The Cowboy and his Elephant (9 page)

“Better not say anything to them yet,” Bob told her. “I don’t know how long they’ll be here.”

B
arry Jackson had agreed to pay Bob five hundred dollars a month to rent the horse stalls while he waited for buyers to show up. There was no telling how long that would take. African elephants were much less sought after than Asians. According to the conventional wisdom, Africans were intractable beasts both as performers and as zoo curiosities, while Asians, rare and endangered, were the pachyderms of choice in captivity. If these assumptions held, the baby elephants could be boarders at the ranch for some time to come. And while that worried Jackson, it suited Bob fine, because, more than being merely curious, he was drawn to the orphans.

From a perch on the fence around the little elephants’ enclosure, he found himself getting to know them as distinct individuals. He could see their intelligence. Each one had a different personality and character. One of them was a clown. She hooked her hind legs on the bottom rail of the fence and swung her trunk, playing with it. Another baby was quiet and serious, and one of them was skittish and shy.

As he observed them in the paddock, he began to focus his attention on one of them in particular. She was different
from the other five. She was the runt, smaller and less assertive. The other five babies pushed her away. It was clear to Bob that this one in particular was going to have the hardest time adjusting to a new life.

He told Jane, “She’s the littlest. She’s kind of. . . well,
beautiful.
She has long eyelashes. Real pretty amber eyes. Good lookin’. She is a real little lady. She has charm. The others kind of knock her around.”

The next day he watched her alone in the stall and attended her feedings, standing on the other side of the door while Jackson dipped her trunk in the milk buckets. Bob encouraged her to eat oats from his palm. She was not gaining weight as she should, Jackson told him. Something was wrong. She would not leave her stall unless she was forced out into the paddock with the other elephants. Bob bent over the door and talked to her. Jackson said that the stall must have reminded her of the crate in which she had traveled from Africa. She was afraid of open spaces.

Bob knew the seductive power of a carrot with horses. He sliced a carrot with his knife and gave the baby elephant a piece. She ate it tentatively, then she held out her trunk for more.

“Now I’ve got you,” he told her. He stepped into the stall. She reached out her trunk for the carrot. Bit by bit, step by step, he got her to leave the stall on her own. He kept the door open. She could go back in anytime. He watched her out in the paddock. She was curious. She looked up at the sky and lifted her trunk to smell the air. But at the sight of a
ranch hand riding past on his horse, she folded her ears, lowered her head, and ran back into her stall.

In the days that followed, with the baby now entering the paddock on her own even without the inducement of carrots, Bob left off training his cutting horses to watch her from the corral fence. Some of his ranch hands joined him on the rails. There were the usual jokes and laughter, which this time Bob found annoying.

“Cut it out,” he ordered his hands. “She may be a curiosity, but she’s no joke. She’s a beautiful animal. Use your eyes.”

He was watching the baby with a horse trainer’s eye to see exactly what made her different and appealing. Earlier the colts in the round pen had panicked at the sight of her. With shrieks of sheer equine terror, the young horses had leaped like kangaroos over a six-foot pipe fence to get away from the sight of her. The little runt stood aloof, while the other babies had huddled together for safety. The colts frightened her, Bob could tell, and he tried to understand her fear. He knew how he would feel if his own kind avoided him. Built into the runt’s character, he believed, was an awareness of herself as different.

Bob worried about who would protect her. She had no adult elephant to come between her and the other babies, who behaved as they would never have been allowed to in the wild. They ganged up on her, took her food, and hit her with their trunks. They behaved as orphaned elephants did in the wild.

For want of an adult elephant as her protector, Bob made certain that she got her fair share. He shouted at the other babies to move aside. His presence in the paddock on a horse forced them to back away. Using his skills as a cowboy, he cut the other elephants away to allow her time to eat and drink. He visited her stall, where she was separated for her own protection. He visited her in the late afternoons and evenings when the sun was setting. He fed her carrots. He talked to her. She moved closer to him and lifted her trunk to smell him.

Until now he had not stopped to wonder if she had a name. He asked Jackson when he next came by.

“Amy,” he replied automatically.

“Nice,” said Bob, then tried out the name aloud a couple of times. “It fits her, don’t you think?”

“If you say so, Mr. Norris.”

“Where does it come from? Amy?”

“I don’t know. Someplace. It was written on her crate.”

A
s a rancher and horseman, Bob believed that “no better word was ever spoken of a man than that he was careful of his horses.” He added goats to that list, and dogs, cats, and cows, “any damn thing except rattlers and ostriches,” he liked to say. Now he included one baby elephant on this list as well.

On a day when the sun was warmer than usual and the sky was bright he paused a moment to watch as Jackson
chased Amy around in her paddock. She was terrified, Bob guessed, because men on foot running like Jackson had killed her family. She was trying to get away to a corner of the paddock.

Amy did not belong to Bob; she was a strange animal, and he did not know her behavior, but he knew a frightened, traumatized baby when he saw one. He climbed the fence rail and poised himself to jump down into the paddock. He watched as Jackson, chasing her, raised a length of two-by-four. Bob straightened up. Jackson swung and hit Amy hard across the rump.

Bob was off the fence and running across the paddock. He snatched the board out of Jackson’s hands. He was trembling with anger and had trouble controlling his voice when he told him, “You hit her again, Mr. Jackson, and we’re going to have a problem.” He threw the board over the fence and walked off in disgust. Jackson stood there looking between Amy and Bob. He did not know what was happening, but he sensed the presence of powerful emotions that he did not grasp. These elephants were a commodity to him, and he could not comprehend anyone feeling protective of them simply as animals. He got in his truck and drove off. He would not hit her again.

A
my was still not eating as Bob imagined she should. She was not properly weaned, and she was frightened much of the time. An occasional lassitude indicated a serious depression.
She had started to come into her own, induced by the carrots, but then she had slipped back, and then further back.

He tried to understand her. He had no knowledge of where she had come from. But he imagined a jungle with vines to swing on, odd beasts, and people wearing jodhpurs and pith helmets, and natives with bones in their hair. He knew that his view of Africa was outdated, if it had ever been real. Still, Amy missed her home. She missed her family, her mother and sisters. Bob could not replace what had been taken from her, but he could act as a surrogate for them—he could be Amy’s mother—for a while.

Jackson had told him about the cull in Africa. Bob would have preferred to be spared the gory details. He hated the words “slaughter” and “killing,” and preferred “harvest” and “cull,” which made what happened sound less cruel and wanton. Jackson told Bob about how Buck deVries had saved Amy. He described her journey through Europe to the United States with the five other babies he had bought in southern Africa.

Bob told Jane, “No creature Amy’s age should have to live with such dark, horrible memories, and nothing happy to replace them with.”

Amy had lost her universe. Bob imagined, as he said, that her simple elephant soul ached. She had been pushed around, transported in trucks that reeked of diesel fumes, limited to a
kraal,
packed in a tight wooden crate, and fed through her trunk as though it were a filling-station nozzle. How much more could any creature take? She had been trying
to gain control of her own basic baby needs when she was captured. She was listless now, and Bob took this to mean sadness. Nightmares startled her awake. She pounded the walls with her trunk. She wanted to escape as if from memory itself.

She had not made a sound, and even knowing as little about elephants as he did, that struck Bob as odd. He checked a book on elephants out of the library. He read that they expressed themselves with a repertoire of screams, squeaks, bellows, trumpets, rumbles, and sounds below the level of human hearing. He read, “All healthy baby elephants scream; if one does not it is either sick, neurotic, or mad, and will either die or be extremely troublesome.”

“She’s just a little baby, a puppy,” he told Jane. “She’s getting sickly. I don’t know what to do, but something has to be done or she’ll die.”

Jane listened, wanting to help but not knowing what to do.

“I mean there’s no way to sweet-coat what happened to her,” he went on. “In a perfect world she would have stayed her whole life with her mama in the jungle. But that didn’t happen.”

“What can we do?” she asked him. “She doesn’t belong to us.”

Bob had never been more serious in his life. “I can’t undo what made her an orphan. But I can do the next best thing.”

T
he next best thing was himself.

He owned more than enough land for a baby elephant to
roam on. He could give her the time to grow and get healthy, and once she was better—once she was over her trauma—Bob could decide what to do with her then. He talked to Jane about it. “I just think I should take advantage of a situation that’s come my way,” he told her. “Why Jackson drove into my ranch instead of somewhere else, I’ll never know. I want little Amy to be a part of our family—I just
want
her. I know she will be a challenge. But I like challenges, and just now maybe I need one too. It’s me or no one.”

His appeal melted Jane, who soon was in her kitchen elbow-deep in a concoction of milk and cornmeal. She and Bob dipped Amy’s trunk in the bucket, and when it was full of warm milk, they guided it into her mouth. Amy knew how to feed this way; she needed a
reason
to eat, not a technique to help her do it.

Jane told Bob, “I can almost hear her asking,
Where’s my mom?
She’s at the age when her mother is her whole world. It’s so very sad; I think we might lose her.”

T
he young animal was wasting away from grief, as Bob saw it. He recalled a story not long before of a llama pair that escaped from a zoo in Boston. The police had shot the male dead in the street, and the female, untouched, laid her head on her mate’s neck and, with a sigh, simply died, without any reason except grief.

Bob telephoned the veterinarian who ministered to his horses and cows. “You have to be the doctor of an elephant
now,” he told Laura H. Harris, a blond-haired woman with pretty sky blue eyes and a cowgirl’s trim figure.

She thought, An elephant in terms of doctoring isn’t different from a horse. The only difference is our ability to read their reactions. We know a horse’s. I know a bear’s and a leopard’s, because I’ve doctored them. An elephant’s? That’s another thing.

She drove out to Bob’s ranch right away and looked Amy over from trunk to toes.

“Nothing’s wrong with her that I can tell, Bob,” she reported.

Amy was physically sound, though underweight and weak, as Bob had said. Her lethargy and depression remained in spite of her eating a little bit now and then. Dr. Harris decided against seeking out expert advice at the local zoo or, farther afield, at the St. Louis Zoo. What ailed Amy was obvious, at least to her. She needed someone in her new world as unique to her as she was unique to them.

“It’s up to you, Bob,” Dr. Harris told him. “If anyone can save an animal like Amy, it’s you.”

Bob thought, Sadness, separation, and loss have happened to animals all through history. Nature is always cruel. As humans we do the best we can. Humans caused this in her, and humans can cure this. I can feed her and make sure she is clean and watered. I can stroke her and pet her. I can lay my hands on her and give her tender loving care. But the rest is up to her.

That evening Bob talked with Jane over a quiet dinner. He told her that trying to save a baby elephant from death was one of those things that you just did without thinking about it. The future would take care of itself. He told Jane, “What I’m asking, Can we adopt her?”

Jane’s first thought was, Here we go again! What could she say? She loved Bob too much to say no. “You’ve thought about where this will lead?” she asked.

Bob told her, “Nope, I haven’t. You never know that. But if you don’t open the door and walk through it, life will be pretty dull.”

She smiled. “Then open the door.”

N
o zoo or circus had offered to buy Amy. By then Barry Jackson had sold the other five elephants one by one to zoos in Mexico and a circus in the Dominican Republic. Amy stood in the paddock alone now, with nowhere to go and no friend but Bob.

Jackson was clever enough to notice Bob’s attraction, and how he talked to Amy, sang to her, fed her, and, reaching through the fence rails, petted her. He hardly left her paddock anymore to attend to his chores. The horses were forgotten; the cows were left to the ranch hands. Amy had clearly become the center of his world. Jackson did not bother to mention to Bob that no one wanted to buy Amy. (What kind of an elephant trader would that kind of remark have made him?) He said to Bob only that she was sure to find a home—some inquiries had been made. It was only a
matter of time. But Jackson kept to himself the simple fact—he knew—that Amy would never find a home.

One Saturday, Bob was standing by Amy’s stall in the gallery of the barn when Jackson came up and told him, “I think I found a buyer for Amy.”