Authors: John Varley
She made two circuits of the arena with the ring of elephants alternately saluting her or being urged into other tricks by their black-clad handlers—headstands, dances, daisy chains, stand perches—and it helped cover up the fact that Big Mama essentially had only one “behavior” to demonstrate, which was standing on her hind legs with her head aimed up so that the tips of her tusks were thirty feet above the ground, waving her trunk around and bellowing, and few people knew how hard it had been to get a crusty old bitch like her to do even that. Training elephants, like training any large and dangerous animal, relied on the animal accepting the unlikely idea that the human trainer, though demonstrably
smaller and weaker, was in fact bigger and stronger than the trained animal, that the human ought,
by natural right
, to be the dominant figure in the social contract, and Big Mama had been the leader of her herd for too long to accept that idea with any regularity or consistency unless lulled by large doses of tranquilizers.
“And now, ladies and gentlemen and children of all ages…,”
the ringmaster intoned, and blah, blah, blah, the show went on for a full half hour, a strange mix of Las Vegas and the Discovery Channel. Showgirls swung down on ropes from hatches concealed in the overhead screen, clad in a lot of pink feathers and not much else, and landed on the backs of the elephants, who did more tricks…sorry, behaviors. At the same time unctuous voices took the audience through the evolution of the order Proboscidae, from the humble little piggish ancestral Moeritherium, up evolutionary backwaters and dead ends to Dinotherium with its peculiar downturned tusks, Platyhelodon with its massive shovel jaw, pausing a moment to ponder the oddities of the Rynchotheres, of Stegodon, Mastodon, Stegomastodon, Zygolophodon, and Archidiskodon, each defunct genus and species faithfully rendered and animated on the heavenly telestrator like moving constellations, until all heads in the audience were swimming in more unwanted Latin gobbledygook than they’d encountered since the classrooms of the ninth grade, right up to what the announcer implied were the three crowning glories of the Probiscideans: Elephas, Loxodonta, and Mammuthus, better known as Indian and African elephants and the family of mammoths: Imperial, Columbian, and Great Woolly. And the narrative left little doubt that of these the greatest of the great was the Great Woolly.
So where
was
the Great Woolly? For the first time, the audience began to get a little restless.
This did not go unnoticed by the producers of the show. Hidden in every tenth seat were electronic devices that functioned pretty much like a lie detector, measuring heart and respiration rate, palm sweat, and the pressure of butts on seats. Lasers were constantly scanning the audience, measuring pupil dilation and analyzing posture. These factors were inserted into a complex entertainment algorithm to produce a
satisfaction index, and every night this presentation produced the lowest value. But Howard Christian liked this part of the show, so it stayed in.
Finally the arena was cleared, the lights and the tent screens faded to black, and one spotlight and every eye in the place swung once more to the grand entrance arch. You could practically feel the ringmaster take a deep breath and then announce, in his most grandiloquent manner—which could have taught the Lord God Almighty Himself thundering
“Let there be light!”
a thing or two about pomposity—
“And now, without further ado, the star of the show, the most famous, the most beloved animal in the world, the Great Woolly Mammoth…Little Fuzzy!”
LITTLE
Fuzzy the Great Woolly Mammoth was no longer exactly little, not really fuzzy, and technically not a woolly mammoth, but it was hard to deny his greatness. He was the biggest animal star in history, bigger than Jumbo, bigger than Seabiscuit, Lassie, Flipper, Secretariat, and King Kong. He was bigger than Mickey Mouse.
HOWARD
Christian had arrived on that night of carnage five years ago in a 1935 Mercedes roadster, one of the few sights that could have appeared on Wilshire Boulevard that would have distracted anyone’s eye from the horrors all around. He was trailed by four Hummers full of Beverly Hills attorneys, public relations people, bodyguards, and general fixers, under the command of Warburton. Some of these people managed to work three cell phones at once, rousting everyone in the Los Angeles area who could help support the premise Howard Christian was determined to establish: that this debacle, all of it, was the responsibility of Howard Christian and no one else, that he would indemnify the city and all the citizens who had suffered damage, that he would in fact begin cleaning up the mess
right now
…and that consequently, and as an acknowledgment thereof, salvage rights would devolve upon him, his corporations and representatives and assigns, including the sedated female mammoth lying by the bus, the bull mired up to his ears in La Brea tar, and the heaps of meat that used to be female mammoths lying in the middle of Curson Avenue. That the animals that had appeared suddenly in the night were, in fact,
his.
Within a few more minutes the police and emergency response
commanders were answering their own phones and getting their orders from the very top levels. Many of them resented it, at least at first, until they saw how quickly and efficiently the scene was being managed, and then it occurred to many of them that this could turn out to be the biggest shit-storm to hit L.A. since Rodney King, and did they really want their names written down anywhere near it? Of course they didn’t. The killing of the herd had gone out on live television, and it was not going to go down well with animal lovers around the world. Best to let Christian shoulder the blame.
Miraculously, there were no reports of anyone having been killed or even seriously injured in the catastrophe, though the property destruction had been enormous. Crime scene procedures were drastically shortened, as no one could think of any actual crime that had been committed unless someone had deliberately unleashed the animals on an unsuspecting city. So Big Mama and her slaughtered herd were hastily photographed, even as Warburton’s trucks were backing up to haul them away. The fate of the male mammoth, eventually to be known as Big Daddy, was handed off to Howard and Warburton with almost audible sighs of relief.
It wasn’t until the arrival of a large horse trailer at the edge of the tar pit itself that anyone other than Howard’s people even knew there was a third mammoth still alive.
SUSAN
witnessed the arrival of Howard’s ridiculous car with more relief than she would have believed possible.
Every second for the last half hour she had feared that she and the baby mammoth would be discovered. The bull mammoth was mired no more than a hundred feet from where she stood, his mighty head moving less and less frequently, his trunk lashing wildly, getting stuffed with the thick goo which he would then snort out, each time more fitfully than the last. Many times flashlights swept over him and she heard people shouting about bringing up some big lights, but that was apparently delayed.
The streetlights in the area were mostly knocked down, and the outdoor diorama was in deep shadow. Twice flashlights illuminated the phony bull in the pool and the phony cow and
calf standing on the shore, but Susan was standing behind a thick palm tree and whoever had the flashlight either didn’t see the real baby mammoth or accepted it as part of the display, even when he moved his little trunk over the plastic flank of his temporary surrogate mother, and the beam moved on.
At first she had doubted her ability to keep the baby concealed. Looking at him, she figured he ran somewhere between three and four hundred pounds; if he wanted to bolt, how was she, at one thirty soaking wet, going to stop him?
But he had proved amazingly tractable. Mostly he seemed content to hover in the shadow of the big statue. If he started to move away Susan moved toward him, and he quickly retreated to what he must have thought of as safety. It seemed reasonable, from his point of view.
If this auntie here isn’t afraid of the two-legs, why should I be?
She had no idea what to do. One thing she was sure of, though, and that was that this baby was not going to be slaughtered like the others, most of which were probably his aunts and one of which was almost certainly his mother. If she had to stand between the baby and the bullets, so be it. She was not going to let this one get away.
And so, for the first time since she had met him, she was happy to see Howard arrive. Whatever else he might be, Howard was power, and power got things done in this world.
It took her a while to get Howard’s attention as he strode up and down the sidewalk above her, shouting into his cell phone or at Warburton. The shadows that had protected her now frustrated her in her attempts to flag him down, there was still too much hubbub for her to easily make herself heard, and she was afraid if she made too much noise she might spook the calf. Once Howard almost seemed to hear her hissed words. He looked around and so did one of his bodyguards, but they didn’t see her. He strode off up the street and she almost cried.
He was back soon, but this time a helicopter overhead drowned out any sounds she could make. She scrabbled around on the dark ground, looking for a good rock, but all she could come up with were a few clods of dirt. She started throwing them, and the third exploded at his feet. He stared at it dumbly for a moment, then he looked up in the air as if wondering
if he was being pelted by meteors, and at last one of his entourage pointed down the slope to where Susan stood with one hand held out and one finger held to her lips, hoping she was getting across
Be quiet, and don’t come down here yet!
Howard gestured to another of his men, this one holding a big Maglite—the great man doesn’t even carry his own flashlight, he hires help for that—and in a moment Susan’s eyes were dazzled, then the beam swept over the baby mammoth, on past it…and she heard a shout even over the racket of the helicopter. Howard stood there with his jaw dropped and his eyes wide, then he shoved the flashlight away and was frantically signaling to his people, all of whom turned their backs, as Howard did, as four Los Angeles uniformed police walked by in the street. He stood there among them, hands clasped behind himself and looking casually at the sky, in what he apparently thought was an innocent attitude.
My god, was he actually whistling, too?
Susan wondered how he ever got away with anything as a kid if that was the best he could do. When the cops had gone by, he casually turned and gave her a broad wink over his shoulder. Her opinion of his ability to handle this mess plummeted.
She needn’t have worried. Howard had learned long ago the secret of getting things done, and it was simple: Hire the people who know how to get things done. He was at that moment surrounded by a dozen such types, headed by the very able Mr. Warburton, the ablest of them all. If Warburton didn’t know how to get it done, he knew somebody who knew somebody who knew somebody who did. So he turned to Warburton and said:
“Forget all other priorities I just gave you. We need that baby mammoth out of here, and the sooner the better.”
Warburton turned to one of his minions and gave his instructions, and more phone calls were made. Ten minutes later a moving van pulled up to the closest police tape on Wilshire, and a dozen very large men got out. They were given their instructions, and proceeded cautiously down the gentle slope to where Susan was standing. They surrounded the little mammoth, ropes were attached, and the squealing infant was unceremoniously wrestled up the slope, over the collapsed fence, and into the back of the van, while a crowd of cops,
emergency workers, reporters, and curiosity seekers looked on. Live images of the capture were fed to a worldwide audience by the dozens of news cameras present both on the ground and in the air.
Susan was already working her telephone as the door slammed on the back of the van—and kicking herself for not thinking of it a few minutes ago. She could have called Howard, standing fifty feet away! But things had been a little hectic there, and she hoped she could be forgiven for overlooking it.
She knew all the elephant keepers from the Griffith Park Zoo, and within an hour most of them were on their way to the Miracle Mile.
When Big Mama woke and staggered to her feet, it was to find herself completely immobilized with ropes and nets. She was bullied and prodded until, not without difficulty, she was induced up the ramp of a giant stake-sided flatbed truck to begin her slow progress through streets lined with most of the population of Beverly Hills, Hollywood, and all intervening Los Angeles neighborhoods until she reached the elephant house at the zoo, at three in the morning.
At the same time crews were trying to figure out how to rescue Big Daddy, but it was hopeless. By the time Big Mama arrived at her temporary new home, the bull had ceased to move, and shortly afterward a veterinarian declared him dead, suffocated by the increasing pressure as he sank into the black ooze. The operation was immediately switched from a rescue to one of recovery. Howard did not intend to let twelve tons of mammoth meat and bones—and viable spermatozoa—be swallowed up to emerge in another twelve thousand years as blackened bones. By the time the sun came up a massive crane had been moved into place, stabilized and counterbalanced. A giant claw, normally used for horsing entire giant eucalyptus logs onto truck beds, plunged into the asphalt and clamped around Big Daddy’s corpse. Ribs could be heard cracking as the claw plucked the body free like a cork from a bottle of very bad vintage wine.
These three ultradramatic operations drew attention away from a fourth one going on at the same time on Curson Avenue. As helicopter cameras followed the progress of the
trucks carrying Big Mama and the calf, other trucks had arrived on the side street, other cranes and forklifts were gathering every scrap of still-steaming mammoth meat and hustling it into refrigerated vans, which sped off to an undisclosed location. There wasn’t a news director in the world who would cut away from the frantic attempts to save Big Daddy to shots of bullet-riddled pachyderm corpses with exploded heads, but by the time the big bull was dead the remains of the other adult cows were nowhere to be found, and even the gallons and gallons of blood had been hosed away. It was as if it had all been a dream, the slaughter on Curson Avenue, and if there hadn’t been the video to prove it had happened many people would have preferred to leave it that way.