The Cowboy and his Elephant

by Malcolm MacPherson

  There was no good way of telling her good-bye. He thought, Good-byes are like little deaths. He had never felt as close to humans as to some of the animals in his life. Amy had stolen his heart. Now he pretended that this goodbye was the start of a better life. She might not even miss him. She had Michelle and her favorite green ball and her other toys, “monkey” biscuits, and a bag of El Chorro’s sticky buns.

  Too soon, it seemed, he was driving into his son Bobby’s ranch. Amy got out of the trailer and stretched her legs, drank, and ate, while Bob greeted Buckles. They talked about the road conditions and the weather, and this and that. Bob was thinking of the inevitable. Distractedly, he told Buckles, “She likes carrots in the morning and buns, and if you can get them where you are in Florida, she likes strawberries dipped in chocolate.”

  He walked over to Amy. He petted her trunk and whispered to her, “Good-bye.”

  He told Buckles. “I can’t stay any longer. I got to go.” He walked away and did not look back. As he drove out of the ranch gates, he thought, I lost two brothers, and now this hurts almost as bad.

  CHAPTER NINE

  At the end of the journey to Florida, Amy looked around, trying to find Bob. Michelle followed her out of the trailer. Amy searched for a single familiar sight. She hugged Michelle around her middle, two orphans, staring out at their new world.

  Buckles tried to reassure Amy. He called to her to follow him around the drive to a tall gate that opened onto a green pasture unlike any other that Amy had ever seen. This one was overgrown with tall grass and with palmettos growing wild. Amy looked at the food that was offered, but it wasn’t what she was used to. She walked over to a water trough, like the one she had dipped her trunk in when she was a baby in Africa. The water tasted warm, with none of the freshness of the ranch. Dark clouds filled the sky, and from far off came the rumble of thunder. Rain threatened to pour.

  She knew the old route at the ranch, from her stall into her paddock, where her toys were kept, and from there into the pasture, to her wallow, or along the drive that formed a circle in front of the horse barn. She probably could have walked on her own along the ranch fences or up to the water tank, where she sometimes went with Bob. Her old world had been strictly defined. Now she backed up into the corner of the Woodcocks’ pasture and looked out, clearly confused and frightened by the newness of it all.

  Buckles unloaded her toys in the barn, where Ned and Anna May were standing in their stalls. He patted Anna May on the nose, then went to put food in Amy’s new stall and open the doors for her to come in when she wanted to. Barbara joined him there as he was loosening a hay bale. She was anxious to see the newest family member. From across the pasture she saw Amy, and Barbara’s heart went out to her.

  “I don’t care if you’re a gopher—when your world changes, there’s an adjustment to be made, and Amy has to do it,” Buckles explained, seeing the look on Barbara’s face. “Her world has changed, and she doesn’t know what’s going on. It’s just something she’ll have to get through. She’ll have to do it herself.”

  “What about Anna May?” asked Barbara.

  He knew what she was asking; Anna May was the matriarch. “I’ll put Amy out with her once she’s seen her new stall. We’ll see if it helps.”

  That night Amy heard the sounds of other elephants for the first time since her childhood, and smelled their smell. She beat the walls of her stall with her trunk, hugged Michelle, and waited for the morning as if she hoped that Bob would be standing by her stall door with fresh-cut carrots in his hand, just like always.

  Instead of carrots, the sight of her own elephant kind greeted her. She had last seen an elephant long enough ago perhaps not to remember. Amy was of the species Loxodonta africana, while Ned and Anna May, as Asian elephants, were classified Elephas maximus. There were plain differences in their sizes and shapes, the fingers of their trunks, their ears, their teeth, the curvature of their backs, the shape of their heads, and so on. But their similarities, at least in humans’ eyes, were greater by far than their differences.

  Watching Amy watch Anna May and Ned, Buckles explained to Barbara, “It’s like if I was raised in a herd of buffalo and I saw another human,” he said. “I’d know I was more like the human than the buffalo. I’d be confused and maybe scared. Amy is too. She’s seeing for the first time that she isn’t a horse and she isn’t a human. She is an elephant. That may come as a shock. She’ll try to communicate, but whether she succeeds, we may never know.”

  _____

  Even more than anyone imagined, Amy missed Bob. Buckles had no other explanation for her behavior. And she clearly longed to return to the ranch, Buckles believed, as though life itself had been stolen from her. She stood as a ghostly figure in the corner of the Woodcocks’ pasture, hour upon hour, staring out at nothing, curious about nothing, not making a sound. She seemed almost to pine, and she only sniffed at her food. Worse still, when Buckles ordered her to move, she refused, as though she were unwilling to take commands from anyone but Bob.

  “She won’t give me a thing,” Buckles told Barbara. “I just don’t know what to do with her.”

  “Just give her time,” she replied.

  Buckles even started to believe that he had made a bad choice. His father was probably right about African elephants. Buckles had no basis for understanding Amy. He didn’t know what to expect. If Amy were Anna May or Ned, he would have known to keep her busy, and she would have soon forgotten all about what depressed her. But how could he keep Amy busy if he could not get her to respond?

  He called Bob on the telephone, ostensibly to report that they had successfully made the journey from Texas to Florida. “She misses you,” he told Bob.

  “That makes two of us.”

  Buckles told Bob about her odd behavior, and he asked him, “You got any idea how to make her snap out of it?”

  “Chocolate-covered strawberries.”

  “That’s it? That’s all?”

  “That and what your wife, Barbara, says, just give her time to get used to it.”

  Anna May and Ned left Amy alone.

  Ned, a rambunctious bull, was spoiled by Anna May. He had never shared with another elephant his own age, and he clearly wasn’t about to now. Even—perhaps especially—in Amy’s presence, Anna May treated Ned as her own baby. She tickled him and played with him. Ned liked being tickled, and he trumpeted, tossed his head, and went all loose and silly. He also loved to be scared. Buckles contended that the young elephant woke up each morning telling himself, I hope something happens today that I can be afraid of. Wouldn’t it be great if I could be afraid? It doesn’t have to be anything large. Just real scary. Ned worked harder than any elephant Buckles had ever known to find excuses not to do what Buckles asked him to. Every day was a battle of wits, and according to Buckles, Ned woke up each morning with elaborate, fully conceived plans to get out of working. “He must have exhausted himself just thinking them up,” he said.

  More than anything else, except for food, Ned loved his B. F. Goodrich tire. He rolled the tire at his side and stuffed it with hay for snacks. He hugged it. He slept with it by his side. The circus roustabouts sometimes teased him by hiding the tire under bales of hay. Ned cried and carried on until the tire was returned. Barbara had to tell the circus manager to make the roustabouts stop tormenting him; Ned was obsessed, even for an elephant, with his tire.

  Buckles had never witnessed such a withdrawal and depression as Amy’s. He despaired for her. As he’d said to Barbara, she was giving him nothing: She wasn’t eating; she hardly moved; she looked sick. Anyone could see that she was losing weight. Buckles no longer worried whether Amy would get along with Ned and Anna May. He wondered if she would live. And he pondered whether to just send her back to Bob.

  He got on the phone to talk to him about her. And what he learned surprised him. Bob was feeling the same effects of separation as Amy. Since they had said good-bye, he had slipped into a surprising depression, the first in his life
of any magnitude. He said little about it to Jane, but he felt all adrift. He rode his horses with no enthusiasm, and he wandered off for long periods of time alone. Sometimes he just stood at Amy’s wallow staring at the reflections of the clouds in the muddy water. He still rode the fences, but he rode without the company of the dogs.

  One afternoon Jane was looking for him around the house. She called out his name. He had been there minutes ago, and he always told her when he was leaving. She looked through the front window. The horse trailer was parked by the curb. She went to look around the back of the trailer. At the rear gate as she looked in, she saw Bob standing with his back to her, all alone, bent over Amy’s little piano. She could tell that he was crying. She turned quietly and tiptoed back to the house. When she later asked him about it, he explained simply, “Hell, she was my girl.”

  On the telephone now, Bob told Buckles, “I said she could come home if it didn’t work out. Maybe she just wants to come home, Buckles. I don’t know what to tell you. I just don’t know. Did you try the trick with the strawberries?”

  “I did,” said Buckles, who felt awkward calling Bob—he was the elephant man. Yet Amy’s depression perplexed him. “Any other ideas?” he asked Bob. “You know her. Maybe you know what might jog her out of it.”

  “Try a toy,” said Bob. “It’s all I can suggest. It helped her when she first came here. Maybe it will help her now.”

  When he hung up, Bob sat down, utterly dejected. He had made the right decision to let her go, but he realized that, in a sense, she was not gone; she was in his heart, where she would remain until the day he died.

  Ned was busy eating hay when Amy first saw his tire. Ned felt confident by this time, nearly six weeks after Amy arrived in Florida, that his tire was safe around her. He apparently no longer felt the urgent need to guard it all day long. Ned looked up from his food bin and let out a terrible elephant scream.

  Amy was touching his tire! Now Amy was rolling his tire!

  “You’d think somebody was killing him,” said Barbara, looking out the window.

  “Well, it is his good friend,” said Buckles.

  “Not anymore.”

  “Ouch!” said Buckles.

  Ned had bitten Amy’s tail.

  In a remarkable way, Ned’s tire helped Amy adjust to her new life.

  “It was that and more,” Barbara reported to Bob. “It’s Ned’s reaction when she takes the tire. She’s egging him on. She knows what she’s doing, and she enjoys teasing him. He is such a baby. He plays right into her hands every time.”

  “She’s just smarter than Ned is,” Barbara told Bob, whom she called with the news. “I swear to you, she torments him. She has fun at it. She may still miss you, Bob, but she found something to take her mind off it. She’s dealing with a dummy. He’s an easy one to trick; if you could see him, you’d feel sorry for him.”

  “I would?” Bob felt like laughing.

  “He protects his tire now all the time. He bellows when she comes near it. He can never quite figure out if she’s going to try to steal it, and he ends up with hurt feelings. Buckles scolded Amy the other day, and the scolding pleased Ned. I swear.”

  Bob felt his depression lighten as he listened to her talk. What she said was funny and strange enough to be true. He had never met Ned, but he could picture him. Amy had teased the colts on the ranch; she was smarter and easily outwitted them. Clearly, he thought, she was doing the same thing with Ned.

  “Ned won’t let her hold his tail,” Barbara was saying. “They’re supposed to be doing that at the opening of the act.”

  “It’s a small price to pay,” Bob told her.

  “That’s not all. She waits until he is asleep or he’s eating, and she pokes him with her tusks. She lulls him into standing in front of her, then she gives him a good jab in the rump.”

  “Keep it up!” Bob told her.

  Hanging up the phone, he thought, If Amy can get over it, I can too!

  Anna May, almost forty years older than Amy and Ned, missed her girlfriend, Peggy, who had retired to the sanctuary in Tennessee. In the years that they were together Peggy and Anna May had often stood side by side in the barn and in the pasture, mumbling and grazing and listening to the wind in the palms. Buckles thought that Anna May felt lonely without Peggy. Even more, he thought that she missed another female to include in her being. Female elephants doted endlessly on young males and protected them and taught them lessons for life, but, it seemed to Buckles, they could only be with other females. Neither scientists nor researchers were able to point to a reason. But Buckles, after years of living with elephants, made a guess: Female elephants talked together, gossiped, and generally cluttered the air with their chatter. He had felt the evidence of sound vibrations on his skin and heard their sounds with his ears. He declared, “Anna May and Peggy stopped talking only when their mouths were full!”

  One day Buckles heard Anna May call out. Amy faced in her direction. Anna May raised her bulbous old head and fanned the air with her small, tattered, spotted ears, as if she were waiting to hear some uttered sound that would tell her that Amy understood her call.

  Anna May persisted, Buckles noticed. Over the weeks, she called out to Amy in strange, haunting sounds. One day, without explanation, Buckles felt the air around Amy and Anna May shake with the pressure of sound. Their ears went out and their heads went up. Almost certainly each was listening to what the other elephant had to “say.” And if she talked to Anna May, what an amazing tale Amy had to tell her! Even more, if their communication was real, Amy had found a creature in Anna May to listen to, an older, wiser animal to possibly help her make sense of all that had happened.

  And with that Anna May became Amy’s refuge. Amy pushed up against her side and held her trunk in the fingers of her own. She followed her around the pasture, ate when Anna May ate, and drank when Anna May drank. It seemed that Amy was over the worst.

  CHAPTER TEN

  At the Big Apple Circus, Amy stepped through a looking glass into a topsy-turvy tented world of gaudy clowns, flying acrobats, and magicians with pigeons up their sleeves. This world of new rhythms and colors came alive with people who were more of just about everything. And, wildly different though this new world seemed to anyone looking in, nothing about it seemed incongruous or, to the circus entertainers themselves, even particularly strange.

  The Big Apple had the appurtenances of an elephant hotel, with conveniences. Every detail of Amy’s life was examined, reexamined, and thought over twice. Feeding and watering were just the beginning. The circus managers, with Buckles advising them, looked at ventilation and warmth and space for Amy to move around in. Her nails were trimmed and polished regularly; her body was scrubbed with brushes and curried with combs. She was treated as a circus professional, as an entertainer with a temperament, individuality, and emotions, as a celebrity, and, sometimes, as a star.

  Amy thrilled Buckles with her recovery. He wondered what his father had meant about the brains of African elephants’ being in their ears. Amy was smart, she was talented, and she was the easiest elephant to get along with that he had ever known. He told Barbara, “Bob made her into a perfect lady.”

  Her new circus routines came as a snap. What more did she need to learn? With Anna May standing by to give her reassurance, she picked up fast on Buckle’s instructions. She was a quick study once she decided to learn. Her circus life started with three-year-old Skye, who wore diapers and did not yet know how to talk. Skye was the Woodcocks’ granddaughter, who performed in the circus every afternoon by perching in a basket that Ned carried in his mouth. The act typified the level of the Big Apple’s performances. Ned was big and Skye was cute and tiny; the difference was simple and the act was undemanding, yet it pleased the crowd.

  But one day Skye refused to perform with Ned, and she did not yet have the words to explain why.

  After weeks of indulging her, Barbara finally learned that Skye wanted to perform with Amy. By her thinking, Ned w
as used goods, dull, and not particularly fun. Amy made her laugh and dogged her around the pathways between the circus caravans and in the tent between shows.

  In the end Skye got her way. With only a bit of additional training Amy learned to lift her. She bent her leg at the knee and with a gentleness that surprised Barbara, she could swing Skye up on her back in a fluid, graceful motion that made her look like a seasoned professional. Amy lay down on her side to let Skye off, and as she got up again, “waltzed” and “spun” to the audience’s applause.

  Training an elephant is a delicate affair,” Buckles liked to say. “There is no braver beast and no greater coward. There is no better friend and no worse enemy.” Though nothing that Buckles asked Amy to do was different from what she would have done in the wild, except for doing them as part of a regular routine, she gave him fits.

  “She’s like a cat!” he complained to Barbara one day. “She can’t be made to like anyone she doesn’t want to like. Her own way is the only way, and she doesn’t try to please. She is only and always just herself—”

  Barbara cut him off. “So, what you’re saying, Buckles, she isn’t one to wag her tail?”

  In their performances Amy was always slightly off cue: She skipped a half beat behind Ned and Anna May. Buckles decided that she had a secret reason. She had discovered the rewards of keeping an eye on the audience. One time, as Ned and Anna May lay down in the ring, Amy lay down—not by coincidence—Buckles believed, in front of three boys in the front row who were sitting with refreshments in their laps. When Buckles turned his head, Amy quickly slithered her trunk over the knee-high barrier that separated the audience from the performers in the ring. She snatched the bags of popcorn from the surprised boys. Buckles had never seen any elephant work faster or with such clear premeditation. Amy was proving herself to be even smarter than Bob had told him. Buckles scolded her after the act was over, but the audience roared its approval at the time.