(A Short Story: 4th of 8 Installments)

Dear Fellow Earthlings,

This is the fourth installment of an 8-installment story of how things will end up if we do not STOP killing elephants NOW!

The Last African Elephant page 4 of 8 pages

Kate would toss around the plant violently until it was in pieces, and then she would force all of the other members of the herd to do the same, so that we would never forget the deadly smell of the poison. I had a precious ten years of education from Kate, who was killed one afternoon by a park ranger whom I had seen so often that I even knew he sometimes brought his children with him in the government-owned Land Rover which he drove. One day the ranger just pulled up and drew out an AK-47. He shot Kate point-blank between the eyes.

We decided to help Kate by putting our bodies around her, but then the killer just started shooting all of us: Sasitorn fell over, her legs broken; little Ken’ichi dropped to his knees, spasms rocking his body; Ismail screamed in agony as a round tore into his liver; Bharad began running, leaving enough blood behind in the first ten meters of his 300-meter long escape attempt to fill the bodies of 65 full-grown Cocker Spaniels; and poor Federico fell on and crushed six-week old Zarzan.

All instincts and good intentions aside, we decided to run. In the confusion we scattered, and I ended up as an adult, ‘independent male’ even though I was not even 14 years old -- in human terms I was the equivalent of an 18- or 19-year old boy – still just a teenager!

Without any older males who could serve as my mentors, I had to recall what my original family (my birth mother’s family) had taught me about what I, as a male, was supposed to do with my life. In addition, I also needed to review the additional grains of wisdom that my now defunct second family had added to my knowledge portfolio. Thanks to my uncanny ability to learn in difficult situations, I was able to locate food and water, achieve a degreee of safety from the onslaught of the apes known as humans, and became aware of the fact that my masculinity had to aid me as I sought to mate, thereby increasing the population of my kind.

When each of my three precious offspring perished, they were already nearly grown -- and the tusks which grew so proudly as part of their bodies lured the deadly apes to them and to their mothers. My pride and joy was Nguyen, 11 years old when she died. I was luckily spared when a gun misfired that day, but my favorite daughter dropped quickly as she was caught by one bullet between her eyes and another which entered behind her left ear.

I lost my two sons the following year. Claude was shot by poachers who fired their weapons from a helicopter as he tried to outrun it. Gordon died when he ate an apple that had been filled with cyanide. I am unable to give you the details of their departures from Earth because it HURTS SO MUCH. SORRY...

Now I am childless. -- I do not know if all of the members of the three herds with whom I communed over the past 10 years were killed or if some of them somehow escaped, but I knew that as a

28-year-old with tusks bigger than any I have ever seen, I had to run!

(continued in tomorrow’s installment)

Steve Walker

Earthsaver and Jingles Creator

© 2013 Steve Walker, The Jingles-The Japan Foundation for English Pronunciation, Summit Enterprises.