Where Do Elephants Go To Die

Where Do Elephants Go To Die ? I have seen them in my dreams, moving like shadows across the long green grasses, their great heads nodding in silent reverence to the world that made them. The rivers, the mountains, the endless sky—once their kingdom, now their grave. They walk with wisdom beyond our own, knowing joys we have long since forgotten, suffering wounds the greedy have inflicted. Once, they laughed in the golden light, their voices trumpeting through the valleys, their bodies warm with the touch of their own kind. They lived as the earth intended: with love, with gentleness, with the silent understanding that life is not only to be endured but to be cherished. And yet, for all their wisdom, for all their strength, they could not escape the hunger of man. Hunted as though they were our equals in crime, as if their ivory was a price of their souls, as if their intelligence was a reason to break them. Men have taken their mothers, their fathers, their young, and left them to wander with sorrow too vast for tears. Have you ever seen an elephant cry? Have you ever heard their mourning song? If you have, you will know the sound of the world breaking. They love their own as we should love one another. They feel joy, and pain, and fear, and hope. They know kindness and practice it freely. And yet, for all their goodness, we have failed them. Men have darkened the forests and silenced the waters. Man has driven them to the edges of the world, where the trees grow thin and the rivers run dry, where the wind carries no scent but death. And so, they welcome sleep. No longer hunted, no longer afraid, they lay their great heads upon the earth, closing their wise eyes for the last time. Where do elephants go to die? Not to a place, but to a silence, to an end too gentle for the cruelty they have known. Where do elephants go to die? They go where men cannot follow, where our hands cannot harm them, where only the stars remember. And we have betrayed them and are left with such a vast starless sky of but the few that now know such emptiness.