
“Yes. I think I knew that.”
“So this woman wanted to see how just how good their memories really are. She’d play a call of an enemy that was recorded a bunch of years earlier- a call they’d heard only once- and they’d get panicky and sometimes they’d run. They remembered hundreds of calls. Thousands. There might not even be a limit. Isn’t that fascinating?”
“It is.”
“Because what’s really fascinating is that she’d play the call of a dead elephant to its family members. “
“And?”
“They remembered.”
“What did they do?”
“They approached the speaker.”
“I wonder what they were feeling.”
“What do you mean?”
“When they heard the calls of their dead, was it with love that they approached the jeep? Or fear? Or anger?”
“I don’t remember.”
—Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
(Source: synodik)
