The Cowboy and his Elephant (23 page)

One day out of Cape Town, South Africa, a pod of seven short-finned pilot whales broke the surface in rolling seas. They spouted and raced beside the ship in clear sight of the elephants on deck. Excitedly the elephants extended their trunks over the rail and called out with guttural sounds. As one of the whales rose up on a wave and came nearly within the reach of the elephants’ trunks, Owalla let rip a trumpet blast that convinced Moore: These two endangered species were actually
talking.

Finally, when they tied up to the dock at the Kenyan port of Mombasa, a minister of the Kenyan government met the ship. He was carrying a walking stick carved out of elephant ivory and wore an ivory bracelet on his wrist. Armed guards joined him on the ship’s gangway, and with the first words out of his mouth, he demanded a bribe—or else the elephants would not disembark on Kenyan soil.

“This is a bad beginning,” Moore told him.

“Then you will go back home.”

“But home is eight thousand miles from here.”

At last, after hasty transatlantic phone calls, the elephants were allowed to step off the ship but remained under virtual house arrest on the edge of Tsavo Game Park. Over the next four months, while Moore begged the government to honor its agreement, and while he was starting to introduce the elephants back into the wild, Tshombe, the stubborn bull with the handsome tusks, contracted salmonella from stagnant water and died.

The death came as a terrible blow to Moore. He remembers, “Tshombe’s death hit me hard, and it was to be a long time before I overcame my grief. I had spent more time with Tshombe than the other two, having ridden him for hours on end in the bush. It had been a relationship of deep mutual respect and, dare I say it, affection. In that period of mourning I recalled an amazing incident on board the ship which had brought us to Africa. I had been standing on the deck gazing idly to sea, when I felt an elephant’s trunk wrapping itself around my waist and, very gently, pulling me. It was Tshombe. He pulled me right up to his chest and held me firmly in his trunk. . . . There was no doubt it was a show of affection. It was one of the most gratifying moments of my elephant experience, and recollection of it made Tshombe’s death that much more agonizing.”

Now, after all his good intentions, all this effort, he wondered what had he done that, in the end, was positive? He buried Tshombe, and he waited to know whether the government would allow him to remain in Kenya long enough
to reintroduce Owalla and Durga back into the wild. The answer came. He was to be expelled, with Owalla and Durga. He was not to come back.

“Why?” Moore asked one sympathetic member of the Kenyan parliament whose efforts on his behalf had failed.

“Officially I do not know. Unofficially it’s because your elephants are South African elephants.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Not me, but the minister you refused the bribe. Your elephants were born in South Africa. According to him they are not good for Kenya.”

Moore looked incredulous. “Nothing will ever surprise me again,” he said, as he prepared for the sea journey that took him and his charges down the east coast of Africa. He thought sardonically,
Out of Africa?
This is more like
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.

But when the ship arrived in South Africa, port officials ordered him to keep the elephants on board and keep sailing, citing a threat of the spread of hoof-and-mouth disease.

“But elephants don’t carry that disease,” Moore pointed out to them. “What’s the threat?”

“One-year quarantine in a country without hoof-and-mouth disease, then you can bring them back in.”

“Where?”

“There are several countries to choose from. The United States for one.”

“I came from there.”

“Then you know the way back.”

He was finally beginning to understand why no one had ever tried to bring an African elephant back to Africa before.

A
fter a year with the elephants in quarantine outside Washington, D.C., the South African ambassador to the United States agreed to help Moore if he would stop his badgering. The
American Sportsman
renewed its sponsorship, and finally, with a clean bill of health, Durga and Owalla boarded yet another freighter. By now, Moore had traveled thirty thousand miles together with his outcasts. He was personally running out of steam. He had one last chance, and this time he got lucky. With their own yearnings to be free of apartheid, the black people of South Africa greeted Owalla and Durga as returned prodigals.

Moore planned to release the elephants back in the wild on a game preserve in Pilanesberg, where rangers were searching for surrogate mother elephants for orphaned bulls that were running out of control. About to try what no one had done before, Moore rode his elephants on the reserve, and soon they were feeding off natural vegetation and drinking from streams and lakes, after years in captivity, eating baled hay and drinking fluoridated water out of the end of a hose. One evening as he was riding Owalla, they came upon a waterhole, and suddenly Durga’s ears flared and she let out a scream. A large female white rhino with a young calf at her side was standing there. “Steady, steady,”
Moore told Owalla. With her head down, ears flared, and trumpeting loudly Durga charged the rhinos. Moore followed on Owalla, and as they broke through a growth of acacias, Moore saw that Durga was still trumpeting loudly. In the distance the rhino and her baby were running out of sight.

Moore praised his elephants lavishly for overcoming their nervousness. They had stood up to the only animal in Pilanesberg that had the weight and power to threaten them.

Slowly, day by day, he gave his elephants more freedom, until they were allowed to wander on their own without him on their backs. Every night they returned to camp, and every morning they set out again to explore the wild. The seasonal rains came and went; then one day the elephants did not return.

Moore went out to search for them, fearing that they had been shot by poachers. Just before dark he thought that he heard an elephant call, but he wasn’t sure. He looked over a small, secluded valley. He strained his ears at the silence, certain that his imagination had played tricks. Then he heard the sound again. He focused on the far horizon: There, Durga, Owalla, and three wild orphaned bulls were grazing peacefully in the tall grass.

Owalla looked in Moore’s direction, as if waiting for his command. Moore thought, There won’t be one. This is our final parting.

And with that the elephants vanished in the dusk.

_____

F
or once, Moore had finished something he had begun. The newness of the experience changed him. He said to himself, to his own surprise,
You did something that nobody has ever done. Why quit now?

He returned to the United States for more captive elephants that he would take home. He found a majestic, handsome bull elephant named Abu locked in a farmer’s barn, lying on a concrete floor in the dark with his feces caked on the sides of his head. Somehow, his owner had avoided the protective vigilance of the USDA. Moore bought him on the spot with funds that he had raised for that purpose in South Africa after the success of his initial experiment. The Fort Worth Zoo gave him an unwanted, floppy-eared and very forlorn African elephant named Benny. It had one broken tusk and another that was worn to a nub from rubbing against his cage. Last, Moore bought two African orphans named Cathy and Sammy from a safari park near Toronto. Sammy was neglected and for a time had even broken pond ice with his tusks for fresh water to drink. Cathy was a strong leader, Moore said, with the sweet look of a cherub.

With high hopes he booked this new brood on a freighter leaving from Savannah. He banked on his previous experiences in South Africa, when his elephants were greeted in the press and public with enthusiasm, but when the ship finally reached the port at Durban, South Africa, no crowd
and no press were waiting. The novelty of African elephants being returned to their original homes had clearly worn off. Again Moore was on his own.

With the help of a patron in the tourism business, he conceived of an idea to create a “halfway house” for African elephants between captivity and freedom in the wild. The first time around, he had taught Owalla and Durga to carry humans on their backs. That led him now to ask himself, Why not teach these new elephants to carry tourists, as they are adjusting to the wild? The directors of an ecotourism company welcomed his idea and agreed to a ten-week trial on a large track of wilderness in Botswana, north of South Africa.

Moore rode his elephants more than two hundred miles in eight days, crossing the Kalahari Desert into an African wilderness of pelicans, storks, and cranes, myriad geese, ducks, and hundreds of different bush birds. The elephants fed on varieties of new vegetation and traveled through herds of plains game—zebras, buffalo, giraffes, impalas, tssesebe, and lechwe (antelopes), and reedbucks. Finally, they reached the site of the Okavango Delta, which the guidebooks refer to as “The Last Eden.”

Moore pitched a tent on the shore of a lagoon and christened the camp “Abu’s.”

T
o be certain about Randall Moore, Bob called Maguire to ask him if he knew anything about him.

Maguire said, “I know about what he’s done over there.”

“What would you recommend? Is it a good place for Amy?”

“Definitely,”
Maguire replied.

And that was all that Bob needed to hear.

B
uckles had wanted Bob to decide what to do with Amy. After all, by his thinking, she was still Bob’s elephant. But with time and schedules, the pressure was mounting. For one thing the circus had announced Buckles’s retirement at the end of summer 2000, a date that was fast approaching. He thought he had found a place for Ned with Ringling’s circus, and Anna May was retiring with him and Barbara to Florida. He supposed that a circus or a zoo would buy Amy, but he was uncertain what to do.

Then one night when the Big Apple Circus was performing at its home site at Lincoln Center, the cell phone rang in the RV, and Buckles picked it up. He listened to a voice from far away that sounded, he said, like something whispered through a long tunnel.

“My name is Randall Moore,” the caller said.

“I’ve heard of you,” Buckles told him. He quickly had to remind himself: Moore had taken some elephants back to Africa. At the time he thought the story sounded bizarre. No one took elephants
back
to Africa. Why would anyone bother to send them back only to have them shot? It made no sense to him.

For a while the two men, an ocean apart, talked about elephants and elephant people in common. They traded the
names of elephants as other men and women bandy those of college classmates and friends.
Flora was where? How was she doing these days? And the big bull, Tembo? He was in Munich. What about Matadi and Jimmy?
Moore asked pointedly about Anna May, knowing how much she meant to Buckles.

Then, as Buckles was starting to wonder about the purpose of his call, Moore said, “I’ve been hearing reports on your Amy.”

“You have?” said Buckles. “Just what have you heard, Mr. Moore?”

“That you’re looking for someone to take good care of her.”

“Maybe that’s true. What do you have in mind?”

“I’d like to bring her over here to where she started,” Moore said. “I’m looking for Africans like her. I’ll bring ’em all back if I can. She has had an odyssey from what I hear. She deserves the best.”

“Well, I’ll be darned,” Buckles said.

F
ate had chosen Amy to live while her family died. It carried her into a strange human world that few elephants had known before. She did what she had to do in her new world, and more. No one can ever say what made her different. She was “mellow” and learned human ways. Her curiosity seemed to quell any “anger” or “resentment,” or any of the other feelings that could have come naturally to her. She behaved like a “lady.” She was gentle and sweet, held herself with a kind of dignity, and innately seemed to understand that she was different. The description of her itself as merely a survivor insulted the success of her effort. A brightness from within had seemed to guide her and keep her safe, and that, finally, was all that anyone could say.

When she reached the Woodcocks’ farm in Florida at the
start of Buckles’s and Barbara’s retirement, Ned had gone to another circus, and Anna May, out in the fields of palmettos and green grass, simply settled down and relaxed after forty years of work.

Amy was reaching an age when hormonal yearnings were calling to her. She had babies to give birth to, a family to raise, a herd to adopt and travel with, and middle age and old age to reach among her own kind. She would reach these stages of her life in Africa, where she would be returning.

S
he certainly had a story to tell the wild elephants of Africa. But what would it really say? Probably simple truths: Life was worth living, her story could begin. People,
species,
races, and ages were pretty much the same everywhere—meaning, there were good and there were bad. You had the power to choose your part in the drama of your own life. If you chose good, more often than not your life would be a happy one.

What a
beautiful
story that was for the Storyteller to tell back in Africa!

B
ob rides a different horse these days. This stallion—young, frisky, and able to travel the fence lines for miles without tiring—was not even born when Amy, Bob, Big Bob, Butch, and Jo rode together. Bob feels good about everything that happened, though the certain knowledge that another chance like it will not come again naturally saddens him a little. An animal like Amy is a once-in-a-lifetime happening.
He was lucky, he guesses, for that. He is old now, and there isn’t as much trail in him left to ride. Looking back, his friendship with Amy shines like a star.

“She meant more to me than I can ever say,” he says.