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 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, 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, in the rain forests 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, edit 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.
# # #
Originally published on Written Tales.
