Big problems

How do you find a guy who's hiding two elephants?

ONE DAY I happened to be reading the New York Times when a short piece caught my eye. In the article, an animal trainer named Murray Hill, in an undisclosed location, explained to the reporter why he was on the run with his two elephants, Tory and Dutchess—“the girls,” he called them.

I’d been looking for a nonfiction book project and this sounded intriguing. How could anyone be “on the run” with two elephants? Murray’s daughter, Robin Seidon, who lived in New York, was quoted in the article and turned out to be listed in the Manhattan directory. Bingo! I called her, told her I was a writer in Toronto, and explained that I’d love to get in touch with her dad.

“Join the club,” she said. “You’re about the twentieth person I‘ve heard from this morning.”

I introduced myself—writer and editor in Toronto—and asked if she could get her dad to call me collect at any hour that suited him. She said she’d pass on the message, but explained that he was wary—worried about cops, and the FBI, and private detectives.

“If I send you a letter and couple of books I’ve written, could you forward them to him?”

She agreed to do so, and a couple of weeks later she let me know he’d received them. The week after that, late one night, I got a collect phone call.

“This is Murray Hill”—gruff and suspicious—”whaddaya want?”

“Thanks for calling. I want to meet you and talk about maybe doing a book together.”

“Oh yeah? How do I know you’re not a cop? Or working for Drake?”

“Well, I’m definitely not a cop, and I don’t know who Drake is.”

“He’s the guy I sold the girls to and took them back from. The bastard.”

“I see. OK. But why would anybody who was trying to find you enlist a writer in another country to help him?”

“You’re right. Drake’s not that smart.”

“Where are you at the moment?”

“Can’t tell you.”

“I’m in Toronto, but I’ll come see you on short notice wherever you are.”

“Lemme think about it.”

MURRAY AND I spoke a few more times on the phone, more easily each time, before he finally called me on a Wednesday night and said, “Be in Shreveport, Louisiana, this weekend. Check in to the Richmond Suites. Don’t bring anybody with you.”

I did as instructed. That Friday night and all day Saturday I found myself twiddling my thumbs. I dined via room service, not wanting to miss a call to the room. Finally, at 10 o’clock on Saturday night, there was a knock at my door. I opened it to see a jockey-sized guy standing there. He was maybe fifteen years my senior and a foot shorter than me. His fedora had a jaunty tilt and he smelled of what I would come to recognize as elephant shit.

“Sorry it’s late. I had to put the girls away.”

“Come on in, Murray. It’s great to meet you. Drake and the FBI are in the bathroom.”

That got us off to a good start, and we ended up talking late into the night. He slept on the pullout sofa. By Sunday afternoon, when he had to get back to the girls, we had an agreement. I’d write a nonfiction book about his adventures and find an agent to represent the project. He’d cooperate exclusively with me. We’d split the proceeds 50/50, with his share going to support an elephant sanctuary in Missouri.

Such was the start of what eventually became an eye-opening journey into the world of circuses and carnivals, the trade in exotic animals, and—in the dawning age of PETA, and protests at zoos, and animal liberation—a vanishing way of life.

Murray Hill spent five years on the run with “the girls,” Tory (left) and Dutchess.

RESEARCHING the book, At Large, I met fascinating people and a dozen or so elephants. At one point I found myself in a pungent barn in the Midwest with five circus elephants lined up in a row. Each was chained by its right front leg. They racked back and forth in unison, like a Motown band, swishing and swaying and bobbing their heads. They didn’t interrupt their routine as their trainer led me in, but they certainly took inquisitive notice. I felt like a guy who realizes that the whale surfacing alongside his kayak is actually eyeballing him. Massive whale, tiny kayak. Twenty-five-thousand pounds of elephant, 185 pounds of me.

After a minute, the trainer steered us toward the largest elephant. Her trunk took a lazy, indirect path to my outstretched hand. An elephant’s nose—coarsely textured, reticulated, and densely muscular—is not just for breathing and smelling, of course. It’s also used for drinking, self-bathing, trumpeting, and—amazingly for an appendage that could knock me across the room—gingerly taking the proffered sugar cubes with the “finger” at the tip of her trunk and then checking my pockets for more.

I spent an enchanted hour in the elephants’ company. You sense at once that their bonds are powerful. As we know, they help one another, call to each other at (for humans) inaudibly low frequency over great distances, and mourn their losses. They indeed have long memories and will return to the bones of deceased kin many years later. Their mix of delicacy and brute force, their patience, their love of play, their gentle curiosity toward a stranger—all are reminders of how much animals have to teach us.

And what did trainers at the time teach their elephants? That, prodded by hooks and harsh language, they must bend to human will. That life is a zoo compound, or an endless circle, or an eighteen wheeler that goes from mall opening to county fair to car dealership. That people will pay to see them adopt unnatural postures and perform goofy stunts. That existence for these highly intelligent and empathic creatures is a numbing routine of constraint and obedience—until they finally lash out.

LIKE MOUNTAIN climbers, elephant trainers who stay in the game long enough often end up dead. A handler in Pennsylvania gets trampled, a circus elephant in Hawaii goes rogue. These may seem like rare occurrences, but there are literally hundreds of elephants in captivity that have killed people. Murray had friends who’d been taken out by their animals, and he himself decided to exit the business after his bull, Onyx, downed and pinned him. But for Onyx’s broken tusk, Murray would have been impaled instead of just laid up with broken ribs.

That close call and lengthy recuperation is why he donated Onyx to the zoo in Springfield, Missouri, and then sold Tory and Dutchess for $75,000 to Dick Drake, a stunt man and animal wrangler on the outermost orbit of the movie business in Tehachipi, California.

Drake was an amiable bullshitter who soon fell behind on his monthly payments. Formal demands for money were deflected and then ignored, so Murray decided to repossess the girls. When he found an opportunity, he took off in an eighteen-wheeler with a quarter tank of gas, no money, and two full-grown Asian elephants in the back.

When he got a look at the girls, at a friend’s barn in New Jersey, he concluded they’d been mistreated: hook marks, scars, feet that hadn’t been attended to. Steaming mad, he vowed that Drake would never get them again.

Thus began an unlikely, five-year odyssey across the U. S., a little guy in a big truck hauling two full-grown Asian elephants.

I’ll return to this story next week.

P. S. My post about grammatical and spelling mistakes prompted readers to point out a couple more common errors. Many people misuse lay and lie. (You lay down your arms, and you lie awake at night.) Also, verb tenses—especially past and past perfect—are increasingly used improperly; e.g., He should have went straight home, instead of He should have gone straight home.

Someone suggested incidence (rate of occurrence) as a word often incorrectly used in place of incident (event). And a teacher wrote, “Proffered is one for your spelling list. Students like to double the r instead of the f.”