The Cowboy and his Elephant (14 page)

I
n the spring the cowboys rounded up the pregnant cows and early calves. Bob and Amy rode “bog” to rescue those stuck in watering holes, with a rope around the saddle horn. Sometimes he waded in after them, while Amy held Big Bob’s reins. With her strength Amy could have pulled the cows out of the mud with her trunk. But sometimes the cows freed
themselves
at the very sight of her.

“They’d walk on water just seeing her approach them,” Bob said.

The cowboys kept the herds moving. On a ranch like the T Cross, cows behaved like a huge mowing machine that had to be shifted from one section to another to prevent overgrazing. After a severe winter the hands brought the cows cottonseed cake and hay. After mild winters, they grazed and fattened until spring roundup. The ranch hands and Bob cut and branded the calves, then let them loose to roam the ranch for the summer period of fattening. The work was hard on man and beast, and the days were long, even for Amy, who was assigned no particular chores except to stay out of the way. Her presence had a strange effect on the steers. When she was there, they watched her and were easier to cut. She stayed close to Bob, as if she had assigned herself the role of his bodyguard. Otherwise no one paid much attention to her, except to tell her to move out of the way.

Bob enjoyed Amy’s sense of humor. He knew as certainly as he knew what made
him
laugh that she laughed at the cows, and the colts made her trumpet at different intensities of sound that Bob was certain were giggles. She even seemed to understand the pathos of Michelle fretting over being left alone. Amy, Bob believed, thought of the goat as a sweet simpleton. Amy teased her, closed gates on her, and sprayed her with the garden hose, she pushed her into the mud and threw toys at her. Michelle seemed unfazed and only wanted to be with her friend Amy.

_____

I
n the summers Bob and Amy invented games to play. In one he ignored her until she complained to him with grumbles, moans, and trumpeting. He chased her. Her ears spread wide, her trunk stretched straight out, and she trumpeted. The chase ended with Bob spraying her with water from the hose and Amy spraying him with her trunk.

In the mornings they often played hide and seek. Cleaning out her stall with a shovel and a push broom, Bob told Amy to get out of her stall—there was hardly room for her
and
him. Reluctantly she went into the paddock, but she was back a minute later, trying to stuff herself in.

“No, Amy,” he told her.

She inched her toe over the threshold. Bob told her with mock seriousness, “No, no.”

She pulled her foot back. Then, little by little, she inched it forward again. Bob was convinced that she thought of herself as tiny, even invisible. Now she put in her other foot and then her shoulders, until she was back in and the stall was crowded again. Bob blustered with comic indignation, and Amy fled down the barn gallery “like Big Bird,” Bob said, with her ears straight out to the sides, trumpeting and moving her legs in her “silly walk” of loose and disjointed limbs, trunk and flopping ears.

Once out of the barn she turned back into the paddock and came around to the outside of her stall. She released
the catch on the lower door with her trunk and softly stepped back into the stall. Bob was waiting. He scolded her, and she ran off again, honking and bellowing.

This time around, as she circled through the paddock, Bob would hide himself in another stall, squatting down in the corner by the gallery door. Amy looked in her stall; he wasn’t there! She searched the barn, trumpeting with excitement. She
knew
where he was hiding: He chose the same stall to hide in each time. And when she discovered him squatting in the corner, she trumpeted louder and ran away with an excitement and joy that Bob knew were just that, no matter what behaviorists said about animals being incapable of such feelings.

I
n the late mornings when the sun was warm, Bob sometimes napped by the paddock fence. He’d rest one boot on the rail, tilt back on the rear legs of a straight-back chair, and tip his hat down low over his brow. Amy was usually in the paddock playing with Butch and Michelle, and she’d wander over to Bob, who’d take his foot off the rail and put it on the ground. The game for Amy, Bob believed, was to see how close she could come to stepping on his foot without actually doing it. She went past, then around the paddock again, and again and again.

Bob watched her from under the brim of his hat. One morning a young horse that was “goofy and couldn’t concentrate on anything” stood looking at Amy’s hay in front of
her stall door. Amy had backed up to Bob, and he was scratching her rump. The radio was playing. The colt entered the paddock and walked over to Amy’s hay. Reins looped over his neck held his head from the hay. While Bob was watching her, Amy looked at the colt. She looked back at Bob as if to say,
Excuse me for a minute.
She went over to the colt, led him out of her paddock by the reins, and closed the gate. Amy then walked over, picked up a big trunkful of her hay, and walked back to the gate. She held out the food and fed the colt like a mother with a baby. She went back for more and fed him again.

Bob pushed back his hat. He thought, God, where’s my camera?

B
ob’s favorite local restaurant was El Chorro’s, a relaxed, al fresco place with a patio and tables under wide colored umbrellas. It had a bar that stocked numerous tequilas, and two small dining rooms with big windows, daylight streaming through their panes. El Chorro’s served Mexican food. Sometimes in the mornings Bob ordered
huevos rancheros
and sticky buns baked fresh in the restaurant’s ovens.

One day around brunch he drove up with Amy in a horse trailer. Amy stepped out at valet parking as Bob waved hello to the owner, Joe Miller. For something to do, while the patrons on the patio watched, Amy raised her trunk, waved a napkin, and performed her “break dance.” As a reward the owner served her a platter of sticky buns from the kitchen.

Miller asked Bob, “What’s a cowboy doing with an elephant?”

“Having fun!”

“With an
elephant?
”

“Hell, why not? Like we say, ‘If you’re not having fun you’re not living right.’”

F
rom her knowing how to “play” an oversize plastic harmonica, Bob soon resolved that Amy had an ear for music. Like a stage mother, he decided to nurture her talent with piano lessons. He consulted with the experts at Toys “R” Us and came home with an electric piano keyboard in the back of his truck.

He set up the piano in Amy’s paddock. She was curious and tested the keys with her trunk. Bob sliced a carrot. Amy loved carrots almost as much as sticky buns, and Bob placed a slice on a piano key. As she picked up the carrot, she pushed on the key, and a single note sounded.

“Hold it. Hold it. Hold it. Steady. . . . Hold that down.”

Bob waited, then told her, “All right!” and she ate the carrot on the key. Then another note, and so on, until finally she understood what he wanted from her. Bob told T. J., “She’ll never make a melody, but I can’t make one either.”

She played, and Bob occasionally danced. The ranch hands, watching their boss scuffle in the dirt, wandered over, wondering whether he had gone loco. Dancing to Amy’s tune on the piano, he told his hands, “This, boys, is a Zimbabwe
tune that you may not recognize.” Soon they too were dancing in the dirt, slapping their chaps, waving their hats, and laughing loud enough to be heard out on the highway. Bob sang along to her music, beat time, and waved his arms like an orchestra conductor. Seeing the hands and Bob shuffling in the dirt, Amy danced too, and with the touch of a control button on the piano Bob switched the play to automatic. To the sounds of Disney’s “It’s A Small World,” he danced and Amy shuffled her feet, and the dust rose up in a cloud.

A
my basked in the attention of an audience. Bob believed that the discipline and the exercise of “performance” engaged her mind. By the standards of what circus elephants were trained to do, her “act” was nothing more than what elephants
naturally
do.

His brunch with Amy at El Chorro’s gave Bob another idea. Amy’s little act had entertained the guests, so why not set up an act for kids to enjoy? Bob and Jane gave generously to charities out of a sense of duty and obligation to those who were less fortunate. But giving, Bob thought, was never as good as
doing
for others.

One morning he drove Amy in the horse trailer to a local Colorado Springs public elementary school. When he stepped out of his truck he was dressed in a red cowboy shirt with fringed sleeves that Jane had patterned for him. Amy backed out of the trailer, followed by Michelle, Big Bob, and Butch. A local TV station had sent a reporter with a camera crew to film Amy’s performance.

Amy and Bob walked from the parking lot to the school’s baseball diamond, where the children were waiting in the bleachers. Amy did not need to do anything but be herself. A real live elephant has amazing powers of enchantment over children. Bob set up her electric piano and rolled out a steel tub. Amy, with Michelle behind her, wandered to the baseball diamond’s home plate, which she tried to pry out of the ground. The children screamed with delight. Amy carried the rubber rectangle up to the pitcher’s mound, dropped it in the dirt, then tried to excavate the pitcher’s “rubber.” Already, before the show even began, she was the star!

When she finally began her act, she turned to the bleachers and bowed on her knee. She waved an American flag in her trunk and played the piano. Bob sang “The Yellow Rose of Texas” and kept up a running monologue about Amy’s history and as much as he knew about elephants in the wild. The children cheered when Amy perched on the steel tub and hopped in her “break dance,” and when she rolled over on her side. She blew on the harmonica as a finale and took bows as the children clapped their hands.

That evening Amy appeared on the TV station’s news. And soon after, invitations to perform arrived in the ranch’s mailbox. Bob was flattered. He told Jane, “We’re getting known, I guess.”

O
ne of the first invitations Bob accepted was a charity dinner in town. The party’s theme was “Carousel Caravan,” with drinks, dinner, and dancing, under the stars. A buffet table
stretched from one end of a long white tent to the other, covered with chafing dishes and platters. Guests wore the costumes of circus performers—sideshow acts, lion tamers, high-wire walkers, clowns, and so on.

Bob arrived with Amy in the trailer when the party was in full swing. The professional organizer of the evening, who did not know Bob and thought of him as a hired entertainer, gave him a welcoming look that said
Carnie
and Avoid! As he was unloading Amy from the trailer, the woman told him, “Now, if you are hungry you can go over there to eat with the other help.”

“I won’t be talked to like that,” said Bob.

“Oh, yes you will.”

He pointed to the buffet table. “I’ll eat with all those other folks over there.”

“No, you won’t!”

“Why the heck not?”

She stared at him with contempt. “Because you are not wearing a costume.”

Bob knew when to seize an opportunity. He went along to charity benefits because of Jane, not because he enjoyed the chitchat, and now was his chance to escape back to the ranch. He smiled at the lady, tipped his hat, packed Amy into the trailer and delivered her back to the barn. He settled her in, watering and feeding her, and he then drove to El Chorro’s for dinner, leaving the restaurant with a bag of sticky buns for Amy’s breakfast.

From then on Bob accepted many invitations, including one date in Denver at the Western National Stock Show and Rodeo. The guests were seated on hay bales and in folding chairs set out in a horseshoe. They ate off paper plates in their laps. Amy went through her paces but she was distracted, and she missed her cues. Bob wondered if she needed a break from performing. He asked her to sit on the tub, and she paused. Bob thought,
Uh-oh.
She was looking straight at a man sitting in the front row with a full paper plate in his lap, of boiled corn, chicken, and barbecued beans. Amy snapped out her trunk and in an instant snatched his plate away. The man fell over backward in surprise, and while the audience laughed, Bob decided that he should retire her for a while from showbiz.

He got out of bed one morning, and his old football knee locked up. He hated to admit that he needed to see a doctor—cowboys resented sick spells more than five-mile walks. At Jane’s urging he went to an orthopedic surgeon who scoped his knee. For the next few weeks, back at the ranch, he hobbled around on crutches. Jane worried for him. “What if you can’t move out of her way and Amy bumps into you by accident?” she wanted to know.

“Then it’s my own damn fault.”

He went straight to the barn on crutches and opened Amy’s stall door and Amy, clearly glad to see him, walked into the barn gallery and put the end of her trunk all over his face. Bob hobbled down the gallery to the tack room, and
she came along. He looked over and laughed. Amy was hobbling with the same jerky rhythm of him on his crutches.

“Knock it off!” he told her. “I won’t be made fun of by an elephant!”

A
my had lived at the ranch for five years when Bob and Jane became regular “snowbirds” during the winters, fleeing Colorado for the warmth of Phoenix. They packed up to leave after the fall roundup, with Bob turning over T Cross to a manager. And with a horse trailer hitched to the pickup and loaded with their menagerie, Bob, with Jane beside him in the cab, turned onto Route 25 for the drive south through Pueblo toward the New Mexico border near Trinidad.

Bob had customized the horse trailer to accommodate Amy, and for space to carry Jane’s dresses and jewelry and Bob’s saddles and bridles. Bales of hay were tied on top. The trailer groaned under the weight of Amy, Michelle, Big Bob and usually another horse of Bob’s choice, the two
dogs, plus Amy’s piano, which he put within her reach to play as they drove.