From the Field Notes of Colonel Aubrey Fitch-Harrington, FRS

Observations Upon the Fauna of Southern Africa — Volume III (In Preparation)

“The Marula (Sclerocarya birrea) produces a fruit with eight times the vitamin C of an orange. Elephants travel specifically to individual marula trees when the fruit ripens in January and February. The story that elephants become intoxicated on fermented fallen marula is almost certainly incorrect: the quantity of fermented fruit required to achieve intoxication in a five-thousand-kilogram animal is physically greater than can be consumed at a sitting. The mathematics have been done by several researchers; the answer is consistently the same. The elephants come for the fruit, not the fermentation. The author has been writing the fermented-fruit story as confirmed for two volumes. He is crossing it out.”

He had been writing it for years.

Elephants intoxicated on marula fruit. It appeared in two of his previous entries, once as a confirmed observation and once as a reference to the confirmed observation. He had not personally witnessed an intoxicated elephant. He had witnessed elephants under marula trees eating fallen fruit with the specific focused attention of animals that had made a journey to reach something they wanted. He had noted this as intoxication.

He was now reading the calculations.

An African elephant weighs five thousand kilograms. The fermented marula fruit contains alcohol at a modest percentage. The quantity of fruit required to deliver the necessary dose to a five-thousand-kilogram animal was, consistently across the research literature, more than the elephant could physically consume at one sitting.

He crossed out the two entries.

The marula above him smelled sweet in the warm morning — the fruit coming into season, the smell specific and promising, the smell that had drawn an elephant to this specific tree from a specific distance at a specific point in the calendar because the elephant knew the tree, the time, and the distance.

“They know the tree,” Cetshwayo said.

“Individual trees.”

“Yes. They remember. This tree. This place. This time of year.”

The Colonel looked at the trunk. At the bark with its history of use. The elephant who had been here three days ago had known this specific tree. Had made a specific journey to it. Had remembered it through the dry season and arrived when the fruit was ready.

He wrote: The elephant knows this tree. Knows when it fruits. Made a specific journey to it. The author has been explaining this as intoxication. It is not intoxication. It is knowing. The two are not the same thing and the author has been confusing them for two volumes, possibly on the grounds that knowing is less interesting than intoxication, which is a reason for the error and not an excuse for it.

He put the pencil down and sat with the word. Knowing. The elephant knew this specific tree. Not trees-in-general. Not marula-in-general. This tree, this location, this fruiting period. It had calibrated its internal calendar to the specific production cycle of a specific tree and had been arriving, within the relevant window, for what was probably its entire adult life.

The Colonel looked at his kit bag. Inside it: field guides, reference monographs, annotated maps, this notebook with its two volumes of accumulated observations. He had all of this and he had been wrong about the elephant's motivation.

The elephant had none of this and had been right about the tree for decades.

"How far," he said to Cetshwayo. "When they travel to a specific tree."