Marianta — Part Two
Across several nights, Marianta began to hear soft and seemingly internal fluttering as she slept, and her ears gradually developed the colors of a monarch butterfly’s wings. She was awestruck upon seeing herself in the water’s reflection one morning. Even more stunned were the human families and zookeepers, who took her picture. Still, most of the people and animals liked her, including her giraffe neighbor, who could see her head more clearly than any of the others. One man described her as the most fascinating animal that he had seen or heard of since the articles on a gorilla who had learned to speak sign language and was friends with a kitten.
The people decided that Marianta’s miraculous ears were a sign that she needed to be returned to the wild. Later in the week, the Sydney Zoo brought her onto a boat to send her home. “Goodbye, friends!” she signaled to the zoo animals whom she recognized, with her fluttering ears. The others (including Butterfly) looked back, happily sensing that she was still able to communicate with them.
After a couple of days at sea (one of which was stormy and another shared by a whale-shark who swam nearby), Marianta was released onto a shore of what she realized was the Indian Ocean. Towards the east, a small cluster of meteors fell, glistening, into water by the horizon. “Whatever in time could be causing that?” she wondered, entranced, and a little worriedly. She was startled upon seeing a parched jellyfish on the sand a moment later whose tentacles were nearly touching her feet, until it was reached and taken by the gentle incoming tide.
A middle-aged man carefully guided Marianta into the greenery. As she contentedly entered, she could hear the footsteps of a rhinoceros in the distance and the nibbling of crabs opening a coconut on a nearby part of the shore. Familiar aromas which she had faintly sensed from the boat now flowed into the elephant’s sinuses.
While walking through a secluded grassland in India, Marianta discovered a fort-like structure from which she could hear a familiar sound. It was the trumpeting of another female elephant. “Mother!” Marianta called. Rushing to the outdoor end of this shelter for orphaned and endangered animals, she reached her mother, who recognized her almost instantly. “My name is Marianta, now”, she told her as they wrapped trunks.
The man and lady who ran this shelter welcomed her with glad surprise. They soon remembered having seen the report on television of the Sydney elephant with butterfly-patterned ears. The husband was from Thailand, where Marianta’s rainforest grew, and his wife (whose name was Johanna) was originally from the United States. They decided to call the zoo in Sydney, simply to let them know that they had seen her, and both agreed that she was healthy enough to be free when she herself was ready to continue after meeting her mother.
That night, Marianta told Mother Elephant about the butterfly who had helped her at the zoo. “My Love, I am sorry to tell you that I lost your father just after you were separated from us as a calf during the night monsoon. He was hunted for his tusks, which the humans here are trying to put a stop to it.” They grieved her father together that night, but were both glad to have found each other alive. “I am so glad that the people we meet are now trying to help us. I wish I could tell him goodbye through my new ears", Marianta whispered, mournfully.
The next day, Butterfly’s mate (who was migrating and had heard of Marianta from the zoo) visited with good news. “Are you Marianta?” he asked her. “Yes, you must be Mother Butterfly’s husband.” He answered 'yes’. He seemed a bit shy, but friendly.
“Our four caterpillars have hatched, and since they are preparing their cocoons, they can’t talk with their wings yet, but they wanted me to ask you if they could make their adult homes with you when you’re back in your rainforest. They would like to make friends with their mother’s friend.”
“Oh, can they join me? I would like to see them, but will they know the way?” asked Marianta. “Yes, I’ll help them to find you. Mother Butterfly trusts you, entirely, as their friend.’’ Marianta promised, “I will take care of them as long as they are with me.”
Before leaving the animal ranch, Marianta met a male elephant from Africa named Jua (for whom her mother had cared while he was injured), and he and Marianta mated. She was a young adult elephant and ready for the company of a male elephant, and to be a mother soon. “It may be safer for you and my mother to stay and recover completely, but I’ll visit you after our calf is born and we can go back to the rainforest together”, she told Jua. "Thank you, I will come to you if anything unexpected happens", he said.
On her way home, Marianta felt a warm fluttering about her, then saw sparkling and realized that the four butterfly children were greeting her. “Are you...you’re the elephant our parents know.” Three butterflies fluttered to her, looking at her ears and then her eyes. “For a moment, I thought that the sound of your wings was the sound of more honey bees; my wing-ears seem to attract them,” said Marianta. "It’s so nice to see you."
"Dad brought us to see an Albatross he’d met on one of Australia’s beaches, and this albatross flew us to India," one of the butterflies explained. "He was very pleasant company and seemed not to mind us even when we tickled his back and his neck by mistake." From what the butterflies remembered hearing, he also had a godson who was a pelican in training to sing baritone with the Sydney Opera.
One evening later, still migrating with the butterflies, Marianta noticed smoke behind her, drowning the light and shapes of the stars. The butterflies could feel it on their wings. “They’re human hunters!” one of the three realized. “Fly to the koel birds”, said Marianta, looking towards a small flock of black and violet-winged birds with shiny red eyes. “They will lead us away”, but the hunting men appeared and began shooting arrows (some of them flaming) and bullets at the Asian Koels, hardly missing them. By the words which Marianta could hear from them, these humans were perhaps more greedy than hungry. At the same moment, it began raining and Marianta became at once afraid and frustrated.
"Greedy, heartless things”, she trumpeted, realizing her father, in trying to protect her mother, was a victim of this as well as her flying friends now. For a second or two, her eyes seemed to blaze in the same nature as the poachers’ lights, and she nearly wished that an elephant with tusks accompanied her (or was her). “Dirty murderers!”
“Forget those normal-sized butterflies”, one of the hunters exclaimed. “The wings that this elephant has for ears will make gold!”
“And we’ll want the feathers of that koel, after we taste it,” said another, indicating that they had successfully wounded and landed one of the birds. Soon, however, Marianta thought of something more helpful than yelling at the hunters or spearing them back. While the birds spread their wings, talons, and chattering beaks (without quite making physical contact with the men) to defend themselves and the butterflies, Marianta used her wing-ears to keep contact with the butterflies and birds, and her trunk to distract the hunters with noise. It worked, and Marianta could hear creaking crickets within the next mile, and the soft yet deep growls of a tiger in the shrubbery. The Asian Koels (grateful for being rescued) flew ahead to let Marianta’s home rainforest know that she was returning, joined by colorful young insects.
Finally, after close to two weeks of walking, Marianta and her winged friends made their way back into her original jungle. “Elephant is back!” the monkeys, pandas, and lizards exclaimed, each with a different onomatopoeia. “We’ve been expecting you, the birds you saved a few nights ago told us that you were coming,” a leopard said. “But we’ve still been so excited to see you, and look at her wonderful ears.”
“Her name is Marianta now,” the butterflies explained. “Our mum from the zoo named her.”
“Did she give you the wings too, Marianta?” a panda asked. “Yes, in a way. She also has helped me to find my mother.’’
During the next few days, Marianta told her neighbors more of Mother Butterfly, her own parents, and her journey back with Mother Butterfly’s children, while she waited for the birth of her calf. Once this day came, Marianta and her mate communicated through her wing-ears to give her strength and company as she labored. When Marianta’s calf was born, she named him Pepper. “I won’t give my baby to any human,” Marianta promised, “even if he were cared for in a zoo. I must raise him where he most belongs.”
Pepper was curious about the world from the moment he had left his mother’s womb, and he knew that he was at home. After Pepper was born and he had gotten to know the butterflies, they began to tell Pepper their story of their mother, and how they knew his.
In a couple of weeks, there was a surprise for Marianta. Jua had come to live with her and their son. “We can still visit your mother,” he told her. “But I know that we need each other now, and Pepper needs both of us.”
“That will be all right, I can hear her with my wings when she wants to see us,” Marianta said. When the butterflies continued to migrate, they would visit their father and Marianta’s mother, who was curious about her grandson.
Shortly after Pepper was born, Mother Butterfly’s life had come to an end due to the brief life spans of insects. Marianta’s ears began to lose the butterfly colors and lines as a result, regaining their original blend of purple and silver. She was saddened, knowing that she could not give her a farewell in person, and wondered if Mother Butterfly’s death was at all related to her being caught in Marianta’s ears while teaching her to flutter, as she had seemed weaker during that afternoon and evening.
On the morning following her new knowledge respecting Mother Butterfly, Marianta met her children with conciliatory eyes. While they rather wished that a chance could have come for them to bid their mother goodbye in person, the son and two daughters of Marianta’s friend understood her feelings and assured her that she was pleased and settled during her last days. “What’s more is, it isn’t very unusual for an insect’s offspring to be somewhere else when their life ends,” one butterfly-sibling added. Marianta soon realized that the father butterfly must be near the end of his life as well, but was glad of having met him once, and remained a true friend to their children as she had promised.
Now and then, people from different cities would be amazed by the news of a wing-eared elephant mother and want to find her for a picture. There were also those who did not believe it, deciding that her images in articles and on television must have been human-made or computer-generated. There were even a couple of people who unsuccessfully attempted this very thing, either by visiting a zoo or joining a safari and photographing themselves next to an elephant, before editing the image with monarch butterfly wings in place of the ears.
As the years passed, Marianta knew how much or little of a need there would be to show herself and was satisfied with staying in nature. By the year of 2007 and after, her ears would become an iconic image for environmental awareness, and people use it still as a reminder of endangered elephants and other threatened or depleted species. Even without a symbol, however, elephants would need no reminding. For even those who had met Marianta only once would remember her as their friend and relative every day, until the end of their lives.
