Nor was Old Mom’s trick unusual. It seems characteristic of elephants to desire to take a night out for themselves every so often.
In August, a few years ago, a big show was spending Sunday night on a fair grounds. It was hot, sultry. Three times that day the elephants had been watered at an old hand-pump close to the menagerie tent; in fact, the whole circus had been forced to gain its water from this source.
Three-thirty o’clock came in the morning. The menagerie superintendent, sleeping in the animal tent, awoke drowsily to the sound of incessant pumping. On and on it went—pump, pump, pump, squeak, squeak, squeak—accompanied by the intermittent splashing of water. Minute after minute he lay there, wondering when those men ever would get their buckets filled, and speculating as to why circus workmen should be so eager for water at this hour of the morning. Then suddenly there came to him the possibility of fire. He rose hurriedly, ducked under the side wall, stared into the semidarkness, and then stood for a solid five minutes, watching, and laughing. Out there at the pump was an elephant which evidently had become thirsty and had sneaked from the picket line, remembering that pump and the coolness of the water. It was he that was making the noise, he who was working the pump. The ground about him was a muddy mass from the outpourings of the faucet, for there had been a difficulty about it all. He evidently had been there for hours, striving to work the pump-handle with his trunk and at the same time get it under the spout! At last:
“Hey, Major! What the dickens are you trying to do there?”
The elephant halted. He had done wrong in sneaking away, and he knew it. Squealing excitedly, he jumped from the side of the pump, skidded in lopsided fashion through the mud, ducked under the side walling and ran so hard to take his place in line again that he missed in his calculations and upset a cage, which cost seventy-five dollars to repair. There’s usually a bill to be paid somewhere when an elephant takes a vacation!
CHAPTER IX
THE KEEPER OF THE BULLS
PLEASE forgive a garrulity when the subject is elephants and the narrator a circus man. They are so many-sided, these pachyderms, so lovable, so exasperating and so fearful, that their complete story is a far greater one than that of all the other menagerie animals combined. In previous chapters there has been a recording of the sagacity and humorous sides of their natures. But there is another angle, that of the time when they become obstreperous, amenable to only one man—the “keeper of the bulls.”
There are certain well-founded American traditions regarding the equally American circus which it seems almost sacrilege to disturb. For instance, it has been handed from generation to generation that when a big show goes into territory comprised of many small towns the circus splits into several parts like the fabled joint snake and exhibits in three or four places at once. Again, it’s a certainty that the fiercest beasts in captivity are the lions and the tigers, and that if ever one of them should escape it at once would vent the pent-up rage of years of imprisonment by killing every one in sight. By the same line of reasoning the bravest man on the whole blatant organization must be the lion trainer, who twice daily—rain or shine—goes into the dens with these beasts and by a narrow margin comes forth with skin and body still hanging together. A different existence indeed from that of the bull-man—who has nothing to do save to keep his placid, gigantic, ever-begging charges from eating too many peanuts, to bring them forth now and then that they may push a few wagons complacently around the lot, or trot them into the ring during the crowded hours of the performance to do the hootchy-kootchy in their lumbering, comical fashion, to play a big mouth harp with their trunks until that laughing, easy-going trainer takes it away from them, to cavort at a pachydermic game of baseball or bear the million-dollar beauty around the arena at the head of the grand entrée. All in all, comparatively speaking, it would seem much easier than shooting a blank-cartridged revolver into the bellowing jaws of a roaring lion. Of course he must be handy always to warn the uneducated that his big, clumsy charges hate tobacco, and that they never forget an injury, but those are only little idiosyncrasies which bob up even with some human beings. No matter how placid a person or beast may be—
But to get back to the traditions. A show never splits and never exhibits in several places at once. The lion and tiger trainer has his troubles, it is true, but his is not the hardest job of the show. And the life of the elephant keeper isn’t placid!
For, as it often happens with traditions, the usual reasoning is wrong. In the first place, the bulls are not placid, just as they are not clumsy, just as they do not remember an injury for years and just as they do not promptly set upon the man who insults their taste with a juicy plug of tobacco. Perhaps, long, long ago there may have been a solitary elephant that disliked nicotine, but times evidently have changed. To-day a plug of tobacco is a titbit for any elephant, and more than once is a visitor’s pocket ransacked by an inquiring trunk searching for a chew. Elephants eat tobacco just as they eat sugar cane or pop corn or peanuts or candy. To them it is a delicacy. Nor is the taste confined only to chewing tobacco; if you’ll keep your eyes open the next time you go to a circus you may even see elephants shooting snipes, where visitors have dropped their cigar butts along the picket line. Which ends that.