The One and Only Ivan. Katherine Applegate
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to do.
Here in my domain, there is no one to protect.
The Littlest Big Top on Earth
My neighbours here at the Big Top Mall know many tricks. They are an educated lot, more accomplished than I.
One of my neighbours plays baseball, although she is a chicken. Another drives a fire truck, although he is a rabbit.
I used to have a neighbour, a sleek and thoughtful seal, who could balance a ball on her nose from dawn till dusk. Her voice was like the throaty bark of a dog chained outside on a cold night.
Children wished on pennies and tossed them into her plastic pool. They glowed on the bottom like flat copper stones.
The seal was hungry one day, or bored, perhaps, so she ate one hundred pennies.
Mack said she’d be fine.
He was mistaken.
Mack calls our show “The Littlest Big Top on Earth”. Every day at two, four and seven, humans fan themselves, drink sodas, applaud. Babies wail. Mack, dressed like a clown, pedals a tiny bike. A dog named Snickers rides on Stella’s back. Stella sits on a stool.
It is a very sturdy stool.
I don’t do any tricks. Mack says it’s enough for me to be me.
Stella told me that some circuses move from town to town. They have humans who dangle on ropes twining from the tops of tents. They have grumbling lions with gleaming teeth and a snaking line of elephants, each clutching the limp tail in front of her. The elephants look far off into the distance so they won’t see the humans who want to see them.
Our circus doesn’t migrate. We sit where we are, like an old beast too tired to push on.
After our show, humans forage through the stores. A store is where humans buy things they need to survive. At the Big Top Mall, some stores sell new things, things like balloons and T-shirts and caps to cover the gleaming heads of humans. Some stores sell old things, things that smell dusty and damp and long-forgotten.
All day, I watch humans scurry from store to store. They pass their green paper, dry as old leaves and smelling of a thousand hands, back and forth and back again.
They hunt frantically, stalking, pushing, grumbling. Then they leave, clutching bags filled with things – bright things, soft things, big things – but no matter how full the bags, they always come back for more.
Humans are clever indeed. They spin pink clouds you can eat. They build domains with flat waterfalls.
But they are lousy hunters.
Gone
Some animals live privately, unwatched, but that is not my life.
My life is flashing lights and pointing fingers and uninvited visitors. Inches away, humans flatten their little hands against the wall of glass that separates us.
The glass says you are this and we are that and that is how it will always be.
Humans leave their fingerprints behind, sticky with candy, slick with sweat. Each night a weary man comes to wipe them away.
Sometimes I press my nose against the glass. My noseprint, like your fingerprint, is the first and last and only one.
The man wipes the glass and then I am gone.
Artists
Here in my domain, I do not have much to do. You can only throw so many me-balls at humans before you get bored.
A me-ball is made by rolling up dung until it’s the size of a small apple, then letting it dry. I always keep a few on hand.
For some reason, my visitors never seem to carry any.
In my domain, I have a tyre swing, a baseball, a tiny plastic pool filled with dirty water, and even an old TV.
I have a stuffed toy gorilla too. Julia, the daughter of the weary man who cleans the mall each night, gave it to me.
The gorilla has empty eyes and floppy limbs, but I sleep with it every night. I call it Not-Tag.
Tag was my twin sister’s name.
Julia is ten years old. She has hair like black glass and a wide, half-moon smile. She and I have a lot in common. We are both great apes, and we are both artists.
It was Julia who gave me my first crayon, a stubby blue one, slipped through the broken spot in my glass along with a folded piece of paper.
I knew what to do with it. I’d watched Julia draw. When I dragged the crayon across the paper, it left a trail in its wake like a slithering blue snake.
Julia’s drawings are wild with colour and movement. She draws things that aren’t real: clouds that smile and cars that swim. She draws until her crayons break and her paper rips. Her pictures are like pieces of a dream.
I can’t draw dreamy pictures. I never remember my dreams, although I sometimes awaken with my fists clenched and my heart hammering.
My drawings seem pale and timid next to Julia’s. She draws ideas in her head. I draw things in my cage, the simple items that fill my days: an apple core, a banana peel, a candy wrapper. (I often eat my subjects before I draw them.)
But even though I draw the same things over and over again, I never get bored with my art. When I’m drawing, that’s all I think about. I don’t think about where I am, about yesterday or tomorrow. I just move my crayons across the paper.
Humans don’t always seem to recognise what I’ve drawn. They squint, cock their heads, murmur. I’ll draw a banana, a perfectly lovely banana, and they’ll say, “It’s a yellow airplane!” or “It’s a duck without wings!”
That’s all right. I’m not drawing for them. I’m drawing for me.
Mack soon realised that people will pay for a picture made by a gorilla, even if they don’t know what it is. Now I draw every day. My works sell for twenty dollars apiece (twenty-five with frame) at the gift shop near my domain.
If I get tired and need a break, I eat my crayons.
Shapes in Clouds
I think I’ve always been an artist.
Even as a baby, still clinging to my mother, I had an artist’s eye. I saw shapes in the clouds, and sculptures in the tumbled stones at the bottom of a stream. I grabbed at colours – the crimson flower just out of reach, the ebony bird streaking past.
I don’t remember much about my early life, but I do remember this: Whenever I got the chance, I would dip my fingers into cool mud and use my mother’s back for a canvas.
She was a patient soul, my mother.
Imagination
Someday, I hope I can draw the way Julia draws, imagining worlds that don’t yet exist.
I know what most humans think. They think gorillas don’t have imaginations. They think we don’t remember our pasts or ponder our futures.
Come to think of it, I suppose they have a point. Mostly I think about what is, not what could be.
I’ve learned not to get my hopes up.
The Loneliest Gorilla in the World
When the Big Top Mall was first built, it smelled of new paint and fresh hay, and humans came to visit from morning till night. They drifted past my domain like logs on a lazy river.
Lately, a day might go by without a single visitor. Mack says he’s worried. He says I’m not cute any more. He says, “Ivan, you’ve lost your magic, old guy. You used to be a hit.”
It’s true that some of my visitors don’t linger the way