Funeral Rites of the Greater Mammals

Abstract

Funeral Rites of the Greater Mammals Colin Pope (bio) Thirty yards from the water, it lies wreathed by joggers,beachcombers, a pair of hand-holding lovers,a pectoral fin pointing at the sky in accusation."Jesus," Katie says, "how does this happen?"Thunderheads flash the horizon.The surf mumbles its eulogy as the authoritiesfumble and attempt: it's a long exchange, tying a limp monster by the tail. They are amateurs in a small townand so unspindle a steel chain from its gashed flukes,unfurl a spiral of manila rope instead, like a teenagerin a den with the phone cord stretched. I feel constantly like I should rush forth, like we need to waitto see which ghosts wriggle free its blowhole. "No hurry,"one of the workers says. "Gonna be two days beforethe tugboat." This is what I always forget about loss:just when you think it can't get any deeper,that the anchor is scraping your abyss, that's whenyou whiff the seaweed and plankton-eating bacteria, the rank tunnels fish have carved inside youand realize your immensity and hownothing hurts at all, it never did, that conclusionis a new problem which we will, like it or not, be forced to haul away. + + + Two days somehow the biorhythmically allottedcross-species timeframe forfeited to losing one's mindwith grief: after her babywas whipped around like a flywhisk by a lovesick male, [End Page 286] Gracie the chimp carried its corpse for two daysbefore the wardens of the L.A. Zoo could pry it freeand sneak the child from the paddock like an armloadof wet laundry. "They're just quiet": how the zookeeper describedthe toddler's family in mourning. Same with the fallen matriarch of the elephant herdin a South African preserve, its calfwailing and weeping in black streamsas the family tried to raise mama's enormous bulk with their trunks.They rumbled, quieted, covered her with dirt and twigs and stood vigil forty-eight hours, no sound on the savannabut a child's sorrow. Western lowland gorillas, too:a mother is observed cradling her stillborn son, grooming him with slow, steady fingers, two days straight.And the dolphins raising a whitened podmateand the giraffe licking the fur from its friend and the zebrasnudging at a chalky, dry muzzle, always, always two days, inexplicably, as though one sun, one moonweren't enough for even the souls of beaststo decipher what it means to go on. + + + "No one knows why they do it," Katie says, staring down into her phone. "They just end up on the beach."Entire fleets of cetaceans sometimes, lined across the shorelike a photograph from Vietnam, somewhose jackfruit-sized brains went haywireat signals from subs and sonar. Some done in by bad math in the shallows. Some photos of toothed whalesyou can almost see yourself inside, not as a pilotbut actually being, crooning, listening with your jawboneswhen a lifelong partner calls from up above, having literally [End Page 287] landed itself in trouble. Swimming to its aid, failing,then calling for more help untilyou're all gone. Tell me, thinkers, philosophers,tell me what of these strandings could faithfully be categorizeda natural phenomenon? + + + It gets so you stop wondering, so it's no big whoopwhen you traipse through the woods for your seventy years on Earthand never stumble upon a dead lynx or Kodiak, a bull mooselying in state, unbloodied, pure. Blue Babe, the 36,000-year-old steppe bison mummified in vivianite:even the Alaskan gold miner who unearthed it with a pressure hosecould tell the poor darling got caught by a sudden blizzardand so, we can cross it off the list, its termination a so-calledaccident: what if nothing dies the way humans do? Of biologic exhaustion, of spending ourselveslike produce in an open truck? What is it about two daysthat matters? You are shy enough to fall in love with someone who charms, who on a rocky outcropping by the seagets down on...