Once the scrubbing on Sue’s foot was done, one of the assistants rolled out a surgical tray with several sizes of scalpels and no fewer than twenty pairs of scissors. A team of doctors began gathering around Sue’s injured leg, commenting on the dimensions of her foot—approximately the size of a toilet seat—and the thickness of the black hair on her leg—about the consistency of a steel dog brush. Later, if she survived, the wiry hair all over her body would be burned off by a blowtorch just before the start of the season. Fred, unlike other trainers, chose not to primp his elephants further by painting their toenails white. His elephants, though well-trained females, were still dangerous, he seemed to be saying, a lesson one family—indeed one entire community—would learn all too well later in the season.

Dr. Heard interrupted the gawking session to begin the operation. He took a long spike about the size of an oven cake tester and poked it into the heart of the abscess just above Sue’s toe. A red, pussy substance oozed from the wound. Using a scalpel, he peeled away the flaky black skin and shaved off several layers of the toenail. As he slowly cleaned the wound and finished trimming her nail, the mood in the barn began to lighten. Several doctors began sizing up Sue’s teeth. A handsome male teacher posed for pictures next to her head.

Within half an hour, Dr. Heard had finished emptying the abscess and the doctors began rolling the equipment away. One woman remained, filling the banana-sized abscess with sterilized gauze and wrapping the entire bottom half of Sue’s foot with seven Ace bandages. At 10:30, after removing the respirator tube, Dr. Heard administered a shot of the reversal agent into the identical spot in Sue’s right ear where he had applied the sleeping drug. Almost immediately Sue’s eyes flashed open, she exhaled, and her entire body convulsed.

“Everybody clear!” Dr. Heard shouted, as the last several members of the team scampered behind the gates.

“She’s moving!” cried Doug, who had just returned. “She’s moving her hurt foot.”

“Sue, Sue!” called Fred in his steady cadence. “Steady, Sue!”

Sue nodded her head slightly and stretched her injured foot. Blood seeped from her wound and left a small stain on the bandages. Fred began to pace. Everyone else stood still. Sue issued a muted growl and slowly unfurled her trunk. In a moment she began to rock back and forth in an attempt to gain leverage. Then she collapsed, splashing hay on her face.

“This is where they can most damage themselves,” Dr. Heard said aloud. “It should take about fifteen to twenty minutes for her to get enough energy to rise up again.”

Fifteen minutes passed, then twenty, but still Sue was unable to right herself. After thirty minutes she stopped swaying, and at forty-five she closed her eyes. The room became tense again. Hoping to coax her onto her feet, Fred walked into the surgical area and unhinged the steel chains around her feet. Doug turned away in fear. Dr. Heard felt Sue’s ear for a pulse and wiped away the tears that were streaming down her face.

At 11:30, a full hour after the reversal shot had been issued, Dr. Heard administered a second dosage. Twenty minutes later, when Sue had still not roused herself, the doctors resorted to a set of home remedies. First they got out the broom again and began sweeping her sides. Next they threw several blankets on her back and three team members began giving her a massage. When that too failed, they stuffed a deflated truck tire inner tube underneath Sue’s neck and futilely tried to prop her up by inflating it. They even discussed tying ropes to the ceiling and leveraging Sue to her feet.

“It’s not going to work,” Doug moaned. “She’s given up. This is what I was worried about. She’s lost the will to live.” He asked me to take one last photograph of Sue so he could bring it back to his wife.

By now close to desperation, one of the doctors suggested Sue might be tired of all the humans in the barn and prefer other company. The room was cleared and a student trotted across the lawn to the recuperating barn and returned with a dashing Thoroughbred stallion who was under treatment. The horse was led slowly into the barn. He looked at Sue. She looked at him. Then she fell back asleep. The experiment had failed. The horse was led away.

When all of these old wives’ gimmicks had failed, Dr. Heard decided that he would give Sue one more shot of the reversal drug. Perhaps the dosage he had used on the African male in Albany was not enough for Sue, he speculated. If the third dosage did not work, however, Sue would soon be in serious trouble. After lying on her side for much of the morning, she was in jeopardy of filling a lung with fluid.

For the fourth time that morning Dr. Heard climbed on top of Sue and shot an injection into her right ear. Quickly he climbed over the railing and waited. He did not have to wait long.

Within seconds of the third shot reaching her bloodstream, Sue sat upright with a bold and startled jolt. Moving deliberately, but determinedly, she rocked her body back onto her hind legs and paused. The thirty people huddled against the railing around her paused as well. Then, at 12:37 in the afternoon of a chilly, rainy, late-January day, after three and a half hours of morphine-induced sleep, the forty-two-year-old Sue heaved her two-and-three-quarter-ton body onto her three still healthy feet, arched her trunk high into the air, and heralded the start of the circus year by filling the air with a ceremonial elephantine trumpet blast and flooding the ground with an equally unceremonious outpouring of elephant urine.

Let the season begin.

First Half

The Circus on Parade

Without warning a voice descends from the blue-and-white-striped heavens.

“Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, the world’s largest traveling three-ring tented circus will start in five minutes…”

Behind the back door of the packed big top, Jimmy James turns off his portable microphone, clips on his black pre-tied bow tie, and pulls the ruffled cuffs from underneath the sleeves of his royal red tailcoat. Without thinking, he pats down his hair, unavoidably white after three decades and three hundred thousand miles on the road, and pulls down his waistcoat, surprisingly trim as it settles around nearly three hundred pounds of all-American truck-stop cuisine. He smiles wanly, peers through the flaps at the three thousand people hurriedly assuming their seats, and reopens his microphone to a voice as deep and rich as the three primary colors of the tent itself.