Neighbors were complaining.  Across backyard fences, while hanging clothes to dry during those last mild days in September, or tidying up gardens for the winter.  “Hey, did you hear that noise last night?” “Like a truck in low gear, you mean?” “Yeah, and sort of honking its horn.” When the wind was just right, it sounded like an angry trumpeter out of tune.

Jan Peterson, who’d lived on Eastside Hill for 30 years, had never heard anything like it. “Kept me awake last night,” she grumbled to Maxine next door, arranging mums on her front porch.  Maybe it was just her arthritis.  Sometimes it seemed more like something she felt than heard.  Like joints creaking when she slipped out of bed at 2:00 a.m. to go downstairs for some aspirin. But creaking joints don’t topple knick-knacks off shelves.  That happened one night: something large rumbled by, just outside the kitchen window.  A quick blast of three sad notes and suddenly—maybe it happened when Jan jumped back—her favorite elephant figurine fell to the floor, shattering.  Steeling herself, she turned off the kitchen light, stepped gingerly over the shards, pulled back the curtain, and peered out.    

Nothing.  Only darkness.  She imagined the hard frost creeping over the butternut squash.  Have to get those in soon.  Then—there, what in the world was that?  Over by the compost, a huge boulder!  Jan’s blood froze.  Her old eyes, damn the floaters, fixed on the object.  The flapping ears, the curve of a trunk—it was clearly an elephant in a pile of leaves.  With a red cap on.  She blinked and laughed.  It couldn’t be an elephant; this was Wisconsin, not Africa.  She jumped again as the motion light over the garage, probably triggered by a rabbit, kicked on, lighting up the whole backyard.  No boulder out there, no elephant.  Nothing at all.  Not even, come to think of it, a rabbit.

That week, Maxine’s house was packed for the Neighborhood Association meeting.  Dick Johnson was griping again about his “wreck of a yard.”  The State Archaeological Society had dug up a good bit of it looking for artifacts from the circus that used to pass through town in the 1900s. Where was that grant money to pay for the landscaping, he wanted to know?  He had bills.  “Shut up, Dick,” said Maxine.  “We’ve got bigger problems.”  Dick shut up.  It was true:  people were reporting property damage, odd depressions in the soil.  Worse was the tuneless bugling at night, just at the edge of hearing.  Children were sleeping with parents.  Somebody’s cat had been trampled.  Jan volunteered to call City Council.

The next day was bulk trash pick-up.  Over coffee Jan scanned Hogeboom Avenue to see what the neighbors were tossing out.  Spotting the umbrella stand, it hit her.  Those archaeologists had found more than just carved ivory in Dick’s yard.  She’d help that old circus elephant buried there find its other three feet.  She put on her coat and went out.    

Stephanie Turner lives in the Eastside Hill neighborhood of Eau Claire and has written about cryptic creatures and taxidermy art. An English professor at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire, she is working on a book about the ways we look and talk about the current mass extinction of species.

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