The Cowboy and his Elephant (20 page)

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.

I
n 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!

A
nna 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.

A
t 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 was 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.

T
raining 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.

Amy actually seemed to smile and bask in the approving screams of the children. With their noise in her ears, all on her own, without prompting from Buckles, she acted silly, spreading her ears and letting her trunk go floppy, just like when she played hide-and-seek with Bob.

Her mind was too quick for the repeated routines of an act that changed only once in a circus season. Once she snatched a woman’s pocketbook off an empty seat during a performance. She reached out to frisk the audience for treats while Ned and Anna May performed their dramatic “stands.” When Amy lay down in the ring, she blew on people, as if the audience were there for
her
amusement. She once held a trunk of water through several minutes of the performance. Then when Buckles turned his back, she showered the audience with a blast of elephant spray.

One day Buckles lined up Amy, Ned, and Anna May for an inspection outside the tent before they entered the ring to perform. Again he turned away for an instant, and that was
long enough for Amy to escape. She walked out of the elephant line, over to a circus guest who was pushing his child in a stroller along a path. Amy smelled the man and the baby and searched their clothing for treats. The child laughed. The man reached up and petted her trunk. Amy reached gently down and snatched an ice cream bar out of the child’s hand. A moment later she walked through the gate back to her tent to “retire” for the rest of the day.

Buckles was flabbergasted.

“It’s all Bob,” he told Barbara soon after the incident. “She thinks she’s a queen because that was how he treated her.”

“But you can’t allow her to just wander off,” Barbara said.

“I can’t? What choice do I have? She has her own mind, and nothing will change it. That’s how she is; that’s how Bob raised her.”

As if to confirm that fact, that same afternoon during rehearsals, when Buckles was working with Ned and Anna May and Amy was supposed to be standing in a corner by herself, she searched around her feet for tidbits of popcorn and candy. Finally, bored with herself, she set off skipping around the ring, first on one front foot, then the other. Buckles and the other performers stopped what they were doing and just stared, as if to say,
There she goes again
!

Buckles again called Bob to report to him the changes that he had seen. “She has all the things we look for in an elephant,” he told him. “She’s like a thoroughbred racehorse, but she marches to a different drummer.”

“I’m glad to hear it,” said Bob.

“What, that she’s like a racehorse or she marches to a different drummer?”

“Both,” said Bob proudly. “I could have told you, Buckles, that if you expected Amy to be right on the dime you’d be disappointed.”

“She is unflappable. I’ll say that much for her. But she just doesn’t seem to know she’s in showbiz.”

“She always just did things on her own. You have to let her be. She just figures she’d rather do something different sometimes. You can’t blame her, either.”

S
he had performed with the Big Apple Circus less than a year before Buckles awarded her a starring role. The act was billed as “The Magic Carpet” and featured Amy and the Big Apple’s top clown, Bello Nock, whose “signature” was a shocking palisade of yellow hair. Bello clowned continuously in and out of the ring and quickly recognized Amy as a kindred spirit.

He told Buckles one day, “I mean, she is clownish all by herself without makeup and costumes and an act.”

“You mean she likes to get away with murder.”

That was partly it. “She likes to see what she can get away with, it’s true, but that’s what we clowns
do.
She likes to get the better of you, like you were her father. That’s why the kids laugh with her. She is always trying to get away with something, like they do at home. She does simple funny things that she isn’t asked to do.
And
she has good ideas.”

As part of “The Magic Carpet,” Amy routinely dragged
Bello out of the ring on the “magic” carpet at the finale. She was soon bored with this routine, though, and, Buckles was convinced, was looking for mischief. One day at the end of the performance, she seemed to notice a large pile of elephant dung that Ned had deposited on his way out moments before. Now Amy was pulling Bello on the carpet as usual, when at the last instant, as she was leaving the ring, she swerved off-line and dragged him
through
the manure. The audience screamed louder than Bello had ever heard them. Amy stopped outside the tent and looked at Bello, and he could have sworn that she was smiling.

In feigned anger, he grabbed her trunk in both his hands, speaking sternly into its end as if it were a telephone, then smacking it over his ear, as if he were listening to her reply. “You did that on purpose,” he told her. He fanned the seat of his dirty pants, and he thought he saw her mouth curve upward.

With every indication that he thought his hair actually looked handsome, Bello sometimes was seen turning away to primp his pompadour. Amy apparently decided that she could make fun of this vanity. In their act together, Bello pretended to be a waiter in a restaurant. Amy sat on a chair at a table and “read” a menu, while Bello stood by waiting to take her order. Bello walked away, then returned with bread on a tray and was looking at the audience when Amy snatched the bread away. Bello feigned not knowing where the bread had disappeared to. The kids screamed at him: “
Amy
!”

In the meantime Amy had sucked up a trunkful of water out of a wooden bucket that was placed on the table. And as Bello scolded her for stealing the bread, she sprayed him all over with water. His proud blond cascade of hair wilted and fell in his eyes. The audience screamed its approval. Again Bello was convinced that Amy’s mouth curved upward in an elephant’s smile.