29The First Herd

Every story on this trail is about animals travelling to Waco. This one got here first — by roughly sixty-five thousand years. Stand on the plaza in front of the Mayborn Museum and you're looking at a Columbian mammoth bull, a mother, and her calf, cast in bronze at full life size: the bull alone stands close to fourteen feet at the shoulder, with another eight feet of head, trunk and tusks lifted above that. They aren't invented. Their measurements were taken from real mammoths pulled out of the ground a few miles north of here, at what is now Waco Mammoth National Monument, where a nursery herd died together and stayed together. And they were sculpted by Tom Tischler — the same hands that made the meerkats keeping watch at the zoo gates. The parade is older than it looks.