In the menagerie the lions and tigers nodded sleepily, with nothing to disturb them from their Sunday slothfulness. The elephant picket line was calm and peaceful, the long trunks weaving lazily at the transference of a full portion of roughage from ground to mouth. Group by group the circus people departed from the lot, townward bound, for the usual Sunday stroll and the luxury of a night in a hotel instead of the cramped berths of the sleepers. Only the watchmen were left about the various tents, only the assistants in the menagerie.
Night came, starlit and peaceful. The torches began to gleam about the circus grounds, spots of limited brilliance barely sufficient to provide protection against the pitfalls of stakes and wagon tongues and tight-pulled guy ropes. Hours passed in torpid peace. Down town the superintendent of the elephant herd, Fred Alispaw, seated himself at the table of a night restaurant and glanced across toward his wife, awaiting her decision on the menu of an after-theater supper. He called a waiter. He began the giving of an order. Then suddenly the café, the street, the city were in darkness, following a green blaze of lightning and its consequent crash of thunder. A moment more and the rain was pelting, borne at the fore of a forty-mile gale. Winnipeg all in a second had become a storm-stricken city, its lights extinguished by a lightning bolt which had struck one of the main feed wires, its street-car service blocked, its streets running small rivers from the rain, its every activity for the moment halted. In the café diners laughed, struck matches and waited for the lights to come on again, all but one man, stumbling through the darkness toward the doorway, Fred Alispaw, keeper of the bulls.
“Stay here until the lights come on!” he ordered hastily of his wife. “I’ve got to get to the lot!”
“But the cars are stopped.”
“Can’t help that. I’ll find a taxi! I’ve got to get to the lot!”
Out into the sheetlike rain he went, to leap to the running board of the first passing automobile and literally commandeer it for a trip to the circus grounds several miles away. His experience with elephants and the instinctive knowledge of what the beasts might do under circumstances such as this demanded swift action, and plenty of it. More, intuition proved correct!
The storm had struck as suddenly at the circus grounds as in the city. With the first flash of lightning the wind had swept through the menagerie tent with galelike force, lifting the side walling and causing it to slap and bellow and snap in queer ghostly fashion. The elephant herd, peaceful and drowsing at its double row of stakes only a moment before, had heard and seen!
There was no keeper to reassure them; only assistants. To an elephant an assistant counts for little if the supreme voice is absent, and right at that moment Alispaw was miles away. In vain the menagerie men sank their bull-hooks into the ears of the plunging charges, then, bobbing about like so many plummets, strove in vain to hold the beasts in line. Even Old Mom, the head of the herd, had become panicky with the rest, not from fear of the storm but from the fright caused by the sight of that twisting, writhing side wall as it had shown for an instant in the glare of the lightning. To the elephants it represented some unknown bellowing monster about to attack; the unexplained thing always means trouble in an elephant herd. So the stampede had begun.
One by one the extra stakes were dragged from the ground. One by one the frantic animal attendants were thrown aside or knocked down by the flail-like blows of tossing trunks. The thunder now bore an obbligato of screaming, hissing cat animals, crouched in fear in their dens, of shouting men, of rending stakes, clanking chains and squealing, trumpeting elephants. Then still another thunder, that of ton-heavy bodies plunging across the menagerie tent, the crashing of timbers as they knocked poles and cages from their path, and the stampede of the nine-elephant herd was on! A moment later the stages, the poles, the seats and grand stand of the main tent were splintering and snapping as some sixty thousand pounds of fear-maddened elephant flesh tore madly here and there in the big inclosure, rushing wildly, then wheeling as frantically in the other direction as a lightning flash showed that writhing, flapping thing of wind-blown canvas surrounding them on every side. Greater and greater the frenzy became; in the milling two of the males collided and began to fight with swift smashing rushes and lashing trunks. Louder and louder became the squealing and trumpeting—suddenly to lull. A voice had come faintly from the darkness of the menagerie tent—every torch long had been extinguished—a voice which caused Old Mom to turn and to trumpet with a new note.
“Mom—Mom! Here I am!”