The Cowboy and his Elephant Read Online Free

foods that she saw her aunties andcousins eat. Sometimes a bouquet of green grass grasped in her trunk ended on the top of her head or draped over her ears. At other times she snatched a leaf or grass directly from her mother’s mouth. Eating on her own, she identified the grass by sniffing it: then she pulled it up or broke it off, and brought it up to her mouth and ground it with her molars.
    Drinking frustrated her. Water was hard to hold. She siphoned it into her trunk by breathing in, but
not
inhaling too hard lest the water go to her head. Then she would sneeze loudly, spraying the air with a fine mist. She practiced sucking water up in her trunk. She learned to raise her head and reach the tip of her trunk up to her lips. The older elephants, who drank without effort, forced the water into their mouths by gently blowing. Amy let gravity work for her. The water drained out of her trunk and dribbled into her mouth. And as she repeated this exercise, she gained proficiency and could be said to drink on her own.
    She was rapidly acquiring social skills as well. Again, as in everything else, she learned by observation, example, and trial and error. She noticed those males in the herd that from time to time came around to check for females in estrous. In comparison to her family members, these males were huge and overbearing, their behavior direct and single-minded. The presence of the males intrigued all the family’s females, no matter what their ages. By watching her aunties and older cousins with the males, Amy learned lessons for use later in life.
    She was communicating with her family more often now, learning the basic elephant language by listening and entering the “discussions.” And from the leadership of the matriarch she was gaining useful knowledge of her habitat. Indeed, she was reaching a time when she would start to show the other elephants what she was to become—strong, resourceful, and prepared to contribute in important ways to the family’s future.
    Then more time passed, and the females finally approached the boundary of their reserve. The whole herd at last was together again. As the sun set, the air around the southern edge of the Sengwa filled with elephant sounds. The long-awaited feast was soon to begin. This was the moment they had all waited for. Majestic and sublime, they were the greatest creatures to walk the land.
     
    T he headman of the Tonga, a skinny old great-grandfather with crooked teeth, was the enemy of the elephants. He hated them.
Vermin,
Siwelo Bvathlomoy Dingani said. N
o better than rats!
    At that moment Dingani was leaning on the gnarled stick that he used as a cane. Even this early in the morning Dingani despaired as he limped past the village’s cinder block shed, where the corn was ground into meal. Its gas engine had lain idle for days with nothing to mill from the fields. Roosters crowed, the hens scratched the dirt, and a black pig burrowed its nose into a heap of garbage. Villagers emerged from their thatch-roofed huts for the first timesince sundown. Out early before school began, Dingani’s great-grandsons started to play a game of soccer in the dirt lot in back of the huts, kicking an object that rolled but was not an inflatable ball.
    Dingani did not have to walk far to come within view of the southern edge of the Sengwa Wildlife Research Area. He saw the fence that was supposed to keep the elephants out of the village’s cropland. Then he turned to look at that land. The evidence of the elephants’ damage from the previous night was strewn everywhere. Soon nothing would be left of the spring planting.
    Necessity had taught the Tonga tribe, which numbered around a million, how to survive. As refugees in a foreign land, they were ignored by Zimbabwe’s ruling tribe. Forty years earlier colonial Britain had forced the Tonga on Zimbabwe (then Southern Rhodesia) to make way for the opening of the Kariba Dam. Poor soil since then had given them paltry, bitter