“All right then. Go back to your place in line.”
Whereupon a big elephant, head hung low, with every evidence of shame, with every appearance of an abashed, punished child, rose and trotted back to his accustomed spot in the picket line. But had that elephant gained the idea somewhere that he had been perfectly right in his actions, the attendant might be talking yet!
For an elephant wants what he wants when he wants it, and nothing else will do. What’s more, he knows what that want is. Seven years ago a circus sold an elephant to the Salt Lake Zoo. Two weeks later, there came a telegram:
“Please rush something from the circus. Alice is lonesome.”
The menagerie superintendent looked about for the most available thing and found Meat, a female Chow dog, a canine hanger-on of the menagerie. He knew that as a rule, elephants do not like dogs, and that Alice especially possessed an aversion for them. But he knew also the workings of animal psychology. Out went the dog by express, and a year later when the circus passed through Salt Lake in Liberty Park were two inseparable friends, whose story was known to every person in Salt Lake. They had even progressed to the status of a little act, by which they amused Sunday visitors, Alice doing the “sit up,” while the dog balanced herself on the elephant’s head. Because of the fact that she had saved a pachyderm from death, caused by loneliness, Meat was the possessor of a municipally presented collar, engraved with a perpetual license! While Alice was beaming with elephantine happiness, content in the possession of a comrade which she loved, not because she was a dog, but because Meat typified a thing where the big animal had been happy, a place which had stood for home,—the circus!
CHAPTER VIII
A HUNDRED TONS OF PRANKISHNESS
CONTINUING the subject of elephants, I remember a pre-season conference last winter where a circus owner got a new idea. Around the table were the press representatives, the general agent, the manager and all the rest of the men whose constant winter activity forms a part of the preparations for the summer season of a circus; posters and various sorts of billing were scattered about, letters from performers desiring contracts were piled high in the wicker receiving baskets, and suggestions were everywhere. So the circus owner made a suggestion of his own.
“Got a new catch-line for the bulls,” he announced, as he stared across the room toward a twenty-four-sheet stand depicting the accomplishments of the five herds of elephants. “We’ll cut out this stuff about massive mastodons and ponderous pachyderms and call ’em what they really are—a hundred tons of prankishness.”
It was a great idea, for a moment. Then one by one, press agent, manager, general agent, they overruled him. Not that it wasn’t the truth. Not that it wasn’t a good catch-line. But what would it mean to the man in the street? Nothing. So another good circus idea went into the waste basket, the discarding even being approved finally by the circus owner himself, and all for the reason that the public wouldn’t know what the show was talking about. For the most interesting things about elephants are the things they do when the public isn’t there to pay to watch them! The performances in the ring are only the result of so many lessons. It’s when school is out, or the tremendous pupil is playing hookey, that the true elephant nature comes forth, and naturally that seldom happens during show hours.
