“One of my men said you stopped by yesterday,” said Bob politely. “What can I do for you, Mr. Jackson?”
“I’d like to rent a couple of your stalls.”
Bob explained to him, “We kinda do our own thing here—cuttin’ horses mostly. I don’t lease stalls out.” He looked at Jackson, who seemed disappointed. Bob asked him, “What kind of horses do you have?”
“I don’t have horses,” Jackson replied.
Bob thought, Oh, Christ. He’s got ostriches. He hated ostriches and would gladly have explained why. “You just don’t know what the hell they’re thinking. Ostriches stand there and look at you, and all of a sudden they go bing and they’ve pecked your damn forehead. Or they’ll kick the hell out of you. So I asked him, ‘What in the hell do you have?’”
Jackson paused now, clearly tongue-tied.
“Well, Mr. Jackson?” Bob coaxed him.
“Six baby elephants.”
Bob’s eyes widened in surprise. He was momentarily speechless. To be sure he had heard him right, he asked, “Six . . . elephants?”
“Baby elephants, yes, sir.”
“Well, now, that’s unique.”
Something unique had always been hard to find for a cowboy who was raised with a bear—a black bear, whom the Norris family named Lulu even though he was a he-bear. No one in the family even tried to find out the truth, until a veterinarian told them. Lulu took summertime naps with Bob, still a boy, under an old oak tree on a hill overlooking forty acres of deer park and pastureland of the family farm. Lulu would drape his paw over Bob’s chest, and the two of them snoozed to the summer sounds of buzzing bees and the melodies of bluebirds and shrieks of jays. Lulu was a gentle, sweet bear orphan that Bob’s father had adopted on the spot. Such a different decision was not out of the ordinary for the senior Norris. It was an unusual family to begin with, and the father was the most unusual of all.
Lester Norris was a farmer-artist who had drawn the cartoon characters of the Three Little Pigs and Tinker Bell for Walt Disney and then had forsaken his art for banking, business, and investment. Bob missed his dad, who journeyed to the office each morning and returned home each evening, and after an early dinner he went straight to bed. In the mornings he was gone again. To say that as a boy Bob missed his father is to miss the point. Bob did not want to grow up and do what his father did. Why have children if you could not be with them?
Though Lester Norris went back and forth to his office each day, he thought of himself as a farmer, too—a gentleman farmer. He made himself into a man of sharp contrasts—artist, cartoonist, practical thinker, farmer, and investor. His head ruled his heart, and Mammon dominated his art: Business interfered with, and then finally erased, his creative life, and from then on he would not be the same father to Bob and his brothers and sisters he would otherwise have been, and even the one he would have wanted to be. While he was at home he had little time for his large and growing family and the simple way of life that the animals on the farm had come, in Bob’s mind, to symbolize.
Animals like Lulu were friends of the Norris children. Lester Norris had planned for his three sons and two daughters to care for and enjoy the animals, which were at the center of their lives. Their St. Charles, Illinois, farm was home to the usual saddle horses, milk cows, rabbits, chickens, and goats, and Lulu. Bob’s brothers and sisters assumed their presence and lived alongside them as their caretakers. For Bob, though, the family menagerie gave him the first glimpse of himself as a person with a profound empathy for animals.
The story goes that at an early age Bob visited the yards in St. Charles where the steam trains came in, switched, changed crews, then went out again, with the huffing of engines, the scream of iron brakes, and the clang of steel meeting coupled steel. The smell of creosote and coal, hot oil and burned wood, were intoxicating to a boy his age. There was danger there, too. Railroad employees called “yard bulls” chased down boys like Bob and beat them; the boxcars themselves carried hobos; and heavy steel wheels could never be stopped in time to save the life of a boy who happened to get in their way. Bob hung around the yard, watching and hoping for the unusual and unexpected.
In the late summers, the arriving trains often carried live ewes from the pasturelands to the markets in Chicago. Passing through, they halted in St. Charles to take on water and wood. Regularly a railroad man, his boots crunching in the gravel, walked down the length of the stopped trains, checking for baby lambs born on the trip. He separated them from their mothers and threw them off the train to die on the sun-baked roadbed.
Bob could not understand this wanton cruelty. At the risk of a beating or arrest, he followed the train man, sometimes stealthily, and snatched up the newly orphaned babies before they died. He ran away with them with a feeling of divine grace, and trundled them home in his arms.
Inevitably his mother, standing at the open icebox, asked him, “Who’s been drinking all this milk?”
“Me,” said Bob, who had secretly fed the lambs milk from the farmhouse kitchen.
Her eyes narrowed. She knew where the milk was going. She could see out the kitchen window baby lambs bouncing and skipping and jumping in the pasture.
Bob wondered about himself and this strange gift that he didn’t know what to do with. He felt alone and very much apart. As he got older he took himself up to the top of the knoll where he went with Lulu, looking down over the pasture. Below him cows grazed and horses browsed, and sometimes the sky filled with clouds as white as wool. He wondered at these times about his own inner nature: He was different, he was certain of that now. He got along better with animals than he did with people. He himself preferred animals to his own kind. Animals did not lie and cheat and were sweet and simple, honest and forgiving. He understood them, their pleasures and their pain, their wants and their desires, and their wildness.
It was not that he did not fit in. Of course he was popular. That was not what sent him to the top of the hill in wonderment. He did not want to fit into the real world of his businessman father. The real world to Bob was animals and the land. And the question that he asked himself was, How could he make a life for himself in this animal world that was also his world?
Lulu was a true friend. But he was also a bear. And as he grew and got stronger and could snap his steel chain like twine, he wandered off when and where he liked, until one day he frightened the Norris’s neighbors. Bob’s father feared for an accident, and what would happen to Lulu then? Would the sheriff shoot him? Bob attended school in the day, and Lulu wandered alone, until one day the neighbors reported him again. The sheriff advised Bob’s father to get rid of him, and reluctantly Lulu was sent to the Elgin, Illinois, zoo.
The loss of Lulu devastated Bob, who could not understand why he had to go. He and Lulu had understandings, boy to bear; emotions tied them in profound and mysterious ways. The bear loved ice cream cones and honey on a stick, and his joy seemed so pure. No, Lulu had long since ceased to be just an animal to Bob, if he ever was. Bob had sighted Lulu’s wild inner nature; and it somewhat mirrored his own. That’s what crushed him about Lulu leaving the farm—loved ones did not give up on the ones they loved for being who they were.
In the spring a year after Lulu went away, Bob’s teacher announced a field trip to the Elgin zoo. Bob was as excited for Lulu as for himself. When the day came, and the class traveled by bus, Bob said nothing to any of his classmates about Lulu. Even when, after walking from one pen to another, they reached the bear exhibit, which was typical of outdoor pens with a small moat, a faux cave, and rocks to make it seem like nature in the raw. The class pressed against the iron fence. Lulu was sitting outside in the sun. He spied Bob, or caught his scent, and he growled what Bob interpreted as an invitation to join him in the cage. He was thrilled to accept, with what appeared to the other children to be an act of madness. He scrambled over the fence as Lulu shambled over to him wagging his tongue with what could have been either happiness or hunger. Bob reached out to him, called his
name, and scratched behind his ears. Lulu licked his face. And the zoo attendant, who knew nothing of Bob and Lulu’s history, swooned.
“Don’t move, kid. I’m comin’! Don’t move! Be calm.”
“Okay,” Bob said. He laughed and hammed with Lulu while his classmates watched in horror. He never explained, and the mystery of his magical ability to tame wild animals gained him a wide reputation, especially vibrant among the girls, as the most unusual boy for miles around.
_____
He was a towheaded kid, full of mischief, who liked the spotlight more than school, books, and teachers. He loved the outdoors and physical action. He was wild. One of his favorite jobs was working for the Dunham Woods hunt club as the “fox,” dragging a gunnysack of scented bait behind his horse. Bob thought as a fox would think, running from the jaws of the dogs, which he outwitted by crossing water and laying a circular baited trail for them to follow. He put himself in the mind of the fox, of being the fox. The club’s master of the hounds finally told him to make it easier. The fox that was never caught was disappointing the hunters.
By now Bob was empathizing with all animals, no matter whether they were exotic or just barnyard beasts. They came to him, communicated with him through their actions as signs. They gave him their trust, even putting their lives wholly in his hands.
He started spending time with his grandfather. Robert Angell was a big man, set in his ways, who had been a real cowboy in his younger days on 3,500 acres in California’s coastal Santa Lucia Range. He was retired now, and waxed philosophical with his grandson. He kept stacks of old pulp magazines about the romance of the Western cowboy, which Bob read. He told stories about his ranch, his saddles, silver bridles, and lariats, and what life was like in the old days. Some evenings they huddled in front of the Emerson radio listening to programs like The Lone Ranger. The radio dramas were much more than entertainments. Bob was listening to the adventures of other men and boys living lives that he wanted to lead. He wanted to be a cowboy.
Around campfires later, Bob would talk about that point at which the fantasy of the cowboy meets the reality. The virtue of self-sufficiency was at its core. “I don’t want to sound corny, but,” was how Bob started out. He was serious, continuing, “As a cowboy you have to rely on yourself. You get in situations just naturally that nobody’s going to get you out of. You got to handle whatever comes up.”
He remembers a day, long ago, when the fantasy of his life came together with reality in a moment of urgent need. He trusted his life to an animal: He was out on a mare named Mrs. Honey, checking fences in the national forest adjacent to his own land and breaking the crusts of ice on the water-holes when a blizzard blew out of the north and caught him by surprise. Within minutes he could see nothing. The wind whipped the snow into his face. Mrs. Honey bowed her head against the ice slivers, which felt sharp enough to scratch the skin.
Lost and in danger of freezing to death, Bob turned the mare loose on the reins. He told her, “Take me home, Mrs. Honey.”
He pulled up his collar, clasped his jacket, and lowered his chin to his chest. His hands were frozen in leather working gloves, and his feet felt like stones in the stirrups. His eyebrows were thick with ice. He could have sworn Mrs. Honey was going the wrong way. He wanted to stop her and tell her to turn, but he did not know where to go. And so he went with her judgment. At that moment the world contained no humans but himself, and he felt so much in tune with his horse that he might have been one himself. He knew she would protect him, trying to get home.
Hours went by, as the weather worsened and horse and rider wandered. The snow blew in drifts. Mrs. Honey staggered and Bob hunkered over, not even trying see their direction anymore. He thought they were going to die.
Suddenly Mrs. Honey stopped. Bob woke out of a frozen stupor. He thought she was finished—that they both were as good as dead, and that she was standing now, waiting to die. He pushed up the brim of his hat. He could hear the ice and snow crack on his hatbrim and his collar. In front of the mare’s nose stood the gate to the corral.
The cowboy and his animals lived for one another. Their life was simple, needing only a horizon. “It’s two in the morning, and you get up out of a warm bed and ride through the snow and run your hand up a cow’s butt to pull a calf, and the snow’s blowin’ on your neck and it’s twenty below zero; the cow’s trying to gore you, and the horse’s kickin’, and you get run over in a corral, and kicked, and you do it. You do it because you love the life.
“Not to go on about this, but a little while ago, I was on my horse, Big Bob, sortin’ cows, and I was wearing my rock grinder spurs in tight quarters; I should have worn my ball spurs. This big ol’ calf spun around and jammed up against me, and she caught my foot and I ran that rock grinder in Big Bob’s side and he spun around like that, and I was off, hangin’ on, and the corral is about ten feet wide with steel posts, and he spun me off, and I didn’t want to get dragged, and Bob’s stompin’ on me while he’s spinnin’, and I hit that goddamned post right on the top of my head. And sumbitch, it raised a knot.”
A flamboyance that Bob had inherited from his mother’s family energized his fantasy of the cowboy’s life. His grand-uncle John Gates, called “Bet a Million,” symbolized the buccaneering spirit of the West that Bob yearned to take part in before it was too late. Gates was as brash as he was flush, a gambler to the core who bet the ranchers around San Antonio that he could stampede a herd of longhorns into a stock fence made of thirty strands of the barbed wire he wanted to sell them. They took his bet, and when the wire held against the steers, the wire made Gates a fortune, which he parlayed into railroads, steel, and oil in a company plainly enough called the Texas Company.
After his death in 1911 part of his wealth was passed on to Bob’s mother, who had been his favorite niece.
And Gates’s little oil company in East Texas by then had changed its name to Texaco.
_____
There was no room in the Ivy League for Bob’s horse, and he was not going away without his horse to Yale, which had recruited him as a swimmer. So he went instead to the University of Kentucky, where horses were allowed, and for four years he studied animal husbandry and agriculture. In some respects he already knew more than his teachers. The habits and behavior of horses and cows, and their thoughts and peculiarities, were as familiar to Bob as he was to himself. In class he learned the animals’ anatomies, their bones and musculatures. He was trying, through the formal study of animals, he guessed, to study himself.
He wanted to be a cowboy, but he was, after all, the son of a rich businessman. Bob did not know how to become what he wanted to be, and he hoped the university might show him a way, since that was what higher education was meant to be for. Meanwhile he bided his time.
For one thing he played football at Kentucky for Paul “Bear” Bryant (Bryant coached at Kentucky before his celebrated tenure at the University of Alabama), who taught him more than just the game.
In the spring of his freshman year, while the team was practicing in a snow flurry on a field under Bryant’s flinty eye, one of Bob’s teammates was knocked unconscious. Bob ran to his aid. He was easing the player’s helmet off when Coach Bryant, sitting on his perch, shouted at Bob, who recalled him saying, “Don’t touch that man!”
“Yes, sir, I’ll get a stretcher,” said Bob, misunderstanding.
“No you won’t. Keep playing.”
Another thirty-five minutes went by until Bryant finally hollered, “Break!”
Bob ran for a stretcher. Covered with wet snow, his friend was still unconscious. Bob lifted him up, carried him off the field, and laid him down in the backseat of his car. When they reached the hospital, doctors diagnosed a concussion.
Bob could not sleep that night. He was angry, and he was torn and sad for his teammate and his coach. He loved to play football, but he had lost respect for Bryant. The next day he walked into Bryant’s office carrying his football uniform and told him to “shove it.” “Coa
ch,” he went on, “that man is a friend of mine. None of us mind getting hurt, but what you did was wrong.”
In the summer of 1949, he signed on as a cowboy riding the chuck wagon on the Waggoner’s 3-D Ranch in Vernon, Texas, to get a feel for the life. From the start it was as he had expected, and more, all the years he had waited for the fantasy to come true, all of it—the cattle drives and stampedes, sleeping in a Tucson bed (the hard ground with a saddle for a pillow), chuck wagons, and the potwalloper’s gracious grub call, “Come an’ git it afore I drap it in the dirt!” The ranch manager turned the wranglers out of bed with a kick, to the sound of a clanging breakfast triangle at three in the morning. Bob was “duckin’ rattlesnakes” to reach his horse on the remuda and saddle up. He rode a horse named Coyote. They shifted fifteen hundred almost wild steers under bone-dry skies. Sleeping rough, again with rattlesnakes and horned toads, eating beans off metal plates, alongside men who were older and rougher than himself, Bob kept his mouth shut and his eyes open. The regular hands on the 3-D had little use for a college boy until he earned their respect through his actions as a man and a cowboy.
That moment came for Bob at the end of the summer during cattle-shipping time. The ranch manager was opening a gate to allow the herd to cross a two-lane county highway. A white sun rising on an eastern horizon meant another hot and dusty day ahead for the cowboys and the cows. Bob was riding drag on Coyote as usual, behind the herd. The steers were moving forward at their grudging pace through the gate.
Other cowboys were working that morning, but Bob was the first to look up the highway. Not a car had gone by for hours. Now he froze at the sight of a gaudy red Buick convertible speeding at one hundred miles an hour, headed straight—and, Bob thought, unavoidably—for the steers. The driver saw what he was about to hit and sounded his horn. At the sudden shocking sound, the steers exploded back into the gate in a frenzy, stamping straight toward Bob and Coyote, and a couple of his cowboy companions.
The Cowboy and his Elephant Page 4