The Cowboy and his Elephant by Malcolm MacPherson Page B

a tight wooden crate, and fed through her trunk as though it were a filling-station nozzle. How much more could any creature take? She had been tryingto gain control of her own basic baby needs when she was captured. She was listless now, and Bob took this to mean sadness. Nightmares startled her awake. She pounded the walls with her trunk. She wanted to escape as if from memory itself.
    She had not made a sound, and even knowing as little about elephants as he did, that struck Bob as odd. He checked a book on elephants out of the library. He read that they expressed themselves with a repertoire of screams, squeaks, bellows, trumpets, rumbles, and sounds below the level of human hearing. He read, “All healthy baby elephants scream; if one does not it is either sick, neurotic, or mad, and will either die or be extremely troublesome.”
    “She’s just a little baby, a puppy,” he told Jane. “She’s getting sickly. I don’t know what to do, but something has to be done or she’ll die.”
    Jane listened, wanting to help but not knowing what to do.
    “I mean there’s no way to sweet-coat what happened to her,” he went on. “In a perfect world she would have stayed her whole life with her mama in the jungle. But that didn’t happen.”
    “What can we do?” she asked him. “She doesn’t belong to us.”
    Bob had never been more serious in his life. “I can’t undo what made her an orphan. But I can do the next best thing.”
     
    T he next best thing was himself.
    He owned more than enough land for a baby elephant toroam on. He could give her the time to grow and get healthy, and once she was better—once she was over her trauma—Bob could decide what to do with her then. He talked to Jane about it. “I just think I should take advantage of a situation that’s come my way,” he told her. “Why Jackson drove into my ranch instead of somewhere else, I’ll never know. I want little Amy to be a part of our family—I just
want
her. I know she will be a challenge. But I like challenges, and just now maybe I need one too. It’s me or no one.”
    His appeal melted Jane, who soon was in her kitchen elbow-deep in a concoction of milk and cornmeal. She and Bob dipped Amy’s trunk in the bucket, and when it was full of warm milk, they guided it into her mouth. Amy knew how to feed this way; she needed a
reason
to eat, not a technique to help her do it.
    Jane told Bob, “I can almost hear her asking,
Where’s my mom?
She’s at the age when her mother is her whole world. It’s so very sad; I think we might lose her.”
     
    T he young animal was wasting away from grief, as Bob saw it. He recalled a story not long before of a llama pair that escaped from a zoo in Boston. The police had shot the male dead in the street, and the female, untouched, laid her head on her mate’s neck and, with a sigh, simply died, without any reason except grief.
    Bob telephoned the veterinarian who ministered to his horses and cows. “You have to be the doctor of an elephantnow,” he told Laura H. Harris, a blond-haired woman with pretty sky blue eyes and a cowgirl’s trim figure.
    She thought, An elephant in terms of doctoring isn’t different from a horse. The only difference is our ability to read their reactions. We know a horse’s. I know a bear’s and a leopard’s, because I’ve doctored them. An elephant’s? That’s another thing.
    She drove out to Bob’s ranch right away and looked Amy over from trunk to toes.
    “Nothing’s wrong with her that I can tell, Bob,” she reported.
    Amy was physically sound, though underweight and weak, as Bob had said. Her lethargy and depression remained in spite of her eating a little bit now and then. Dr. Harris decided against seeking out expert advice at the local zoo or, farther afield, at the St. Louis Zoo. What ailed Amy was obvious, at least to her. She needed someone in her new world as unique to her as she was unique to them.
    “It’s up to you, Bob,” Dr. Harris told