He wants to be an elephant keeper “forever,” Wylie said. The boy might not know exactly what that means, his father said, but he knows he wants to be working with elephants for life.

He becomes an "elephant's child", learning how to survive under Oona's guidance. When he becomes separated from Oona, Will lives for a time with a group of infant orang-utans whose parents have ...

A similar capacity for reimagining animates THE BOY AND THE ELEPHANT (Random House Studio, 38 pp., $19.99, ages 4 to 8), a wordless picture book by the Australian illustrator Freya Blackwood.

In Nast’s donkey-in-lion’s-clothing cartoon, the elephant –representing the Republican vote– was running scared toward a pit of chaos and inflation.