David Beresford
another country
At first sight it might be mistaken for a photograph of a fossil, a mollusc perhaps, chipped out of the white cliffs of Dover. Then the mind begins totting up the information digested by the eye; it is the black of odoriferous mud, not the white of long-dead chalk; the “spine” is an elephant’s trunk still lifted for life-giving air. In the half-submerged head an eye gazes back at the camera with a look of … what? Terror? Reproach? Resignation?
The eye seems to have followed me around for months, ever since I picked up the wildlife magazine at a game park. Every now and then I clear my desk, or empty a suitcase and it is there again, the elephant waiting to suffocate in a mud trap, drowning in a Botswana bog. I no longer have to read the text the photographer Peter Pickford’s agonising over the duty of “my species”; his evocation of Joseph Conrad’s knowing savagery and his final decision.
Nowadays the muddy image pops up from time to time, equally uninvited, from the luggage of my mind. It did so, recently, while I was watching a television programme on a herd of elephants in Kenya. It was brought to mind by a scene in which the giant beasts come across the skeleton of a former member of the group. As the matriarch gently probes and caresses the inner pathways of the sun-bleached cranium younger elephants pick up the ribs and hug them against their bodies with their trunks.
The elephant’s eye, drowning with its unspoken message, also gazes at me across the flaming carcasses that have followed in the hoof marks of foot-and-mouth disease across Europe. “If you haven’t got a naked woman the next best thing, a little pet, a puppy, or a baby rabbit, will always sell newspapers,” a Fleet Street veteran lectured me many years ago, passing on to our mutual satisfaction the eternal verities of the salaciousness and sentimentality of the Anglo Saxon mind. Now even the lambs on Beatrix Potter’s farm have been marked down for slaughter in Britain’s panicked reaction to the livestock epidemic.
Regulations prohibiting the killing of livestock within sight of one another have been suspended to facilitate the slaughter. “The three slaughter men are young, cheerful and clear-eyed. Killing is their business,” reports The Guardian. “It will take four hours, they say, and start moving machinery around the barn to prevent the animals trying to bolt. Now the cattle squeal and low and the sheep bleat hard. The legs of a cow give way and it drops to the ground. Five heads strain out of the barn. ‘Of course they know’ says one of the men …”
A government which has been battling to end fox hunting has exterminated more than one million animals, the vast majority of them healthy, and nobody seems to know why. The disease is discomforting, but not fatal to animals and poses no apparent threat to consumers. Alternative measures, notably vaccination, are available. Farmers have been jamming government help-lines in the stampede to offer their own livestock to the burning pyres and mass-graves, at state-guaranteed, pre-epidemic prices. The minister of tourism has crossed the Atlantic to assure the dollar-rich that the drinking water remains uncontaminated. Amid the smell of burning flesh, stands the church clock at 10 to three? And is there honey still for tea … ?
In his meditation on his photograph of the elephant Pickford describes how he “moved slowly about her head and tried to find an image that conveyed the poignancy of her pain”.
The “cold voice of reason” told him that “this was nature taking its course and it was not my place to interfere”. But at the time, he recalls, another emotional voice within him was asking whether he had not been given his intelligence “so that I could come before this elephant with compassion and save its life? If I could not, was it not then my responsibility to at least make use of the technological advancement of my species and bring an end to what would be, without doubt, a purposeless, protracted period of terror, anguish, fear and if the lions found her pain?
“Is life truly incidental and when the smell of death is in our nostrils and upon our tongue is it of no more consequence than the dawn? And are the horror, fear and dread of it no more than the frantic desire of our minds to cling to life? Eventually I could endure it no more,” he writes, “for I knew that I must follow what I believe to be right.”
As he stands and turns to walk away I look in the long-dead elephant’s eye, fixed on the glossy page, and realise it offers no pain, no terror, no reproach, no resignation.
It merely awaits an explanation.