"It started when Big Mama almost killed me. My fault. You never, never forget for a moment that an elephant—let alone a mammoth—is a big, powerful, sometimes willful animal. I turned my back on her, and she dug her tusk into my leg and flipped me twenty feet across the stall. I blacked out almost at once, but they tell me she was straining on her leg chain. She would have killed me if she could have reached me."
Matt had been alarmed, years ago, when he was doing some reading on elephants so as to be better able to talk to her, to discover that the occupation of elephant keeper was one of the most hazardous professions in the world, right up there with test pilot. Susan had once told him that the question when working with elephants was not if you would get hurt, but when, and how bad.
"In the hospital I had a lot of time to think. Did you ever see King Kong? The original, 1933 or something like that?"
"Yeah. Pretty amazing for its time, I guess."
"I saw it when I was four or five. And sure, it looks phony today, didn't scare me a bit, but it made me cry. I watched it again from my hospital bed. The guy who brings Kong to New York, he walks out on the stage with the poor beast in chains, and he says—and I memorized these lines, he says: 'He was a king and a god in the world he knew. But now he comes to civilization, a show to gratify your curiosity.'
"Can you think of a better description of Big Mama? She was the matriarch of the herd. She ruled everything, as far as her world extended. She was a queen and a goddess in the world she knew. Now she is trotted out into a show ring twice a day in chains. Mondays off. Wouldn't you be pissed?"
"I started questioning my life. And no, I haven't joined any radical animal rights groups. I don't think animals can have 'rights,' as I understand the word. I'm against cruelty. I don't like fur farms or trapping, I could never be a hunter, but I'm not against it. I don't like medical research on primates but I try not to think about it too much. I don't eat a lot of red meat but I wear leather shoes and I eat fish and fowl.
"I guess what I feel so strongly now is, there is a difference between domesticated animals and wild animals. I still favor zoos for species survival. But I realized I no longer felt it was right to 'tame' wild animals and make them perform. Working elephants in Burma is one thing, it's not much different from using a horse to pull a carriage. But putting them in show business... it's beneath their dignity. And that came very hard to me, Matt, because I grew up in show business, and I'm at the top of the heap right now. And I realized I just can't do it anymore. End of sermon. The congregation will now sing hymn number fifty-two, 'Born Free.' "
Matt had been so fascinated just watching her face as she told the story that it took him a moment to realize she was waiting for a response. Anxiously.
"Amen, sister," he said. "I admit I haven't spent a lot of time thinking about it, but that all sounded right to me. I wince when I see those pictures of rabbits with cosmetics being tested on their eyes, but I don't much care what they do to a lab rat. And I've eaten rabbit. Maybe that makes me a hypocrite, I don't know."
They both looked at Fuzzy, who was swaying happily and slowly chewing a mouthful of hay in that peculiar back-and-forth jaw motion that worked like a grindstone.
"I'm so glad he's so good-natured," Susan said. "You know, he hasn't seen sunshine or breathed open air for three years?"
"That seems stupid."
"The last time he was outdoors was the day some nut flew over in one of those ultralight airplanes and started shooting at him."
You're kidding seemed an idiotic thing to say, so Matt said nothing.
"We were just lucky it was so windy that day he couldn't aim straight, or maybe he was just a miserable shot. The security guard was better. He put a round into the engine and brought the guy down. He was cheerful about the whole thing. Said he wanted to be the only man alive to bag an actual mammoth. Maybe he thought we'd let him have the head, I don't know. He said he didn't mind going to jail. What were we going to charge him with, murder?"
"World's full of nuts."
"That's what Howard said, too. From then on Fuzzy got his exercise running around in a big covered yard with me on his back. I suspect the shooter is living on the streets of skid row in Portland now. I mean, considering what Howard did to Michael Bartlett, what do you think he thought up for that asshole?"
"Matt, do you think the plan is stupid? Is this all pointless? Can I ever get Fuzzy to a place where he can roam around outdoors?"
Matt knew a lie wouldn't do.
"Fuzzy can never live a 'normal' mammoth life," he said, slowly.
"I don't mean that, I know that's impossible. Mammoths are social, they live in herds—at least until they reach sexual maturity, if they're male, and if they're like elephants, which I think they are. No... I mean..."
Matt took her hand.
"The plan is not idiotic. If it works, it'll get Fuzzy nearer to a normal life than anything I could think of. So it's not pointless. Obviously, I can't tell you if it'll work or not. But I think we have a
chance."
"You do?"
"I do."
"That's all I ask for."
She leaned her head on his shoulder and they didn't say anything for a long time.
28
THE security industry was a growth business all through the last half of the twentieth century and showed no signs of slacking off in the first decades of the twenty-first. This was true of both the public and private sectors, but private security usually had the better technology.
There was no lack of private detective agencies if Howard needed manpower on the streets, and plenty of firms that specialized in guards and surveillance equipment stood ready to provide anything from armored personnel carriers to high-altitude robot drones to six-man midget submarines.
He thought briefly about the subs because he'd never been in one. He knew Fuzzy could swim, but where would he swim to? Anyway, a surface boat would do for that. What Howard needed mostly, at first, was helicopters. Before he was done he had chartered over a hundred of them.
Howard, Andrea, and Warburton landed at PDX as the sun was coming up and the rain was tapering off. It was still too cloudy for Howard's needs—satellite technology would be a vital part in the success of this operation, and visible light was often the best medium for a preliminary search, and you couldn't see through clouds—but the forecast was good, with westerly winds moving a high-pressure area over everything from British Columbia to northern California. It should be clear as a bell in a few hours, and into the night, which was far more important.
Andrea called for a cook to come to the airport and make meals in the plane's full galley, otherwise Howard would forget to eat. He would have been content to have Domino's deliver breakfast, lunch, and dinner, but Andrea's tastes were a bit more refined. She had eggs Benedict for breakfast.
Things were already well advanced before they even landed. Still, an operation of this scale takes a certain amount of time to get fully in gear, no matter how much money you offer for speed. Not all the chartered choppers were equipped with the electronics needed for the search; that equipment had to be obtained and installed, crews had to be assembled. A computer laid out a search pattern and assignments were made. All in all, it was eleven before everyone was flying toward their assigned zones.
All the way there in the plane Howard and Warburton had discussed the options open to them as Andrea listened but seldom spoke. They worked out a strategy, and Howard was forced to order his priorities and face some bad possibilities.