I will remember what
I was, I am sick of rope and chain
I
will remember my old strength and all my forest affairs.
I will not sell my back
to man for a bundle of sugar-cane:
I
will go out to my own kind, and the wood-folk in their
lairs.
I will go out until
the day, until the morning break
Out
to the wind’s untainted kiss, the water’s
clean caress;
I will forget my ankle-ring
and snap my picket stake.
I
will revisit my lost loves, and playmates masterless!
Kala Nag, which means Black Snake,
had served the Indian Government in every way that
an elephant could serve it for forty-seven years, and
as he was fully twenty years old when he was caught,
that makes him nearly seventy a ripe age
for an elephant. He remembered pushing, with a
big leather pad on his forehead, at a gun stuck in
deep mud, and that was before the Afghan War of 1842,
and he had not then come to his full strength.
His mother Radha Pyari, Radha
the darling, who had been caught in the
same drive with Kala Nag, told him, before his little
milk tusks had dropped out, that elephants who were
afraid always got hurt. Kala Nag knew that that
advice was good, for the first time that he saw a shell
burst he backed, screaming, into a stand of piled rifles,
and the bayonets pricked him in all his softest places.
So, before he was twenty-five, he gave up being afraid,
and so he was the best-loved and the best-looked-after
elephant in the service of the Government of India.
He had carried tents, twelve hundred pounds’
weight of tents, on the march in Upper India.
He had been hoisted into a ship at the end of a steam
crane and taken for days across the water, and made
to carry a mortar on his back in a strange and rocky
country very far from India, and had seen the Emperor
Theodore lying dead in Magdala, and had come back
again in the steamer entitled, so the soldiers said,
to the Abyssinian War medal. He had seen his
fellow elephants die of cold and epilepsy and starvation
and sunstroke up at a place called Ali Musjid, ten
years later; and afterward he had been sent down thousands
of miles south to haul and pile big balks of teak
in the timberyards at Moulmein. There he had
half killed an insubordinate young elephant who was
shirking his fair share of work.
After that he was taken off timber-hauling,
and employed, with a few score other elephants who
were trained to the business, in helping to catch
wild elephants among the Garo hills. Elephants
are very strictly preserved by the Indian Government.
There is one whole department which does nothing else
but hunt them, and catch them, and break them in, and
send them up and down the country as they are needed
for work.
Kala Nag stood ten fair feet at the
shoulders, and his tusks had been cut off short at
five feet, and bound round the ends, to prevent them
splitting, with bands of copper; but he could do more
with those stumps than any untrained elephant could
do with the real sharpened ones. When, after
weeks and weeks of cautious driving of scattered elephants
across the hills, the forty or fifty wild monsters
were driven into the last stockade, and the big drop
gate, made of tree trunks lashed together, jarred
down behind them, Kala Nag, at the word of command,
would go into that flaring, trumpeting pandemonium
(generally at night, when the flicker of the torches
made it difficult to judge distances), and, picking
out the biggest and wildest tusker of the mob, would
hammer him and hustle him into quiet while the men
on the backs of the other elephants roped and tied
the smaller ones.
There was nothing in the way of fighting
that Kala Nag, the old wise Black Snake, did not know,
for he had stood up more than once in his time to
the charge of the wounded tiger, and, curling up his
soft trunk to be out of harm’s way, had knocked
the springing brute sideways in mid-air with a quick
sickle cut of his head, that he had invented all by
himself; had knocked him over, and kneeled upon him
with his huge knees till the life went out with a
gasp and a howl, and there was only a fluffy striped
thing on the ground for Kala Nag to pull by the tail.
“Yes,” said Big Toomai,
his driver, the son of Black Toomai who had taken
him to Abyssinia, and grandson of Toomai of the Elephants
who had seen him caught, “there is nothing that
the Black Snake fears except me. He has seen
three generations of us feed him and groom him, and
he will live to see four.”
“He is afraid of me also,”
said Little Toomai, standing up to his full height
of four feet, with only one rag upon him. He was
ten years old, the eldest son of Big Toomai, and,
according to custom, he would take his father’s
place on Kala Nag’s neck when he grew up, and
would handle the heavy iron ankus, the elephant goad,
that had been worn smooth by his father, and his grandfather,
and his great-grandfather.
He knew what he was talking of; for
he had been born under Kala Nag’s shadow, had
played with the end of his trunk before he could walk,
had taken him down to water as soon as he could walk,
and Kala Nag would no more have dreamed of disobeying
his shrill little orders than he would have dreamed
of killing him on that day when Big Toomai carried
the little brown baby under Kala Nag’s tusks,
and told him to salute his master that was to be.
“Yes,” said Little Toomai,
“he is afraid of me,” and he took long
strides up to Kala Nag, called him a fat old pig, and
made him lift up his feet one after the other.
“Wah!” said Little Toomai,
“thou art a big elephant,” and he wagged
his fluffy head, quoting his father. “The
Government may pay for elephants, but they belong
to us mahouts. When thou art old, Kala Nag, there
will come some rich rajah, and he will buy thee from
the Government, on account of thy size and thy manners,
and then thou wilt have nothing to do but to carry
gold earrings in thy ears, and a gold howdah on thy
back, and a red cloth covered with gold on thy sides,
and walk at the head of the processions of the King.
Then I shall sit on thy neck, O Kala Nag, with a silver
ankus, and men will run before us with golden sticks,
crying, `Room for the King’s elephant!’
That will be good, Kala Nag, but not so good as this
hunting in the jungles.”
“Umph!” said Big Toomai.
“Thou art a boy, and as wild as a buffalo-calf.
This running up and down among the hills is not the
best Government service. I am getting old, and
I do not love wild elephants. Give me brick elephant
lines, one stall to each elephant, and big stumps to
tie them to safely, and flat, broad roads to exercise
upon, instead of this come-and-go camping. Aha,
the Cawnpore barracks were good. There was a
bazaar close by, and only three hours’ work a
day.”
Little Toomai remembered the Cawnpore
elephant-lines and said nothing. He very much
preferred the camp life, and hated those broad, flat
roads, with the daily grubbing for grass in the forage
reserve, and the long hours when there was nothing
to do except to watch Kala Nag fidgeting in his pickets.
What Little Toomai liked was to scramble
up bridle paths that only an elephant could take;
the dip into the valley below; the glimpses of the
wild elephants browsing miles away; the rush of the
frightened pig and peacock under Kala Nag’s
feet; the blinding warm rains, when all the hills
and valleys smoked; the beautiful misty mornings when
nobody knew where they would camp that night; the
steady, cautious drive of the wild elephants, and
the mad rush and blaze and hullabaloo of the last night’s
drive, when the elephants poured into the stockade
like boulders in a landslide, found that they could
not get out, and flung themselves at the heavy posts
only to be driven back by yells and flaring torches
and volleys of blank cartridge.
Even a little boy could be of use
there, and Toomai was as useful as three boys.
He would get his torch and wave it, and yell with the
best. But the really good time came when the driving
out began, and the Keddah that is, the
stockade looked like a picture of the end
of the world, and men had to make signs to one another,
because they could not hear themselves speak.
Then Little Toomai would climb up to the top of one
of the quivering stockade posts, his sun-bleached brown
hair flying loose all over his shoulders, and he looking
like a goblin in the torch-light. And as soon
as there was a lull you could hear his high-pitched
yells of encouragement to Kala Nag, above the trumpeting
and crashing, and snapping of ropes, and groans of
the tethered elephants. “Mael, mael, Kala
Nag! (Go on, go on, Black Snake!) Dant do! (Give
him the tusk!) Somalo! Somalo! (Careful, careful!)
Maro! Mar! (Hit him, hit him!) Mind the post!
Arre! Arre! Hai! Yai! Kya-a-ah!”
he would shout, and the big fight between Kala Nag
and the wild elephant would sway to and fro across
the Keddah, and the old elephant catchers would wipe
the sweat out of their eyes, and find time to nod to
Little Toomai wriggling with joy on the top of the
posts.
He did more than wriggle. One
night he slid down from the post and slipped in between
the elephants and threw up the loose end of a rope,
which had dropped, to a driver who was trying to get
a purchase on the leg of a kicking young calf (calves
always give more trouble than full-grown animals).
Kala Nag saw him, caught him in his trunk, and handed
him up to Big Toomai, who slapped him then and there,
and put him back on the post.
Next morning he gave him a scolding
and said, “Are not good brick elephant lines
and a little tent carrying enough, that thou must needs
go elephant catching on thy own account, little worthless?
Now those foolish hunters, whose pay is less than
my pay, have spoken to Petersen Sahib of the matter.”
Little Toomai was frightened. He did not know
much of white men, but Petersen Sahib was the greatest
white man in the world to him. He was the head
of all the Keddah operations the man who
caught all the elephants for the Government of India,
and who knew more about the ways of elephants than
any living man.
“What what will happen?” said
Little Toomai.
“Happen! The worst that
can happen. Petersen Sahib is a madman. Else
why should he go hunting these wild devils? He
may even require thee to be an elephant catcher, to
sleep anywhere in these fever-filled jungles, and
at last to be trampled to death in the Keddah.
It is well that this nonsense ends safely. Next
week the catching is over, and we of the plains are
sent back to our stations. Then we will march
on smooth roads, and forget all this hunting.
But, son, I am angry that thou shouldst meddle in
the business that belongs to these dirty Assamese
jungle folk. Kala Nag will obey none but me, so
I must go with him into the Keddah, but he is only
a fighting elephant, and he does not help to rope
them. So I sit at my ease, as befits a mahout, not
a mere hunter, a mahout, I say, and a man
who gets a pension at the end of his service.
Is the family of Toomai of the Elephants to be trodden
underfoot in the dirt of a Keddah? Bad one!
Wicked one! Worthless son! Go and wash Kala
Nag and attend to his ears, and see that there are
no thorns in his feet. Or else Petersen Sahib
will surely catch thee and make thee a wild hunter a
follower of elephant’s foot tracks, a jungle
bear. Bah! Shame! Go!”
Little Toomai went off without saying
a word, but he told Kala Nag all his grievances while
he was examining his feet. “No matter,”
said Little Toomai, turning up the fringe of Kala
Nag’s huge right ear. “They have
said my name to Petersen Sahib, and perhaps and
perhaps and perhaps who knows?
Hai! That is a big thorn that I have pulled out!”
The next few days were spent in getting
the elephants together, in walking the newly caught
wild elephants up and down between a couple of tame
ones to prevent them giving too much trouble on the
downward march to the plains, and in taking stock
of the blankets and ropes and things that had been
worn out or lost in the forest.
Petersen Sahib came in on his clever
she-elephant Pudmini; he had been paying off other
camps among the hills, for the season was coming to
an end, and there was a native clerk sitting at a
table under a tree, to pay the drivers their wages.
As each man was paid he went back to his elephant,
and joined the line that stood ready to start.
The catchers, and hunters, and beaters, the men of
the regular Keddah, who stayed in the jungle year
in and year out, sat on the backs of the elephants
that belonged to Petersen Sahib’s permanent
force, or leaned against the trees with their guns
across their arms, and made fun of the drivers who
were going away, and laughed when the newly caught
elephants broke the line and ran about.
Big Toomai went up to the clerk with
Little Toomai behind him, and Machua Appa, the head
tracker, said in an undertone to a friend of his,
“There goes one piece of good elephant stuff
at least. ’Tis a pity to send that young
jungle-cock to molt in the plains.”
Now Petersen Sahib had ears all over
him, as a man must have who listens to the most silent
of all living things the wild elephant.
He turned where he was lying all along on Pudmini’s
back and said, “What is that? I did not
know of a man among the plains-drivers who had wit
enough to rope even a dead elephant.”
“This is not a man, but a boy.
He went into the Keddah at the last drive, and threw
Barmao there the rope, when we were trying to get that
young calf with the blotch on his shoulder away from
his mother.”
Machua Appa pointed at Little Toomai,
and Petersen Sahib looked, and Little Toomai bowed
to the earth.
“He throw a rope? He is
smaller than a picket-pin. Little one, what is
thy name?” said Petersen Sahib.
Little Toomai was too frightened to
speak, but Kala Nag was behind him, and Toomai made
a sign with his hand, and the elephant caught him up
in his trunk and held him level with Pudmini’s
forehead, in front of the great Petersen Sahib.
Then Little Toomai covered his face with his hands,
for he was only a child, and except where elephants
were concerned, he was just as bashful as a child
could be.
“Oho!” said Petersen Sahib,
smiling underneath his mustache, “and why didst
thou teach thy elephant that trick? Was it to
help thee steal green corn from the roofs of the houses
when the ears are put out to dry?”
“Not green corn, Protector of
the Poor, melons,” said Little Toomai,
and all the men sitting about broke into a roar of
laughter. Most of them had taught their elephants
that trick when they were boys. Little Toomai
was hanging eight feet up in the air, and he wished
very much that he were eight feet underground.
“He is Toomai, my son, Sahib,”
said Big Toomai, scowling. “He is a very
bad boy, and he will end in a jail, Sahib.”
“Of that I have my doubts,”
said Petersen Sahib. “A boy who can face
a full Keddah at his age does not end in jails.
See, little one, here are four annas to spend in sweetmeats
because thou hast a little head under that great thatch
of hair. In time thou mayest become a hunter too.”
Big Toomai scowled more than ever. “Remember,
though, that Keddahs are not good for children to
play in,” Petersen Sahib went on.
“Must I never go there, Sahib?”
asked Little Toomai with a big gasp.
“Yes.” Petersen Sahib
smiled again. “When thou hast seen the elephants
dance. That is the proper time. Come to me
when thou hast seen the elephants dance, and then
I will let thee go into all the Keddahs.”
There was another roar of laughter,
for that is an old joke among elephant-catchers, and
it means just never. There are great cleared flat
places hidden away in the forests that are called elephants’
ball-rooms, but even these are only found by accident,
and no man has ever seen the elephants dance.
When a driver boasts of his skill and bravery the other
drivers say, “And when didst thou see the elephants
dance?”
Kala Nag put Little Toomai down, and
he bowed to the earth again and went away with his
father, and gave the silver four-anna piece to his
mother, who was nursing his baby brother, and they
all were put up on Kala Nag’s back, and the
line of grunting, squealing elephants rolled down
the hill path to the plains. It was a very lively
march on account of the new elephants, who gave trouble
at every ford, and needed coaxing or beating every
other minute.
Big Toomai prodded Kala Nag spitefully,
for he was very angry, but Little Toomai was too happy
to speak. Petersen Sahib had noticed him, and
given him money, so he felt as a private soldier would
feel if he had been called out of the ranks and praised
by his commander-in-chief.
“What did Petersen Sahib mean
by the elephant dance?” he said, at last, softly
to his mother.
Big Toomai heard him and grunted.
“That thou shouldst never be one of these hill
buffaloes of trackers. That was what he meant.
Oh, you in front, what is blocking the way?”
An Assamese driver, two or three elephants
ahead, turned round angrily, crying: “Bring
up Kala Nag, and knock this youngster of mine into
good behavior. Why should Petersen Sahib have
chosen me to go down with you donkeys of the rice
fields? Lay your beast alongside, Toomai, and
let him prod with his tusks. By all the Gods of
the Hills, these new elephants are possessed, or else
they can smell their companions in the jungle.”
Kala Nag hit the new elephant in the ribs and knocked
the wind out of him, as Big Toomai said, “We
have swept the hills of wild elephants at the last
catch. It is only your carelessness in driving.
Must I keep order along the whole line?”
“Hear him!” said the other
driver. “We have swept the hills! Ho!
Ho! You are very wise, you plains people.
Anyone but a mud-head who never saw the jungle would
know that they know that the drives are ended for the
season. Therefore all the wild elephants to-night
will but why should I waste wisdom on a
river-turtle?”
“What will they do?” Little Toomai called
out.
“Ohe, little one. Art thou
there? Well, I will tell thee, for thou hast
a cool head. They will dance, and it behooves
thy father, who has swept all the hills of all the
elephants, to double-chain his pickets to-night.”
“What talk is this?” said
Big Toomai. “For forty years, father and
son, we have tended elephants, and we have never heard
such moonshine about dances.”
“Yes; but a plainsman who lives
in a hut knows only the four walls of his hut.
Well, leave thy elephants unshackled tonight and see
what comes. As for their dancing, I have seen
the place where Bapree-bap! How many
windings has the Dihang River? Here is another
ford, and we must swim the calves. Stop still,
you behind there.”
And in this way, talking and wrangling
and splashing through the rivers, they made their
first march to a sort of receiving camp for the new
elephants. But they lost their tempers long before
they got there.
Then the elephants were chained by
their hind legs to their big stumps of pickets, and
extra ropes were fitted to the new elephants, and the
fodder was piled before them, and the hill drivers
went back to Petersen Sahib through the afternoon
light, telling the plains drivers to be extra careful
that night, and laughing when the plains drivers asked
the reason.
Little Toomai attended to Kala Nag’s
supper, and as evening fell, wandered through the
camp, unspeakably happy, in search of a tom-tom.
When an Indian child’s heart is full, he does
not run about and make a noise in an irregular fashion.
He sits down to a sort of revel all by himself.
And Little Toomai had been spoken to by Petersen Sahib!
If he had not found what he wanted, I believe he would
have been ill. But the sweetmeat seller in the
camp lent him a little tom-tom a drum beaten
with the flat of the hand and he sat down,
cross-legged, before Kala Nag as the stars began to
come out, the tom-tom in his lap, and he thumped and
he thumped and he thumped, and the more he thought
of the great honor that had been done to him, the
more he thumped, all alone among the elephant fodder.
There was no tune and no words, but the thumping made
him happy.
The new elephants strained at their
ropes, and squealed and trumpeted from time to time,
and he could hear his mother in the camp hut putting
his small brother to sleep with an old, old song about
the great God Shiv, who once told all the animals
what they should eat. It is a very soothing lullaby,
and the first verse says:
Shiv, who poured the
harvest and made the winds to blow,
Sitting at the doorways
of a day of long ago,
Gave to each his portion,
food and toil and fate,
From the King upon the
guddee to the Beggar at the gate.
All
things made he Shiva the Preserver.
Mahadeo! Mahadeo!
He made all
Thorn for the camel,
fodder for the kine,
And mother’s heart
for sleepy head, O little son of mine!
Little Toomai came in with a joyous
tunk-a-tunk at the end of each verse, till he felt
sleepy and stretched himself on the fodder at Kala
Nag’s side. At last the elephants began
to lie down one after another as is their custom,
till only Kala Nag at the right of the line was left
standing up; and he rocked slowly from side to side,
his ears put forward to listen to the night wind as
it blew very slowly across the hills. The air
was full of all the night noises that, taken together,
make one big silence the click of one bamboo
stem against the other, the rustle of something alive
in the undergrowth, the scratch and squawk of a half-waked
bird (birds are awake in the night much more often
than we imagine), and the fall of water ever so far
away. Little Toomai slept for some time, and
when he waked it was brilliant moonlight, and Kala
Nag was still standing up with his ears cocked.
Little Toomai turned, rustling in the fodder, and
watched the curve of his big back against half the
stars in heaven, and while he watched he heard, so
far away that it sounded no more than a pinhole of
noise pricked through the stillness, the “hoot-toot”
of a wild elephant.
All the elephants in the lines jumped
up as if they had been shot, and their grunts at last
waked the sleeping mahouts, and they came out and
drove in the picket pegs with big mallets, and tightened
this rope and knotted that till all was quiet.
One new elephant had nearly grubbed up his picket,
and Big Toomai took off Kala Nag’s leg chain
and shackled that elephant fore-foot to hind-foot,
but slipped a loop of grass string round Kala Nag’s
leg, and told him to remember that he was tied fast.
He knew that he and his father and his grandfather
had done the very same thing hundreds of times before.
Kala Nag did not answer to the order by gurgling,
as he usually did. He stood still, looking out
across the moonlight, his head a little raised and
his ears spread like fans, up to the great folds of
the Garo hills.
“Tend to him if he grows restless
in the night,” said Big Toomai to Little Toomai,
and he went into the hut and slept. Little Toomai
was just going to sleep, too, when he heard the coir
string snap with a little “tang,” and
Kala Nag rolled out of his pickets as slowly and as
silently as a cloud rolls out of the mouth of a valley.
Little Toomai pattered after him, barefooted, down
the road in the moonlight, calling under his breath,
“Kala Nag! Kala Nag! Take me with you,
O Kala Nag!” The elephant turned, without a
sound, took three strides back to the boy in the moonlight,
put down his trunk, swung him up to his neck, and
almost before Little Toomai had settled his knees,
slipped into the forest.
There was one blast of furious trumpeting
from the lines, and then the silence shut down on
everything, and Kala Nag began to move. Sometimes
a tuft of high grass washed along his sides as a wave
washes along the sides of a ship, and sometimes a
cluster of wild-pepper vines would scrape along his
back, or a bamboo would creak where his shoulder touched
it. But between those times he moved absolutely
without any sound, drifting through the thick Garo
forest as though it had been smoke. He was going
uphill, but though Little Toomai watched the stars
in the rifts of the trees, he could not tell in
what direction.
Then Kala Nag reached the crest of
the ascent and stopped for a minute, and Little Toomai
could see the tops of the trees lying all speckled
and furry under the moonlight for miles and miles,
and the blue-white mist over the river in the hollow.
Toomai leaned forward and looked, and he felt that
the forest was awake below him awake and
alive and crowded. A big brown fruit-eating bat
brushed past his ear; a porcupine’s quills rattled
in the thicket; and in the darkness between the tree
stems he heard a hog-bear digging hard in the moist
warm earth, and snuffing as it digged.
Then the branches closed over his
head again, and Kala Nag began to go down into the
valley not quietly this time, but as a runaway
gun goes down a steep bank in one rush.
The huge limbs moved as steadily as pistons, eight
feet to each stride, and the wrinkled skin of the elbow
points rustled. The undergrowth on either side
of him ripped with a noise like torn canvas, and the
saplings that he heaved away right and left with his
shoulders sprang back again and banged him on the flank,
and great trails of creepers, all matted together,
hung from his tusks as he threw his head from side
to side and plowed out his pathway. Then Little
Toomai laid himself down close to the great neck lest
a swinging bough should sweep him to the ground, and
he wished that he were back in the lines again.
The grass began to get squashy, and
Kala Nag’s feet sucked and squelched as he put
them down, and the night mist at the bottom of the
valley chilled Little Toomai. There was a splash
and a trample, and the rush of running water, and
Kala Nag strode through the bed of a river, feeling
his way at each step. Above the noise of the water,
as it swirled round the elephant’s legs, Little
Toomai could hear more splashing and some trumpeting
both upstream and down great grunts and
angry snortings, and all the mist about him seemed
to be full of rolling, wavy shadows.
“Ai!” he said, half aloud,
his teeth chattering. “The elephant-folk
are out tonight. It is the dance, then!”
Kala Nag swashed out of the water,
blew his trunk clear, and began another climb.
But this time he was not alone, and he had not to make
his path. That was made already, six feet wide,
in front of him, where the bent jungle-grass was trying
to recover itself and stand up. Many elephants
must have gone that way only a few minutes before.
Little Toomai looked back, and behind him a great
wild tusker with his little pig’s eyes glowing
like hot coals was just lifting himself out of the
misty river. Then the trees closed up again, and
they went on and up, with trumpetings and crashings,
and the sound of breaking branches on every side of
them.
At last Kala Nag stood still between
two tree-trunks at the very top of the hill.
They were part of a circle of trees that grew round
an irregular space of some three or four acres, and
in all that space, as Little Toomai could see, the
ground had been trampled down as hard as a brick floor.
Some trees grew in the center of the clearing, but
their bark was rubbed away, and the white wood beneath
showed all shiny and polished in the patches of moonlight.
There were creepers hanging from the upper branches,
and the bells of the flowers of the creepers, great
waxy white things like convolvuluses, hung down fast
asleep. But within the limits of the clearing
there was not a single blade of green nothing
but the trampled earth.
The moonlight showed it all iron gray,
except where some elephants stood upon it, and their
shadows were inky black. Little Toomai looked,
holding his breath, with his eyes starting out of his
head, and as he looked, more and more and more elephants
swung out into the open from between the tree trunks.
Little Toomai could only count up to ten, and he counted
again and again on his fingers till he lost count of
the tens, and his head began to swim. Outside
the clearing he could hear them crashing in the undergrowth
as they worked their way up the hillside, but as soon
as they were within the circle of the tree trunks
they moved like ghosts.
There were white-tusked wild males,
with fallen leaves and nuts and twigs lying in the
wrinkles of their necks and the folds of their ears;
fat, slow-footed she-elephants, with restless, little
pinky black calves only three or four feet high running
under their stomachs; young elephants with their tusks
just beginning to show, and very proud of them; lanky,
scraggy old-maid elephants, with their hollow anxious
faces, and trunks like rough bark; savage old bull
elephants, scarred from shoulder to flank with great
weals and cuts of bygone fights, and the caked dirt
of their solitary mud baths dropping from their shoulders;
and there was one with a broken tusk and the marks
of the full-stroke, the terrible drawing scrape, of
a tiger’s claws on his side.
They were standing head to head, or
walking to and fro across the ground in couples, or
rocking and swaying all by themselves scores
and scores of elephants.
Toomai knew that so long as he lay
still on Kala Nag’s neck nothing would happen
to him, for even in the rush and scramble of a Keddah
drive a wild elephant does not reach up with his trunk
and drag a man off the neck of a tame elephant.
And these elephants were not thinking of men that
night. Once they started and put their ears forward
when they heard the chinking of a leg iron in the
forest, but it was Pudmini, Petersen Sahib’s
pet elephant, her chain snapped short off, grunting,
snuffling up the hillside. She must have broken
her pickets and come straight from Petersen Sahib’s
camp; and Little Toomai saw another elephant, one that
he did not know, with deep rope galls on his back and
breast. He, too, must have run away from some
camp in the hills about.
At last there was no sound of any
more elephants moving in the forest, and Kala Nag
rolled out from his station between the trees and went
into the middle of the crowd, clucking and gurgling,
and all the elephants began to talk in their own tongue,
and to move about.
Still lying down, Little Toomai looked
down upon scores and scores of broad backs, and wagging
ears, and tossing trunks, and little rolling eyes.
He heard the click of tusks as they crossed other tusks
by accident, and the dry rustle of trunks twined together,
and the chafing of enormous sides and shoulders in
the crowd, and the incessant flick and hissh of the
great tails. Then a cloud came over the moon,
and he sat in black darkness. But the quiet,
steady hustling and pushing and gurgling went on just
the same. He knew that there were elephants all
round Kala Nag, and that there was no chance of backing
him out of the assembly; so he set his teeth and shivered.
In a Keddah at least there was torchlight and shouting,
but here he was all alone in the dark, and once a
trunk came up and touched him on the knee.
Then an elephant trumpeted, and they
all took it up for five or ten terrible seconds.
The dew from the trees above spattered down like rain
on the unseen backs, and a dull booming noise began,
not very loud at first, and Little Toomai could not
tell what it was. But it grew and grew, and Kala
Nag lifted up one forefoot and then the other, and
brought them down on the ground one-two,
one-two, as steadily as trip-hammers. The elephants
were stamping all together now, and it sounded like
a war drum beaten at the mouth of a cave. The
dew fell from the trees till there was no more left
to fall, and the booming went on, and the ground rocked
and shivered, and Little Toomai put his hands up to
his ears to shut out the sound. But it was all
one gigantic jar that ran through him this
stamp of hundreds of heavy feet on the raw earth.
Once or twice he could feel Kala Nag and all the others
surge forward a few strides, and the thumping would
change to the crushing sound of juicy green things
being bruised, but in a minute or two the boom of
feet on hard earth began again. A tree was creaking
and groaning somewhere near him. He put out his
arm and felt the bark, but Kala Nag moved forward,
still tramping, and he could not tell where he was
in the clearing. There was no sound from the
elephants, except once, when two or three little calves
squeaked together. Then he heard a thump and a
shuffle, and the booming went on. It must have
lasted fully two hours, and Little Toomai ached in
every nerve, but he knew by the smell of the night
air that the dawn was coming.
The morning broke in one sheet of
pale yellow behind the green hills, and the booming
stopped with the first ray, as though the light had
been an order. Before Little Toomai had got the
ringing out of his head, before even he had shifted
his position, there was not an elephant in sight except
Kala Nag, Pudmini, and the elephant with the rope-galls,
and there was neither sign nor rustle nor whisper down
the hillsides to show where the others had gone.
Little Toomai stared again and again.
The clearing, as he remembered it, had grown in the
night. More trees stood in the middle of it, but
the undergrowth and the jungle grass at the sides
had been rolled back. Little Toomai stared once
more. Now he understood the trampling. The
elephants had stamped out more room had
stamped the thick grass and juicy cane to trash, the
trash into slivers, the slivers into tiny fibers,
and the fibers into hard earth.
“Wah!” said Little Toomai,
and his eyes were very heavy. “Kala Nag,
my lord, let us keep by Pudmini and go to Petersen
Sahib’s camp, or I shall drop from thy neck.”
The third elephant watched the two
go away, snorted, wheeled round, and took his own
path. He may have belonged to some little native
king’s establishment, fifty or sixty or a hundred
miles away.
Two hours later, as Petersen Sahib
was eating early breakfast, his elephants, who had
been double chained that night, began to trumpet, and
Pudmini, mired to the shoulders, with Kala Nag, very
footsore, shambled into the camp. Little Toomai’s
face was gray and pinched, and his hair was full of
leaves and drenched with dew, but he tried to salute
Petersen Sahib, and cried faintly: “The
dance the elephant dance! I have seen
it, and I die!” As Kala Nag sat down,
he slid off his neck in a dead faint.
But, since native children have no
nerves worth speaking of, in two hours he was lying
very contentedly in Petersen Sahib’s hammock
with Petersen Sahib’s shooting-coat under his
head, and a glass of warm milk, a little brandy, with
a dash of quinine, inside of him, and while the old
hairy, scarred hunters of the jungles sat three deep
before him, looking at him as though he were a spirit,
he told his tale in short words, as a child will,
and wound up with:
“Now, if I lie in one word,
send men to see, and they will find that the elephant
folk have trampled down more room in their dance-room,
and they will find ten and ten, and many times ten,
tracks leading to that dance-room. They made
more room with their feet. I have seen it.
Kala Nag took me, and I saw. Also Kala Nag is
very leg-weary!”
Little Toomai lay back and slept all
through the long afternoon and into the twilight,
and while he slept Petersen Sahib and Machua Appa followed
the track of the two elephants for fifteen miles across
the hills. Petersen Sahib had spent eighteen
years in catching elephants, and he had only once
before found such a dance-place. Machua Appa had
no need to look twice at the clearing to see what
had been done there, or to scratch with his toe in
the packed, rammed earth.
“The child speaks truth,”
said he. “All this was done last night,
and I have counted seventy tracks crossing the river.
See, Sahib, where Pudmini’s leg-iron cut the
bark of that tree! Yes; she was there too.”
They looked at one another and up
and down, and they wondered. For the ways of
elephants are beyond the wit of any man, black or white,
to fathom.
“Forty years and five,”
said Machua Appa, “have I followed my lord, the
elephant, but never have I heard that any child of
man had seen what this child has seen. By all
the Gods of the Hills, it is what can we
say?” and he shook his head.
When they got back to camp it was
time for the evening meal. Petersen Sahib ate
alone in his tent, but he gave orders that the camp
should have two sheep and some fowls, as well as a
double ration of flour and rice and salt, for he knew
that there would be a feast.
Big Toomai had come up hotfoot from
the camp in the plains to search for his son and his
elephant, and now that he had found them he looked
at them as though he were afraid of them both.
And there was a feast by the blazing campfires in
front of the lines of picketed elephants, and Little
Toomai was the hero of it all. And the big brown
elephant catchers, the trackers and drivers and ropers,
and the men who know all the secrets of breaking the
wildest elephants, passed him from one to the other,
and they marked his forehead with blood from the breast
of a newly killed jungle-cock, to show that he was
a forester, initiated and free of all the jungles.
And at last, when the flames died
down, and the red light of the logs made the elephants
look as though they had been dipped in blood too,
Machua Appa, the head of all the drivers of all the
Keddahs Machua Appa, Petersen Sahib’s
other self, who had never seen a made road in forty
years: Machua Appa, who was so great that he had
no other name than Machua Appa, leaped
to his feet, with Little Toomai held high in the air
above his head, and shouted: “Listen, my
brothers. Listen, too, you my lords in the lines
there, for I, Machua Appa, am speaking! This
little one shall no more be called Little Toomai, but
Toomai of the Elephants, as his great-grandfather
was called before him. What never man has seen
he has seen through the long night, and the favor of
the elephant-folk and of the Gods of the Jungles is
with him. He shall become a great tracker.
He shall become greater than I, even I, Machua Appa!
He shall follow the new trail, and the stale trail,
and the mixed trail, with a clear eye! He shall
take no harm in the Keddah when he runs under their
bellies to rope the wild tuskers; and if he slips
before the feet of the charging bull elephant, the
bull elephant shall know who he is and shall not crush
him. Aihai! my lords in the chains,” he
whirled up the line of pickets “here
is the little one that has seen your dances in your
hidden places, the sight that never man
saw! Give him honor, my lords! Salaam karo,
my children. Make your salute to Toomai of the
Elephants! Gunga Pershad, ahaa! Hira Guj,
Birchi Guj, Kuttar Guj, ahaa! Pudmini, thou
hast seen him at the dance, and thou too, Kala Nag,
my pearl among elephants! ahaa! Together!
To Toomai of the Elephants. Barrao!”
And at that last wild yell the whole
line flung up their trunks till the tips touched their
foreheads, and broke out into the full salute the
crashing trumpet-peal that only the Viceroy of India
hears, the Salaamut of the Keddah.
But it was all for the sake of Little
Toomai, who had seen what never man had seen before the
dance of the elephants at night and alone in the heart
of the Garo hills!