And then comes a rumbling roar that opens the eyes so wide they could well leave their sockets.

What follows is a moment of quietness, of the sort you get when a gun goes off in the dark.

And then Erin Ballagh laughs. ‘‘That’s just Kulab,’’ she says.

‘‘They have all sorts of vocalisations.’’

As if to prove the point, Kulab, still out of sight, lets rip with the familiar trumpeting sound of Tarzan movies.

Soon enough, she wanders along the fence, making no sound at all in the dust with her tree-trunk feet.

Her calf, Ongard, ambles along next to her, mimicking her gait in an exaggerated fashion. They both have their ears lifted up and back.

‘‘She’s been listening to us, checking us out,’’ says Ms Ballagh, who then mutters a few things to the elephant that I can’t decipher.

‘‘She’s happy. You can tell by the softness in her eyes.’’

We’re sitting in a corner of the working area in the elephant compound at Melbourne Zoo. When Ms Ballagh was taken on as a trainee handler four years ago — learning how to read the various signals and behaviours by which elephants communicate— her first 12 months were spent almost exclusively bonding with Kulab.

‘‘They don’t give away their relationships easily,’’ she says.

‘‘They want to know that you deserve to have that relationship — where they look forward to seeing you and accept you as an important part of their social structure.

"They have to know they can depend on you and that you will be able to look after them when times are tough.’’

The extent to which Kulab depends on Ballagh became evident three months ago, when Kulab was in labour with Ongard, the second elephant calf to be born in Melbourne.

The contractions were particularly painful, in part because the animal became stuck in the birth canal.

Ballagh and the other keepers were sleeping on site.

‘‘I remember when I came into the barn, Kulab was moving from side to side, and picking up things and throwing them around,’’ Ms Ballagh says.

‘‘As soon as I put my hand on her and started speaking to her, she became still.

‘‘That was a huge moment for me. It was like she’d been looking for that connection.’’

Ms Ballagh grew up on a dairy farm at Alvie, near Colac. Dairy cattle aren’t exciting, but they are moody, ungainly and more often affectionate rather than cranky.

For a little child, to wander among their passive immensity, will either be frightening or enlivening.

‘‘I was always very comfortable around them,’’ she says.

And there are times, when working with elephants, Ms Ballagh feels a strange sense of nostalgia.

‘‘You’re out in a paddock, hauling bales of hay, cleaning up with a shovel, doing the same sort of physical labour,’’ she says.

Like most people who love working with animals, the desire was there from before she could talk. At 13, with no way to explain it, she decided that zoo life was her destiny.

But landing a job in a zoo isn’t easy. Upon finishing school, Ms Ballagh moved to Melbourne and did a one-year course in animal technology, which gave her husbandry skills, with a focus on livestock.

‘‘It meant I could walk into a job in veterinary nursing or working in the horse industry. To get into a zoo you have to manoeuvre yourself.’’

Ms Ballagh found that Auckland Zoo ran a course in the handling of captive wild animals: it included working one day a week with different species.

Upon completing the course, the zoo offered her a job, initially working with primates.

‘‘They’re a challenge because they’re intelligent and you need to constantly come up with new ways to keep them entertained.’’

Ms Ballagh felt she might dedicate herself to working with native animals in a breeding and release program. It was abandoned once she was offered a trial with the elephants.

‘‘That’s when I caught the elephant bug. I loved that they were so complex. It took a long time to build a rapport,’’ she says.

Time is everything with elephants. D. H. Lawrence articulated this beautifully in his poem, The Elephant is Slow to Mate: ‘‘The elephant, the huge old beast, is slow to mate/ he finds a female, they show no haste they wait/ for the sympathy in their vast shy hearts slowly, slowly to rouse.’’

When Melbourne Zoo offered Ms Ballagh a job in 2006, she had to commit to at least three years.

‘‘Often you hear of elephant handlers staying in the job for 30 years. I have no plans to go anywhere else. There’s still so much to achieve and so much to learn.’’

SUNDAY AGE