Violation by Sallie Tisdale Read Free Book Online Page A

Then, as in a dream, I saw a trunk float by, far above my head, and then I saw a leg—a tall pillar of dirty velvet—and another, another, another. He was moving past the window with a ponderous grace, outsized. I felt that he needed not a bigger room but a bigger planet. He turned when he picked up my strange new scent, his trunk weaving a hypnotic dance against the mesh, up and down. His tushes—the upper incisors, which in Tunga had grown to tusks—were rough points against the thick wire. Several years ago, a keeper was walking past Packy, who was in a barred room. The bull casually reached through the bars with his trunk, grabbed the keeper’s arm, pulled him close, and crushed the limb against the bars with his skull, splintering the bone. Even with the heavy mesh protection, that sinuous trunk is disconcerting; Packy was looking me right in the eye, in a leisurely kind of way. Out of musth, he is usually a placid boy. But he is every inch the king of all the beasts.
    There are between twenty-five thousand and forty thousand Asian elephants left in the world. Their gradual elimination in the wild is the result of a number of changes, most of them recent and a few subtle. The invention of the chain saw, for instance, made forest-clearing much easier and quicker work. But basically there is just not enough room in Southeast Asia for both elephants and people. The elephant’s jungle habitat is being replaced by cropland, and many of the crops are delectable to the now homeless elephant. The elephant raids the millet and sugarcane, and is killed for his efforts, and kills in turn: in India, nearly a hundred and fifty people are killed by elephants every year. Wild elephants are found from India to Indonesia; most inhabit shrinking parks and preserves, in shrinking populations, separated from eachother by human settlements as uncrossable as an ocean. Bulls, being more aggressive, are killed far more often than cows. Not only does this deplete the gene pool, but the cows’ opportunities to breed grow fewer, and as the birthrate falls their mean age increases. Because elephants will feed on the youngest, most tender trees available, finding them the most appetizing, herds quickly denude small parks beyond the point of natural recovery. Several countries, notably Thailand and India, are attempting to conserve these insular environments and to confront the problems of the diminished gene pool and male-to-female ratio, but quite a few people in elephant biology wonder whether the wild elephant is past saving. (There are estimated to be a million elephants left in Africa; however, their numbers are also dropping.) Certainly its future, one way or another, resides in zoos.
    The Washington Park Zoo is a century old. Its origin dates back to a pharmacist named Richard Knight, who found himself in Portland—then still something of a frontier city—with a brown bear and a grizzly on his hands. He gave them, with some relief, to the city, and thus began a zoo. In 1953, Austin Flegel, a Portlander who was working as an economic adviser in Thailand, was given a four-year-old female elephant as a gift, and sent her to Washington Park. She was housed in the zoo’s dilapidated camel barn and—Portland being the city of roses—was immediately named Rosy. Rosy’s advent caused the voters to approve a bond issue to build a new zoo—she led parades, attended store openings, and threw out the first ball at a Portland Beavers baseball game.
    The zoo’s director, Jack Marks, wanted to build the ultimate modern zoo, where the animals would live in natural settings and rarely require handling by their keepers. Together with the architects Abbott Lawrence and Ernest Tucker, Marks travelled the country in search of ideas, and Lawrence and Tucker eventually designed a large, open zoo with grottoes and moats in place of cages and bars. In September of 1956, before the new zoo was finished,