The Last Elephant

Short Story By Ellis Shuman

Sometime in the near future

Ethan has been looking forward to the school outing for weeks. Marking the dates on his calendar, a countdown running in his head. Two weeks to go. One more week. Four days. Two. Today!

Ethan is going to the zoo with his classmates at Lincoln Elementary. With Liam and Stevie, his best friends. They are as excited as he is. The zoo! And they will see the elephant!

“Listen up, everybody,” Mrs. Gibson says to her students when they arrive. She introduces them to one of the zoo’s employees.

“My name is Jackson, but you can call me Jack. Our zoo is a member of Animals Consolidated, the leading zoo management company in America,” he explains. “Our zoos have the most wonderful creatures. You’ll see some of these special animals today. Are you ready to get started?”

Jack leads them along the pathway to the center of the zoo grounds. Past the tropical bird hall, past the reptile pavilion. Past the pond where cranes, herons, and geese flap their wings and dip their beaks. Up a slight hill.

“This is the lions’ cage,” Jack says, pointing through the bars.

“Where are the lions?” Liam asks.

“The lions aren’t here right now,” Jack tells the schoolchildren. “They’re on loan to another zoo. There are so few lions left that we share them.”

Ethan is impatient. He hasn’t come to see the lions. Or tigers. Or any other wild animal. He has come to see the elephant. He walks away from the group and approaches the biggest enclosure of all. And there he is.

Ollie—that’s the elephant’s name. In the distance, Ollie is feeding on greenery, raising his long, gray trunk, and piling the food into his mouth. Lowering it playfully for another mouthful.

Ollie looks up, his white tusks sparkling in the morning sunlight. He lumbers forward, across the pen in slow motion, toward the boy. A huge, bobbing head. One leg lifting heavily and stamping down, another leg following it. Gray, wrinkled skin shaking back and forth. Tail wagging, slapping at flies. A gigantic, magnificent creature approaching.

“Wow!” Ethan shouts. The elephant draws near.

The other schoolchildren join Ethan at the guardrails, watching the bull elephant swaying until it comes to a halt a few feet away from where they’re standing.

“Step back,” Mrs. Gibson cautions them. “Let’s wait for Jack’s explanation.”

“Ollie goes from one zoo to another so that as many people as possible can see him,” Jack begins.

“I heard he’s the only one,” Ethan says.

“Yes, he’s the only one. The only one left. As you may know, there were once hundreds of thousands of elephants. They roamed freely on the savannas of Africa, and in the rainforests of Asia. But we drove them to extinction. Loss of habitat. Poaching. Illegal ivory trade. There are many reasons, none of them acceptable.”

Jack points to the animal in the enclosure. “Ollie is the very last elephant. We raised him in captivity, but elephants do not do well in captivity. All other members of his breed died off, leaving only him. When Ollie dies, there won’t be any elephants left,” Jack tells the children.

While his classmates move on to the bear enclosure, Ethan remains in place. Ollie stares at him with sorrowful eyes. All alone. The only one left of his species.

Ethan notices something on the elephant’s face, just below an enormous flappy ear. A whitish area, set against the gray. It looks like—yes, it’s a star! A five-pointed star, a birthmark on Ollie’s hide.

“Amazing!” he says aloud.

He takes one last look at the elephant and runs to join his classmates.

Thirty years later

Ethan has been looking forward to this assignment for some time. This is the kind of project he’s good at. Every article he writes is a challenge, but he has no doubt the piece he’s working on will be just what his editor asked for.

He parks and hurries to the building’s entrance. A security guard checks his name against the morning’s expected arrivals. Ethan puts down his laptop case and walks through the metal detector.

“Mr. Matheson is expecting you,” the guard informs him.

“Welcome to Animals Revisited,” Matheson says, shaking Ethan’s hand. “You’re the science reporter, right? I’ve read some of your articles. Quite good.”

“I specialize in stories about scientific research.”

“You’ve certainly come to the right place for that.”

“I’m here to learn,” Ethan says. “Can I record our conversation?”

“Sure, everything I tell you is on the record. Animals Revisited is a research lab exploring ways to bring back extinct species. We sequence their genomes and edit the DNA of a close living relative to match it. Then we endeavor to make an embryo with the revised genome and implant it in a surrogate mother.”

“And you succeeded?”

“You’re aware of the repeated failures with mammoths. That’s because we never had viable tissue to work with, not so with elephants, which went extinct barely three decades ago. We perfected the process and achieved the desired results. We successfully brought the elephant back to life!”

Matheson leads Ethan to the lab’s nursery and brings him to a small cage. An animal crib and, inside, a newborn elephant.

Ethan snaps pictures and writes down his first impressions of the infant pachyderm. He walks around the cage, observing the gray calf from all sides. Not yet steady on its feet. Thin strands of black hair. Wide, curious eyes. Just under one of the creature’s flappy ears, he spots a whitish area. A noticeable birthmark on its textured, wrinkled skin. A shape with five points. A star.

“Amazing!” he says.

Ellis Shuman is an American-born Israeli author, travel writer, and book reviewer. His writing has appeared in The Jerusalem Post, The Times of Israel, and The Huffington Post. He is the author of The Virtual Kibbutz, Valley of Thracians, and The Burgas Affair.