KARI AND THE QUICK-SAND
Though elephants are very unselfish animals, they behave like
human beings when brought to the last extremity. The following
adventure will show you what I mean.
One day, Kari and Kopee and I went to the river bank to help pull
a big barge up the river. The towmen could not pull the ropes
hard enough to make progress against the current. All that they
could do was to stand still without getting ahead at all. So word
was sent on to us and we three went to help out. I harnessed Kari
with the tow rope. It was very amusing, as he had never pulled a
weight in his life. At first he pulled very hard. The rope almost
broke and the barge swayed in the water, almost toppled, and
then drifted to its previous position. The swift current was
going against it and the people in the barge were shaking their
hands and swearing at us as they were afraid that the vessel
would capsize.
Kari did not care. After he had pulled the barge about two
hundred yards he stopped; the rope slackened and then the current
pulled against us. The rope became taut again and the men
shrieked from the barge. When you tug a boat, you must not jerk
at the rope but pull it gently, so I urged Kari to pull it
smoothly. In the course of an hour, he had actually drawn the
boat in, and at the end of our journey he had learned to pull
evenly.
After that we went on playing on the river bank. Kopee jumped off
the elephant's back and ran along the shore. I urged Kari to
follow him, and as we kept on going, I lost all sense of
direction and trusted to the intelligence of the animals. The
monkey, however, had led us into a trap. We had run into
quick-sand and Kari began to sink. Every time he tried to lift
his feet he seemed to go deeper into the mud and he was so
frightened that he tried to take hold of the monkey with his
trunk and step on him as something solid, but Kopee chattered and
rushed up a tree.
Then Kari swung his trunk around, pulled down the mattress from
his back, and putting it on the ground tried to step on it. That
did not help, so he curled up his trunk behind to try to get me
to step on. Each time he made an effort like that, however, he
sank deeper into the mud. I saw the trunk curling back and
creeping up to me like a python crawling up a hillside to coil
around its prey. There was no more trumpeting or calling from the
elephant, but a sinister silence through which he was trying to
reach me. He had come to the end of his unselfishness. In order
to save himself, he was willing to step on me.
The monkey screamed from the tree-top and I, jumping off the
elephant's back, fell on the ground and ran. Kari kept on
trumpeting and calling for help, and by this time he was chest
deep in the mud. The rear of him had not sunk so far, so he was
on a slant which made it all the more difficult for him to lift
himself.
I ran off to the village and called for help. By the time we got
back with ropes and planks, he was holding his trunk up in order
to breathe, as the mud was up to his chin. There was only one
thing to do, and that was to lift Kari by his own weight, so we
tied the rope to the tree and flung it to him. He got it with his
trunk and pulled. The rope throbbed and sang like an electric
wire and the tree groaned with the tension, but all that happened
was that the elephant slipped forward a little and his hind legs
fell deeper into the mud.
Now he was perfectly flat in quick-sand. But something very
interesting had taken place. Now that he was holding on to the
rope with all his mortal strength we knew that he would not let
go of it, so it was easy to go near him and put planks under him,
as the hind part of his belly had not yet sunk to the level of
the mud. At last he stopped sinking, but as we could not put the
planks under his feet it only meant that he would not go further
down and smother to death.
Now that his head was lifted and there was an opening between him
and the mud, the question was how to lift the front part of his
body so that he could drag the rest of it out. Another elephant
had to be called in. It turned out to be Kari's mother who had
been given to the neighboring king. By the time she arrived,
however, dusk had fallen and nothing could be done. We trusted to
God and left him to his quick-sand for the night.
The next morning we found Kari in the same position as the
previous evening. He had relaxed his hold on the rope but had not
sunk deeper. We had to put more planks all around him but he now
knew that he should not attack anyone because we were trying to
save him. After the planks had been tested, his mother went up to
him. She put her trunk around his neck and started to lift him,
but he groaned with pain for he was being smothered. He began to
sink again and we just had time to put some more planks between
his chest and the mud.
We had also slipped a rope under him, which some men in a boat
near the river bank came up and threw over his back. The hawser
was made into a loop around his body and the other end was tied
around the mother. Then she pulled with all her might, and her
strength was so great that his fore-quarters were lifted up and
his small legs dangled in the air. He was pulled forward quite a
distance, when the hawser broke and his fore-legs fell on the
plank. His hind legs now were sinking and we were terribly
frightened. We felt as if we had lost him again.
The situation was not so bad as we thought, however, as it was
very easy to slip another hawser under him. This time we made a
double loop around him, and also made him hold on to the rope
around the tree with his trunk. He was very tired, but I urged
him to obey me. And now with the aid of his mother, he managed
to lift the rear half of his body and put first one leg and then
the other on the plank. A great shout of joy went through the
crowd as Kari walked on to solid ground. That instant the monkey
jumped down from the tree and fell on Kari's neck; he was very
glad to see his friend safe again. But Kari was in no humor for
anyone's caresses and he shook Kopee off. The first thing I did
was to pull some branches from a tree which Kari devoured
hungrily. A hungry elephant is not to be bothered by anyone.
I had learned my lesson. I would no longer take my elephant
anywhere and everywhere at the behest of the monkey, for monkeys
have no judgment.