Coyness is keeping the elephant alive. If he does not turn his head, the sun will set and the elephant will not be killed today.

The light is caramelizing. If Robyn can’t get a shot in the next five or ten minutes, the sun will sink past the trees and it will be lion-o’clock out here.

And then he turns his head. His expression is wary, rueful. In his long-lashed bedroom eyes is the look of an old drag queen turning to regard an importunate suitor tugging at the hem of her dress.

Robyn raises her rifle. For the past few months, she’s been rehearsing this moment in her bedroom closet in Texas, aiming, reloading, aiming again. She shoots.

The rifle’s thunder is somehow insignificant. The shot catches the elephant in the appropriate place, at the bridge of its trunk. But an elephant brain is a big piece of equipment—it can weigh as much as twelve pounds. Robyn’s bullet did not apparently sever enough vital neurons to kill the animal in a single shot. He shakes his head, as if to wag away the pain of a wasp’s sting. There is a second shot that strikes him in the neck. He turns to flee, but his right foreleg has buckled. He strives to stand. The effect is of a cripple trying to pitch a broken circus tent. In the franticness of his movements, one can sense the elephant’s surprise that his body, a machine that has served him well for over fifty years, has suddenly stopped accepting his commands. To see so large and powerful an animal vised in an even larger and more powerful inevitability is, for lack of a better word, intense.

The other elephants scatter. Robyn and Jeff jog toward the animal. In the fervor of the moment, Robyn has momentarily forgotten to put fresh rounds in her gun. “Reload, reload, reload,” Jeff instructs. They advance to a distance of maybe twenty-five feet. “Okay, shoot him right in the hip.” The gun fires twice. The tent sags right and seems to sort of sway and billow, as though surrendering to wind.

“Okay, come with me,” Jeff says. He leads Robyn along the animal’s left flank. At the sound of the hunters coming in close, the elephant struggles more direly to rise, but instead, he loses ground against gravity and settles closer to the earth. “Just watch his trunk. [Be sure] he doesn’t hit you with it.”

Jeff leads her to a position perhaps ten feet from the elephant’s left temple. “Okay, hit him right in the ear hole.” At this point there is little the elephant can do except to turn his face away. The last shot claps into the elephant’s ear.

“Perfect,” says Jeff Rann. “Brain shot. You brained him.”

And the elephant, still swaying on its haunches, a slow faucet of blood trickling from his forehead, is no more.

So that is how the elephant got shot. Once in the forehead, once in the neck, twice in the hip, once in the ear. How it felt to watch the elephant get shot is something else. As I watched the elephant go down, what obtruded into my consciousness was a kind of a thing, a psychological sensation with a very particular shape and weight and texture, a geometry as discrete and seemingly physical as a house key or a tire iron, but which I don’t have any useful language to describe. This thing, this mute-pseudo revelation, had something to do with adrenaline’s power to catalyze time into taffy. Forty seconds elapsed between the first shot and the last, yet what happened in those forty seconds seemed to happen out of time. It was another kind of time in which a new understanding of death impressed itself upon me more rapidly than my cognition could accommodate.

The indescribable thought sensation was not this, but some tiny part of it was sort of like this: Before I saw the elephant get shot, I understood that there was life, and there was its cessation. But now I understand there is this other thing—dying, when death stops being an idea and becomes a thing that the body, if not the conscious mind, grasps in its full intensity. Watching the elephant die granted the illusory understanding of death’s grammar and meaning, as with an alingual child who hears five words and thinks he knows a language. The first word went through the forehead, the second through the neck, the third and fourth through the hip, the fifth through the ear. The month before this trip, on another assignment for this magazine, for the first time in my life, I handled the corpse of a dead human being, and I learned nothing about death. I learned nothing about death, either, when Robyn Waldrip shot the elephant. But it left in my skull at least the languageless shadow of the indescribable thing: Death is this. Death is the elephant taking the first shot in the forehead, and the second in its neck, slumping, listing right, taking two in the hip, struggling, sinking, turning, taking one through the ear and not moving anymore. As it was in the beginning, and as it always will be: one in the forehead, one in the neck, two in the hip, one in the ear, world without end.