The Cowboy and his Elephant (4 page)

A few miles on, the convoy pulled to the side of the road in a defile near a stand of
moupane
trees. Sometimes called the Dark Continent, Africa was more the Silent Continent, and this morning it was no different. The men disembarked from the trucks without a sound, their boots and shoes sinking into the sandy Kalahari soil.

Suddenly the noise of the airplane engine broke the stillness, and two-way radios crackled with static. The pilot revved the engine and banked over the treetops in tight circles. He had sighted the elephant herd and was “pushing” them toward the hunters, who were just then loading their guns.

The elephants of Amy’s family—adult cows, adolescents, and Amy—screamed, trumpeted, and bellowed at the horrible sound of the airplane. They ran behind their matriarch, trying to get away, until they came upon the men who faced them with guns aimed. The elephants stopped. The airplane seemed to be everywhere at once—above, behind them and at their sides. In front of them stood the men. There was nowhere to turn. Then the shooting started, the guns exploding in unison. The first elephant killed by gunfire, the matriarch of Amy’s family, slumped on her front knees, then fell over dead on her side. Amid the racket of the airplane and the exploding guns, Amy’s mother and several other older females in the family rushed to where the matriarch lay dead.
They touched and pushed her, trying to help her get up. Her death was inconceivable to them, and their pitiful attempt to save her, refusing to leave her, spelled their quick doom.

Now without her they did not know what to do or where to go. They had no leader. Out of fear they screamed, bellowed, and defecated. They trumpeted to locate the young elephants that were scattering in panic. The older females formed their bodies into a tight phalanx in front of the matriarch. The guns fired nearly point-blank, and the elephants’ powerful legs went out from under them as if the earth had swallowed them up. They fell on top of one another. One shooter climbed onto a dead elephant and shot from that vantage point. Men were shouting. Amy stayed near her mother; then her mother was shot. Amy tried to burrow her head under her mother’s chin.

“That one! That one!” a voice cried. “Do
not
shoot that one!”

Hands pulled Amy away from her mother’s body, though she tried to run away. The gunfire was ending. She struggled out of their grasp. Men with ropes chased her and jumped on her back and straddled her. She was exhausted, terrified, and confused. Men’s hands forced her ears over her eyes. A thin rope went around her head. She was blinded. She could hear the dying sighs and groans of her family. She could smell their deaths. Her family had been slaughtered! Then there was a sharp prick on the inside of one ear, and in an instant, everything slipped away.

_____

D
eVries worked fast. He moistened Amy’s eyes with drops. He listened closely to her breathing. He ordered several men nearby to help him pull her over to his truck. Fifteen minutes went by. The guns were stacked out of sight. Then, “All of a sudden everyone else let go of the baby and ran away,” deVries remembered. “Amazingly, her mother was up! Although she was shot, she was not dead. It was like she had come back to life at the sight of what was happening to her baby and was charging us at full speed. I stayed with the baby; I did not run with the others. The mother went right past me to reach the men who were running away. She caught two of them and knocked one flat out on the ground. The other one fell under her tusks. The one between her legs tried to crawl out the back way on his hands and knees. She did not make a sound. She pushed him forward with her back legs. She would not let him get away. She was standing on her knees. She wrapped her trunk around him. She was stabbing at him with her tusks. His pants were torn off, and his shirt was torn off, and he was screaming. The other man was still trying to get away.

“One of the hunters ran to find his rifle. He came back. He aimed.
Pkaaaa!
” Amy’s mother was dead.

In the silence that followed, the Africans slipped their sharpening steels out of their scabbards. They slid butchering knives up and down the steels with a buzzing of blades.
DeVries injected Amy’s ear with an antidote to the Scoline tranquilizer. She struggled to her feet and cried out. No call from her family came in reply. She pushed her trunk out a narrow slit in the truck’s gate, searching for the scents of her mother, her aunties, and cousins. She screamed for an hour as the truck made its way slowly out of the bush in the direction of the nearest dirt road. From time to time deVries stopped to give her water and fresh leafy branches that he slashed off trees with a machete.

Later the sun set and the twilight passed swiftly; then it was dark. The Ford’s headlights jittered and picked out darkened silhouettes against a line of
moupane
and Rhodesian mahogany trees. At first deVries could not distinguish the shapes. Amy cried out. The dark shadows moved across the truck’s beams. A whole new family of female elephants was running straight at his truck. DeVries remembers, “I was being ambushed. Oh, yes, my friend, it happened. I turned off the truck lights. These elephants pushed the truck backward and forward. The baby cried. The elephants made a helluva noise. I was frightened. I put the truck in third gear and moved forward slowly. I could feel the elephants hit the truck with their bodies. They were trying to turn it over. The whole family of elephants pushed right up against the truck. They tried like hell to get the baby out, I swear to you. I thought I should let her go. I would have been killed if I had tried to get out of the truck. I moved away, I don’t know how far. I turned on the lights. The elephants
were gone. What had happened there that night was very strange.”

A
n adult bull elephant deVries had found long ago as an orphaned baby and raised as a pet, was waiting for Amy in the pen that night when deVries drove up the road to his ranch house. He had rescued the bull, whom he named Jumbo, by the Gwayi River, in a mud wallow that he could not get out of. “Growing up, Jumbo had a milk cow for his mother,” deVries recalled. “When the cow lay down Jumbo lay down right next to her. You could hear him snore a mile away. He was afraid that she would leave him; he laid his trunk over her stomach, and when she got up he woke up and followed her. The cow knew that Jumbo was not her calf. He got bigger and bigger. But she didn’t seem to mind.”

Released from the back of deVries’s truck, Amy ran to Jumbo—one orphan to another—at the far end of a corral made of wide sheets of rubber conveyor belt salvaged from a coal mine. All through that first night and for several nights thereafter, even with Jumbo by her side, Amy’s long, high-pitched screams kept Rita deVries awake. When daylight dawned, Amy was standing by the bull elephant and would not move from his side. DeVries set out a radio with the volume low to calm her. He wanted her to hear people talking, and the sound of music. As deVries understood her future, she was going to be among humans for the rest of her life, and he wanted to help her understand their ways.

_____

A
young animal cast into a strange world for which she was wholly unprepared, she had to learn how to be an orphan. Though she was partly weaned, she could not survive on solid foods alone. Rita deVries worked out a formula of boiled rice mixed with powdered milk that she warmed on her kitchen woodstove. Rita helped Amy eat. She sat on a stool in front of her pen and placed her trunk in the bucket of milk, which Amy sucked up. She had to learn the harder task of transferring the milk from the bucket to her mouth, and that was where Rita helped. With the milk in Amy’s trunk, Rita guided the end of her trunk into her mouth. After a while Amy learned to suck the milk into her mouth as if through a straw. Then Rita put Amy’s trunk back in the bucket for another sip, repeating the procedure over and over. Because the milk stayed fresh in the African heat only for an hour, Rita would go back to the house to prepare more. Amy drank a cup of milk every ten minutes or so, twenty-four hours a day. Rita deVries remembers, “Eventually she decided if she sucked a little bit she could hold it in her trunk by herself. She could get the milk out herself. At first she blew it all over her face, but in three or four days she got it right, and then she sucked a little bit and blew it into her mouth. She was feeding herself. At that stage we had every hope that at least she would survive.”

The nights were cold, and deVries burned logs down to coals, which he shoveled against the cinder block wall outside
Amy’s pen. She pressed her body against the inside of the thick wall and absorbed its comforting warmth. In the mornings she walked around the
kraal,
or pen. She joined Jumbo, and from her place by his side she looked out at her new world. Hens clucked and roosters crowed; the deVries family’s Rhodesian Ridgebacks growled and barked. A pet lion that Rita had raised from a cub stalked the fence. Cars, trucks, and tractors drove by, blowing black diesel smoke from their exhausts. Most of the time Amy stayed close to Jumbo, shivering with fright.

Removed from familiar sights, sounds, and smells—and roped, yanked, and prodded—the young elephant was on her way to becoming a commodity worth her value as a “curiosity” to humans, probably far away from Africa, as an attraction in a European zoo. Just then she needed kindness and love as much as food and water to live. Now that the bond of female elephant emotion had been broken, Amy must have felt lost. Her whole world had disappeared with the death of her cousins and aunties, her mother and the matriarch. She was alone, yet she was alive.

I
n the next months Amy was trained to accept being enclosed in a wooden crate, in which she ate and slept. She could not have known why she was made to enter the crate day after day, but she grew accustomed to it. She was learning to survive. New sounds bothered her, but less so than at first. Strange new sights were frightening, but she no longer automatically ran to the safety of Jumbo’s side.

One day a man she had not seen before came to the edge of the pen and leaned over to look at her. He talked with deVries, then walked back to the house. The stranger was a broker of exotic African animals who was buying Amy and would sell her to a circus or a zoo somewhere in the world. Her future was decided.

On the day of her departure deVries went to say goodbye. In his hand he carried a stick of chalk. He felt that he had satisfied his commitment by helping one elephant to escape the cull. Now she had to move on, but he could not let her go away nameless. In bold letters he wrote on the side of her crate:
AMY
, with the hope that anyone who met her, wherever she was bound, would recognize the word to mean “friend.”

S
he flew out of Africa with five other baby elephants. After the Boeing 747 lifted off from Johannesburg’s Jan Smuts Airport, the Lufthansa captain announced to the people flying with him, “Listen, we have some unusual passengers with us today.”

The flight attendants visited the baby elephants in the airplane’s rear cargo compartment. The crew adjusted the temperature for their comfort. A keeper watched over them, perched on top of a crate, talking to them. He used the Swahili word for elephant. “
Tembos,
quiet.
Tembos,
quiet,” he said.

*
The early life of this elephant, until the cull, cannot be known. This composite is drawn from numerous academic behavior studies of elephants as well as personal observations in that region of Africa.

B
ob Norris tilted his hat and gazed over the land that men like him had roamed for a century and more. In the wind he heard the echoes of the stories that cowboys on cattle drives told around campfires, of longhorns and of their beloved ponies. His reverie was broken by one of his ranch hands, who had come up to have a word with him.

The two men were standing outside in the cool Colorado air, in front of the gallery of the ranch’s horse barn. The snowy peaks of the Rockies shone like fiery beacons in the eastern light. Between the ranch and the Rockies rolled the green hills of the Front Range. The cowboy’s horse-and-cattle ranch spread south and west from where he was standing, farther than the eye could see.

The ranch hand, named Don, reported, “Some guy came
over here earlier this morning. Said he wanted to rent a couple of stalls. I told him to get out of here. We don’t do that.”

“That was diplomatic,” Bob said ironically. A small grin wrinkled his handsome face.

“He’s comin’ back to talk to you this afternoon.”

“That’s fine,” Bob said. “What’s he need the stalls for?”

“He wouldn’t say.”

“Well, hell, for a horse or kangaroos or what?”

“Horses, I guess,” said Don uncertainly.

Bob let it go for the moment. He had chores to do. And besides, with the welcome he had received from Don, he doubted that the stranger would come back soon. He went in the barn for a ladder, which he carried over to the grain silo. He climbed up to the steel rungs set into the concrete, and then up to a dizzying height. He straddled the silo’s rim as if it were a horse. A truck loaded with grain was backing up. By now several ranch hands had gathered around the base of the silo and taken off their hats; with their mouths open they looked up at their boss, who was old enough to be their father.

“What the hell are you boys gaping at?” Bob called down from the silo.

“Well,
you,
Bob,” said a hand named T. J. Eitel. “You shouldn’t be up there,
should
you?”

Bob looked dismayed. “Meaning what?”

“Nothin’, I guess,” T. J. said, smoothing his droopy mournful mustache.

“Who should be up here, then?” Bob shouted.

“Us, I guess.”

“You know I’d never let you do anything I wasn’t willing to, now would I?”

“I guess not.”

Later that morning, with the silo full, Bob and T. J. found the time to haul a load of live cattle up from the ranch near Colorado Springs, north of Denver, in the ranch’s 18-wheeler truck. Bob drove, and T. J. sat holding the side of his face, where a sore tooth had swollen his cheek, and he suffered in silence. They had delivered about forty head in all, and facing the drive home, both men needed a break. Bob thought that a few stiff drinks would be just the thing for T. J. He had in mind a grilled buffalo tenderloin for himself. He pulled the truck to a stop by the curb in front of the elegant Palace Arms restaurant in Denver’s exclusive Brown Palace Hotel. The parking valet leaped to his feet off the bench. The truck reeked of cow dung. He waved them on. Bob set the brake. He climbed down out of the cab and threw the attendant the keys.