The Cowboy and his Elephant (13 page)

“What’s your business with elephants?” Bob wanted to know.

“The Department of Agriculture is mandated to make sure that elephants are being treated properly, the ones in zoos and circuses and ones like yours. Not many like yours, though.”

“Well, how did you hear about me? I haven’t advertised the fact she’s here.”

“The man who sold her to you.”

“Jackson?”

“I guess that’s his name. The law required him to report the buyer to us.” He referred to his clipboard. “I’m here to check around the ranch to make sure of the elephant’s safety.”

“She’s safe,” said Bob. “You can take my word for it.”

“It’s the
law,”
the inspector said.

“Well, do what you have to,” Bob told him, a little disgusted at the interference.

He watched him go over Amy’s stall inch by inch. With a tape measure he measured the diameter of the pipe fence
of her paddock, the square footage of her paddock and stall, the proximity of electrical lines, and so on. His attention to detail amazed Bob. Some of what he observed passed the Department of Agriculture’s guidelines, but not all—The electrical outlets and overhead electrical lines, for instance, were conceivably within reach of Amy’s trunk.

On his rounds the inspector told Bob that some private owners treated their elephants inhumanely. Indeed, they kept them in such terrible conditions that they had forced the government to intervene. They locked them in dark barns, never cleaned their quarters, fed them poorly, and kept them chained to the ground night and day. Bob winced. He began to understand the USDA’s purpose. He even came to see that the inspector had valuable knowledge to impart about elephants. By the end of his tour, Bob told him, “I’d rather you were overcautious.”

“Some of their owners don’t know what these animals are capable of. They can hurt themselves just out of their curiosity.” He pointed out to Bob things that he needed to change.

“She’s screwing around all the time,” Bob told the man. “If there is anything to get into, she’ll get into it, just like a kid with no idea of the dangers. She walks into my tack room and starts messin’ around with my equipment. You always have to be very careful. I am; I try to be. You can’t let her get into the feed room, either, or she’ll eat too much and then get colic.” He told the inspector, “Knock on wood,
we’ve never had a sick day with her once she got over the shock of what happened in Africa.”

The inspector said he would be back. “The government has the authority to confiscate the animal for its own protection,” he warned Bob, if the changes were not made.

Bob had no intention of losing Amy to government rules. But he wondered whether this man’s unscheduled visit was not the thin end of a wedge. How much did the government see ownership of an elephant as being unnatural, and therefore, how much would they continue to meddle in his private affairs?

N
ow that she was trained, Bob expected Amy to help with the chores.

“What do you give an elephant to do?” T. J. asked Bob one day.

“Darned if I know,” Bob replied, looking at Amy in the paddock.

T. J. thought for several minutes. “She could do tricks.”

“No, that’s fake,” said Bob. “I want her to make a difference around here. We’re not running a circus.”

“She could take care of the colts.”

“Yes, and the cows.”

T. J. laughed. “She could be like a
cowgirl.”

“And do a cowgirl’s work too,” said Bob. “That’s what we’ll do.”

Soon after the decision was made, Bob was trying to
teach Amy by example how to cut cattle with her size and with her trunk. She should have been superior at cutting cows to any horse. With that thought in mind, Bob took her into the pen with eight or nine young steers that huddled in a bunch in a far corner, facing out, their eyes bulging with the usual fear. They hardly noticed Bob on Big Bob. When one of them moved, as cows will, they all moved in a tight group.

The trick of cutting was to cut one cow out from this bunch. On the open range each cow was caught, branded, and medicated. Cows were semiwild animals and did not like to do what the cowboys wanted them to. Bob could cut the cows elegantly on horseback. He began to show Amy what he wanted her to do, but she seemed distracted and did not pay attention. Cows were objects to play with, she seemed to believe. Bob could have sworn that the cows’ terror amused her.

A good cutting horse cuts steers even without a rider to guide it. Almost by instinct a horse will feint left and right, shifting its weight, trying to commit the cow to a direction.

Bob got down from Big Bob and walked over to Amy. He ordered her to “stretch out!” He was carrying his
ankus,
and she obeyed him. Bob ran his gloved hand along her back. He talked to her, and he threw a horse blanket on the small of her back. He reached into the pocket of his carpenter’s apron for a treat. “Good Amy,” he told her. He said, “Trunk up!” She was curious and watched to see what he would do next.

He did the unexpected. In a quick move he straddled her back with his legs. “All right,” he told her. He waited; she waited. They stood in one place. Elephant and rider both seemed to have expected a different response. Amy looked around at him on her back and reached over her own head for a treat. “Move up, Amy,” he told her. She stepped forward, and they circled the pen at a slow walk.

Over the next few days, however, Bob felt that something about his training was just not right. Amy could cut steers almost as well as a horse. But increasingly he felt that this kind of work was beneath her dignity. Elephants were not designed to anticipate the motion of a frightened calf. Amy had a trunk to help her, and she was willing to go along with what Bob asked her to do. But in Bob’s eyes she was too noble an animal for a man to ride her like a horse. In spite of her training he still wanted to preserve her untamed nature and beauty as an animal. He never asked her to carry him again.

He chose instead to teach her how to walk the colts. He handed her their lead rope and said, “Take it, Amy.” She already knew how to unlatch and open the paddock gate. He taught her to block the colts with her body from running past her. She reached out her trunk, collected their leads and pulled them up tight, and then walked them back out of the gate. Soon Bob didn’t even tell her what to do. She seemed to enjoy her work.

She followed Bob everywhere and complained loudly when he entered his office and shut the door. She waited for
him and her patience often amazed Bob, who could hear her grumble on the other side of the closed door. She was happily excited when he came out, greeting him with a kiss on the face and a frisk of his clothes.

She was still cautious about wandering too far away from her paddock and stall, even with Bob by her side. The paddock was her home and represented the fulfillment of the important needs of food, water, and shelter. The paddock was where her toys were scattered and where she knew to find Michelle. Bob had long ago given up asking her to ride the fences with him. He went out alone on Big Bob, with Butch and Jo trotting along beside him.

Fence riding was a rancher’s chore, as old as the invention of barbed wire. A cow that went through the ranch fence was a lost cow, and lost revenue to the rancher. Since cows on the range tended to follow the leader, one lost cow often meant more. Besides, a busy interstate highway ran along the eastern boundary of Bob’s T Cross ranch, carrying trucks and automobiles at high speeds twenty-four hours a day.

For a cowboy fence riding was relaxing and could even be fun in good weather. The chore called for long, solitary sojourns under a big sky. For Bob it was a time for reflection, singing songs, and talking to his horse and himself, while keeping an eye out for wire breaks and broken posts.

Usually when he was setting out, Amy walked behind him and Big Bob as far as her wallow before turning back. Bob no longer looked around to see if she was following him.
But one fine day, for a reason known only to Amy, before she seemed to notice how far she had gone past the wallow, she was out of sight of the barns and ranch buildings. She looked back, and then, with a snort of determination, she followed Bob, who slowed up to her pace. He lowered his hat and watched her out of the corner of his eye.

She explored around rocks and under bushes. Lizards and strange ground-nesting birds and rabbits burst from under the sage. The wind whipped in gusts, blowing tumbleweeds as big as beach balls across her path. She chased after them with Butch and Jo. Her curiosity astounded Bob, who was already aware of her inquisitive nature. Once she stood still looking up at the scudding clouds. Bob watched her, realizing that she had not lived in the wild like this since Africa. Now, like a child ordered to go outside to play against her will, Amy was apparently having fun. She browsed, sniffed, and listened to the sounds of calling birds. She picked up sticks and burned cactus plants, uprooted rocks, and root-bound tufts of grasses.

Bob grew to believe that Amy could appreciate beauty. She paused to sniff the light fragrance of a wildflower in bloom, and she seemed to take notice of the brilliance of a buttercup. She watched the cloud formations. She plucked out of the air the windblown fluff of cottonwood trees. She held new leaves on the fingers of her trunk. She watched flocks of wild ducks and geese fly by. Small creatures that scurried out from under the inquiry of her trunk amused her.
Bob thought that she even smiled and believed that he heard the sounds of her laughter.

F
rom the highway, passengers in cars spied her along the fence, some of them blinking in disbelief. The cars usually drove on for a short distance. Bob sometimes counted to three, waiting for the car’s brake lights to go on. The passengers turned their heads and watched Bob and Amy with their mouths wide open. They really
had
seen an elephant. The drivers pulled over on the shoulder of the road and reversed to the point where Bob, Amy, and the dogs were walking on the other side of the fence.

Bob was too much of a showman not to give people a closer look at her. Sometimes the roadside turned into an impromptu audience of excited children, dogs, cats, and parents. Most of them had seen elephants before at the circus or in a zoo. But none had ever been found on a cow ranch with a cowboy.

The parents often asked Bob excited questions, while the kids reached through the strands of barbed wire to touch Amy. Bob gave the children treats to give her, and Amy frisked their pockets for whatever else she could find.

T
hey often returned from riding the fences hot and tired. Bob sometimes pointed the nozzle of a hose at Amy to cool her down. She wriggled, groaned, and turned in circles. Bob rubbed her skin with a long-handled brush and she backed
into him, as if to tell him,
More there,
that’s
the itchy spot!
She then finished at a ten-foot-high mound of sawdust dumped there for her to roll in. She lay down on her side like a puppy and scratched her back in the dust, while Bob heaped sawdust on her stomach with a coal shovel.

Once, after a hot summer fence ride when the thermometer on the barn read 108 degrees, Bob was sweating through his shirt, and a band of sweat stained his hat by the time they got back to the ranch. Amy ran around the corner of the barn. It was too hot for him to run after her, and besides, he thought, she was probably going to find shade. He was unsaddling Big Bob when Amy came back around the corner. She walked up to him, raised her trunk, and sprayed him all over with water she had drawn from a tub. Then she went back for a second trunk and cooled herself with its spray.

T. J. was watching. “Is that what I think it is?” he asked Bob.

“She is such a little mother.”

A
s time went by Amy and Bob lived and worked side by side, Amy’s uniqueness was long past almost anyone noticing. She was one of the crew. When Bob worked his horses in the cutting pen, she worked along with him. Each day was just another day. Bob by now had put away his video camera. The photos of Amy did not come out of his wallet so often. Amy had become part of the ranch’s normal routine.

The relationship between her and Bob seemed perfect for itself alone, not for what it should or could have been in
some ideal world. It was an odd affection and respect, Bob liked to think, between two species that connected on a level no one could really explain. Bob enjoyed Amy, and she seemed to enjoy him, and that was enough. They couldn’t talk, but their intuitions sufficed as a language, like an old married couple long past needing to explain.

Still, Bob was never entirely certain if his affection for her was requited. Then one morning, after Amy had been at the ranch nearly three years, she offered him a gift as rare as anything a human ever has received from an elephant. He was in her stall when she raised her head and took his hand by her trunk and put it in her mouth. Bob told himself, Either she wants to eat my hand or she wants me to stroke her tongue. Amy, her eyes half-closed, gave a low rumble like a purr.

Bob guessed that she was telling him in her own way that she accepted him into
her
species. In human terms he was her family, and she would live here as she was meant to in Africa. Bob felt happy knowing that from now on she would never be anything less than healthy, happy, and strong. Words failed him, except to say, “I guess everything came together for Amy at that moment.”

T
hey had picnics together under the eucalyptus trees. The air was clear, the wildflowers were in bloom, and the whole summer lay ahead. Amy stood at one end of a picnic table and Michelle at the other. Butch stretched out in the shade.
Bob tuned a radio to a country music station and put the volume down low. He took their lunches from a paper bag and spread the food out on the table, and they ate together.

Sometimes the air around Amy shook with vibrations. Was she trying to communicate with him? If so, he felt sorry for her. She understood him, but when she sent him messages, if that’s what the vibrations were, he had no idea what she was trying to say. Often she felt his moods before he did. When he was sad, angry, down, or happy, she adjusted to his mood. In the mornings when he was feeling good, she greeted him with excited trumpetings. When he was down, she was always quiet and watchful. She seemed to pout with him, and she knew unerringly when he was leaving her for the day. When he returned to the barn, her trunk went up, her mouth opened, and she trumpeted what Bob interpreted as a hello. She plugged him with a kiss on his face, and he blew into the end of her trunk, greeting her as Army Maguire had told him elephants do.