Chapter 6: Mabel Down

An old elephant lying down too long starts to crush herself.

Her own weight presses on her lungs and cuts off the blood to her legs.

Clyde taught me that my first week.

After a few hours, the muscles start to die.

I called him first.

"Mabel's down and she can't get up."

"Coming."

Then I called the vet, an hour away in her pickup, and woke her.

Then I ran up the hayloft stairs and hammered on the door.

Ramsey opened it in jeans and nothing else, his hair standing up.

He looked at my face and grabbed a shirt off the chair.

"Tell me what to carry," he said.

"Everything."

We dragged straw bales in from the stack and rammed them against Mabel's back so she couldn't roll flat again.

Clyde came limping in with his knee wrapped and a headlamp on his cap.

He knelt by Mabel's head, slow, and put his forehead on her trunk.

"Hey, old lady. You picked a bad night to be lazy."

She rumbled at him.

The straps lived in a crate in the tack room for nights like this.

Two wide canvas bands, each as long as a car, with steel rings on the ends.

Getting them under nine thousand pounds of elephant took all three of us.

Ramsey lay flat on his belly in the straw and pushed the first strap under her chest with a broom handle.

I pulled from the other side.

Clyde called the inches.

Ramsey's shirt was soaked through and his forearms were scraped raw from the floor.

Clyde backed the tractor up to the stall doors and we chained the straps to the loader.

"Slow," Clyde said. "Slow. She's got to want it."

He raised the bucket an inch at a time.

The straps went tight.

Mabel groaned and kicked and got halfway to her chest.

Then her front legs folded and she went back down.

Keep reading free with an account. Start He Ditched Our Wedding, I Married His Wealthy Uncle from Chapter 1, then sign up free to read the rest of this chapter.