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she is. She would tend to fight him a bit—to think that she shouldn’t have to do what he wants. Tamba’s sort of imprinted on people.” Neither will Packy mate with Belle, his mother. “I think that he knows she’s his mother,” Schmidt said, “but I can’t prove it.”
    I have never seen a pair of elephants mate—few people have—and I suspect that if I had the opportunity I would turn my back. I was shown a series of photographs of such an occasion, and I felt like a voyeur, a trespasser into private territory. In the photographs, the bull begins by laying his trunk across the cow,guiding her gently against a wall, stroking her until she assumes a spread-leg stance. It is too intimate, this soft control, the stolid acceptance by the female, and then the unexpectedly human posture. He plants himself behind her, upright and stately. It took me a moment to place that dignity; it is Ganesha, the elephant-headed Hindu god of wisdom. The bull stands erect and bows his head to his work with all the concentration of a man and all the power of a god.
    TUESDAYS ARE BLOOD-SAMPLING days here. Early on a summer morning, before the zoo’s gates opened and the crowds arrived, I watched while Jim Sanford and Jay Haight performed their deft art. They visited Hanako and Tamba first, in a room at the far end of the hall. The giant animals seemed genuinely glad to see them and immediately moved close to greet them. Haight carried an ankus, a tool that looks something like a boathook and is used to guide and control the elephant, and laid it lightly alongside Hanako’s trunk, taking hold of her fleshy, triangular lower lip with his free hand. “She likes me to hold her,” he told me. “It keeps her calm. She’s not wrapped too tight.”
    Hanako stood still and patient for a moment, then began stroking Haight with her trunk, waved it in my direction—I was standing safely outside the hydraulic door, which was opened a foot or two—and finally swung it to her side, stroking Sanford’s trousers. Sanford pulled out the fan of her thin-skinned ear, rippled with veins, and poked a small needle into the largest, a gentle line running like a riverbed from top to bottom. The needle lodged in place, and he held a vial to catch the steady drops. Hanako’s trunk continued its undulations, from Haight to the unfamiliar air around me and on to Sanford. When the vial was full, Sanford pulled out the needle, stepped through the door, and took two bananas from a box.
    â€œTamba, get back, get back!” he shouted at the younger cow, who had rushed forward in her eagerness for fruit. He moved toHanako. “Trunk!” She swung the floppy member aside, and Sanford shoved the bananas in whole.
    Tamba was restless. “She knows she’s gonna get a stick and a treat,” Sanford explained. “She’s a happy camper. She’s a doll.” Tamba moved over to the door opening. She threw her trunk above her head like a lady flinging open a parasol; her mouth opened wide, presenting me with a giant pink cavity framed by two bright, intelligent eyes. Her tushes, short and dull, were at the front of a set of enormous molars, each nine inches long and weighing about four pounds. Her throat dropped away from me into blackness, the pale-pink tongue, as large as a loaf of bread, damp and vibrating with life. Sanford reached in and massaged her tongue, grabbing it with a firm hand and scratching its rough surface. Tamba seemed to sigh with pleasure at the touch. The men traded places, Haight moving to Tamba’s ear while Sanford held her trunk. As they worked, they swore cheerfully, insulting each other and the animals, disparaging clothes, looks, and heredity with equal zest. Tamba wiggled her head, trying to watch, and Sanford, tall enough to meet her at the eye level, yelled in her ear, “Get your head down, or I’ll get all over you like a cheap