What her own mother called her, how she caressed her and adored her, how she ached and trumpeted when her child was corralled and shipped across two oceans, we can never know. What we do know is that the life for which Mysore was destined was the life of a circus elephant: the trains and trailers, the spotlights and music, the head stands and hind legs, the awe and laughter, the sharp-pointed bullhooks used in training and the brave little children daring to draw near to the closest creature that we have to a breathing mastodon. For Mysore, who may have travelled more miles by road and rail than any living person, that life is over; her masters retired her last year. On this day—like every other day—she stands at the distant corner of a barren corral on a parcel of scrubland in the centre of Florida and waits until a keeper arrives with loaves of soft bread to be stuffed, a few slices at a time, into her automatic maw. When the bread runs out, so does Mysore, or rather she wheels and sifts away, seemingly content to pass the hours lost in thought, perhaps singing to herself, as Rudyard Kipling wrote. On May 1, in Providence, R.I., and on the same night in Wilkes-Barre, Penn., a dozen of Mysore’s sisters in showbiz and shackles will take their final bows and shed their caparisons as the epoch of the circus elephant draws closer to a close. On that date, the two travelling troupes of the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus—“The Greatest Show on Earth”—will withdraw all of their pachyderms from public performance after nearly a century and a half, and they will truck them, one last time, down to Polk County, Fla. Here, they will spend the rest of their days lolling, dust-bathing and munching hay in what suffices for “freedom” in a ravaged world that never again will be safe for any large, rare, beautiful thing.