Elephant Winter - By Kim Echlin Page 0,7

trunk, tucked them under her belly and rolled on them. She also liked to squeeze them through the stall bars and wear them on her head as a hat.

Lear, Jo’s favourite, was the only African elephant.

“He’s mine, this one,” said Jo. “Most places don’t want a male. African males aren’t much good when they hit their twenties. They get unpredictable. I took him when no one else wanted him.”

With Lear, Jo showed me the simple voice commands they all knew: steady, move up, lie down, trunk up. Jo was disciplined with them and he never asked more than he needed, even to show me. He’d taken on their gentle, intelligent ways.

“If you listen they’ll tell you what you need to know,” he said. “If you think you understand something they’re not saying, it will make them uneasy, or afraid.”

“How will I know?”

“How do you know if you make me uneasy?”

I thought, “Do I?” and said, “I don’t know. I suppose I watch for little signs . . .”

“It’s about the same with elephants.”

“But I don’t know how to read them.”

“You will.”

As I watched Jo and the elephants I began to see the language between them. The only tool Jo used was an ankus, a short stick with a hook on the end of it. He touched Lear’s leg with his ankus in the field and Lear understood the touch as the first word in a long idea that began with him dipping his knee so that Jo could scramble up his side for a ride back into the barn. But Lear understood a similar touch in the performance ring to mean he should kneel for a bow. It was an elephant homonym; the signal sounded the same but meant different things in different contexts. The complex language between Jo and his elephants had as much moral responsibility as any human communication. As long as they both agreed on the conventions and certain fixed ideas of their mutual responsibility they could live together peaceably and creatively. But if either broke the code, asked for something unreasonable, failed to answer out of plain churlishness, there was failure. Through language they explored each other. If one of them refused to listen, pretended he couldn’t speak, the other was betrayed.

Jo taught me their routines. Each morning he bathed them, made sure their feet and toenails were in good shape, then fed them and worked them for the demonstrations. He showed me the screw in the clevis, the U-shaped iron leg shackle that some of them learned to undo. He used the solid brummel hook on Lear, impossible for an elephant to open. He showed me how he mucked out and where he walked when he took them to the fields each afternoon. I observed his constant alertness among them, reading their moods and their intentions. His days were long and physical and busy.

“In a couple of months I’ll hire them out for six weeks of circus,” he said, “and when the Safari opens again we take them to the pond twice a day for a swim, put on the two shows every afternoon and give rides.” He reached for me. “But winters are slow.”

The barn was fresh and cool after my mother’s stale bedroom. We leaned against bedding straw, Jo slipping his arm behind my back and drawing me close. His ways were so soft that the hard strength of his arms kept surprising me. In his slow, quiet voice he teased, “How did you know I was looking for a barn hand?”

I laughed and shot back, “So this is how you train your help!”

His jaw tightened against my alacrity and I felt his awkwardness when words flew too lightly back and forth. But he shrugged it off and said peaceably, “I never thought you’d come back that night.”

“But you asked!” and then I too refrained from speaking.

Since I’d taken over the mucking out, he spent longer walking with the elephants in the fields. On the coldest days he left Saba and Alice with me. I brought some books and pads of paper and a big old tape recorder from the back of one of my mother’s closets to listen to music while I cleaned the stalls. Each afternoon I hurried through the shovelling and cleaning and settled down on a bale of hay to sketch. I drew the elephants, a pair of old barn boots, sacks of grain, the owls, our threadbare blankets. I wasn’t much taken with the inside of the barn