The caretaker that died in the elephant sanctuary was supposedly trampled by a stampeding elephant. One of the detectives asks Thomas Metcalf how an elephant managed to sneak up on someone, considering their size and how much noise they make. He asked them if they'd ever seen an elephant stampede and hoped they wouldn't as an answer. I found this video of a herd of elephants stampeding. Honestly, I wouldn't be able to tell they were stampeding if the video wasn't titled it. They are moving quickly, but not as fast as the average person could run. The whole herd moving together is pretty intimidating, but not as scary as Thomas Metcalf made it sound. One interesting aspect of this video is when the narrator describes how most of the elephants don't know why they are stampeding, they just go along with the crowd, similar, he says, to a stampede of people at a stadium. The book keeps making connections between the actions of elephants and humans and characters finding them to be intellectual equals. (Virgil for instance) This is just another possible connection.
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