An Audience with an Elephant Read Free Page A

time, Rani steps from tub to tub, or walks over people. (‘Being the only animal which can’t jump, an elephant has to be sure-footed. She could walk on an egg.’) She also plays cricket but has refused to play football. ‘And what else would she be doing?’ Robert Raven stroked one huge wrinkled side. ‘Humping timber or walking up and down in a zoo.’
    However often you have seen elephants, the bulk close up is bewildering. This, and the fact that the animal is never still, the body swaying from side to side, the whiskery trunk, in perpetual motion conveying food to the strange pink little mouth, prompting unease. I had brought a big bag of windfalls, which she ate one after the other, then did a quick professional frisk of my person. Apart from that she seemed to be engrossed in a private world.
    ‘Oddly enough, I used to be frightened of dogs.’ We had taken her for a walk. ‘I suppose it’s dangerous work, for more injuries are caused by an elephant than any other animal. Most of it’s accidental, caused through sheer weight.’ He stared at the great shape. ‘When we go for a walk like this she hovers round me. She might chase a bit of paper but she never goes far. Does she like me? I don’t know, she does as I tell her, but it’s hard to say. Still, we have a good time — we go everywhere. We went into the sea once, only she went in a bit far.’ In their time together he has managed to potty-train her, and a large black bin accompanies this curious pair on their social round. ‘She’ll go anywhere with me, and because of her I’ve been to places I wouldn’t have been to, met people I’d never have met.’
    He stopped, the elephant stopped and even the sinking sun seemed to stop. ‘He’s not a bad chap, that Harrison Ford,’ said Robert Raven.

It Came as a Big Surprise
    HERE IS AN Angler’s Prayer you still come across occasionally, painted on old mugs in fishing inns. It is a bit like a river itself, the couplet meandering towards a tired rhyme.
    Lord, grant that I may catch a fish so big that even I,
    When speaking of it afterwards, may have no need to lie.
    This is an account of a man, ‘an excellent angler, and now with God’, as Walton put it, who did just that. He caught a fish so big it would have needed two large men, their arms fully outstretched, to give cynics in saloon bars even a hint of its dimensions.
    But he did more than that. He went fishing for salmon one day and caught something so peculiar, so far removed from even the footnotes of angling in Britain, that a grown man who was present ran off across the fields. Nobody would have thought it at all odd that day if the fisherman had been found trying to look up his catch in the Book of Revelations.
    It needs a photograph. The fisherman is dead, his friends are beginning to die, and, had a photograph not been taken, few people would now believe what happened. A hundred years ago ballads and hearsay would have wrecked it on the wilder shores of myth; as it is, yellowing cuttings from the local paper, almost crumbling into carbon, are slowly unfolded from wallets, a print is unearthed reverently from under a pile of household receipts.
    It was on 28 July 1933 that Alec Allen caught his fish, but even that has been elbowed into myth. His obituary (far from the national press) says that it was on 9 July. The Guinness Book of Records says that it was 25 July. But the one contemporary cutting had no doubts. It was 28 July. Appropriately, it was a Friday.
    The photograph is extraordinary. Allen, a short man in a Fairisle pullover and baggy trousers, leans against a wall beside a trestle. It is a typical 1930s snapshot slouch. His hands are in his pockets, there is a cigarette in his mouth. But of course you notice all this a long time afterwards, because of the thing dangling from the trestle.
    At first it looks like the biggest herring in the history of the sea. It towers over the man by a good 4 feet, a fish certainly, but the head