KARI IN THE LUMBER YARD
Not long after this Kari was sent to the lumber yards. It was
very interesting to see that he learned all the tricks of the
lumber trade in a few days. He would pull heavy logs out of the
forest into the open, lift the lighter ones with his trunk and
pile them up, one on top of the other. He had such a good sense
of symmetry that his piles were always extremely neat.
Soon an older elephant came to help him. Whenever there was a log
which was too heavy for Kari to lift, they would each take one
end of it and lift it on the lumber wagon. An elephant, as you
see, can do the work of a truck.
We had reached a stage in the history of the world when motor
engines did a large part of the work of the jungle. The elephants
would bring the lumber from the forest and deposit it near these
engines where it would be cut into proper lengths and then thrown
out again to be piled up by the elephants.
The mechanics who ran these engines ate meat and drank liquor. It is
very strange that when Western people come to the East, they do not
give up their expensive ways of living. Drinking wine and eating meat
is one thing in cold climates, where one has to keep warm, but in a
hot climate a man is sure to go to pieces if he eats and drinks much.
Kari had no objection to wine drinking, but he did not like
meat-eating men any more than he liked meat-eating tigers. He never
hated them or feared them, simply he somehow did not enjoy their
company. But these white engineers who came from afar did not know
that an elephant had a soul.
Kari always woke up at half past five and then went to work.
Toward noon I would bathe him and put him in his shed. Early in
the afternoon he would begin to work again. Later on he ate lots
of rice of which he was very fond. In the evening I would tie him
up in his shed while I went to sleep on a hammock outside.
One night, I heard a terrible trumpeting. I jumped down from my
hammock and went into Kari's shed, where I found two drunken
engineers lighting matches and throwing them at him. Kari, who
was afraid of fire, as all animals are, was trumpeting angrily. I
protested to the men, but they were so drunk that they only swore
at me and went on flinging matches. Seeing that there was nothing
else to do, I loosened all his chains except one, and let him
stay there tied to the ground by one foot only.
An elephant's chain is generally driven about five or six feet
into the ground and is then covered with cement and earth. An
elephant can rarely break this kind of chain, but I was afraid
that the matches might set the shed on fire, and I trusted Kari
more than drunken men. I knew that if the shed caught fire the
elephant could break one chain if he tried hard to escape. The
night passed without any further incident, however.
I must explain why animals are afraid of fire. Fire, you see, is
the one thing that they can never fight. They are not afraid of
water, as most of them can swim, but if they are caught in fire,
they are generally burned to death. For this reason they have
built up a protective instinct against fire. Whenever there is
fire of any sort, they run. As they have seen the jungle set on
fire from time to time for generations and generations, the sight
of fire frightens them more than anything else. As long as they
have inherited this fear from their ancestors, it is very wise
not to play with fire in the presence of animals. If an animal as
powerful as an elephant were frightened by fire, he would run mad
and do the greatest amount of mischief.
One noon when we had suspended work for the day, I tied Kari in
his shed and lay down in my hammock to rest. Toward late
afternoon, I heard the same terrible trumpeting that I had heard
before. The same thing had happened again. The two engineers,
being idle, had drunk liquor and were trying to tease the animals
nearby. The shed had a thatched roof of straw. The walls were of
clay, but there was a lot of bamboo lying on the floor. Kari was
eating twigs, some of which happened to have dry leaves.
I came up to the elephant, and seeing what was going on, told the
white men to stop teasing him. They would not hear of it,
however. Just then I saw a flame rising from the leaves. Kari
raised his trunk and trumpeted fiercely. As I was afraid that he
would be burned to death, I hastened to loosen his chain and with
one terrible trumpet he rushed out of the shed, trampling down
one of the drunken men and killing him instantly. Kari then
trumpeted more and more loudly, waving his trunk and rushing
madly around.
Realizing the danger we were in, I went up a very heavy banyan
tree out of Kari's reach and lay among the leaves. The first
thing he did was to go and put his foot on the automobile of the
chief engineer, which happened to be standing outside of the
shed. In a few minutes there was nothing but a mass of twisted
steel on the ground, over which the elephant danced in anger.
Then he saw the chief engineer and two other men standing on the
porch of a bungalow. He rushed at them, but they knew what it
meant to have a mad elephant about, and ran into the house. Kari
then pulled down part of the thatched roof of the bungalow with
his trunk, and finding no one there made straight for two new
trucks that had only been in use a fortnight and broke them to
pieces. Then he rushed at a bull which was grazing in a field,
and wound his trunk around his neck. The bull dropped dead. In a
few moments Kari was out of sight.
[Illustration: IN HIS MADNESS HE MUST HAVE GONE BACK TO THE
JUNGLE]
For a fortnight no one heard anything of him. I expected him to
return to me, but he never came back. Even to this day no one
knows what happened to him. Evidently those miserable engineers
had driven him out of his mind. In his madness he must have gone
back to the jungle and by the time he recovered his senses was so
lost in its depths that he could not come back. When his mind
returns to him, an elephant can never remember the road that he
took in his insanity, and if he runs very far into the jungle he
may never come back because the Spirit of the jungle seizes him.
Kari's last impression of human beings must have been so terrible
that when the Spirit of the jungle asserted itself in him, he
allowed it to lure him away forever from the habitations of men.
That is how it came about that I lost my friend and brother, the
elephant. Though as an animal Kari is lost to me, my soul belongs
to his soul and we shall never forget each other.