The Cowboy and his Elephant (10 page)

“Oh?”

“A woman from Arizona said she’s coming around to pick her up this Thursday.”

Bob nodded without a word.

“She wants her for a pet.”

“Really?”

“She has a little lot down in Phoenix. She keeps exotics—tigers and lions and snakes.”

Bob turned to Jackson: He could not let this happen. “Let me ask you, what if I was to buy her from you instead?”

“You?”

“Yes, me. She could make her home here. She likes the place. She’s used to it.”

“What would I tell the woman from Phoenix?”

“Tell her, ‘Don’t bother to come up here.’”

Jackson thought about that for a minute, perhaps pretending to decide. “Okay,” he said. “She’s all yours if you want to pay what I’m asking.”

A handshake sealed the deal. Then Jackson folded Bob’s check, slipped it into his wallet, and boarded his truck. With a wave he headed down the road. Watching him go, Bob thought back to when he was a college kid and took flying lessons from the colonel. Just like that day in the airplane,
he was now “flying solo” with a baby African elephant. The dust from Jackson’s truck settled on the road. Bob scratched his head and thought, Come to think of it, Jackson never did tell me the name of that gal who was going to buy Amy. He smiled with the pleasure of owning Amy. He thought, he had stood up to Carl Icahn and the officers of Texaco and Pennzoil. He had sold quarter horses and cows at a profit. He considered himself a sharp trader. But never before had he wanted anything as much as he wanted Amy. “I got out-horse-traded,” he told Jane that evening. “It’s fine by me.”

T
wo cowdogs on the ranch were the first to play with I Amy, and their first acquaintance was clearly not by any design of Butch, a shorthaired blue heeler with a red coat. Butch was the ranch’s so-called walk-on lover. He was a hard-headed dog, Bob said, that had appeared one day at the ranch, and stayed. He minded only Bob, who had taught him to work the livestock. Jo, a Doberman, kept her distance from the hands and the herds. A sullen dog that bit when she was frightened, Jo once sank her teeth into Bob’s neighbor, Ordell Larsen. “She got him right in the ass,” said Bob with a laugh. “He knew he’d been nipped.”

The dogs roughhoused near where Amy could watch them. They chased a green rubber beach ball that was too large for them to pick up in their mouths. They drooled on it,
rolled it with their noses, fell over it, and kicked it with their legs, as thrilled as they were mystified by its movement.

Amy came out from her stall into the paddock and watched the dogs from a corner. Over days, she had learned not to be afraid of her visitors. They hardly paid attention to her and no longer barked at her. She was like a young horse, and they instinctively knew to leave her alone.

But a ball was a tempting toy for most animals. It moved without a sound. It was smooth and soft and waited for a foot or a trunk to animate it. Amy stayed by herself, always watching. Then one day a gila monster bit Jo’s lower jaw, and the skin on her lip fell away. In pain and sick, she went to her bed in the barn, leaving Butch alone with no playmate.

Amy walked up to the ball and touched it with her toe. She watched it roll across the paddock. She went over to it and hit it with her trunk. The ball rolled against the stall door. She kicked it, and it rolled over to Butch. He tripped over it, and rolled it to Amy. She kicked it across the paddock; she chased it.

Butch soon forgot the ball and chased Amy’s trunk. She spun in circles, keeping it just out of his reach. He chased her immune to the boredom of repetition. He was able to fetch the ball twenty or thirty times in a row with the same enthusiasm each time. Amy’s trunk was just as fun.

Soon Amy gave every indication that she looked forward to Butch’s visits. She stood over the ball waiting for him.
But Butch was an unreliable playmate. Now and then, he wandered off the ranch in search of girlfriends and was absent for days. Amy waited near the ball. Bob, watching her, thought it was a hopeful sign.

B
ob visited her stall from the gallery side. The sound of his voice, he thought, soothed her. He had sung to his cows on drives to settle them down when the night sky crackled with lightning, songs composed long ago to the cadence of a walking cow, songs like “The Night-Herding Song”:

Oh, slow up, dogies, quit moving around

You have wandered and trampled all over the ground
.

Oh, graze along, dogies and feed kinda slow.

And don’t forever be on the go.

And to Amy he crooned:

“Once in love with Amy, always in love with Amy.”

He explained as he would to a new visitor about the seasons on a Colorado cattle ranch. Sometimes, he talked to her about what was on his mind—about state politics or the movie he had seen on TV the night before. Bob believed that Amy’s eyes brightened at the sound of his voice. She stood by the door and waved her trunk in the air, he was convinced, as if she wanted to reach out and touch him.

One day, out in a converted stall at the end of the horse barn, Bob was working on his tack when he heard a sound that he could have sworn was a car horn, though he had not seen a car come up the road or heard the sound of an engine. He was cleaning up saddles, halters, ropes, and chaps that hung on pegs all neat and tidy, smelling of saddle soap, polish and neat’s-foot oil. Earlier he had fed Amy and talked to her. Now, he assumed that she was playing ball with Butch.

Bob cocked his ear and pushed back his hat. He went out into the sunlight and leaned against the fence.

Amy was chasing Butch around the paddock. She let out a blast of sound that cleared up Bob’s confusion. The trumpet seemed to startle Amy most of all. She stopped and looked around, as if to say, “
Who was
that?”

The sound of her trumpeting made him laugh. She would survive, he guessed, and might even thrive from now on.

B
ob and Jane began to see other changes in her. She was eating again, and the milk buckets were replaced now by bales of hay and oats. Bob noticed that the wrinkles in her skin were smoothing out.

T. J. Eitel, the ranch hand with the sore tooth and the flamboyant mustache, helped Bob take care of her. T. J. was an expert at breaking horses to the saddle. He was tall, thin, and soft-spoken. When he reached to unlatch Amy’s stall door, Bob held up his hand to stop him.

“She’s wild,” he told T. J. “Jackson told me that a baby elephant could kill a man with a swipe of its trunk.” He nodded at T. J. “Don’t think just because she’s cute that she’s cuddly.”

“She’s wild?”

“Yes.”

“Then how do we tame a wild elephant?” asked T. J.

“I don’t know,” said Bob. “How would you think?”

“You can’t break ’em to the saddle, like a horse. They aren’t naturally tame like cows or dogs and cats. Hell, I don’t know.”

“We better think about it, then,” said Bob. “I don’t want her to hurt anybody without meaning to.”

J
ane wanted a more constant friend for Amy than Butch. He was wandering more now, and Amy was bored without him to play with. Jane asked Bob, “Can’t we find her something better? Butch is either all
on
or all
off.”

Bob knew what she was referring to. Some animals, like thoroughbred horses, had their own “pets.” Amy needed a companion to be with her night and day. Bob had proof of what Jane was suggesting, or he thought so, anyway. Amy had scooped grain in a little pile in a corner of her stall. Seeing it there and not mistaking it for an accidental spill, Bob had wondered why. It seemed an odd behavior, though he knew next to nothing about how elephants behaved. A few weeks went by, and he forgot all about it, until one day
when he was entering her stall to clean it. A small barn mouse scurried along the baseboard. Bob stood perfectly still, watching. The mouse stopped and smelled the air, and cleaned its nose with its front feet. It dropped down and nibbled at the grain. Had Amy left the food for the mouse? Had she chosen this mouse for her companion? Maybe he was only imagining it. But about the same time he first noticed the saved food, Amy had stopped crying at night.

Still, she deserved a better friend than Butch and a bigger one than a barn mouse.

M
ichelle was a mellow goat with a light brown coat, a white rectangular patch on her side, white dots on her forehead and chest, and floppy ears that hung down like two spare cheeks. Bob bought her from a neighbor, and when she arrived at the ranch, she walked over to Amy and said hello with her nose. Amy wrapped her trunk around Michelle’s middle, and from the first moment they met, they walked along together around the paddock like girlfriends out shopping at the mall. Michelle became Amy’s “teddy bear” and her “blankie.” She cuddled Michelle, and Michelle did not seem to mind, or even to notice that her stallmate was an elephant.

“Goats don’t think much,” Bob told Jane. “I guess that explains it. Michelle probably doesn’t think that Amy is an elephant. Amy
knows
she isn’t a goat. It’s a nice sight to see how Amy responds to her, though, like a long-lost friend or
like the family she left behind over in Africa. But she knows it isn’t true. Michelle, on the other hand, doesn’t know what she is, and that’s why I chose her. Taking nothing away from Amy, Michelle would probably be happy with a damned kangaroo for a friend.”

From that day on Amy and Michelle played together and stood by and watched over each other. One followed the other as though they were attached by a string. Sometimes, in search of scraps of food, Michelle roamed the ranch, but at night she stayed at Amy’s side. It was not so much what they did together, Bob thought. They were together as constant friends.

Sometimes Michelle took her “friendship” a step too far, however, and at those times Amy corrected her. She had saved food for the mouse, but the mouse’s appetite was nothing compared to a goat’s. Michelle ate cans and chewed on rubber mats and assorted junk from the scrap bin. Bob always set out a big bucket of hay and oats for Amy, from which she ate through the day, whenever she was hungry. The constant presence of food was a temptation that Michelle could not resist. She viewed all food as
her
food, without noticing that Amy did not seem to like sharing.

With Amy standing at the far end of the paddock, Michelle wandered toward the barn and the bucket of food and started to eat, looking up from time to time to see where Amy was standing. Amy took notice and walked across the paddock to the stall. She nudged Michelle away
from the bucket and, with her trunk firmly around her waist, she led her out the stall door and into the paddock.

“Michelle knew she was being asked to leave, and she scooted,” said Bob, who watched with fascination.

Amy then returned to her stall. She shut the bottom door with her trunk to keep Michelle out, and ate her dinner in peace.

A
n obstinate billygoat named Larry had arrived at the ranch with Michelle, as part of a two-goat deal that Bob had made. Larry had yellow slit eyes and curly horns. He must have thought that Amy was a punching bag. Right from the start he slammed her sides and shoulders, and butted her incessantly. Amy ran from him, but Larry was fast afoot, and his need to butt superseded any other goat activity. He lived to butt. He stood up on his hind legs and, with the full weight of his body, slammed his horns into Amy. He could not help himself.

“Larry was a rat,” said Bob.

A week after Larry arrived, Bob saw him butt Amy. Unlike the other times, though, now she reacted, and her attack nearly took Bob’s breath away. As quickly as he had ever seen an animal move, she hit Larry with her trunk. He left the ground.

Bob thought, Good for you, Amy! You sure are learning how to take care of business!

A few days later Bob was walking by Amy’s stall when he
heard the grunts of a goat in agony. He looked in and saw that Amy had pinned Larry up against the wall and was pushing him with her head.

“Ol’ Larry was going, ‘Unnh, unnh, unnh.’ He knew he was about to die. I thought, Oh, nuts! I did not want Amy learning bad habits. I said, ‘No, no, Amy,’ and she backed off. Larry ran out. I never let him
near
her again. To be honest, after that he was a goner, anyway, as far as the ranch was concerned. He was bad news.”

Tentatively at first, Amy began to explore her new world. She twisted bolts and unscrewed screws, turned handles and unfastened latches. She might have dismantled her stall, leaving it in a state of collapse, if Bob had not tightened down every nut and bolt with a wrench. She wandered, sniffed, and touched out of an enormous natural curiosity, seemingly missing nothing. She explored with her trunk up in the ceiling of her stall. She worked the latches on the doors, broke off doorknobs, and pulled levers. She tested water taps. She “tasted” soaps and cleaners in the tack room, and she “played” with the saddles and bridles. She pulled the windshield wipers off the trucks and tractors and reached into the open windows and turned the steering wheels.

Her favorite distraction by far, though, was a garden hose, which she had learned to turn on at the tap. She held the nozzle and squirted herself all over, and sprayed Michelle and anyone who happened to come within reach. Bob ran
through the spray and turned off the water, and Amy stood patiently holding the end of the hose, clearly waiting for him to leave.

Bob gave his young elephant the freedom to roam the whole ranch. It was time for her world to expand, he believed. He didn’t mind where she went. (There was nowhere to go, anyway, but into the wide open spaces.) He kept the gate to her paddock unlocked. He had no control over her. He predicted correctly that she would always return eventually to her feeding bucket.

She looked bizarrely out of place even to the cowhands who saw her every day. Some of the newer ranch hands rubbed their eyes in disbelief, seeing her for the first time. After a few days, her presence made the hands feel different and, even a bit special. She was
their
elephant too.