But the big cow had never been known to act up when the spotlight was on her, it was almost as if she enjoyed performing, and she was a trooper tonight, following docilely behind her handler, an anonymous woman with a slight limp dressed all in black so as to be as unobtrusive as possible, like those Japanese Bunraku puppeteers who manipulated their life-sized mannequins right out in plain sight but were hardly noticed. She lumbered once around the ring to thunderous applause, the crowd on its feet, bringing down the house. On the screens above, dawn broke, and computer-generated mammoths fully as convincing as real ones circled with her, and if you thought that forty or fifty hundred-foot images of mammoths above would somehow detract from the majesty, the massive dignity, the sheer star power of Big Mama, you would have been wrong; this audience had been weaned on huge screens in outdoor stadiums cheering for the Raiders or the Dodgers, they were used to towering images in replay or magnifying the actions that were tough to see from the nosebleed seats, they loved it, they understood it was just a setting, a backdrop, that it made Big Mama more of a towering figure.
She made two circuits of the arena with the ring of elephants alternately saluting her or being urged into other tricks by their black-clad handlers—headstands, dances, daisy chains, stand perches—and it helped cover up the fact that Big Mama essentially had only one "behavior" to demonstrate, which was standing on her hind legs with her head aimed up so that the tips of her tusks were thirty feet above the ground, waving her trunk around and bellowing, and few people knew how hard it had been to get a crusty old bitch like her to do even that. Training elephants, like training any large and dangerous animal, relied on the animal accepting the unlikely idea that the human trainer, though demonstrably smaller and weaker, was in fact bigger and stronger than the trained animal, that the human ought, by natural right, to be the dominant figure in the social contract, and Big Mama had been the leader of her herd for too long to accept that idea with any regularity or consistency unless lulled by large doses of tranquilizers.
So where was the Great Woolly? For the first time, the audience began to get a little restless.
This did not go unnoticed by the producers of the show. Hidden in every tenth seat were electronic devices that functioned pretty much like a lie detector, measuring heart and respiration rate, palm sweat, and the pressure of butts on seats. Lasers were constantly scanning the audience, measuring pupil dilation and analyzing posture. These factors were inserted into a complex entertainment algorithm to produce a satisfaction index, and every night this presentation produced the lowest value. But Howard Christian liked this part of the show, so it stayed in.
Finally the arena was cleared, the lights and the tent screens faded to black, and one spotlight and every eye in the place swung once more to the grand entrance arch. You could practically feel the ringmaster take a deep breath and then announce, in his most grandiloquent manner—which could have taught the Lord God Almighty Himself thundering "Let there be light!" a thing or two about pomposity—
"And now, without further ado, the star of the show, the most famous, the most beloved animal in the world, the Great Woolly Mammoth... Little Fuzzy!"
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.