by Rick Bass
As they worked, kingfishers that had been roosting in the nests and crevices and burrows of their making flew from their hollows in the earth as if from some magician’s trick, or as if excavated and released by the frantic labor of the searchers.
For two hours, the crew worked beneath the towering, silent elephant, kneeling beneath it as if praying for absolution; or as if attempting, perhaps, to prevent the elephant from falling, rather than encouraging it to fall; for seen from any distance at all, their exertions would have been indistinguishable from any one goal to another.
Mufti was the only one among them who was thinking clearly; he was the only one who had not joined in the digging, and stood instead up on the bluff, tending to the elephant: speaking to it, scratching its ears.
Most of the others—Marie, and, amazingly, even Max Omo—were beginning to have the first flickers of self-doubt, despite their work: as if, in their furious burrowing, they were tunneling closer to some lucid, surprising truth, and that it was a truth they did not want to discover, and yet neither could they stop digging.
Because the ledge was not stone, there was no telltale buckling or fracturing to tell the miners below and the riders above when the shelf would suddenly give free, delivering them all into the river.
There would be only the briefest, hastened hourglass-trickling of sand pouring down upon the necks and backs of the workers below, and there would not be time to ponder or consider the meaning of this. There would be barely time to leap.
And when the workers below—the houndsmen, the children, and Marie and Max Omo—felt those whisperings of sand, in the moment before collapse, each threw aside his or her shovel and dived to the side just seconds before the world above fell upon them.
In his sorrow, Mufti was curled up on the elephant’s back with his arms spread wide as if trying to embrace the animal, or as if riding the elephant in his sleep, at a great rate of speed, so that he had to lower and turn his head against the resistance.
When the ledge broke, crumbling into the excavated void below, it was fortunate for Mufti that he was already properly positioned for such a ride; and in their plummet it seemed to Mufti that he had caused it from his mere will alone: a metamorphosis as astonishing as the transformation from a graven image on a coin—a horse, or a hound—into the living object itself.
They flew past the others, man and rider, passing their comrades with a hushed roaring of sand, then sweeping past the place where the others had been standing only seconds before, sweeping past them as if the laborers had been but ghosts; and the crumbling assemblage collapsed into the rushing, muddy Pecos, which accepted them as readily as if such admixture was the very fuel on which the river ran. As if no other miracles could exist or be sustained without the regular stirring-in of additions, willing or unwilling, such as Mufti and the elephant.
The elephant’s legs, summoned and working now from a place even deeper than where the pain of the firebrand had been able to reach, churned frantically, and like a gray boulder being transported by unimaginable force, the elephant spun and whirled, looking not so much imperiled but like some wild teacup ride in a children’s amusement park, and Mufti clung to the animal’s ear.
Had the river gotten wilder in all the years intervening since the cattle crossings? The old ranchers said that if anything it had gotten lower and tamer; and watching the elephant bob helplessly in its current, his starlit ivory tusks twirling and rising and falling like driftwood spars, and the trunk writhing upward, desperate for air, twisting like some great serpent that came up from the river’s depths only once every century or so, Max Omo wondered how any of the cattle had ever made it across.
He tried to reconcile in his mind the vision of ten thousand cattle churning and lunging broadside to the current, a plait of flesh contesting the river’s many electrical currents, each sheathed in its own pulse, while above that subaqueous song, little different from the baying of the hounds, the frantic legs of forty thousand hoofs gnashed at the water, surging for the other side: the mass of their cumulative desire so great that they often formed a temporary bridge, a living dam that the water still breached, but which raised the shuddering water upstream by a height of several feet.
The elephant continued downstream, spinning, tipping, and bobbing, with Mufti still hanging on (in his desperation he had seized the elephant’s ear with his teeth, and with his eyes shut against the whirling, had committed fully to traveling wherever the elephant went—to be saved or lost, according to the fortunes and talents of the elephant), and Max Omo and Marie and the houndsmen ran alongside the river above them, stumbling across the sand; the houndsmen running for their claim, watching their tenuous chance for riches be pulled farther away from them, and unable, in the enormity of the moment, to let it go as only the cost of a lost day’s wages, an education, and a spectacle.
The boys ran along the river like hounds, and Max Omo ran without knowing why. Marie ran alongside as well, with the hopes of somehow being able to rescue Mufti, or to provide consolation to him in his vanishing: and as she ran she entertained still, and despite her exhaustion, thoughts of somehow trying to rescue, or at least comfort, the elephant.
But their quarry spun farther away, as if unmindful of the desires that pursued him, and was whisked onward by some speed and power far greater than the hungers of the pursuers and the pursued.
Quickly, then, the elephant and Mufti disappeared into the darkness, and the followers ceased their pursuit; and in ceasing—strung out and straggled up and down the high banks of the river—each felt the release of a torment that none had realized they even possessed.
Even the boys felt the new peace, and stood there huffing, sweating, listening to the river.
Marie knelt in the sand and wept: and whether for Mufti, the elephant, or herself, she could not say, nor could she have identified the tears as being those of sorrow or release.
She cried a while longer—Max Omo and the boys stood rigid, mortified by this sprawl of rampant femininity—and the houndsmen looked away, slightly embarrassed but feeling sorrowful in their own manner over the loss of their money.
Without a word to the houndsmen, Max Omo turned and went back to his truck, heading home to work. His boys followed close behind him, and farther back, like a sleepwalker, Marie.
She noticed that Max Omo was walking gingerly, almost lightly across the sand—as if seeking to avoid being detected by someone, or something; and it was some moments before she realized, through the downward tilt of his jaw, and the whipped cant of his tense and stiffened shoulders, that that thing whose notice he sought to elude was failure.
For days afterward, and then weeks, Max Omo would feel stuck in place, mired in some awful morass of weakness and unoriginality, days in which the most mundane problems would appear before him, and where once before he would have evaluated them almost seamlessly, it seemed now that his rhythms had vanished, as well as his energy and interest.
A generator would not start, or would be firing on only one spark plug, or his diesel fuel would get some salt water mixed in with it, and he would stand flummoxed, motionless, on the verge of weeping. His strength seemed to be all unwound from within, and though he wanted to blame it on the elephant, he knew that the weakness, the rottenness, had to come only from within; that he had only himself to blame, for hauling off across the sands after that damn elephant; for having drawn too close to another’s dream, rather than fashioning and pursuing his own, however dull and tame and uninspiring his own might have been.
The dream of rising daily and grappling with the salt in the muscular combat of steady immersion. The dream of unwakefulness. He had been gluttonous, had traveled too far beyond his world, and he knew it; and now his body and his mind were like aliens to him, and he could not seem to find his way back.
He began to stand at the edge of the lake for long periods of time, particularly in the evenings, just staring: a man who had never before wasted time or energy on dreams now plagued by the
m, with the notion or concept of failure a shadow or possibility now over everything he did or looked at or even considered.
In the river, options were more limited. There certainly could be no steering of the elephant, and as Mufti clung to the animal’s back, it seemed to him that they were not so much being swept downstream laterally, but that their flight, their falling, was vertical, as when in a dream the dreamer shuts his eyes and lets go entirely.
It seemed to Mufti that he had become the elephant: or that he had always been the elephant, and only now, in the center of the stripping current, and pummeled by stones and logs, was that old mask or outer layer being pulled away, scouring clean the disguise of the man to reveal instead the essence, the elephant.
As Mufti rode—the elephant jarring against spars and jams, colliding and careening—there were nonetheless long rushing stretches in which they floated without striking anything; and in those unencumbered runs, with the elephant’s thick legs churning silently under water, it felt to Mufti as if the elephant was dancing.
Sometimes Mufti could hear the clatter and rumble of rocks tumbling along the river bottom beneath them, their movements muted by the blanket of river. Was it worse to watch the stars, or the rushing dark river? Mufti imagined that he could see pulses of electricity beneath them, and it seemed too that on his journey he was passing through zones and pockets of sentience, if not full intelligence, and thinking, living processes: not his own sentience, but the river’s.
From time to time, in certain sections of the river, he would find himself passing through waves of communication so strong that after he had swept through and past them, he would turn his head and stare back at the place he had just passed through, as if hoping to continue receiving the communication; but there was never a second refrain, only the once-calling: and then, farther down the river, he would pass through another place in which it seemed the river was more alive.
On they rode, with the night melting now back into the living red heat of the dawn that would have destroyed the elephant, had he remained collapsed in the sand; though even in the river, Mufti noticed, the elephant was riding lower: yet still, the legs kept churning.
Mufti leaned in close to the elephant and whispered encouragement to it, and marveled at the animal’s power, and celebrated for so long having been associated with such an animal.
He knew it went against that which he had previously believed in, but he leaned in even closer (the waves had flattened out to mere swells, and the elephant was bobbing along almost effortlessly now, even if it did appear to be sinking lower with each passing mile) and whispered, for the first time in over twenty years, the elephant’s name: “Tsavo.”
He did not believe it was the end of the line for the elephant, nor did he believe that his own time was drawing near; instead, he wanted only to call the elephant’s name out of respect and overwhelming gratitude, and out of mortification and apology, too, as he realized sharply that despite all the tricks and stunts he had trained the elephant to do across the years, it should have been the other way around, with the elephant the trainer, and Mufti the student.
“Tsavo,” he whispered again, and as if Mufti had somehow driven a lance between the elephant’s ribs, the elephant dropped perceptibly lower in the water, even though the current was no longer troublesome, but was instead mild and consistent, like a winding brook such as two young people might paddle upon in a canoe on a Sunday afternoon, out on a picnic, with a hamper of cheese and wine in the bow.
The sun was riding higher. Only a broad oval of the dry center of the elephant’s back, and his head, sunk nearly to eye level, remained above the surface now; and though the current was easier now, the elephant was laboring harder.
Now the elephant’s eyes were below the water. Could it still see? Mufti wondered. Was it observing wondrous wrecks of the past, the spars of old wagons, or even the ribs of its ancestors, the mastodons, embedded as fossils in the underwater cliffs?
Still the elephant kept swimming, its trunk swirling listlessly just above the surface, taking in air in that fashion, with the water up to the base of Mufti’s calves, so that now it was as if Mufti was surfing; and he wondered again if it were his own weight, his own desire, his inability to part with and release the elephant, that was driving the elephant deeper.
He slipped off and swam alongside.
The sun was fierce above them now. Mufti was surprised by how strong he felt in the elephant’s company. As if he could swim however far was required of him. He hoped that the elephant felt the same way; but even as this hope swelled in Mufti, the elephant began to sink again, forced down yet farther by the iron-weight burden of Mufti’s need.
The elephant rising and falling in that manner like the musical notes from some calliope rendered somehow silent, though the piston-piping sound waves continued to pump away—inaudible to most, but possibly able to still be heard or sensed or felt by someone else, someplace else.
“It’s okay,” Mufti said, raising the elephant’s ear like a fan and speaking into it, even as he swam, sidestroking. “You don’t have to go back to the circus,” he said. “You don’t have to work for your keep anymore,” he said. “We’ll retire. We’ll go home,” he said. “Back to where you came from. Just don’t give up.”
It seemed to Mufti then that the elephant rose a little more.
They swam side by side a bit farther—another hour; a couple of miles?—and when next they passed through a deep eddy Mufti understood the elephant communicate to him that it was over, that he had covered all the territory he could, and that he would be going under now—that he did so with regret, but that it could no longer be helped, and that Mufti should swim to shore and save himself.
To the end, Mufti could not bring himself to let go; even as the elephant sank all the way under, submerging now like a sounding whale, Mufti dived with the elephant, seizing one of the giant ears, and held his breath for as long as he could, kicking and pulling with bursting lungs, endeavoring to raise the elephant back to the surface.
But the full weight of destiny had him now—the elephant seemed heavier than iron, was sinking at a determined rate, and Mufti too was out of air.
He released his grip and kicked hard for the surface, crying under water: and when he burst into the bright air, coughing and gasping, he treaded water, watching intently downstream, drifting with the current, hoping for the sight of the elephant resurfacing, or even the periscoping trunk—pleading with the elephant to keep on and to travel however many more miles were required.
But there was nothing, only the serpentine sheen of the river winding lonely and onward, silt-colored and silent, hungry only for the next bend, and the next—hungry only for the ocean—and Mufti turned and swam for shore, and pulled himself up onto the damp sand.
He lay there with his face down, covered with his arms, alternately crying and sleeping, with his feet still in the river, and tons of water sweeping past him each minute, and each hour: and the elephant a boulder now, rumbling and tumbling along the bottom, tusks clacking against the rocks, consigned now to the land of spirit and memory, and leaving Mufti behind like some strange alien or outsider not yet permitted to enter into that far more common territory, where all will meet again, and travel together again.
It was only another forty miles to Mexico, which was where the elephant made its landfall. His body washed up two days later in a small village just across the border, where it was discovered by a woman who had gone down to the river to do laundry. In the soft gray light of dawn, the elephant had been fog-colored, so that all she noticed at first were the tusks.
She had approached curiously, thinking them to be oddly tilted lengths of driftwood, and of how happy her husband would be that she had found them, so he could cut them up into firewood.
So slow had the horror been to spread, when she began to piece together the patches and outlines of what she was really seeing—her eyes, against her wishes, disassembling her dream of firewood, and reassem
bling reality—that when the final understanding came, there was still too much of a gap between that understanding, and the emotions of fright.
Instead of acknowledging her fright, she stood there mute before the monolith; and in her silence and disbelief, and in that morning fog, even standing but a few yards away from the astounding sun-swollen beast, she could not quite be sure of where the animal ended and the gray sky and fog began. Even as she was looking right at it, she could not quite be sure of what it was she was seeing.
She remained silent, with the terror that was filling her rising so slowly and so detached from the normal profile of fear that for the longest time she did not even recognize it as her own.
When she did, she fell backwards, as if pushed two-handed by some invisible force: smitten, as if in biblical times: as if she had witnessed some forbidden sight.
She rose in a scramble, looking around to see what might have pushed her, and ran back to the village, where at first she had trouble making anyone believe what she had seen. It seemed impossible, rather than simply improbable. They all thought they had already seen everything, and knew everything; that the world was a small and regular, finite place. That elephants could never drift down their slow and muddy river.
By noon they had the tusks sawed off. Even two days dead, the elephant did not look entirely mortal—or rather, stiffened as it was now, it looked dead, but somehow preserved, and capable, perhaps, of getting back up again and traveling on, and away from them. They fastened a chain around one of its bent and stiffened legs, lest the current undercut it once more and pull it away from them.
