The Cowboy and his Elephant (17 page)

Amy had almost always given Bob what he had asked; she had learned to lie down and roll up her trunk and blow a harmonica, and even tap the keys on a piano. She had helped him with his work and was his companion on the ranch. She was his friend and he was her “matriarch.” Her world revolved around him and the ranch, the road journey between Colorado and Arizona, and the desert ranch in Phoenix. He was as wrapped up in her welfare as he had ever been with his children’s. But, he came to see clearly,
she was an elephant living in a human’s world, and nothing could make her what she wasn’t. Nothing could ever transform her into a smaller, more compact animal. The horse trailer and a barn and paddock were for farm animals, not an elephant. She could not be made to disappear at the Arizona border. She was big. She was an elephant.

In a way she was ready to take on a wider world of humans than Bob had raised her in. She had to move on, and he had to let her go. He had known this for some time, but he had always chosen to wait, to delay, and to pretend. Just as a unique coincidence had brought Bob and Amy together from far apart, another unique circumstance was separating them now. Amy was no steer, no dog, cat, or horse. She was intelligent, with a distinct character and personality. She was trained. She needed more than he could give her. Bob had been blind to everything about her except his feelings, but now circumstances were forcing him to see.

One day, like a tailor fitting a large woman for a ball gown, he took her measurements from trunk to tail, feet to forehead, and all around her stomach. She was big, there was no denying it. Sadly he measured her one more time, stooping under and leaning around and over her, then marking each measurement on a sheet of paper. When he made his calculations, the tape told him that she had outgrown his world altogether.

He sat down at his desk and, out of a sense of desperation, drew a design for a transporter that would be big
enough to accommodate her. He sketched a customized vehicle with a Plexiglas bubble top for Amy to see out of, heaters and vents, a hay bin, and companion compartments for Michelle and Butch. When he was finished with the drawing, he asked a mechanic who specialized in custom auto work whether the design was feasible.

The man looked at Bob’s drawings. “Sure, I can build it,” he said. “The problem is whether the law will let you take it out on the road.”

“Don’t circuses haul elephants?”

“I don’t know about that,” the man told him. “I assume so. They use railroad train cars and big semi trucks, not a trailer you’ll pull behind your truck, Bob.”

T
he man from the USDA arrived at the ranch again. Bob was polite, but he had a feeling about what he was going to say.

He was the same inspector as before, wearing the same rubber boots and green jumpsuit and apparently carrying the same clipboard. With Bob’s permission, he looked around again; he didn’t need to measure Amy. He was far more interested in the dimensions of the places where she lived, and whether Bob had made the required changes. The regulations, he announced, had been changed; now the USDA was making more stringent demands. Principal among them were requirements for strengthened fences in her paddock, new gates, and a whole new barn for her to live
in, designed according to the government agency’s specifications. The inspector took all day taking new measurements.

“She’s still too big for that stall, even though I see you’ve widened it,” he told Bob. “You’ll have to break out that wall again or build a new barn for her from scratch.” He paused. “There’s also the issue of the ceiling. Your elephant can still conceivably reach her trunk into the electric conduits. Those will either have to be moved, or else you’ll have to raise the roof.” He enumerated again the list of mandatory changes. He slipped his clipboard under his arm. “I’ll be back,” he promised for the second time.

Bob watched him leave, beginning to hurt inside with the thought of what he must do about Amy. Throughout his youth he had wondered about this gift of his: He had made himself into a cowboy to be with animals. And now, yet again, as it had been long ago with Lulu, he was finding to his deep regret that his empathy with animals carried with it the greater pain of separation.

N
ot just anybody could take care of Amy. She would not obey the ranch hands who baby-sat when Bob went away. Bob and Jane could not leave T Cross for even a weekend together, because of her. Amy accepted only Bob as her caretaker and friend, and Jane was getting truly fed up with the restrictions her needs had placed on their lives.

Their own children had grown up and left. These years
should have been their time to enjoy themselves alone, after all the parenting. But with Amy to care for, they were perennial parents of a child that would never leave them.

Jane confided to a friend, “Bob is like an alcoholic with her. It’s like he’s saying, ‘I got to face reality here. I got to stop this.’ He realizes that she is too big to handle and it’s time to move on, but what can he do about it? He can’t go
anywhere.
He knows how nailed down he is. Amy is like having a new baby that never gets older. Bob is in full charge of her, and there’s just no time for us to do anything else.”

T
he crisis only worsened one night when Jane was flipping channels and stopped at the sight of an amateur video on one of the shock TV shows, recording the horror experienced by a keeper at the San Diego Zoo. He appeared to hit an elephant in his care, named Cindy. He struck her with the hook end of an
ankus.
Suddenly reacting to the abuse, Cindy snatched the hook out of his hands. She trumpeted with rage, picked the man up, and threw him high in the air over a tall steel fence.

As Jane watched she could not help but ask herself,
Could
this ever be Amy?

The video left a startled impression on her that did not soon go away. She told Bob about the TV. He was unfazed. “I trust Amy,” he said. “She would
never
do such a thing.”

“But she might hurt you and not mean to.”

“Just like horses,” he said.

Jane shook her head. “You can get around a horse. You can’t get around her. Amy is huge.”

He smiled. His smiles always worked with Jane. “She’s still my little girl.” Jane did not soften.

“Oh, Bob, you refuse to see her as she is. You love her and have no fear of her. How much longer can you go on?” Jane thought again about the video on TV. The zoo attendant had been working with the elephant just as Bob worked in Amy’s stall. “Bob, you work around her and bend over and pick up things that she drops. You never look up to see what she’s doing; that’s dangerous.”

“He hit the elephant, you said?”

“Yes.”

“I’d never do that to Amy. Never have.”

She just looked at him, frustrated by his resolve.

Maybe some part of what she said was true, Bob thought. He did not worry for himself. But he
was
responsible. It was just like Lulu. He asked himself what his father had probably asked about Lulu at the time, “What if she injures somebody? I
am
responsible.”

Jane worried as well about their legal liability and what they risked losing if Amy injured someone and they were sued. She told Bob, “Think about it. In a single stroke everything we’ve worked for could be taken away from us.
What are those years worth?”

The next day Bob called his lawyer for a legal opinion. “Should I let her continue to do her little act at the schools for the kids?”

“No!” replied the lawyer. “Emphatically no! And in my opinion you never should have let her from the start.”

O
ne afternoon, feeding Amy in her stall, Bob asked his son Bobby, who was home visiting, to lend a hand.

Bob was in Amy’s stall. “Come on in, it’s okay,” he told Bobby.

Bobby straddled Amy’s rubber food tub. Amy pushed him against the wall with her forehead.

“Dad? She’s pushin’ into me.”

“Hard?”

“Hard now.”

Bob said, “Amy, no no.”

Bob wondered, What if he had not been there to tell her no? Would she have hurt Bobby?

He thought, She’s still young by elephant standards. She’ll outlive me, that’s for sure. So what will become of her if anything happens to me and she’s still here? Who will decide for her? Eventually there will have to be a change. Amy is young enough right now to adjust to another environment. It’s the right time; she’s in good shape. She has recovered from what ailed her from over in the jungle; she enjoys life. She is disciplined. She wouldn’t hurt me, but what if she hurts someone else when I’m not looking? What happens to her then? Does someone shoot her? Is that fair?

T. J. was walking through the gallery. Bob stopped him and began talking about where
he
thought Amy should go. He prefaced the discussion. “No matter what is decided,
if
I
decide, if it doesn’t work, we can always get her back. We could go and get her and bring her home. Couldn’t we?”

“I guess so,” said T. J. who felt only a sense of relief. All the ranch hands knew that Amy was too big for Bob to handle anymore.

“What kind of place do you think would suit her? I mean, what people do you think would she be the most comfortable with?”

“Well,” said T. J. “Amy is smart.”

“She can’t go just anywhere.”

“What if she was returned to the jungle?”

“She’s too domesticated for that,” Bob replied. “Besides, they’re shooting the elephants over there. Am I going to send her somewhere to be shot?”

“What about zoos?”

Bob recalled his conversation with the woman from St. Louis. “That might be worth looking into.”

“Circuses?”

“It’d keep her mind busy. She wouldn’t get bored.”

“Well?”

Bob sighed. “I just don’t know.”

B
ob felt woefully uninformed, and he wanted to know every option for Amy before he began to make an informed decision. He read that 625 elephants lived in captivity in the United States, 349 of them located in one hundred zoos and safari parks. Zoos, in spite of his misgivings about them, must be doing something right.

He also became familiar with the writings of an eminent British zoologist named Sylvia Sykes, and her definitive work on elephants,
The
Natural
History of the African Elephant
in which she wrote that captive elephants “respond to serious training with intelligence, obedience and apparent enjoyment, just as they respond to the dignity and pomp of royal ceremony.” According to Sykes, elephants working in circuses were healthier mentally and physically than those in zoos. “To some extent, winter work with a circus may replace the need and fulfill the urge of captive elephants to migrate annually.”

In the days that followed, Bob went to visit the nearby Phoenix Zoo. What he saw interested him. The zoo had two elephants at that time. One, an Asian named Ruby, drew “pictures” with paint and was a local celebrity popular with children.

Bob felt hopeful, thinking he might have found just the right solution. He reasoned, if Amy went to live at this zoo, she would be cared for day and night by professional elephant handlers. Best of all, he lived half the year no more than fifteen miles away. She would have a “paddock,” and though she would not be allowed to wander around as freely as she did at the ranch, she could entertain children visitors to the zoo with her “act” to keep her mind sharp. Bob wrote his proposal to the zoo’s directors, offering Amy to them as a gift, with the proviso that he and Amy be allowed to perform a couple of times a week for kids.

“We are a
zoo,
not a circus,” the zoo explained to him in a reply.

Bob called them up to argue his case. “What about the elephant that draws the pictures?” he wanted to know. “Isn’t she entertainment?”

“That’s different.”

“How so?”

“It is an elephant doing what it likes to do with paint on a sheet of paper.”

“Amy likes to do her act.”

“Sorry,” he was told. “It just won’t work for us.”

B
ob didn’t give up on zoos. He dismissed the disappointment with the Phoenix Zoo as a misunderstanding. And in the weeks that followed, he flew to San Diego to visit its famous zoo. He dined with one of that zoo’s directors and asked all the right questions. What bothered Bob more than anything about zoos in general was that he saw the animals just standing around as if they were bored. He returned one last time to the San Diego Zoo. In every season, no matter when he looked in on them, the zoo’s elephants still seemed bored. He owed Amy at least the basic freedom to use her brain. She was educated. He had taught her discipline and, to some extent, responsibility. Turning his back on that, he thought, was tantamount to cruelty. One after another he went down a list of zoos: Topiaries, he thought, because that was what the zoo elephants had looked like to him. Amy was no shrub.

Bob trusted Army Maguire more than anyone else on the
subject of elephants. He knew elephants, and he knew Amy. Bob called him and explained his problem. It was a call that did not surprise Maguire. He had learned at their first meeting how unprepared Bob was for Amy’s future.
He
knew how Amy would grow, and how her world would shrink until something had to be done.

Bob asked him, “What choices do I have?”

Maguire replied without hesitation, “Let me answer you this way: You don’t.”

Bob laughed nervously. “That’s helpful.”

“You have to make a decision about her. She’s too big for you to handle, and she’s getting bigger every day. Right?”

“Right,” said Bob.

“And you want her to go somewhere that’s as good as your place.”

“Exactly,” said Bob.

“You want to entrust her to the very best. You want to know the people who will care for her.”

“That’s right, if I can,” said Bob. “I’m not going to let her go to perfect strangers. It’s why I’m calling you, Army.”

“You ruled out zoos.”

“She’d be bored.”

“What does that leave you with?”

“You tell me.”