Mammoth

19

LITTLE Fuzzy the Great Woolly Mammoth was no longer exactly little, not really fuzzy, and technically not a woolly mammoth, but it was hard to deny his greatness. He was the biggest animal star in history, bigger than Jumbo, bigger than Seabiscuit, Lassie, Flipper, Secretariat, and King Kong. He was bigger than Mickey Mouse.

Within a few more minutes the police and emergency response commanders were answering their own phones and getting their orders from the very top levels. Many of them resented it, at least at first, until they saw how quickly and efficiently the scene was being managed, and then it occurred to many of them that this could turn out to be the biggest shitstorm to hit L.A. since Rodney King, and did they really want their names written down anywhere near it? Of course they didn't. The killing of the herd had gone out on live television, and it was not going to go down well with animal lovers around the world. Best to let Christian shoulder the blame.

Miraculously, there were no reports of anyone having been killed or even seriously injured in the catastrophe, though the property destruction had been enormous. Crime scene procedures were drastically shortened, as no one could think of any actual crime that had been committed unless someone had deliberately unleashed the animals on an unsuspecting city. So Big Mama and her slaughtered herd were hastily photographed, even as Warburton's trucks were backing up to haul them away. The fate of the male mammoth, eventually to be known as Big Daddy, was handed off to Howard and Warburton with almost audible sighs of relief.

It wasn't until the arrival of a large horse trailer at the edge of the tar pit itself that anyone other than Howard's people even knew there was a third mammoth still alive.

SUSAN witnessed the arrival of Howard's ridiculous car with more relief than she would have believed possible.

Every second for the last half hour she had feared that she and the baby mammoth would be discovered. The bull mammoth was mired no more than a hundred feet from where she stood, his mighty head moving less and less frequently, his trunk lashing wildly, getting stuffed with the thick goo which he would then snort out, each time more fitfully than the last. Many times flashlights swept over him and she heard people shouting about bringing up some big lights, but that was apparently delayed. The streetlights in the area were mostly knocked down, and the outdoor diorama was in deep shadow. Twice flashlights illuminated the phony bull in the pool and the phony cow and calf standing on the shore, but Susan was standing behind a thick palm tree and whoever had the flashlight either didn't see the real baby mammoth or accepted it as part of the display, even when he moved his little trunk over the plastic flank of his temporary surrogate mother, and the beam moved on.

But he had proved amazingly tractable. Mostly he seemed content to hover in the shadow of the big statue. If he started to move away Susan moved toward him, and he quickly retreated to what he must have thought of as safety. It seemed reasonable, from his point of view. If this auntie here isn't afraid of the two-legs, why should I be?

She had no idea what to do. One thing she was sure of, though, and that was that this baby was not going to be slaughtered like the others, most of which were probably his aunts and one of which was almost certainly his mother. If she had to stand between the baby and the bullets, so be it. She was not going to let this one get away.

And so, for the first time since she had met him, she was happy to see Howard arrive. Whatever else he might be, Howard was power, and power got things done in this world.

It took her a while to get Howard's attention as he strode up and down the sidewalk above her, shouting into his cell phone or at Warburton. The shadows that had protected her now frustrated her in her attempts to flag him down, there was still too much hubbub for her to easily make herself heard, and she was afraid if she made too much noise she might spook the calf. Once Howard almost seemed to hear her hissed words. He looked around and so did one of his bodyguards, but they didn't see her. He strode off up the street and she almost cried.

He was back soon, but this time a helicopter overhead drowned out any sounds she could make. She scrabbled around on the dark ground, looking for a good rock, but all she could come up with were a few clods of dirt. She started throwing them, and the third exploded at his feet. He stared at it dumbly for a moment, then he looked up in the air as if wondering if he was being pelted by meteors, and at last one of his entourage pointed down the slope to where Susan stood with one hand held out and one finger held to her lips, hoping she was getting across Be quiet, and don't come down here yet!

Howard gestured to another of his men, this one holding a big Maglite—the great man doesn't even carry his own flashlight, he hires help for that—and in a moment Susan's eyes were dazzled, then the beam swept over the baby mammoth, on past it... and she heard a shout even over the racket of the helicopter. Howard stood there with his jaw dropped and his eyes wide, then he shoved the flashlight away and was frantically signaling to his people, all of whom turned their backs, as Howard did, as four Los Angeles uniformed police walked by in the street. He stood there among them, hands clasped behind himself and looking casually at the sky, in what he apparently thought was an innocent attitude. My god, was he actually whistling, too? Susan wondered how he ever got away with anything as a kid if that was the best he could do. When the cops had gone by, he casually turned and gave her a broad wink over his shoulder. Her opinion of his ability to handle this mess plummeted. She needn't have worried. Howard had learned long ago the secret of getting things done, and it was simple: Hire the people who know how to get things done. He was at that moment surrounded by a dozen such types, headed by the very able Mr. Warburton, the ablest of them all. If Warburton didn't know how to get it done, he knew somebody who knew somebody who knew somebody who did. So he turned to Warburton and said:

Warburton turned to one of his minions and gave his instructions, and more phone calls were made. Ten minutes later a moving van pulled up to the closest police tape on Wilshire, and a dozen very large men got out. They were given their instructions, and proceeded cautiously down the gentle slope to where Susan was standing. They surrounded the little mammoth, ropes were attached, and the squealing infant was unceremoniously wrestled up the slope, over the collapsed fence, and into the back of the van, while a crowd of cops, emergency workers, reporters, and curiosity seekers looked on. Live images of the capture were fed to a worldwide audience by the dozens of news cameras present both on the ground and in the air.

Susan was already working her telephone as the door slammed on the back of the van—and kicking herself for not thinking of it a few minutes ago. She could have called Howard, standing fifty feet away! But things had been a little hectic there, and she hoped she could be forgiven for overlooking it.

She knew all the elephant keepers from the Griffith Park Zoo, and within an hour most of them were on their way to the Miracle Mile.

When Big Mama woke and staggered to her feet, it was to find herself completely immobilized with ropes and nets. She was bullied and prodded until, not without difficulty, she was induced up the ramp of a giant stake-sided flatbed truck to begin her slow progress through streets lined with most of the population of Beverly Hills, Hollywood, and all intervening Los Angeles neighborhoods until she reached the elephant house at the zoo, at three in the morning.

At the same time crews were trying to figure out how to rescue Big Daddy, but it was hopeless. By the time Big Mama arrived at her temporary new home, the bull had ceased to move, and shortly afterward a veterinarian declared him dead, suffocated by the increasing pressure as he sank into the black ooze. The operation was immediately switched from a rescue to one of recovery. Howard did not intend to let twelve tons of mammoth meat and bones—and viable spermatozoa—be swallowed up to emerge in another twelve thousand years as blackened bones. By the time the sun came up a massive crane had been moved into place, stabilized and counterbalanced. A giant claw, normally used for horsing entire giant eucalyptus logs onto truck beds, plunged into the asphalt and clamped around Big Daddy's corpse. Ribs could be heard cracking as the claw plucked the body free like a cork from a bottle of very bad vintage wine.

These three ultradramatic operations drew attention away from a fourth one going on at the same time on Curson Avenue. As helicopter cameras followed the progress of the trucks carrying Big Mama and the calf, other trucks had arrived on the side street, other cranes and forklifts were gathering every scrap of still-steaming mammoth meat and hustling it into refrigerated vans, which sped off to an undisclosed location. There wasn't a news director in the world who would cut away from the frantic attempts to save Big Daddy to shots of bullet-riddled pachyderm corpses with exploded heads, but by the time the big bull was dead the remains of the other adult cows were nowhere to be found, and even the gallons and gallons of blood had been hosed away. It was as if it had all been a dream, the slaughter on Curson Avenue, and if there hadn't been the video to prove it had happened many people would have preferred to leave it that way.

By two that afternoon, not much more than fifteen and a half hours after the arrival of the mammoths, traffic was flowing smoothly again, and Howard Christian, bone weary by now, retired to his aerie in the Resurrection Tower to begin writing the checks to pay for it all.

But he was smiling.

IT was not much later than that before Susan had a chance to catch her breath and realize, with a flush of shame, that she hadn't thought of Matt more than once or twice the entire day. There had just been too much to do, too many places to be at once, trying to see the baby mammoth safely to his temporary new home at the zoo, monitoring and advising during the operations around Big Mama and Big Daddy by cell phone cameras, with barely any time to weep when Big Daddy breathed his last, mighty breath.

But at last she and the zoo veterinarians completed their checkup of the little mammoth, who stood calm and compliant for all the poking and probing, either in shock or unable to fathom what had happened to him and thus ready to accept any friendly attention, and she sat down with a sandwich and a cup of coffee and wondered why Matt had taken off as abruptly as he did. He had said he might be gone... how long? "A while." One of those maddeningly inexact English words describing time. A bit. A moment. A tick. A spell, a flash, a jiffy, a shake, a space, a stretch, a breath.

In this case, a while would be five years.