Elephant Winter by Kim Echlin Read Free Book Online

and sleep, they heal themselves, and with mortal diseases, they die.
    When Lear still hadn’t got up after three days, Jo went into the Safari office and telephoned Dr. Yu, a veterinarian originally from Burma, who worked in the large animals section at a nearby university. Dr. Yu was a gentle and sad-voiced man. Though elephants were not his specialty, Jo liked him because he had grown up in a country where elephants and people have lived together for centuries, where elephants eat and work in city streets. I had talked to Dr. Yu once to ask him what he knew about elephant infrasound. He said he’d read about it but the old elephant men had never spoken of it. He asked me if I knew an elephant can read a man’s thoughts, and then he laughed. He was full of folk talk of elephants. He told me that pregnant women pay money in the city streets to walk under an elephant’s belly three times, a charm to protect their babies. Then he added, “That’s all superstition, we don’t believe in things like that here, do we?”
    I was stroking Lear’s head when Jo came back from the office. “What did he say?”
    “Not much.”
    “He must have said something.”
    “He said he didn’t know much we could do.”
    “Did you try anyone else?”
    “I left a few messages.”
    “What did you tell Dr. Yu?”
    “I said, ‘Lear won’t stand up.’”
    “And what did he say?”
    “He said, ‘That’s bad.’”
    This was the first day that we didn’t make love. We sat together with Lear until I had to go. I asked Jo if he wanted me to stay and he said, “No, you’ve got your mother to look after too.”
    I left him peeling an orange and feeding it to the elephant bit by bit. His shoulders were slumped forward. He looked as if he were already in mourning. I was annoyed by his resignation. I wondered how anyone could be so arrogant as to give up so quickly. I wondered who had beaten the hope out of him.
     

     
    The next day was a bitter, windy twenty degrees below zero. Jo asked me to keep all the elephants in while he went to see Dr. Yu. The elephants were restive, shuffling together, ears up. Saba was tucked well in under Alice, and Kezia pressed herself against the two of them. Gertrude, who’d been rolling on a tire, stopped and lifted her trunk toward the loft. I was shovelling and hauling dung in a wheelbarrow when I heard a movement in the hayloft and strains of thin harmonica music that rose like an exhalation. I climbedthe ladder to look. In the north corner, I could see a strange man leaning against some hay, partly obscured by a wall of bales. I called over, “What are you doing in here? No one’s allowed up here.”
    The stranger twisted his body around without moving his hips. He smiled casually across the tips of his fingers, cupped his harmonica against his chin, and didn’t speak. All my senses stood on end as he approached me; I was trying to smell him out, feel him out, the way a woman on an empty street at night listens to quickening footsteps behind her.
    The stranger’s azure eyes were flecked with grey and his teeth the clean white of someone who doesn’t smoke or drink coffee or wine. He wore a felt hat and his leather jacket was the colour of groats. His beard had the bluish tinge of a few days’ growth and the hair poking out from under his hat lay in snaky clumps. He stared at me and then averted his gaze with a disarming shrug. He walked loosehipped over the scattered hay, barely disturbing the dust. I couldn’t tell how old he was. There were cocky smile lines at the corners of his eyes. He looked down, assessing me, and when he stepped into the light at the top of the ladder he brought his boots close enough to my fingertips that I slid them back. He squatted down so that his face was too close and I leaned back as far as I dared and froze again. He dropped his harmonica into his breast pocket and flipped open his palm to hand me a little white card embossed with gold. It read:
    I am