If, as many recent nonfiction bestsellers have revealed, animals possess emotions and awareness, they must have stories. In The White Bone, a novel imagined entirely from the perspective of African elephants, the most splendid of nature's creatures, Barbara Gowdy creates a world whole and separate that yet illuminates our own.

For years, young Mud and her family have roamed the high grasses, swamps and deserts of sub-Saharan Africa. Now, however, the earth is scorched by drought, and the mutilated bodies of family and friends lie scattered on the ground, shot down by ivory hunters. Nothing - not the once-familiar terrain, or the age-old rhythms of life or even memory itself - seems reliable anymore.

Yet a slim prophecy of hope is passed on from water hole to water hole: the only chance for survival is the mysterious white hone.

And so, amid scenes of terrifying carnage and despair, begins the quest of Mud and her family for the bone that, legend holds, will point them toward the Safe Place. Their journey takes them through Africa's vast dessicated plains, where they meet with injury and starvation, ruthless poachers and rapacious carnivores, lone nomadic bulls and unexpected allies - until at last the survivors find themselves facing a final, chilling trial of loyalty and courage.

Plunged into an alien arid landscape, we gradually orient ourselves in elephant time, elephant space, elephant consciousness. And we begin to imagine, as Gowdy puts it "what it would be like to be that big and gentle, to be that imperiled, and to have that prodigious memory."