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The White Bone by Barbara Gowdy is a story of African elephants’ interminable exodus. The fictional elephant herds Gowdy animates are ever in danger of slaughter by humankind, always fleeing vehicles and helicopters, following signs and omens to where they hope to find The Safe Place.

Gowdy’s novel is brilliantly researched. She constructs hierarchical systems based on actual elephant behavior and natural history. The reader enjoys an introduction to this elephant world with a glossary of terms in the preface and to its elephant characters in plotted family trees tracing four matriarchies whose lineages intersect throughout the novel.

Never before have I so empathized with the terror elephants experience in the face of extinction. Gowdy renders the scenes of savage poaching with vivid disgust. The violation, the horror of gunshot, of elephant faces hacked through with chain saws, ivory tusks thrust between human legs and pumped in sick mockery—the perversion of monsters who would fell such magnificent beasts for such a petty harvest will churn your insides black. Only one with no heart at all could read these chapters without grief for what can be seen as no less than rape and murder of a sacred species. Gowdy’s work is, in part, an homage to those who tirelessly fight for the safety of endangered elephants.

There is, also, the curious dimension of elephantine time. Elephants are famous for their memory. “Every odour they have ever sucked into their trunks, every flicker of sunlight they have ever doused with their tremendous shadows is preserved inside them as a perfect and instantly retrievable moment.” Gowdy likens their memories to their blood. When memories begin to drain, so blood weakens and sooner the elephant shall die. There are select elephants who have the ability to see the future. These few are caught in the perfect past, present and future. The confluence of all of these timelines, the myriad characters, and the curious choice of an omniscient third person narrator who volleys about in time and place to portray everything at once does disorient the reader at times. The elephants also have a complicated nomenclature which is perhaps more distracting than it is clever.

Beyond rendering the fictionalized world of elephants which at times reads like The Gods Must Be Crazy, Gowdy ventures to address several deep, universal, and undercurrent themes of existence: why do bad things happen? Why have faith? The “white bone” refers to something of a holy grail for elephants, a rib bone from a newborn that will shine bright white from the darkness; the direction it points shall guide the lucky elephant who finds it to The Safe Place. The prophecy of the white bone reads something like a psalm, “The deeper the darkness, the whiter it is to the eyes…but whoever throws it must believe in its power, otherwise, it will only lead the thrower in circles” (44). This imagery seems to liken the elephants to the Israelites who wandered in circles through the desert in search of the Promised Land.

The elephants, as they wander, squabble with one another. They philosophize about why bad things happen. Some make groundless pronouncements about the future, about why some are slaughtered and others are spared. Some need to believe there is a reason for it all. Through the novel, the terror that plagues the families of elephants is for an uncertain apocalypse. Those who grip the tightest to life, let go with ease and euphoria when the inevitable shots pelt their hides as though by some terrible “natural law.” Gowdy delivers a tender tragedy that will have you seeing blue clouds and the sad backs of blue hills as you peer over the spine of this book into the horizon.

To learn more about the current state of affairs in the endangered elephant kingdom, visit The World Wildlife Federation.