Mammoth

"...The Columbian Mammoth... Big Mama!"

Well, that wasn't precisely what they had been waiting for, but it was good enough, it would do for now because everyone knew that what they had all really come to see would be there in his own good time, this was merely setting the stage, and after all, this was the Greatest Show On Earth, an organization that would never disappoint, these were circus people who knew that building the anticipation was almost as important to the show as the main attraction itself.

And what a buildup!

The night sky was suddenly shattered by a meteor shower the likes of which the planet hadn't seen since the last major asteroid strike, first a hundred, then a thousand streaks of blue-white and pale yellow and blazing green, some exploding silently at the end of their trajectories, then larger chunks, some hitting the ground on the far side of the mountains that could now be seen not only by moonlight, but by meteor light. Explosions could be heard (and nobody cared that the speed of sound dictated that most of those impacts wouldn't be heard until whole minutes had passed, this was show business, not science) and it looked like the Earth was on fire over there, and then one hit on this side of the mountains and the entire gigantic building shook, hard enough to spill a few drinks in the skyboxes and to cause gasps of genuine alarm from those who hadn't read the warning in the program books designed to prevent an earthquake panic ("Explosions, bright flashing lights, and harmless seismic effects are included in tonight's show!"). And not one voice was raised in protest that a giant asteroid impact had killed off the dinosaurs, sixty million years ago, not the mammoths in the recent past.

And now, here it came... well, no, not yet, but once more no one complained, because what did come was the elephants.

The great steel doors beneath the arched icy ground sloths sprang open and they lumbered out, twenty of them, in full circus regalia of red leather harness studded with brass, multicolored drapes big enough to carpet a fair-sized room hanging from their sides, and headdresses of pink feathers. Ten went left and ten went right around the oval arena floor and they spread out evenly, then turned to face the center. Then all twenty elephants reared up on their hind legs and raised their trunks and started trumpeting, a truly amazing sound, considering that their already ear-splitting volume was caught by throat mikes, amplified, and sent to the speakers overhead.

You couldn't say she dwarfed the assembled Indian elephants... well, P. T. Barnum probably would have said it, he claimed his famous Jumbo stood thirteen feet high at the crown of his head, but he never let anyone measure him while he was alive... but she stood in relation to her attendant pachyderms as a Clydesdale would to an ordinary horse. She was in fact thirteen feet tall at her tallest point, which was her massive, humped shoulders, and none of the Indian elephant honor guard topped out at much over ten feet... and come to think of it, maybe that does qualify as dwarfing them.

But her tusks. Her tusks!

They were the crowning glory of the Columbian Mammoth, growing almost straight out from her face, then curving inward until they almost touched, ten feet from her mouth. They had been yellowish in color when she was captured on the streets of Los Angeles, but assiduous dental care had made them gleam white as a toothpaste advertisement.

Big Mama was a show business veteran by now, used to the bedlam, the flashing lights and the noise and the smells that at one time were so alien to her. It also didn't hurt that a tranquilizer pill the size of an apple had been mixed with her feed an hour before showtime because, though the circus didn't like to talk about it much, Big Mama still had a streak of wildness in her, had been known to lash out without warning, had in fact seriously injured her chief trainer a few years ago because, after all, you can't keep an animal in a tranquilized torpor twenty-four hours a day even if, with an animal like Big Mama, you might like to.

But the big cow had never been known to act up when the spotlight was on her, it was almost as if she enjoyed performing, and she was a trooper tonight, following docilely behind her handler, an anonymous woman with a slight limp dressed all in black so as to be as unobtrusive as possible, like those Japanese Bunraku puppeteers who manipulated their life-sized ma

She made two circuits of the arena with the ring of elephants alternately saluting her or being urged into other tricks by their black-clad handlers—headstands, dances, daisy chains, stand perches—and it helped cover up the fact that Big Mama essentially had only one "behavior" to demonstrate, which was standing on her hind legs with her head aimed up so that the tips of her tusks were thirty feet above the ground, waving her trunk around and bellowing, and few people knew how hard it had been to get a crusty old bitch like her to do even that. Training elephants, like training any large and dangerous animal, relied on the animal accepting the unlikely idea that the human trainer, though demonstrably smaller and weaker, was in fact bigger and stronger than the trained animal, that the human ought, by natural right, to be the dominant figure in the social contract, and Big Mama had been the leader of her herd for too long to accept that idea with any regularity or consistency unless lulled by large doses of tranquilizers.

So where was the Great Woolly? For the first time, the audience began to get a little restless.

This did not go u

Finally the arena was cleared, the lights and the tent screens faded to black, and one spotlight and every eye in the place swung once more to the grand entrance arch. You could practically feel the ringmaster take a deep breath and then a

"And now, without further ado, the star of the show, the most famous, the most beloved animal in the world, the Great Woolly Mammoth... Little Fuzzy!"