Elephant Winter - By Kim Echlin Page 0,2

straight through, unable to give in to or fend off her unwilling dying.

Day after day I watched the elephant-keeper walk his elephants out back behind the maples. I stood in the shadows at the side of the window and I noted how he looked up and searched the reflections in the glass for me. So one day I slipped through the Safari gates, behind a delivery truck stacked with crates of chicks for the big cats. The little birds were mostly frozen and suffocated but a few terrible peeps still escaped the boxes. I ducked behind the trees near the fences, cut through the side field and went straight to the elephant barns. There he was, leading the elephants back from their afternoon walk. His fair hair fell over his forehead and his skin was clear with the rosy dryness of someone who lives outside in the cold. There were white frost patches along the ridges of his cheekbones and he frowned at me. I ignored that, sliding through the fence. I liked him, eyes and bones, so I decided to wait.

The smallest elephant squeezed under the bottom rail like a curious child, and she raised her trunk to scent me. The keeper followed her, reached his hand into her mouth to rub her jaw, and stood between the two of us.

“Can I help you?”

“Not really.”

“There’s no visitors back here. Who let you in?”

“No one. I didn’t ask. That’s the house where I live.” I pointed with my chin, hands wrapped inside the sleeves of my layered sweaters. “I wanted to see the elephants.”

He glanced back through the maples at the dark window sockets in my mother’s house. He stared at me, skin flushed, eyes inspiriting me, and said, “I’ve seen her here before. She used to come to the bird barns. Why didn’t you come out?”

“I’m her daughter. She’s sick.” The words hung cold in the air, untended feelings and questions already between us as if we’d spoken to each other all our lives. “I’ve just come back from Africa. I used to go see elephants on safari there.”

“These elephants are Asian,” he said, pulling his hand out of the little one’s jaw and rubbing its side. “First time I saw an elephant was the Fort Lauderdale zoo. I stood in front of it all day until my brother came back to get me.”

He spoke so softly I had to strain to hear, and his breath froze like crab apples in the air. One of the elephants reached across the fence and ran her trunk tip up the arm of my heavy sweater. The sensitive trunk finger crawled along gently touching and scenting. She got to the bare skin of my neck and she left a sticky shine there, a kind of spit. She startled me but I didn’t move. I liked the warm dampness of her touching.

The elephant-keeper was watching me. I waited as her trunk lifted toward my frozen cheeks. She ran it over my face then let it swing back under her. I was caught in her staring eye as if I’d met her before. The keeper’s lips loosened upwards with the same affable curiosity I felt in the animals.

“That’s her way of finding out who you are,” he said.

We stood side by side watching the elephants shuffle against the evening cold and he surveyed them with a chary pride.

“I have to take them in now,” he said.

But I wasn’t ready to go. I liked the odour of him. I liked the warm animal sweat and hay smells of the elephants out in the frozen air. They waited for him, lightly swinging their trunks through the space around them, over each other’s bodies. I soaked up the intelligent calm between them and the peaceable alertness of their keeper. I wanted to touch them myself, I wanted what I felt in them to touch me, and impulsively, I asked him if he needed a barn hand.

He stood gazing into the thin twilight. Animal people see things from odd angles, I knew, because my mother was like that too. Maybe he needed help. I could see him deliberating.

“What’s your name?”

“Sophie Walker.”

“I’m Jo Mann,” and pointing to the elephants, “This little one is Saba, and this is Kezia, behind her is Alice and that one’s Gertrude. We’ve got an African male in the barn called Lear.”

I stared at them, trying to take in their names, the shapes of their faces and ears. He said nothing more, and I pulled