The Elephant Keepers' Children Read Online Free Page A

because nosooner have they begun to amble than Hans begins to swirl around them as though he’s on the lookout for something from which to protect them, or a big puddle he can lie down in so they can cross without getting their feet wet.
    The trouble is my older brother was born eight hundred years too late. He belongs to a chivalrous medieval age and considers all women to be princesses who may be approached only gradually by means of slaying dragons, for instance, or lying facedown in puddles.
    But the girls of Finø attend tae kwon do lessons and move to Århus when they are sixteen and take a year out as exchange students in America when they are seventeen, and if they should ever meet a dragon they would want it to be their boyfriend, or else they would pull it apart and write a biology report about all the pieces. So Hans has never had a girlfriend, and now he’s nineteen, and his future prospects are less than bright, to say the least. Now, too, he stands gawping like some creature on which Finø’s nature warden is about to perform taxidermy, until Tilte yells at him, “Drive, Hans, you dolt!”
    That wakes him up. Tilte yelling and two men halfway across the square in a full sprint definitely ticks all the boxes, and perhaps it seems to him like he really is saving the princess.
    Now that I have spoken disparagingly of my older brother, even if only between the two of us, I need to add that he has a way with horses. Every year from April to September, Finø Town is closed for traffic with the exception of ambulances and delivery vehicles, and instead we drive the tourists aroundin horse-drawn carriages and small electric golf buggies. We charge two hundred and fifty kroner for the trip from the harbor to Finø Town Square, and Finø Town looks even more like a postcard, and the island, if we are to be honest and forthright, is transformed into a one-armed bandit in the middle of the blue Kattegat.
    So everyone on Finø can drive a carriage, but none like Hans. Hans drives like he was aboard a sulky on the trotting track at Århus. Perhaps it has something to do with the horses always knowing that if they don’t cooperate they’ll be turned over onto their backs to have their tummies tickled.
    He never uses the whip, not even now, but simply clicks his tongue and flicks the reins so our four horses leap into motion like wild rabbits and BlÃ¥gÃ¥rds Plads nearly vanishes into the horizon behind us.
    Now the two men in suits make a mistake. They veer off toward a big black BMW with diplomatic plates that is parked in front of the library, and at once they are inside and accelerating away from the square.
    Under normal circumstances they would catch up with us in an instant. But these are not normal circumstances, because BlÃ¥gÃ¥rdsgade is a pedestrian street, closed to motor vehicles.
    Strictly speaking, it is closed to horse-drawn carriages, too. But in every Dane there resides a yearning for the days when Denmark was still a land of agriculture and the king rode through the streets of Copenhagen on horseback and everyone kept livestock and slept with the pigs in the kitchento keep warm and because it was so nice and cozy. So as we come toward them at full trot, people step aside and send us friendly smiles, even though Hans is urging on the horses as if we were part of a rodeo.
    But when the black BMW appears, popular sentiment turns. I’m familiar with it from Finø Town, because when all the streets are pedestrianized as they are in the summer, something nasty rises up inside people when they see a car that’s not supposed to be there. It doesn’t help that the BMW displays the mark of the diplomatic corps—in fact, it only makes things worse—and what happens then is that people begin to close in on the car and prevent it from moving.
    Now Hans looks back over his shoulder, and then comes the stroke of genius that proves quite exceptionally that