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 winds' untainted kiss, the waters' 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; and 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 placed called Ali Musjid, ten years later; and
afterward had been sent down thousands of miles south to haul and
pile big baulks of teak in the timber-yards at Moulmein. There he
had half killed an insubordinate young elephant who was shirking
his fair share of the 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. 'Mail, mail, 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 than 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 elephants' 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 from 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 moult 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 moustache,
'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 under
ground.
'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 who 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 behaviour. 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. Any one 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 plains-man who lives in a hut knows only the four
walls of his hut. Well, leave thy elephants unshackled to-night
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 burst. 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 honour 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.
'Look 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-boar 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-one rush. The huge limbs moved
as steadily as piston 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 ploughed 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
up stream 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 to-night. 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
centre 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 count only 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
torch-light 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 fore foot
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 fibres, and the fibres
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,
the elephants who had been double-chained that night, began to
trumpet, and Pudmini, mired to the shoulders, with Kala Nag, very
foot-sore, 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--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 off that tree! Yes; she was
there too.'
They looked at each other, 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 hot-foot 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 camp-fires 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
favour 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, that 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 honour, 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!
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