scratch, to dig, to knock things out of trees. But I’ve never seen an elephant use a stick to hit or prod another creature.”
Saba was born in captivity so she was green broke quite easily. Alice taught her to accept us and to accept our touch. Saba watched us working the other elephants and learned our simple voice commands. When she began to eat solid food, Alice taught her to take grain and hay, but we brought her treats—oranges and grapes and ice.
Jo showed me how to work with ideas elephants have themselves. Saba was curious about balls and Jo taught her to play catch with him.
“You have to get rid of the idea that they play ball to please you,” said Jo one day as we worked with Saba. “She’ll kneel to please you, but even if she wanted to she couldn’t really play ball to please you. She plays ball because she loves to, the same way she loves to toss dirt over her shoulders, or reach and grab for leaves in the trees. The best ball-playing comes from loving to play ball, not wanting to please us.”
I thought of my early art lessons as a child. I had wanted to please my mother, to be like her, and after every stroke I’d looked over my shoulder to see if she approved. My work was competent, but after I got away from home and started mucking around with sculpture and oils and collage I discovered that I loved doing it whether she was looking or not. Everyone steals ideas and techniques. Watching Saba snag balls Jo tossed just out of reach and toss them back with perfect accuracy, I understood that Saba got ideas from Jo but how well she played ball had nothing to do with wanting to please Jo and everything to do with her own passion.
The most difficult moment in Saba’s training was the first day I hung two small sacks of sand over her back to get her used to the idea of weight. She kept flinging them off. I had to shackle her and tie her trunk. It was the first time I’d ever feared her strength. Until then I’d always wanted her near me. Her eyes looked at me as if I’d gone mad. Neither of us liked what was happening and neither of us understood why we were doing this.
Jo said, “If you are unclear, she will be too.”
Everyone is unclear sometimes while learning to live with their elephants. After that the harmony of discipline sets in.
Our interest in what we were doing together became our passion. I asked her to admit me, to be respected by me, to be my passion. Many animal trainers think love is irrelevant to their work. Not many think passion is. It is a difficulty of language. Elephants have no word for love. I think getting close to your gods means trust, interest and passion. Some people call this faith. I call it being broken.
Living with elephants broke me.
My mother and I were sitting in her bedroom watching television when we heard a knock on the door. Evening visitors were so rare that she said, “Don’t bother going, it’s probably Bible-thumpers.”
I got up to look and when I opened the door, there stood Alecto.
“I’m surprised you didn’t just walk in,” I said.
He pulled his slate out of his pocket and wrote, “I tried to. It was locked.”
“Do you want to come in?”
“I want you to come out.”
I shook my head and said quietly, “I don’t go out in the evenings.”
“She won’t mind.”
My mother called from the bedroom, “Who’s at the door?” Alecto walked past me into the house.
“Well, Dr. Rikes, it’s late, but come in, come in.” My mother sat up and pointed to the chair I had been sitting in.
Alecto always knelt for a moment beside her bed, taking her hand and smoothing it with his own while he held her eyes in his. My mother called it his mute trick.
“He can’t walk in and say, ‘Nice day,’ or ‘How the hell are you?’” she said, “so he connects that way. It’s melodramatic, but so is he.”
He got up and sat in my chair and didn’t take off his coat. He wrote on his slate, “I need to borrow your daughter.”
She read, showed me and said to him, “Well, ask her, then.”
Before he could finish writing on his slate I said, “I’m not going out. It’s late.”
“I don’t mind, Sophie,” said my mother, “if