Every day is World Elephant Day--an excerpt from a new #novel #ecofiction bringing #wonder to the world

Janet Mason
Aug 12
5 min read

Since today is World Elephant Day, I thought I would post an excerpt from my novel Dick Moby. The excerpt is about a whale imagining an elephant. There are lots of reasons that human beings need elephants, including the reason that elephants keep ecosystems in place. The earth needs this, and human beings need the earth. But human beings also need to dream, and it's my view that elephants help us to dream. Elephants bring wonder to the world.

Dick Moby

I imagine I am the Whale who Vishnu reincarnated into. As such, I have met elephants in my past lives. My reverence for them has always been so great that I have worshipped them. In an awake dream, I go back in time and see myself as Vishnu. It is the kind of dream where I am Vishnu, and I am separate from Vishnu. I feel like I am outside of myself watching myself.

There is a bluish cast to my skin and my head is heavy with a golden crown which has alert cobra-like serpents standing next to each other and protruding from it as if to protect me. I imagine I am rising in the sea and then hovering above it. Somehow, I have arrived on the savanna where I gaze raptly at a hefty creature with large flat ears flapping in the hot dusty breezes. Her large ears help her stay balanced since she is so immense. Her ancestors must have decided to stay on the land.

Her hefty gray body is surprisingly graceful as she lumbers on her four thick legs to the watering hole. She dips her trunk, curvy and long, into the pond. Her trunk is where the nose would be on my face if I had a nose. She draws water up through this long appendage as if inhaling it. After a time, she steps back and lifts her trunk to her wide mouth which curves downward in the middle and up at the corners in a perpetual smile. Water drips from her mouth as she drinks from the stored water in her trunk that makes its way to her mouth. Directly below her trunk, and above her mouth are two short ivory tusks that are fierce and practical looking as if they could be used as tools by her, for purposes such as stripping bark from trees, and for scaring away predators.

Her trunk is long and cylindrical. Vishnu has heard elephants have an incredible sense of smell. The trunk starts on the elephant’s face and snakes down to watering holes and other low places and up high to grab tasty-looking tree branches and bring them down daintily to put them into her mouth.

The author of the tome I put in my mind describes the elephant as being an imposing creature like us Whales. But he mentions the elephant is the size of a small dog compared to the magnitude of us Whales. He doesn’t say the elephant is the largest creature on dry land, but I imagine it is since the author seems obsessed with size. Some might even say, “He’s a size queen.”

He also mentions numerous times elephants are associated with kings in battles and processions. The poor elephants! I wonder about the author. He seems fixated on kings and on thinking they are important. What’s that all about?

He even maintains the elephant’s brow like the Whale’s massive forehead is “regal,” a word traced back to its origins in Latin meaning “kingly” or “fit for a king.”

See—there’s a lot of information in that big brain of mine.

I am so lost in my thoughts about the thick book I found floating in the sea, the one I put into my brain, I barely feel the warm water buoying me and the sharp strands of the nylon fishing net that has ensnared me.

The author writes the elephant’s trunk and the Whale’s tail are similar in nature. This seems strange to me because they are very different. For starters, they are at the opposite ends of our bodies. They also serve different purposes. We Whales cannot use our tails to grasp things or to trumpet warning sounds to others. We use our tails to propel ourselves. We pump our tail fins up and down to propel us over great distances. The author of the thick book in my mind writes the Whale’s sense of touch is primarily located in our tails, in the same manner the elephant’s sense of touch is based in the trunk. This may be true because my tail does have a great amount of feeling in it. Right now, my tail is feeling sad and deeply angry because it is trapped in a ridiculous fishing net that shouldn’t be there in the first place, which is preventing my natural movements of swimming freely in the sea.

It is easier for me to make up a story than to stay in the painful present, so I do.

Hiding behind a wide tree trunk where he is spying on the adult elephant who is at the watering hole, Vishnu is surprised by a baby elephant who looks just like her mother with her perfectly formed large flat ears and her bulky wrinkled gray body. But she is in miniature compared to her much larger mother. The only thing the mother has that the baby does not have is short ivory tusks.

Just like Humans who walk by shadows behind the bush which might be slumbering elephants, Humans, and Human-like deities—such as Vishnu—are hidden from elephants as they lurk about spying on the elephants.

The baby elephant had lagged behind her mother, as she played in the dust. Then she sees Vishnu and is not afraid despite the menacing cobra-like serpents in Vishnu’s gold crown. Because they are made of gold, the cobras don’t hiss. Instead of drawing back, the little elephant reaches out her rubbery and hairy trunk, and tickles Vishnu’s wrist. This causes Vishnu to giggle.

The watering hole is not far away from where Vishnu has hidden behind the base of a great Banyan tree with its many trunks merged into one. Becoming entranced by the baby elephant causes Vishnu to step out from behind the tree to where he can be seen by the mother elephant. On hearing the giggle, the large mother elephant quickly swings around, the tuft on the end of her tail flying in the air.

Seeing Vishnu between herself and her calf, the mother trumpets the loud call of alarm reserved for threats posed by Humans. She runs over and stomps on Vishnu until she squashes him, and he dies. And that is the story of how Vishnu reincarnated into the Whale whose image was painted on the wall so it could be worshipped at the shrine of the cavern of Elephanta.

I don’t know if this story is true, of course, since I imagined it. But it brings me such great pleasure I forget for a moment I am trapped in a nylon fishing net floating in the vast ocean.

CINNAMON, my most recent novel, is available on amazon.com: Cinnamon: A dairy cow’s (and her farmer’s) path to freedom: Mason, Janet: 9781958419786: Amazon.com : Books