An Inconvenient Elephant (15 page)

HOW MUCH SHOULD YOU CHARGE FOR A LIFE
when it's sold into ownership? To whom does it belong? Tusker was going to cost thirty-five thousand dollars. The horses we were selling were worth only eight or nine hundred apiece. Was Mousi being sold to the slaughterhouse for meat this very moment? He was chubby. Do you sell life by the ounce? By the pound? Wasn't there some kind of immutable stewardship that every living creature is entitled to? And despite my ethical reservations, it was up to Diamond and me to set prices on the horses we were selling.

The good thing was that we
were
selling horses. It seemed that we had an edge on the market. Short, calm, overweight, bucket-headed horses were in great demand, and that's exactly what Mrs. Wycliff had accumulated over the years. We managed to sell ten horses in two weeks and now horse
number eleven, having met all the prerequisites, with the bonus of being remarkably unattractive, was being loaded into a lovely well-kept trailer to become a gift for a ten-year-old girl.

The horse had been at the sanctuary for two years, having been left behind in someone's backyard after they moved. My guess is that he patiently waited for his owner to remember he was still back there. Waited patiently for his owner to return home and feed him his dinner or to offer him a bucket of water to slake his thirst. Waited patiently, faithfully, quietly for weeks, while his life was being starved away. Until someone noticed, and he was brought to the sanctuary, where Mrs. W. named him Sprinkles, in honor of the black dots that splattered across his white coat, and just like that, his life was restored. Diamond put a price tag on him, someone came to ride him and thought he was wonderful, and now his life would become a gift to someone else.

Of course Diamond and I had made sure to inspect his new home, had the mother sign papers that stated we could drop in unannounced anytime to make sure he was okay and that he was to be returned when he wasn't wanted anymore. That's how it should be done when you sell lives. Too bad Marielle hadn't thought of it.

Now Diamond and I stood together in the parking lot and watched Sprinkles's black-polka-dotted rump wiggle up the trailer ramp and disappear as the tailgate was shut behind him.

“I hate selling animals,” I grumbled. “If that was a person, it would be considered immoral.”

“If that was a person, we could send him out to get a
job to support himself,” Diamond replied. “He isn't and we can't, and we need to make money and room to save more.”

“I hope we never have to take him back,” I said as the trailer made a track of dusty spirals down the driveway before rounding the corner, out of sight. “Doesn't it bother you that Sprinkles has no say in where he's going to be spending the rest of his life?”

Diamond stepped in front of me. “You know, sometimes we don't either,” she said impatiently. “But with his sale, we've made a total of eighty-five hundred dollars, and it's enough money to throw the fund-raiser.”

 

Margo was cranky. Again. She was pacing her stall when I let myself into the barn and even slapped Abbie with her trunk for getting in her way. Abbie squealed a protest and stood chastened in a corner until I quickly brought her mother a tub of grain garnished with sliced carrots, sweet potatoes, and apples, which Margo graciously allowed Abbie to share. When their breakfast was finished, Margo grumbled and threw her tub at the bars, though I suspected that I was the more likely target, standing just outside. The tub hit the bars with a crash, and I shuddered from the memory of having been flung like that not too long ago. I waited until Margo settled and allowed her trunk to be stroked before I gave her the daily donut treat. I didn't want to reinforce the wrong behavior.

“Here's a little mood elevator,” I said, handing her a jelly donut through the bars. She popped it into her mouth, then slipped her trunk back through the bars to give me a hard push. I skidded back and lost my balance, landing once again
on the floor. Apparently, jellies weren't the drug of choice this morning.

“Good thing you stayed outside the bars,” Richie said, entering the barn just as I hit the floor. “She's been a little out of sorts lately.”

I righted myself and brushed the hay from my jeans. “Does she hate me?”

“If she hated you, she would have killed you,” Richie said, his face serious. “She's had any opportunity to do that.” He picked up the long stick he used to guide her down to the bottom field and opened her gate. “Maybe it's the change of seasons.” He led her out, then pointedly called over his shoulder, “or maybe she's just plain lonely.”

 

Margo marched through the gate and out the barn doors, with Richie careful to stay at her shoulder, instead of leading in front, the way he used to. Abbie trotted behind them, and I followed Abbie, mulling over the significance of Richie's remarks. Margo had her child and she had us—it seemed to me she had all the companionship she needed. Or did she? Was the need for her own kind so strong that it surpassed her affection for us? It had been little more than a year since she had left her wild family behind, and I knew she remembered them. Elephants remember everything. But surely our love was enough. I stopped at the top of the hill and watched as Margo swung her great body from side to side, marching next to Richie in slow elephant steps. She was going down to the pond. Where she went every day. Elephants in the wild wander hundreds of miles, and Margo was walking the same seven or eight hundred feet to her little pond. Every deadly boring day.

And I suddenly knew Richie was right. Margo shouldn't need to walk next to anyone. She was an elephant, a wild creature, and she deserved her independence. She needed her own kind, her own sovereignty, her own leaders and followers. She needed to walk with them over huge fields and complicated landscape. She had been trying to tell us that there was a void in her life. To keep her here was wrong. To keep her isolated from other elephants was cruel. If I loved her, I had to let her leave. It would be the completion of her rescue.

 

“Sorry about the microwave,” Diamond said to me in a defeated voice when I got home. Apparently it had produced a lightning storm of sparks that eventually burned out the magnetron tube because she had stuck in a can of soup to heat for lunch, forgetting that microwaves hated metal. She was sitting at the kitchen table, fingering the blackened can and drinking a cup of coffee.

“That's okay,” I said wearily.

“I'll get you a new one tomorrow,” Diamond said. “I promise, first thing.”

I knew she didn't mean to destroy anything. She just acted impulsively, drawing from her experience in the bush to sort things out. The trouble was, experience in the bush did not exactly translate to domesticity.

Bedsheets, for instance. They had pockets at the corners to fit the mattress. But after she'd washed the sheets, the art of folding them totally confounded Diamond. She had tried every which way, until one day, exasperated, she just rolled them into lumpy piles and heaped them up like color
ful beach balls in the linen closet. From then on, she left her bed tidily made and returned to sleeping on the floor under her heavy safari jacket.

And then there was the remote control to the television in the little den downstairs. Actually, I had two remotes: one was for the satellite television, and one was for the CD player, though Diamond could never quite figure out where the music was coming from.

“Where the hell are the satellites?” she had asked me, peering up at the ceiling. And how could I explain that pushing a button on a rectangle of black plastic made the TV in front of us send beams into the heavens to change the station we were watching. Okay, maybe it didn't quite work like that, but Diamond accidentally deprogrammed each remote at least four or five times a week, sometimes in the middle of whatever we were watching, and the problem was that I had never quite mastered how to fix them.

My computer mystified her, and she regularly tried the TV remote to change an Internet site. She melted plastic containers into colorful puddles in the oven and stood flustered in the supermarket, staring at the skin and hair care products with amazement.

“Why does anyone need anything more than a nice soaking rain?” she would ask. I had no answer for her. Especially since she rarely saw a need for that, either.

 

I knew Diamond wanted to go home. And home meant sitting on a horse, traveling broken trails, listening to the wind for a certain cry that meant danger, sniffing the air for the telltale scent of a predator coming her way.

In her own way, she, too, was a child of the jungle. It didn't judge her—it had only wrapped itself around her and allowed her to survive.

And now I watched her as she got up to pour herself another cup of what was left of the morning coffee, even stronger for having been fermenting in its grinds all morning, and sit down again at the kitchen table. She looked solemn.

“Doesn't that keep you awake?” I asked her.

“Coffee doesn't bother me. I like to sleep light,” she said. “So I can be ready.”

I gave a little laugh. “But you're safe here.” She nodded and burst into tears.

“You know, I was civilized once,” she sniffed. “Honestly. I bet I could fit in again. I'm trying so hard.”

I knew she had grown up in the city. That she had done all the things that are part of the civilized world. Opened gifts on Christmas morning, ridden subways and buses, and walked through shops that sold everything. I also knew that she had shoplifted food for dinner when her aunt had spent all their money on bottles of vodka, and that her Christmas gifts ultimately wound up being sold off for the same reason. I knew all those things about her. And I knew she had gladly left them all behind for wide skies and tall, rude trees and nights filled with a meadow of stars.

“What does civilized mean, anyway?” I asked, snapping open the bottle of wine I had brought home and passing it to her to take the first drink. It had been a question long on my mind, the quality of being civilized. “We've both lived civilized, and we've both lived wild.” I stopped and took a breath before giving voice to something that had been on
my mind since I had come home. “And I think wild was infinitely better.”

“Civilized is overrated,” Diamond agreed. “You can be civilized in your heart without all the other stuff.”

The phone rang behind us, and Diamond-Rose reached for it and handed it to me.

I could see on the caller ID that it was Richie, which struck me as odd, since I had just left the farm.

“Hey,” he said after we exchanged hellos, “are you ready for some news?”

“Only if it's good,” I said.

“It isn't,” he replied. “I just got a phone call. We found that really nice man.”

SOMETIMES FATE MAKES A MISTAKE BECAUSE NO
one was listening.

But sometimes, if you try hard enough, move fast enough, engage in a quick sleight of hand, you can convince fate to change its mind and turn everything around.

I was lucky that fate was giving me another chance. I was lucky, too, that the horse world is small but very public and very willing to help one another. The really nice man, traced quickly through Marielle's description of his truck and trailer, coupled with Richie's diligence, was definitely a buyer for the slaughter sales. His name was Lou Dickerson, and that's what he did for a living. He ran a kill pen. He posed as a nice man, promised he would take your free horse home to his children, promised that your horse would have a forever home, and resold it almost immediately to a slaugh
terhouse in Canada that was near the New York border. He wasn't really a nice man at all.

“Oh God, no,” I gasped, when Richie gave me the news. “I have to go right away.”

“Be careful” was all Richie could say. “And be prepared for the worst. Your horse may already be gone.”

 

We ate dinner in silence that night. Diamond had made stew by mixing several cans of soup together, cutting up a few potatoes, then heating it all in one big pot. The blending of colors and ingredients looked odd, but I didn't have much of an appetite anyway.

“We're going first thing tomorrow,” I said to Diamond, “since we won't be able to see horses in the dark. We'll leave before the sun comes up.”

“Where are we going?” Diamond asked, ladling more stew into her bowl. The potatoes hadn't really cooked through, but Diamond said a good stew should have a little crunch to it.

“Lou Dickerson's stable is about two hours from here,” I replied. “And he has a horrible reputation.” I gulped back tears. “I never thought Mousi—” I couldn't finish my sentence. I put my head down on the table in my arms and wept.

Diamond rose from her chair to put her arms around my shoulders. “Here's one thing I learned a long time ago,” she whispered. “Don't cry tomorrow's tears.”

 

There are places on earth that are so wretched, that you would wonder why Providence had turned its back on them. When I
helped rescue Margo, I saw poverty in Zimbabwe that shook me to my core—starving children, starving animals, people broken from desperation. When I returned to the States the first time, it was with a certain complacent belief that my own country was above such agony. I was wrong.

Anadilla Horse Sales was a two-hour drive from the sanctuary. Diamond and I made the sanctuary our first stop so that we could borrow Mrs. Wycliff's horse trailer. It was a roomy trailer with four large stalls and a dressing room in front, which meant we also needed to borrow Mrs. W.'s truck to pull it.

I grabbed my checkbook, though my own savings were rapidly shrinking, thinking I would offer everything I had to buy Mousi back, while Diamond, apparently not believing in the easy availability of fast food, filled her rucksack with peanut butter sandwiches, our passports, and a week's supply of cheroots, in case we had to chase Mousi over the Canadian border. Also tucked away in the bottom were her entire life savings from the last twenty years in Kenya. We had no idea how much Mousi's freedom would cost, and she wanted to make sure we had enough.

“I can't believe you'd do this for me,” I said, weeping. “But if he costs a lot, I will pay you back. No matter what it takes.”

“I'm not worried,” Diamond said. “I know you'd do it for me.”

She drove as I stared stonily out the window, unable to hold any kind of comprehensible conversation. All the mental images of Mousi that I had forced myself to repress over the past two weeks flooded into my mind. I was picturing the worst beyond the worst.

Diamond was smoking the cheroot clamped between her teeth and ripping along the highway at top speed, though she didn't have a valid New York license.

“You have such great roads here,” she enthused. “I bet I could hit a hundred without a problem.”

 

There was no sign outside the place. Just a rutted muddy driveway that wound off the main road and threaded its way through gnarled trees and thick, impenetrable groves of sharp-needled thornbushes.

“Ugly,” I spat out.

“They're planted on purpose.” Diamond pointed. “See how straight the lines are? They're to keep animals from escaping. They do that in Kenya, too. Almost the same kind of bushes. Only to keep the wild animals from raiding the farms.”

One more turn and we found the pens. They were large, three of them, bordered by broken post-and-rail fences strung together with barbed wire and rotted rope. Several broken trucks chocked up on cement blocks littered the landscape, while broken horses stood quietly in the pens, waiting for their last trip. They stood without shelter or food or water or hope.

“It's a holding pen,” said Diamond.

“I'm afraid to look around,” I gasped. “What if I don't see him?”

“Toughen up,” she commanded. “We're on a mission.”

We slipped through the broken wire and wandered through reeking pens filled with horses and donkeys, one after the other, standing knee deep in piles of manure. I
tried to scan each pen carefully, glad for once that Mousi's white coat, normally a nuisance to keep clean, would stand out against the dark, muddy coats of the other horses. Diamond and I walked through the pens together, gently pushing aside blind horses, injured horses, frightened and trembling animals, their starvation-rough coats plastered against prominent ribs and sharp bony hips. Pushing past horses with deep ragged wounds, horses down, horses nickering to us, begging for a last morsel of food or a sip of water.

“Bollocks! How does he get away with this?” Diamond demanded, gesturing to a small white shack that stood way off in the back of the property and apparently functioned as the office.

“He's been reported dozens of time,” I said, “but the authorities don't care. Come on—we need to hurry.”

“You're right.” Diamond shook her head with disgust. “Let's just find your horse and get out of here. And then we can report him.”

We combed through all three pens, but Mousi was not in any. There was another pen on the far side that held a few foals, but he wasn't there either.

“There's nothing else around,” I said, sick with disappointment. “Maybe we can drive up to the border and ask if one of his trucks went through recently. Or maybe we can find the slaughterhouse and ask—”

“Shh.” Diamond put a finger to her lips. “Listen.”

I tilted my head and strained my ears. There was a muffled sound, a low, defeated whinny, but I couldn't place it. “Where is it coming from?”

Diamond climbed through a fence and stood for a
moment to look around before walking to a clearing behind the pens where a large rusted truck stood. A horse nickered softly from inside. I helped Diamond quietly lower the back ramp.

“Stay here,” she cautioned me as she climbed up and peered in. “It may be something you don't need to see.” She disappeared into its dark interior. “Looks like they were going to take this shipment pretty soon,” she called down to me. “Bollocks, it's dark in here. Hey! Here's a white horse.” She was quiet for a moment. “Bollocks!” she exclaimed again. “It doesn't look like the horse I saw at your brother's.”

“Oh God,” I said, holding my stomach. “I have to see for myself.” I started up the ramp.

Diamond reappeared at the top. “Know what? I think it might be him. Just don't get upset at the way he looks.”

I was up the ramp in a flash, my heart pounding, then taking tenuous steps inside until my eyes adjusted.

“If it's him, you'd better get him off straightaway,” she said, throwing me an old frayed rope that she had pulled from somewhere inside the truck. She walked the rest of the way inside with me, then helped me drop a long metal bar that blocked our path to the back of the truck. The floors were slick with manure, and the ammonia smell burned my eyes as I tried to scan through the darkness for a white horse.

“First stall all the way in the back, on the left,” Diamond whispered to me.

It was Mousi. He nickered when he saw me, and it was all I could do to keep from screaming out his name.

He had lost a lot of weight, he was filthy, and his mane was matted, but at least he was still alive. He was wedged
in between two foals. I slid the rope around his neck and quickly took him from the stall, and walked him down the ramp while Diamond held the foals back.

I led him to the waiting trailer, but Diamond remained behind.

“Oh, Mousi,” I whispered to him as I tied him inside, then gave him a long hug. “Mousi!”

I looked over my shoulder for Diamond, but she hadn't followed me. I retraced my steps—she was still in the big truck.

“Let's just pay for Mousi and get out of here,” I urged her.

“We can't leave them here,” Diamond said, pointing to the foals staring at us with large, frightened eyes. “Get some ropes,” she said. “They're coming, too. And so are the others.”

I looked back at Mrs. Wycliff's trailer. “How many are there?” I asked.

“It's too dark to count them,” she replied, “so let's just unload them. We can't leave them.”

Diamond was right. In my impatience to get Mousi home I had forgotten my own heart. We couldn't leave the others to be taken to slaughter. “How many do you think we can squeeze on the trailer?” I asked. “It only has four stalls.”

Diamond squinted her eyes and calculated. “They're awfully thin, so I'm figuring two to a stall, Mousi in the aisle stall, and maybe one or two of these foals in the dressing room.”

“That makes eleven,” I said.

“Eleven sounds about right,” Diamond said. “That's always been my lucky number.”

There was a thin chestnut mare ready to foal, who had a
sweet face and a huge open gash across her neck and chest; a skeletal brown-and-white pinto gelding, obviously sick, judging by the amount of mucus pouring from his nose; an emaciated black-and-white pinto mare that was trembling violently in a corner—nine in all, not counting the foals.

A dark bay mare hobbled painfully over to the fence as we passed with the last horse and nickered to us before leaning her body against the precarious fencing for support. Diamond looked at me and raised her eyebrows.

“She'll make twelve,” I said to Diamond.

“Twelve's always been my lucky number,” she said.

We stuffed the mare in the middle next to Mousi and put the foals, who were huddling together and shaking with fear, into the dressing room and locked them in.

We had loaded them as fast as they could walk up the ramp—the pregnant mare, the babies, the geldings—before finally slamming the tailgate shut. Suddenly a loud shout echoed across the pen.

“What the hell you doing out there?” A rough-looking man in a yellow slicker slogged through the mud and manure toward us. He stopped and rapped his knuckles against the trailer. It must be Dickerson, I thought. He stuck his face right into mine, and I tried not to inhale his acrid cigar breath.

“I asked you a question,” he snarled.

Diamond dug into her pocket and casually lit a cheroot. The smell resembled the paddocks we had just walked through. “I'm the one you need to be talking to,” she said, taking a long drawn-out puff and casually directing it into Dickerson's face. It didn't faze him in the least.

“All right, then, I'll talk to you.” He jerked his head toward the trailer. “What you got in there?”

“Twelve horses,” I answered him in her place, trying to keep my voice from shaking. It was possible that Dickerson wouldn't even want to sell any. “How much for them?”

He stretched up to peer over the back gate. “Why, they're nothing but skinners,” he sneered. “Look how you got them packed in there! Like sardines. Slaughterhouse won't take them in that condition.”

Diamond was impatient to leave. “How much for all of them?” she asked, blowing an especially large puff of cheroot smoke in Dickerson's direction. It smelled particularly acrid.

“Are you kidding me?” He took a step back to avoid the smoke. “I can't be bothered. Biggest bunch of miserable shit I ever saw.”

“Spare us the lectures,” Diamond snapped. “Just give us a price so we can get out of here.”

Dickerson flapped a hand at us, his face filled with a well-practiced disgust. “I won't buy a one,” he said. “I wouldn't get a penny for any of them at the knacker's. Get them the hell out of here. Get them the hell off my property.”

I looked at Diamond. A lightbulb sparked over her head. We were thinking the same thing. Diamond drew another long breath from her cheroot and blew it casually into Dickerson's face. Now he waved it away and gave a little cough.

Diamond gave me a defeated shrug. “You heard what the man said.”

“I did,” I replied.

“So, we'd better comply.”

“We should.”

We slammed the trailer doors shut and hurried into the truck.

“That's right,” Dickerson called over his shoulder. “You just get them the hell out of here. Take them back home. I won't spend my good money on shit like that.”

“Whatever you say, boss,” Diamond yelled from the window, and gunned the engine. The truck groaned under the weight, and the front wheels spun as they tried to gain purchase against the mud. Diamond backed up slightly, then touched the gas again. The wheels grabbed and slowly rolled us forward rut by rut, slick mud to hard dirt, and back to slick mud. Diamond pressed the pedal for more gas, the truck heaved, and for one horrible moment, I thought we would get stuck. Finally we were moving from the driveway onto the solid asphalt of the highway.

Two miles away, I started breathing again. I turned to Diamond and gave her a sardonic grin. “I guess this makes us bona fide horse thieves.”