The Cowboy and his Elephant (11 page)

Amy was content. Water was abundant, the sky was filled with clouds, and her food bin was always full. She was wild and free. Bob did not discipline her Indeed, he asked nothing of her but that she find her way in her new world. He allowed her the freedom to grow up and gain confidence at her own pace.

One morning Amy and Michelle wandered over from the paddock to the cutting pen, where Bob was working the colts. Suddenly Amy’s trunk went up, and she trumpeted loudly. Bob looked over at her, surprised. He thought, Oh, damn, here she comes!

She charged the colts in the pen as though they were the zebras back in Zimbabwe. The colts “just went bonkers
when they saw her coming. I mean, one jumped plumb over the fence, it wanted out of there so bad. I didn’t know what Amy was going to do. Hell, I didn’t know what the horses would do either. Amy knew that she was scaring them, I swear. She was having a ball. She figured that out real quick. It was as if she was thinking, Hey, these guys are scared to death of me. I’m going to have some fun with it. She ran after them deliberately and trumpeted to frighten them.”

Soon after, realizing that Amy was going to have to get along with the colts sooner or later, Bob put colts in the paddock next to her. When the colts ran around the enclosure, Amy ran around in her paddock trumpeting loudly. “She got so excited she did figure eights,” said Bob, who next tied the colts to Amy’s paddock fence.

At first the young horses bunched up at the sight of Amy. She walked over to them and reached her trunk through the fence. She touched their noses. She tugged at their ropes. Days later she entered their paddock and rubbed up against them. Now they didn’t seem to mind. They treated her with all the indifference they would have shown just another colt.

Bob told Jane, “I guess she’s starting to think of herself as a horse with a trunk. Or maybe the colts are starting to think that they are elephants without a trunk. It’s hard to know. It is becoming a peaceful kingdom out there, anyway, with the lions laying down with the lambs.”

Jane told him, “It seems like the only one she isn’t used to, Bob, is
you.”

He knew that. He had asked himself how he might best approach her. He did not want to frighten her. A misstep or a premature action, he knew, might take away her self-confidence. He had no answers. But Jane was right. It
was
time to make Amy as much a part of the human ranch as she was of the animal.

The more he considered the problem, he came to see that an old football injury might hold the key. A couple of years before, a surgeon had removed bone chips from his knee, which sometimes locked up, “just snapped shut,” and forced him to walk on crutches or ride on horseback when he would normally walk. He asked himself, Why not approach Amy on horseback? Would that fool a smart young elephant like her? He decided to give it a try.

Astride Big Bob, he rode up to Amy in her paddock. He steadied the horse and leaned over in the saddle. He took Amy’s trunk in his hand and soothed her with the sound of his voice. So slowly that he hardly appeared to be moving, he swung his leg over the stallion’s back and lowered one leg to the ground. He was watching Amy, ready at an instant’s notice to climb back on the horse. He kept his hand out to her. He came down out of the saddle with his other foot. Now he was standing slightly apart from Big Bob. He walked across the paddock with his back turned to Amy. He pushed his hat up on his head. Deciding, Now or never, he stopped, figuring that she would either run away or charge him. He made a quarter turn to face her.

She nearly bumped into him.

Bob laughed out loud. She accepted him on his own two feet. Now they could start to be best friends.

M
ud gave Bob the idea. Amy had rolled in it after rain showers and where the water from the hose pooled in the dirt. He believed that she would roll in a teacup of mud if she fit. One day he decided to build a proper, African-type wallow big enough for them to enjoy together.

He flooded a natural depression in the land, about fifty feet around and three feet deep, behind the horse barn. He brought Amy out and stood with her at the water’s edge. At first she splashed with her trunk and stood on the bank. Then suddenly she charged across the pond, trumpeting. She blew water at Butch, and splashed Michelle. She sprayed Bob, then lay down and rolled over in the wallow.

T. J. and the hands came to watch. They took off their boots, rolled up their pants, and waded in, up to their calves. They splashed, fell over backward in the water, and flopped around in the mud. They threw water at Amy, and she blew water at them. Then Bob was in, up to his knees, laughing. He said to his hands, “Hell, boys, you’re just like a bunch of kids.”

T
he Toys “
” Us sales assistants thought Bob was a doting grandfather. Money seemed to mean nothing to him. He liked
big
toys—oversize harmonicas and inflatable swimming pools, plastic baseball bats, and huge rubber balls.
The staff recommended other items—educational toys, board games, and the latest promotional tie-ins from popular kids’ movies. But all the cowboy wanted were
big
toys.

“Why is that?” one of them finally thought to ask him.

“For my elephant,” he replied without thinking, as he tested the strength of a plastic pool for Amy’s paddock.

“Yes, sir,” the attendant had replied.

No one in the store really believed him. The only elephant in the area, almost everyone knew, was the one at the Colorado Springs Zoo. So they humored him and started to recommend toys that an elephant might even enjoy, rolling their eyes at each suggestion.

Over time Amy’s paddock filled up with toys, like a spoiled child’s playground. At Christmas, after opening their presents around the tree at home, Bob and Jane wandered down to Amy’s stall with presents in their arms. They had wrapped her gifts individually and tied them with colored ribbons. Bob laid them down on the straw in her stall. The gifts excited her interest; she tugged at the ribbons with the fingers of her trunk while Bob hummed Christmas carols to set the mood.

On Halloween Bob turned the tables on her. He dressed up in a bluish gray and
very
baggy elephant suit, with an elephant’s trunk that drooped down off his face, and elephant’s ears that flopped to his shoulders. Amy sniffed at him and then followed Michelle into the paddock. Bob could hardly remember a time when Halloween had been this much fun.

_____

S
he was his little girl—“little” even as her growth was beginning to worry about everyone else on the ranch. Jane was the first to raise the issue. It wasn’t that Amy was big and powerful, it was that
Bob had no control over her.

She would not leave the barn area, even when Bob encouraged her to accompany him when he rode. She went back into her stall when she was hungry, not when Bob wanted her to. Behind Bob’s back the ranch hands started to call her “the Bulldozer.” And, like Jane, they worried about her wildness, her size, and Bob’s lack of control.

Another issue that upset Jane was that Bob was spending all his spare time with Amy. Jane was used to him working long hours at the ranch with the cows and the horses. But he wasn’t giving his time to them anymore: It was all going to Amy alone.

“You know how, when a girl is married to a golfer,” she asked Bob one night, “they’re called ‘golf widows’? I’m becoming an ‘elephant widow.’ It’s time for you to try to figure out where you’re going with Amy.”

“I’m not sure what you mean.”

“Amy has to be included in
all
our lives,” she told him. “For a start she has to learn to live among us, and that means she has to learn discipline. One reason you spend so much time with her is that you feel responsible for her. You have to spend the time because you have no control over
her You have to watch her or otherwise there’s no telling what might happen.”

“That’s true,” he said.

“She does what she wants. But she has to learn to do what
we
want. She can’t stay a wild animal forever because she isn’t living in the wild anymore. She may hurt someone. You have to be able to tell her what you want and don’t want from her.”

“I still don’t see what you mean.”

“She’s big and wild,
that’s
what I mean! She’s going to get a whole lot bigger.”

“She’s vulnerable, that’s all, like King Kong.”

“If you don’t give her proper formal training, Bob, she will
be
King Kong.”

B
ob talked with Laura Harris, the veterinarian, on one of her regular visits to the ranch.

“What do
you
think I should do?” he asked her.

She thought it over. “You and I, Bob, grew up around horses,” she told him. “We didn’t grow up around elephants.”

“So?”

“Well, we don’t think about whether a horse will step on us or knock us over. The horse is an animal that is brought up with people and is used to them. But an elephant, you don’t know its mind. Amy is wild, and she is getting real big. Jane is right. You never know what she’ll do.”

Bob looked pained. “I want her to be a good elephant,
not an outlaw of an elephant, or whatever it’s called. I have a responsibility to give her a good life.”

Harris repeated Jane’s advice. “Without discipline she’s going to hurt somebody. And that’s not fair to her. If she kills someone, you’re going to have to shoot her. That’s how it goes.”

O
n one of her visits to the ranch, Bob’s elder daughter, Carole, saw what her father didn’t want to see. Her mother told her about Amy and asked what she would do. Carole had no advice to give. Besides, she had other concerns. She was trying to find a gift for Bob’s upcoming sixty-fifth birthday. He was hard to buy for: He had everything he wanted. Did Jane have any ideas?

Her mother blurted out, “Find somebody to help him with Amy.”

As the birthday approached and Carole still had not found a gift, one night, watching a TV documentary entitled
Elephant,
she sat up and listened closely.

A research biologist was explaining about elephants in captivity. “Elephants are dangerous. They are big. Many people are killed every year by them. It is not something well known. They seem like cartoon characters, like Dumbo, very gentle. If they are trained properly, they are.” The documentary’s narrator went on, “To teach their zookeepers how to train elephants safely, the Point Defiance Zoo in Tacoma, Washington, hired trainer Richard L. Maguire.”

Maguire was then shown on TV “working” the zoo’s wild
bull elephant as if it were a trained dog. As the camera captured him on film, Maguire called to the bull, and he came. He ordered him to “stretch out,” and he lay down. Carole thought, He can make this wild elephant do anything he wants! Richard Maguire told the camera, “This is essentially a wild animal. They can be taught, and for everyone’s safety, they
should
be taught.”

Carole said to herself, I just found Dad’s birthday present.

She reached for the telephone and called the local PBS station. And after more than a dozen calls, she got Maguire himself on the other end of the line.

“I want to hire you to help my father train his elephant,” she told him.

“You’re kidding,” said Maguire. “No private person
owns
an elephant.”

“My dad does. Her name’s Amy.”

“Most of what I deal with are zoos and circuses.”

“Will you do it?”

“I don’t know.”

“Please?”

“Let’s just say I’m intrigued.”

F
riends nicknamed Maguire “Army,” for his neat appearance. An energetic young man with dark hair and a choirboy’s face, a deep voice, and a machine-gun style of delivery, he had trained birds, baboons, chimps, capuchin monkeys, pigs, goats, dogs, camels, horses, ponies, llamas, large cats, cheetahs, lions, and tigers. He had worked for circuses,
safari parks, and movie productions. Finding himself with nothing to do one afternoon, he had even taught his own pet shorthair cat how to meow on cue. But elephants were his specialty.

He had spent months studying them in Asia and Africa. By his own count he had trained sixty wild elephants, and he had saved the lives of many others by teaching them and their trainers how to get along. He believed that captives needed to be trained to know how to behave around humans. He based his confidence in his abilities on experience. He said that he had never failed at what he set out to do.

He told Carole, “I believe that God gave man dominion over all animals. The Bible says so. With that dominion comes a responsibility. Because of our intellect, we humans have a responsibility for the management of animals in our care. And that brings us to all the elephant questions you or your father are ever going to ask. You start ’em at the beginning, and they go to school properly, and when they grow up they don’t smash people into walls and go running through gates.”

“So you’ll help my father,” said Carole.

“I didn’t say that,” retorted Maguire. “I never worked for a cowboy before.”

“They’re no different from anybody else.”