Elephant tattoo across a hand

Her keeper called her Mab. She carried water up from the well in her trunk, and by spring she was lifting dressed stone for the masons mending the chapel wall. Ned, the reeve's youngest, sat with her every evening. He drew her on the flagstones with a burnt stick, long curved lines and quick hatching along her legs, and she stood very still for it, the way she stood for nothing else. When he finished, she curled the tip of her trunk around his fingers and breathed warm air across his palm.

The dry year came in June. The well sank to mud and the masons went home, and one dusk Ned led Mab down to the river, where the old chapel bell lay sunk in the silt. She would not go back up the crag. She waded in, found the bell with the end of her trunk, and lifted it clear, streaming, until it hung swinging over the water. When it rang, the sound rolled up the valley, and the hay carts came down from the high fields, every one of them, following it home.

The travelling man came back for her in October with his whistle and his new boots. Ned walked with them as far as the bridge, carrying the stick. At the first stone of the road he turned his own hand over and drew Mab across the back of it, trunk running down the fingers to the tip, so the road would know him if he ever came back alone. She went away down the valley with the whistle going ahead of her, and Ned kept his hand closed all the way to the reeve's door.