Page 2 - Fables volume 2

Tusker’s Last Stand

Sampson had been surreptitiously testing the stockade’s weak
points. The huge bull elephant was a keen observer of his human
managers. He witnessed the labor and materials necessary to maintain
his pen degrading little by little over time. While ignorant of the
cause—Bozambiqueya’s collapsing economy—he sensed its effects:
log walls bound with rope decreasingly received the care needed in
the tropics. The research center-cum-tourist trap was doomed.
There Sampson had learned to paint, holding a brush in his trunk
in mimicry of the now-extinct Asian elephants in Thailand. American
graduate students had expanded his mind with logical and linguistic
symbols, first on flash cards, then, as the decades rolled past,
computer screens. He could kneel, stand on a large pedestal and
trumpet on command—skills painfully acquired during his early years
in a Moroccan circus. Yet the goad and the prod had not killed his
curiosity nor dulled his intelligence; rather, they had taught him
stealth in determining the limits of his crudely-built cage.
Rescued after international haggling, he had returned to his
homeland, not far from where he must have been captured in his
youth. It was a mixed blessing. The familiarity of climate, flora and
fauna were tonic to his world-weariness. But he came under a new
sort of tutelage: positive conditioning by humans just as persistent as
his former cruel and unsophisticated jailers. He longed for the
companionship of his own kind. But the poachers and encroachers
had steadily reduced the population of wild elephants. He did not
know he was the last one living in Bozambiqueya.
It was late on a moonless night when he pushed on a pair of
rotting logs tied with hemp, the fraying fibers of which had been
steadily eroded by his deceptively innocent and random rubbing. The
fence gave way, slowly at first, creaking and snapping, then with a
great thudding crash. Sections of paling and crossbeams fell around
Sampson; one gave him a vicious blow on the head, another tore a
gash on his flank. He did not break stride, taking the full force of
breaking through the enclosure on his wounded brow. Then he was

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