Never forget the elephant

Ruapehu Bulletin, Volume 14, Issue 653, 10 September 1996, Page 6

Never forget the elephant

By

Greg

Meylan

In the days when circuses travelled the country Ohakune was one of the places where they stopped to pitch their big top. Most of these circuses had an elephant to delight children and adults but on one occasion the circus elephant was left behind in Ohakune. Out of the elephant cage came a curling grey trunk to pluck from the roadside some choice and tender branches of local greenery, except this elephant tore a branch from the wrong tree — tutu. Tutu has a history in this country of killing large animals to the extent that early surveyors and explorers in Otago noted its presence on maps to try to spare the lives of cattle and horses. The circus found its elephant sick, poisoned, and had to watch it die. And with its death came the problem of what to do with a dead animal that weighs almost as much as a rugby team. They buried it by the

sportsgrounds where the relocated railway houses now sit beside the railway lines. But lacking experience in elephant burial the hole was dug deep enough to cover the body but not deep enough to trap the rancid stench of its rotting flesh so that for weeks the area about the elephant' s graveyard was not a pleasant place to be. Wired Sadly for future fossil hunters puzzled looks and grand theories will never rise from the rediscovery of an elephant skeleton beneath an old railway house. Much later, Massey University staff arrived to exhume the clean unsmelly bones and the elephant now exists joined together by wire . in a basement in Palmerston North. Though some say on dark moonless nights the earth shakes a little and a strange ghostly trumpeting can be heard — or is it just a goods train?