________________________________________________
_ Toomai of the Elephants
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!
___
End of Toomai of the Elephants [A story from Rudyard Kipling's Jungle Book] _
Read next: Shiv and the Grasshopper
Read previous: Darzee's Chant
Table of content of Jungle Book
GO TO TOP OF SCREEN
Post your review
Your review will be placed after the table of content of this book
