Column & Humour: Bernard and the Elephant Nobody Rides Anymore

His bar had closed. Three weeks — just long enough for Sophea to repaint and swap out the fan that had squeaked since 2008. A man without his stool is a man without a country. So when some vague acquaintance mentioned a place that was “quiet, cheap, far from the Kevins,” Bernard heard paradise and said yes before he looked at a map.

Illustration only

His bar had closed. Three weeks — just long enough for Sophea to repaint and swap out the fan that had squeaked since 2008. A man without his stool is a man without a country. So when some vague acquaintance mentioned a place that was “quiet, cheap, far from the Kevins,” Bernard heard paradise and said yes before he looked at a map.

Ratanakiri. More than five hundred kilometres. Red earth, hills, and Sovatha — young, pretty, Khmer, mad about elephants and about her own culture, forever trailed by Vuthy, her assistant, who has the very Asian habit of filming everything.

Sovatha speaks very quietly. Almost a whisper. “Elephants are sensitive to noise,” she breathes by way of hello, while Vuthy, true to form, is already filming Bernard on his phone. Vuthy films everything. He has an account, @vuthy_and_the_giants, forty thousand followers, and a mission: to show the world that man and animal can, Sovatha murmurs, “live together.”

But first, the big news of the camp. “Here,” Sovatha breathes, “we work the old way. The mahouts. The tradition. We ride them. In the wild an elephant walks close to eighteen hours a day looking for food; riding them recreates that effort and lets them burn off their energy — it’s essential for their wellbeing.”

Bernard stops dead. His face lights up.

“We ride them.” He repeats it like a term of endearment rediscovered, and at full volume, which makes Sovatha jump and, somewhere, an elephant too. “Finally, a serious place. No oat milk, no bloke in linen telling you the beast has feelings. You climb on and off you go.”

“Have you ridden before?” Sovatha whispers, while Vuthy tightens the shot, camera in fist.

“Have I ridden.” Bernard puffs out his chest, which shifts a certain volume. “Dozens of times. Back then, in this country, you got around by elephant or you didn’t get around. There were no roads. You climbed up at dawn and you were a man.”

Nobody checks. Nobody ever checks with Bernard.

“Perfect,” whispers Sovatha, radiant. “We’ll give you Aakma. The gentlest one.”

Aakma steps forward. And now Bernard discovers a detail he had left out of his legend: an elephant, seen from below, is very tall. Much taller than in the memories. Memories don’t have lower backs.

The mahout gives a soft command. Aakma bends her knees, lowers herself, offers the most welcoming mounting-step in the kingdom — the one so many visitors before him have used without effort. All that’s left, literally, is to lift a leg.

Bernard looks at the leg in question. His leg. He hasn’t asked anything of it since 2011, apart from the stool-to-toilet-and-back run.

“Actually,” says Bernard, “the real problem is the elephant.”

“How do you mean?” asks Sovatha. Vuthy’s phone edges closer.

“She’s adopted me. You said so yourself. You don’t climb on someone who’s adopted you. She’d be offended. Elephants, they feel emotions.”

Sovatha opens her mouth. Closes it. She has just heard Bernard hand back to her, almost word for word, the argument she once heard from a young Englishman, six years earlier, at a “sanctuary” in Mondulkiri. He had explained to her, learnedly, that before he arrived the Cambodians had tortured their elephants all day long; that he had opened their eyes; and then, thanks to donations from abroad, had bought up every elephant in the province. Since then, he said, they had become real elephants again, almost wild — the only drawback of this recovered wildness being that the vet could no longer get near them, and that they were dying, one after another.

There is no answer to that kind of blind faith. Sovatha had let it go, then built her own project, closer to her culture but fed by the recent advances of ethology. Her own grandfather had owned a bull elephant named “Ponlu,” whom the Khmer Rouge had confiscated, and whom he never saw again. The loss of that friend, almost mythical in the family’s memory, had left a wound that never quite closed.

So Bernard sits down. On the ground. Beside the elephant. In the exact posture of his stool, but without the stool, which makes him furious and dignified at once. He lights a cigarette. Aakma settles down next to him.

What Bernard doesn’t see is that Vuthy is still filming.

The van back leaves the next morning. Bernard climbs in without looking back — a question of the neck. He’ll know nothing of what’s coming.

Because that same evening, @vuthy_and_the_giants posts. Close-up of Bernard sitting in the dust, cigarette between his lips, elephant against his shoulder. Caption, in English, in capitals: “HE REFUSED TO RIDE OUT OF RESPECT FOR THE ANIMAL.” Two million views in three days. Shared by an actress. Picked up by a Norwegian NGO. Bernard, without knowing it, becomes the global face of ethical elephant tourism.

He finds out a week later, on his freshly repainted stool, when a young man in a tote bag walks into the bar, recognises him, and buys him a beer “for everything he does for the cause.”

Bernard takes the beer. Bernard understands nothing. But Bernard has never in his life turned down a free beer, and it’s not some planet-wide principle that’s going to start today.

“That’s right, yeah,” he says. “The cause.”

He drinks. Somewhere, the counter ticks past two and a half million.