After he left the army—old, tired, and a little disgusted—he founded an elephant orphanage on his five hundred acres, gathering those the army had lost use for and would have disposed of: the old, the weak, those missing a leg or a piece of trunk, susceptible to rage, made skittish or deaf from gunfire. Of those he cared for, one stood out to him, a young male, shy of the others, who after feeding lingered at the door. They began to walk together, the elephant and the man, in the evening along the white road at the perimeter. He spoke to it, and sometimes did not speak. The beast, he felt, could know his mind. As these walks lengthened, the old man’s wife saw less and less of him.

One evening, the man and elephant met on the road a truck of young men heading in the opposite direction. The young men jeered at the elephant and threw eggs at its head. The elephant reared, enraged. And when the rage had passed, it found its feet had come down on the old man, who lay crumpled and wet in the dirt. When in the morning the old man’s wife found his body in front of the house, it was wrapped in the trunk of the elephant, who knelt in the dust, clinging to the body, smelling of sulfur and grass. As she came near, the creature struck her mouth with its bloody trunk and beat the earth.

The old man’s wife and daughter circled the elephant, pleading with it, that day and each day after. They set before it a basin of coconut water, which it refused, and a bowl of peeled and salted mangoes, but it ate nothing: the mangoes darkened with ants, and days of circling passed uncounted. The women stopped speaking of it to each other, and then stopped speaking to each other altogether. And when she could no longer bear it, the daughter shot the elephant in the head. But the elephant did not shudder, for by then it had been dead a long time.