The Cowboy and his Elephant (15 page)

The night before setting out, Bob checked the Weather Channel on TV for conditions over the Raton Pass, just out of Trinidad, where the temperatures often dropped to freezing. The bodies of the other animals in the trailer helped to keep Amy warm. But one fall, as they were driving at eight to nine thousand feet south of Raton, a whiteout blizzard came up that frightened Bob. He stopped, bundled Amy in blankets, and drove fast through the storm until they reached Albuquerque, where they turned west on Interstate 40.

“What’re you hauling?” a trucker asked Bob over his CB radio.

“Horses,” he replied on his CB.

“Funny-lookin’ horse you got there, cowboy.”

“Why did you say that?”

“I saw a trunk come out the side.”

“Oh, that’s my elephant.”

Soon thereafter, a convoy of 18-wheelers often lined up behind the trailer, waiting to pass by and look at Amy, who trumpeted in reply to the blasts of their air horns.

When they stopped for gas, Amy naturally wanted to get out of the trailer and stretch her legs. A station attendant, filling the tank with gas, asked Bob what he was hauling.

“An elephant.”

“Oh, yeah, sure.”

“If you don’t believe me, open the door and look for yourself.”

Amy stepped out down past the attendant, who was too frightened to move. Ignoring him, she wandered around the station’s platform, attempting to frisk the Coke and candy vending machines. Bob tried to lead her back into the trailer, but she would not be rushed. A crowd soon gathered; Jane tensed as some children walked right up to Amy. Bob enlisted a posse from the garage, who helped to push her back into the trailer. Bob never again asked anyone to “see for themselves.”

He laughed as they drove off, but the incident worried Jane, who told him, “Things like that, I mean—Amy might be like a big dog but she
isn’t
a big dog. What if she had hurt one of those children?”

A
t first Bob had been able to keep Amy out of sight. But the inspectors on the border at the State of Arizona’s agricultural and animal port of entry near Gallup, New Mexico, could not be fooled for long. On their initial trips together from Colorado to Arizona, Bob often stayed with the trailer, while T. J., who came along to help with the animals, went inside the station. The inspector asked him what kind of livestock they were hauling over the border into Arizona that day. T. J. glanced out the window. The trailer was parked in plain sight: Bob was bribing Amy with carrots to keep her trunk in the trailer.

“Equine or bovine?” the inspector asked.

“Cows,” T. J. replied.

The inspector looked at the form. T. J. looked out the window.
He gasped—Amy’s trunk was waving in the air in plain view. Bob was bent over, giggling.

The inspector saw T. J.’s horrified gaze. He asked him, “Why’s your truck squattin’ so low?”

T. J. smoothed his mustache. The trailer was slanted on one side, and every time Amy took a step from one side of the trailer to the other, it tilted. He said, “Horses. They all go over to one side, then the other.”

“Okay, then. Have a nice trip.”

Back on the road, T. J. turned to Bob. “Never do that to me again.”

Bob smiled. “Tell that to Amy.”

She could do nothing about her size. She was almost six years old and getting big. She now weighed nearly two thousand pounds and stood five feet tall at the center of her back. She had a few thousand pounds of weight yet to put on, and a couple of feet to grow in her lifetime: Elephants continued to grow their whole lives.

“They
do?”
Bob asked, surprised, when Maguire told him that part of the elephant life cycle.

“And Africans like her get bigger than Indians,” Maguire said.

At the time, Bob could hardly visualize what Maguire described, but now he was starting to see it for real.

A
s Amy grew, the trailer became for Bob an instrument of doubt: He wanted to ignore the proof of her size. She was turning seven, and though she had grown up for everyone else, she was still Bob’s “little girl,” no matter that nothing at all about her was little anymore.

Bob and Amy out for a trot.

Amy hanging out with a friend.

Bath time!

Bob and Amy relaxing in the shade.

Amy battling with some branches.

Amy and Larry come out to play.

A present from Amy.

Amy playing with a friend.