He looked startled. “What the hell’s that?”
“What?” asked Bob with feigned surprise.
The inspector pointed out the window. “That!”
Bob said, “A cow.”
The inspector looked at him real hard.
“A horse,” Bob said, changing his mind.
“A horse with a damned trunk?”
Bob grinned slyly. “It takes all kinds.”
“Well, cowboy, whatever it is you got in there, get it out of here before I impound it.”
Jane watched all this with growing dismay, until one day, despite herself, she had to ask Bob, “What are we going to do?”
“About what?” He knew what. “Something will turn up to fix it,” he told her.
“Nothing is going to fix her size. She’s an elephant, Bob.”
Yes, of course, but Amy was also his friend.
“Can’t we leave her at T Cross when we go to Arizona?” Jane asked.
“And who would take care of her there? Who would be responsible for her?”
After a long silence, Bob stopped on the shoulder of the road. He got out of the truck and got into Amy’s trailer. He sat with his back to the wall. He talked to her as a friend. He felt sad and did not hide his feelings behind a cheerful voice. The time was fast approaching for some decision that would change their lives. Amy was growing up, and Bob had choices to make. Damn, he thought. I don’t even want to think about what to do.
The Arizona “snowbird” life mirrored on a smaller scale what Bob and Jane had built for themselves in Colorado. They owned a nice house in the Paradise Valley suburb of Scottsdale, and Bob maintained a miniranch for Amy and his horses and a few cows on the outskirts of Phoenix, by the canal.
With Bob’s constant presence and encouragement, Amy adapted to Arizona during her months there each year. Her stall and paddock were about the same size and shape as they were in Colorado. She ate the same foods and had the company of Michelle and the cowdogs. Best of all, now that he was away from the big Colorado ranch, Bob spent the whole day with her, every day. They walked the ranch’s fences, and they wandered over to the canal and watched the water flow by. The skies were a sulfurous yellow and the air was hot; gray rabbits and sometimes an armadillo wandered in from the desert; the nights were cool and the stars bright.
In the 1990s, few places in the United States were growing faster than Phoenix and Scottsdale. It was the same story over much of the Old West. Bob could see and even smell and hear how the empty land was filling up with new construction, people, noise, traffic, and pollution. Housing developments were built right next to his Phoenix ranch, so close that Bob could have waved to his new neighbors. The ranch was already hemmed in by the canal on the north and a road on the south; the road, which so few cars once had traveled that rabbits hopped across at their leisure, now thundered with traffic. But as time went by, new construction blocked both the other ranch boundaries. This squeezing of the property served also to emphasize Amy’s growth and size. Bob’s world, and not just the trailer, was getting too small for her. She had outgrown her stall, her paddock, the barn gallery, her trailer, and the ranch itself.
One evening at a dinner party in Scottsdale, Bob was sitting next to a woman visitor from St. Louis. He took out his billfold as usual and showed her photographs of Amy, and told her how he had come to adopt her. He rhapsodized about their lives together, and the woman, an animal lover who raised horses, was enthralled. In passing, Bob mentioned his concerns over how big Amy was growing.
“Why don’t you let me find her a home at the St. Louis Zoo?” the woman asked him; as a member of the zoo’s board of directors she could have arranged the adoption with a single telephone call.
“No,” Bob said, and thanked her politely. But before leaving the party that night, he went up to her and said, “I may be in touch,” and they exchanged business cards.
On the way home he brooded over what he had said to the woman; he felt as if he had betrayed Amy with his words.
“What’s the matter, Bob?” Jane asked.
“Nothing,” he told her. But it wasn’t nothing. It was one of the biggest decisions he would ever have to make.
A subtle change in Bob began after that night. It took the form of a gradual withdrawal, a slight avoidance, and emotional separation. He was being left behind, again—he, the Marlboro Man and a lifelong cowboy who was supposed to be forever young. He had to let go. Out of the blue he would say things to Amy like, “I sure would miss you.”
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.”
The 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.
Not 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.”
The 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.”
One 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.”
Bob 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.”
Bob 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.”
The Cowboy and his Elephant Page 12