In the old stories of the savanna people, it was said that elephants were once human — that long ago, in a time before the separation of species, a group of the wisest and most compassionate people asked the universe to give them bodies large enough to hold all the love they felt, and so they were transformed, their ears growing wide enough to hear the heartbeat of the earth, their memory deepening until it contained every moment that had ever mattered. Amara was the eldest of her herd, one hundred and twelve years old, her grey skin mapped with the lines of a century of living, and when she spread her great ears wide and lifted her face to the sky there was something in her expression that the young researcher who studied her could only describe, in her private notes, as joy — pure, uncomplicated, luminous joy. The researcher had come to the savanna to study elephant cognition but what she found instead was something her instruments could not measure — the way Amara would place her forehead gently against the foreheads of the grieving, the lost, the frightened, and hold it there until whatever had been broken in them quietly, inexplicably mended. The local people were not surprised when the researcher eventually stopped taking notes altogether and simply sat with the herd day after day, learning the only thing Amara had ever been trying to teach — that wisdom is not a destination but a way of moving through the world, slowly, together, forgetting nothing and forgiving everything. And if you looked closely at Amara's face in those golden afternoon hours when the light fell just right, you could see within the ancient geography of her wrinkles something that looked unmistakably like a smile — the smile of someone who has lived long enough to find the whole beautiful, heartbreaking, magnificent thing funny.