The Weight of What We Cannot Leave Behind
"Aaaahhh!!"
A shout. The bullroarer.
Wiiiiioooooong!
Bullroarer.
Tung tung tung tung tung!!!
The drum.
The sound that rose and echoed across the grassland drove the elephants back, slowly, step by step. It meant they could sense something they had never encountered before—a threat beyond comprehension.
'Good…! Run away, please…!'
As far as I knew, elephants were timid creatures. The wild elephants we'd met wandering Africa had bolted to the far horizon at the sound of a car horn alone. So this was working.
But the more timid an elephant was, the more its maternal love defied imagination.
I had seen it once before—an old cow elephant guarding her calf that had bled to death after a hyena pack's attack. The local guide who'd been leading our group had clicked his tongue and said that sometimes, if they went on like that, refusing food and water, they'd just die on the spot.
That was why elephants could die for their young. Could abandon their territory. Could do anything for the calf at their center.
"Louder!"
I screamed until my throat split, slamming the drum with everything I had.
Tung tung tung tung tung!!!
The drum roared, and the others matched it—shouting, stamping, waving their firebrands.
"Aaaahhh!!"
The people screamed again.
Wiiiiioooooong!
The bullroarer split the air.
Whooshhhrrrrrrlll!!!
The fire flared higher, spewing acrid smoke in every direction. The grassland was wailing now like a single enormous beast—the flames, the smoke, the shouts, the drumbeats, and some strange keening cry none of us could name.
Things we had never experienced. Things we couldn't understand. All of it pressed against the elephant herd at once, driving them back.
But then.
"…!"
At the very front of the herd, an old-looking elephant stared directly at me. And right behind it—
Phuuuu…
A young elephant, cowering in terror, body hunched tight, trying to stand but collapsing again because its legs wouldn't hold. The injured calf.
It was the same young elephant I had seen that morning.
A cold sweat ran down my spine.
God damn it.
I understood now. Why they wouldn't run. Why they held their ground so stubbornly.
We were frightening them, yes.
But for these elephants, there was something more important than this grassland. Something they couldn't leave behind even if they wanted to run. A calf lying in the heart of the herd.
'They won't move.'
No matter how the fire burned, no matter how the drums thundered, no matter how the bullroarer tore the sky.
The herd would not abandon its young.
And that old elephant knew it better than anyone.
It was watching us. No—
Watching me.
Those deep, wrinkled eyes pierced straight through the flames to my face. It looked like a question. As if asking: Can you abandon your young too?
"Stop!"
I nearly screamed.
The drumbeats, which had been pounding steadily, began to falter.
"I said stop!"
When I shouted again, the people's cries died one by one.
But the bullroarer's eerie wail still hung in the air.
Wiiiiioooooong!
"High Bird! Stop that!"
High Bird, who had heard my cry, grabbed the cord and held it still.
Uuuuuuung…
The bullroarer's sound trembled one last time and vanished.
In that instant, the grassland fell quiet.
Not completely—there was still the crackle of fire, the hacking coughs from the thick smoke, and—
Phuuuu…
The thin, trembling cry of the young elephant. That single sound struck my ears harder than all the drumbeats had.
"Pretty Eyes, why… did you stop?"
High Bird ran up beside me, his face full of confusion.
"Look at that."
I pointed at the young elephant with my finger.
"The calf can't move."
"Calf?"
"We're not going. Absolutely not."
I clenched my teeth.
"If we push any harder, they'll charge."
Before I'd even finished speaking—
The old elephant took one step forward.
Thud.
The ground shuddered low.
That single step sent the people behind me recoiling instinctively.
Thud.
Another step. The elephant's ears slowly unfolded. The massive shadow swallowed the firelight and grew.
"Back away."
I spoke low.
"Everyone, step back slowly."
But it was too late.
Phuuuuuuuu!!!
The old elephant let out a long, keening wail.
It wasn't anger. It was closer to a warning. Stay away. Don't come any closer. Separate yourselves from our young.
You didn't need language to understand that.
When the old elephant began scraping the ground with its tusks, we retreated further. It was a sign—come any closer and you will be attacked.
I tried to steady my pounding heart and locked my gaze forward. The old elephant, bristling with vigilance, and behind it the young one that still couldn't rise.
It was badly injured, or struck with some grave illness—there was no way it could move in its current state.
And then—completely past the horizon, where the sun had already set—the clouds that had been veiling the moon slowly parted, and moonlight so bright it made the modern world look dim flooded across the grassland.
And because of that, I could see it clearly.
A long, straight rod embedded in the side of the young elephant.
Anyone could see it was a spear shaft—its bark stripped away by human hands, roasted straight over a fire.
Someone had attacked that young elephant.
"Hm, smaller than I expected."
Hansuha looked down at the exposed bones and spoke carefully.
"No, it's big enough, but… it feels ambiguous whether you'd even call it a corpus."
Hamilton examined the elephant's skull while nodding.
"It's not the bones of a corpus. It's still the skeleton of a living individual."
"If it's not a corpus, then…?"
"It would have been a young individual. Judging by the tooth wear, probably around one to two years old. But it's larger than modern elephants, so it was likely one of the ancestors of African elephants."
Hansuha stared, mouth half-open, then let out a small gasp.
"Wow… Professor Hamilton, you really know your stuff."
"I study both paleoanthropology and paleobiology, same as Professor Park."
"Huh? Professor Park has a paleobiology degree too?"
When Hansuha looked at Professor Park in surprise, he didn't stop packing the skull bones as he spoke.
"I have two PhDs. We studied together for years—don't tell me you didn't know that."
"No, I just didn't realize people who got two doctorates were that common."
"They're not."
Professor Park gave a short reply and turned his gaze back to the bones.
Hamilton smiled faintly, then quickly wiped the expression from his face.
"But this is strange."
One sentence changed the atmosphere.
"What is?"
Professor Park asked.
Hamilton carefully indicated the area beside the skull, where the ribs and shoulder bones were still partially covered in earth.
"If this young individual had simply died of natural causes, the bones wouldn't be clustered like this. If a predator had scavenged it, they'd be more scattered."
"Could it have been washed here by a flood?"
Hansuha asked.
"That's possible. But look."
Hamilton brushed away the dirt with a small brush.
Scrape. Scrape.
As the dry earth was thinly peeled away, a long, narrow mark appeared beneath the shoulder blade. A deep, sharp wound—clearly made by something sharp.
Hansuha swallowed her breath.
"…A wound?"
Professor Park's expression hardened.
"Don't touch anything."
He raised his hand and stopped everyone immediately.
"Take photos first. Record the position and excavate the surrounding soil in one piece."
"Then this…"
Hansuha asked carefully.
"Was it killed by a human?"
No one answered immediately.
After a moment of silence, Professor Park spoke in a low voice.
"We don't know yet."
He didn't look away from the wound.
"To say a human killed it, we'd need at least three more pieces of evidence. The direction of the wound, the time it was inflicted, and traces of tools."
"Then what we're seeing now is…?"
"A possibility."
Professor Park spoke firmly.
"An extremely uncomfortable possibility."
Hansuha swallowed dry spit.
Hamilton silently pulled out a magnifying glass and examined the wound. After a moment, his expression shifted subtly.
"Professor Park."
"Yes?"
"This doesn't look like a postmortem mark."
Professor Park's hand stopped.
"Are you sure?"
"I can't say it's completely certain, but look at the edges of the wound. The bone isn't simply cracked—it shows a slight inward curl. That suggests the wound was inflicted while the animal was alive, under strong pressure."
Hansuha asked carefully.
"So… it was stabbed?"
Hamilton neither nodded nor shook his head.
"The back of the shoulder. Between the ribs. Angled diagonally, from below upward."
"From below upward?"
The playfulness vanished from Hansuha's face.
"That rules out a predator bite."
"The likelihood is low."
Hamilton's voice dropped too.
"It's less like tooth marks from a predator and more like something narrow and hard was driven deep inside."
Professor Park stared at the wound for a long time. Then he slowly raised his head and scanned the area around the excavation site.
"Widen the dig."
"How much?"
"One skeleton isn't enough."
Professor Park's voice sank.
"This might not be the problem of a single dead elephant."
"Then whose problem is it?"
Professor Park didn't answer. He just stared into the distance at the red-stained sediment layer.
"It might be the center of the incident."
Hansuha unconsciously rubbed her arms. A dry wind swept across the excavation site—the smell of sand and earth.
And in that wind, for just a moment, she had a strange illusion.
From somewhere far away…
Phuuuuu…
As if she could hear the cry of a young elephant.
'What the hell kind of lunatic…!'
The curse came first, before anything else.
Hunting elephants wasn't unheard of. But it was always a case where a group surrounded an individual that had fallen behind or was already badly wounded. Nobody—nobody—stuck a spear into a calf at the center of a herd.
It wasn't an ethical question. It was a question of survival.
Elephant herds move around their young. Not just the mother—aunts, older sisters, all the old females move to protect the calf.
A human-made spear in the body of that calf? From that moment, it wasn't hunting. It was a declaration of war. At least, the elephants had no choice but to see it that way.
'Damn, damn, damn…!'
I clenched my teeth.
Until now, I had thought the elephants were just blocking the grassland. That they saw us as enemies, blocking our passage, trying to drive us away.
But that wasn't it.
They weren't blocking the path.
They were protecting their young.
And we—
Carrying fire and smoke and drumbeats and that strange keening cry, we had been marching closer to that calf.
How must we have looked in the elephants' eyes? The ones who had driven a spear into the calf's body, and then reappeared carrying fire.
They couldn't have told us apart.
"…Put out the fire."
At my words, everyone stared at me in shock. I shouted at them with as much restraint as I could manage.
"Extinguish the fire! Make no sound! Don't even breathe loudly—back away slowly."
I looked at the old elephant's eyes as I spoke.
It was still watching us. Ears spread wide, scraping the ground with its tusks, not retreating a single step.
Behind it, the young elephant lay still.
A body trembling faintly. Forelegs scraping weakly at the ground. A long spear shaft, still embedded and swaying at its side.
In that state, it couldn't move.
And that herd would not leave that calf.
This couldn't be driven away by noise or threats. They would have to leave on their own. And that would probably only happen when the young elephant's strength finally gave out.
And the young elephant's condition…
"…It's not going to last past today anyway."
It couldn't survive another day. Nobody could go get water. Nobody could sit down. Elephants and humans alike stood through the night, watching each other across the body of the dying calf.
Maintaining a distance where neither side closed in nor pulled away, we simply stared at each other.
The sun rose.
Slowly, without anyone noticing, it began to warm our cold bodies and spread bright light across the grassland.
But at the center of the grassland, at the heart of the herd—
The young elephant did not rise.
Phuuuuu!!! Phuuuuuuuu!!!
From the elephant herd, a mournful wailing echoed across the land. The sound of parents who had left this harsh world before their child—calling, grasping, finally letting go. They wailed for a long time, and then, slowly—
Very slowly, they began to move. No one ran first. No one hurried.
A few looked back at the very end—the place where the dead calf had lain, and us, watching them in turn.
I couldn't look away from that gaze.
And so the elephants left the grassland.
And long after they were gone, the grassland said nothing at all.