Fuzz: When Nature Breaks the Law

by Mary Roach

Officer Raj gives me the particulars of the most recent fatalities. He begins, each time, with the exact date. You get the feeling there’s a lot of paperwork. “Thirty-one October, 2018. Three workers in the road.” The spot we passed earlier. “Suddenly one elephant appeared.” One can be scarier than many. Herds comprise females and young elephants, the peace-loving jumbos of my childhood. A loner is typically male, and males can be trouble. Bull elephants go through a periodic hormonal tumult called musth, during which their testosterone levels are as much as ten times higher than at other times. This gives them a competitive edge with other males and with the herd’s dominant matriarch, but also a degree of random volatility. The musth mood state ranges, in the words of Asian elephant specialist Jayantha Jayewardene, from “hyper-irritability” to “a charging or destructive tendency” toward other elephants, human beings, “and even inanimate objects.” Villagers know this. “The men tried to escape into the bushes,” says Officer Raj. “One person unfortunately fell down.” Officer Raj supplies the detail Aritra was careful to omit. The elephant stepped on the man’s head. When you weigh 6,000 pounds, simply stepping or kneeling on a person—or, in the 1992 case of a riled circus elephant named Janet, performing a headstand upon the person—is an effective means of killing. But Officer Raj’s determination in this case, based on footprints and disturbances of the surrounding vegetation...