Violation by Sallie Tisdale Read Free Book Online Page B

another elephant arrived. A Portland engineer named Orville Hosmer had gone to Vietnam to help rebuild a villagedestroyed by a flood, and in gratitude the villagers gave him a female calf named Tuy Hoa (pronounced Tee Wah).
    Rosy and Tuy Hoa moved into their spacious new quarters in November of 1959. The move from the camel barn had to be effected by truck, and neither of the animals was particularly willing to clamber aboard. They finally did so only with the guidance of a pair of more experienced elephants—Belle and a bull named Thonglaw, both of whom belonged to an animal importer named Morgan Berry, a friend of Jack Marks. Berry was destined to play an essential role in Portland’s elephant future. He had imported four baby elephants (and a large number of other wild and exotic animals) some years before, and raised them in the basement of his house, in a residential neighborhood in Seattle. He later made a living with his own travelling elephant show and such odd jobs as helping to move Portland’s elephants. By 1961, when Belle was nine and Thonglaw fourteen, Berry wanted a little break. He lent both, along with Pet, then six years old, to Washington Park for a few winter months, planning to retrieve them in the spring. Berry suspected that Belle was pregnant by Thonglaw, and he thought he knew the date of conception; he had, after all, stood right next to Belle while Thonglaw mounted her. But the conventional wisdom of the time held that both animals were too young to breed successfully, and Berry kept his suspicions to himself. No elephant had been born in the United States in the previous forty-four years; no elephant bred in captivity here had ever survived.
    Elephant reproduction is rather simple and elegant, and resembles human reproduction in certain ways: elephants bear single babies; assist each other in labor, birth, and the rearing of the young; and live in family groups. The cows have two human-size breasts on the upper chest. Males reach sexual maturity at the age of nine or ten; females can conceive as young as six. A cow’s most fertile years are from twenty-five to forty-five, after which she reaches menopause. The heavy, hidden matings of elephants have inspired fantastic and beautiful ideas; long treatises on the nature of love, lust, fidelity, and adultery among pachyderms; talesof poetry, yearning, and faith. Elephants were once said to have died from a broken heart; in fact, they do sometimes die suddenly, with no apparent cause, after separation from their loved ones. It is still widely believed that they mate only in privacy, or only under water, and in ancient times it was believed that male elephants fell in love with human women, particularly those who sold flowers or perfume. One such elephant courted a woman by laying apples on. her bosom. J. H. Williams, in Elephant Bill , his 1950 memoir of twenty years in Burmese elephant camps, wrote:
    The mating of wild elephants is very private. The bull remains, as usual, outside the herd, and his lady love comes out where she knows she will find him.… They fall in love, and days, and even weeks, of courtship may take place.… When they have knocked off from the day’s work, they will call each other and go off together into the jungle.
    In a more comprehensive work, Richard Carrington’s Elephants , the author states that the ancients believed that elephants copulated face to face: “This was regarded as additional proof of the animal’s wisdom and intelligence.… They will indulge in innocent dalliance, much as young human couples in spring.… Dalliance turns to serious love play, the female using all her wiles to bring the male to the peak of his desire … Anyone who has studied the way a female elephant encourages her lover by alternate advances and retreats, by provocative gestures of her body, and a teasing and erotic use of the trunk, will recognize her prowess as the Cleopatra of the animal