PEN]
The attachment the elephant has for his keeper is something marvelous.
Almost incredible accounts are told of their devotion. Perhaps this
is due to the inseparable life that the mahout and his elephant lead,
for the keeper and his charge are constantly together. Always the same
hand feeds and tends him, always the same voice commands him, whether
at work in the lumber-yards, charging through the jungle at a round-up,
or moving slowly in some royal procession. If by any chance a mahout
becomes too ill to work or dies, there is often the greatest difficulty
to induce the elephant to accept a new master, and it is very seldom
that the new man can gain the complete mastery over the brute that its
original trainer had.
There is a wrong impression prevalent that the Siamese regard the white
elephant as a deity. That they hold it in special regard is true,
for each Buddha, in passing through a series of transmigrations, is
supposed to have inhabited the body of some white animal, either a
monkey, a dove, or an elephant; and therefore a white animal is yet
worshiped as having at some time been the superior of man.
[Illustration]
[Illustration]
NOOSING WILD ELEPHANTS
[Illustration]
BY CHARLES MOSER
[Illustration]
From time immemorial, Eastern princes have captured wild elephants by
driving them into a stockade and noosing them from the backs of tamed
beasts. It has been virtually the only means of replenishing their
stables, for elephants in captivity do not breed well. Nevertheless,
elephant kraals, the common name from Jeypore to Siam, have always
been events of great interest and excitement. The enormous size of the
game, its inevitable danger, and the wonderful exhibition of brute
intelligence often seen, account for the fascination of the sport.
Kraals are usually conducted by the minor prince or chieftain who holds
in feudal tenure the villages of the district in which the kraal is
held; and it was our privilege to be at the one last mentioned as the
guests of Ratemahatmeya Meduanwella, lord of the villages of Panamure
and Wellawe, in the province of Sabaramamuwa.
We left Colombo at sunrise in a motor-car (I can never get over that; I
am still near enough to my boyhood’s dreaming over the pages of old Sir
Samuel Baker not to accept _that_!) and swept along the muddy Kelani,
alive in the early morning with _cadjan_ boats and women bathing.
It is a lovely, undulating valley; we saw coolies treading out the
grain in the paddy-fields, _svelte_ arecas and talipot-palms smoking
with dew, low hills thickly feathered with the dark-green plumage of
young rubber-trees, and bevies of brown girls plucking leaves among
the sparse tea-bushes. By nine o’clock we had reached the rest-house
at Ratnapura, nestled close by Kelani’s sullen lip, and were calling
loudly for breakfast. The most striking ornament in the dining-room
was a placard advertising American buckwheat cakes, and our roving eye
fell upon a two-months’-old copy of the Kansas City “Star,” sure signs
of the miracle of mere living in our times. Ratnapura is the capital
of the famous gem district, and our host, a wily Cingalese with a
prodigious tortoise-shell comb in his back hair, showed us some rough
stones--rubies, sapphires, and cats’-eyes--which he had “found,” and
would part with as a very special favor.
At noon we left the motor-car and took to the jungle on foot. Our route
lay for eight miles along a path cut and burned through the densest
jungle specially for this occasion, and toward dusk we came at last,
drenched, yet thirsty, through dim, green aisles of tall ebony-and
satinwood-trees, to a wide meadow and the dark, swift stream that
flows through it along the hem of Panamure. We saw a man far up in a
giant palm-tree, clinging to the bole with his naked feet, cutting
branches; then a great gaunt beast in the jungle twilight, feeding on
the white, succulent trunks of banana-trees; and the pathetic figure
of a baby elephant, captured only the week before, tugging hopelessly,
but incessantly, at his ankle-ropes, and we knew that we were near the
scene of the kraal. We crossed the stream on a bridge half crushed in
by ponderous, pachydermous feet, and at once found ourselves among
lines of bare brown men squatting under palm-leaf shelters. These
were the beaters surrounding the wild herds. The long line of their
fires dotted the dusk of the jungle, and the smell of wet wood smoke,
flavored with the odors from their cooking-pots, made a kind of wild
incense, strangely grateful and reminiscent to our civilized nostrils.
At a distance an occasional faint snort, or the soft crackling of
undergrowth followed by the thudding of some distant beater’s drum,
betrayed the locality where the quarry fed uneasily.
The plan and strategy of an elephant kraal is very simple. A wooded
country, over which elephants rove and through which a suitable stream
flows, is selected. A stockade from twelve to sixteen feet in height,
and inclosing part of the stream and from four to six acres of jungle,
is constructed of stout logs lashed together with rattan withes. At one
side of the inclosure is a gate, with a V-shaped approach leading to
it. When the stockade has been completed, the villagers arm themselves
with guns, spears, tom-toms, old pots, horns--anything that will make
a noise--and pour into the jungle to beat up the wild herds. They
spread out in a circle, sometimes twenty-five miles long, but gradually
lessening as the herds are driven nearer the stockade. The main object
is to keep the elephants from reaching water except by entering the
inclosure, and sometimes this is very difficult. Fires are kept alight
at distances of a few feet; and sometimes at night, when the huge
beasts charge in a body, the din of drums, bells, shouts, and horns is
enough to daunt bolder spirits than the jungle denizens. Frequently a
herd succeeds in breaking through and making its escape, occasionally
not without a heavy loss to the enemy; but usually after being kept
from water for three or four days their terrible thirst drives the poor
creatures to the water within the stockade, and the gate closes forever
between them and the dear free life of their native jungle.
Panamure is a lovely little village, idling along the banks of its
streamlet and cuddled in between two tall and softly wooded peaks
as delicately rounded as the breasts of a woman. Its daughters are
tender-eyed and domestic, performing the family washing at the front
gate, while the men are of mild manner and much given to the business
of gentling noosed elephants. They are Buddhists, but their real god is
the snowy-bearded old Ratemahatmeya, who is also their father, lord of
their lands, and of every grain of rice that goes into their mouths.
[Illustration: THE LORD OF THE KRAAL AND HIS HEIR]
We found the old gentleman waiting for us at the “hotel.” He had laid
aside the garments of his high estate and put on the long-tailed shirt
of the coolie, as being more in keeping with one who had watched five
nights in the jungle; but for all that he was a memorable figure,
with his small, sharp nose and eyes like those of a sparrow-hawk, his
patriarchal beard and imperious voice. Even more distinguished-looking
was his brother-in-law, the imperturbable Kalawane. Clad to lead the
heaters in nothing but a breech-clout and his shining black beard,
he seemed at that moment to have stepped out of the pages of Kipling
especially for this occasion.
[Illustration: NATIVE BEATERS IN CAMP]
[Illustration: READY TO PROD THE ELEPHANTS]
[Illustration: NATIVES BINDING A WILD ELEPHANT TO A TREE]
[Illustration: TWO TAME ELEPHANTS CAJOLING A WILD SISTER]
[Illustration: “HE SCREAMED, FROTHED, AND LUNGED AGAINST HIS FETTERS”]
They took us to get a first glimpse of the stockade in the now
fast-dying light. It was the old Ratemahatmeya’s fourteenth kraal, he
told us, and he had had 2500 villagers out for many days. He hoped to
catch thirty or forty elephants, but some might escape through the line
of beaters that night, as the elephants were desperate and the beaters
nearly exhausted. Even as he talked there were sounds of trampling and
crashing of underbrush a few yards to our right, and the whole line of
beaters rushed toward the spot, beating brass pots and yelling. After
torches had been thrown, the crashing ceased suddenly, and not another
sound was heard. Not a line of living form could be seen; not even a
leaf stirred, but one had the most vivid sense that all about us the
jungle was permeated with mysterious forces, tremendous, yet impalpable.
The stockade itself was worth a fortune, could it have been brought
to market. It was constructed of peeled ebony and satinwood logs,
many from twenty to thirty feet long and as thick as a man’s body.
Seven hundred and fifty coolies had spent three weeks in building
it, sinking the upright logs ten feet into the earth and with rattan
thongs lashing to them the horizontal logs at three-foot intervals. It
looked enormously strong and resistant. Overlooking the stockade on
three sides, towers had been built from which the Ratemahatmeya and his
principal guests were to view the grand spectacle of noosing and tying
up the kraaled elephants.
Dinner in the hotel that night was eaten on bare boards, within
gunny-sack walls, and with damp earth underfoot. As we sat about the
boards afterward, in bare feet and pajamas, a small, breathless figure
dashed up and flung his torch of dried stalks down before us. Some
elephants had entered the kraal and the gate had been closed behind
them! It was not a moment for reflection. Away we ran through the black
night, barefooted and pajama-clad, unmindful of thorns, and deadly
cobras, perhaps, lying in wait along the path. Guided by the weird
little figure with his torch, who was immensely proud to have been
the bearer of great tidings, we reached the stockade and found the
Ratemahatmeya seated on a log rocking himself in glee. Ten elephants,
led by a furious old cow, he explained, had been trapped. To-morrow
the rest of the herd would be caught. In this, however, he proved a bad
prophet, for during the night the elephants outside the kraal broke
through the beaters’ lines and escaped.
Around the circle of the stockade they were now lighting hundreds of
fires. Flames and smoke shot up half-way to the tops of the trees, and
the whole jungle was an endless moving parade of black shadows. Scores
of men lined the barricade, their bodies dripping sweat, points of
light flashing from their sharpened spear-heads. The business was eery
and serious. Twice the fear-maddened animals had charged the stockade
and twice had been driven back with spear-thrusts and firebrands. Now
they were hiding somewhere in the gulf of blackness beyond the fires,
as silent as the dark, plotting, full of hatred, and terribly dangerous.
We went back to the hotel and to a sleep of troubled dreams. There is
no doubt that the presence of wild elephants in the neighborhood of
one’s slumbers produces a curious impression. Some might even call
it “funk.” Throughout the night the shouting of the beaters and the
muffled trumpetings of giants in distress told how mighty Hathi and
his sons struggled to break through the cordon of their enemies. And
when morning came we knew from the scattered fire-lines that the lords
of the jungle had bravely won their freedom. The Ratemahatmeya held a
sunrise court-martial over it, but no one knew anything. He was forced
to content himself with the ten animals safe within the kraal.
Early as we were at the stockade, the village, bringing its breakfast
in fresh _kos_ leaves and gourds, was there before us. A thin stream of
sunlight, penetrating the kraal, revealed the captured herd standing
together in the deep shadows beneath a giant unga-tree, brooding and
sinister, their alinement as perfect as that of a line of infantry.
They were absolutely motionless, yet somehow conveyed the impression
of hair-trigger alertness. We could count two half-grown bulls, two
yearling calves, and a two-year-old. The other five were cows. There
were no tuskers among them, but it soon became evident that an old cow,
which always took her position on the extreme right, was “boss” of the
herd. The moment she cocked her ears the others stiffened their tails
and gathered themselves to charge.
We had not long to wait for the first charge in daylight. Ratemahatmeya
Kalawane came upon the scene riding his brother-in-law’s finest decoy,
a magnificent brute in the prime of his vigor and intelligence.
Apparently without a command, the big elephant majestically approached
the stockade at a point nearest the beleaguered herd, lifted his
trunk over the barricade and gave the call of his kind. The whole
herd at once swung toward him, as if in obedience to the voice of a
friend. They had covered barely twenty paces, however, when suspicion
entered the mind of the old cow. At her signal they all paused, waving
their trunks uncertainly. One of the village headmen thought this an
auspicious moment to step through the stockade for a clearer view.
Instantly the old cow’s tail shot into the air as stiff as a rod, and
she charged with the speed of an express-train, the others following
her, but half-heartedly. A volley of yells from the spearmen and
beaters greeted her as she came, but she struck the stockade with a
tremendous impact, rocking the piles in their sockets and making the
earth tremble. The beaters stood fearlessly to their work, however,
and a score of spear-thrusts from the heavy twelve-foot staves sent
her back, sullen and bloody. The others, seeing their leader’s
discomfiture, contemptuously turned their backs to the enemy and
continued their interrupted coquetting with the decoy elephant.
But those trapped cows, though frightened and no doubt bewildered
beyond anything in their experience, were not foolish. The big,
handsome bull, sent out to court and mollify them, continued his
outrageous attempts at flirtation through the interstices of the
stockade all in vain. Not that they were not flattered, perhaps, by his
attentions, for they paralleled his amiable saunterings up and down the
barricade for an hour, but always at the safe distance of a hundred
yards; ten pairs of little, bright, malicious eyes the while keeping
watch of his every movement and of every movement inside the kraal.
Satisfied at last of his treacherous intentions, and, perhaps, tiring
of the sport, they ignored him altogether and turned their energies
again toward their human foes.
The rest of the morning was given to beating back charge after
charge. The old cow, especially, was a veritable demon in temper and
courage. Sometimes she charged alone, her calf bellowing and coughing
his ridiculous rage in her wake. Sometimes, with one impulse, the
whole herd charged with her, as if at a preconcerted signal. Once,
indeed, she nearly got our photographer. The elephants were standing
quiet for the moment, a hundred yards away, trunks down and slack,
apparently oblivious to their enemies. A fugitive patch of sunlight,
finely illuminating their heads, tempted the camera man to advance
a few steps inside the gate in the hope of obtaining a picture. The
next instant the whole herd was almost upon him. He had barely time
to fling himself headlong between the posts when the old cow, in the
lead, crashed against the gate. Another yard, and she would have got
him. It took half an hour and two brandy sodas to coax his nerve back,
but the imperturbable Kalawane, who had been lying sound asleep beneath
the gate timbers till the crash awakened him, merely raised himself
long enough to curse camera man, elephants, and beaters fluently and
indiscriminately, and then resumed his nap.
I had often heard of the speed of an elephant’s charge, and had
marveled without enlightenment. I had even scoffed, because those who
told of it never were able to explain it. Their descriptions seemed to
me the result of “nerves,” justifying effect by cause. Now that I have
seen it for myself, I marvel no more, but am simply dazed. You cannot
explain the charge because you do not really see him make it. One
instant he is standing over there, a hundred yards away, as motionless
as the tree-trunks; at the end of that same instant he is upon you,
overwhelming, monstrous, like a mountain falling upon you. And you did
not even see him start!
I have a theory about it. An elephant’s loose skin is a sort of bag
that conceals the most flexible and finely articulated set of muscles
in the animal kingdom. He has no bulge of muscles anywhere. They are
all as smooth and flat as ribbons, as elastic as rubber, tempered like
steel wire. Wherefore he can wheel that vast bulk of his instantly and
in a space the size of a tea-table. He can hurl the whole four or five
tons of him into action with a single impulse and strike his top speed
in a single stride. Place an enemy in front of him, and I believe he
can run ten yards or two hundred from a standing start faster than any
other creature on legs.
Meantime, the decoys to be used for the noosing in the afternoon
had come up from their teak-piling duties in the low country. Seven
gigantic beasts, far larger than the captured ones, they moved like
conquerors, majestic and grand. It was not to be comprehended that
these colossi, the mightiest of the earth’s creatures, were willing
servants of those pygmies astride their necks. Yet all through the
subsequent proceedings the mahout’s word was law, and I never once saw
a tame elephant pricked with the ankus. This is the more remarkable
when it is understood that with one exception they had all been wild
elephants fewer than ten years before.
After they had been bathed and scraped and holystoned till their hides
shone like polished slate, the decoys were led before the Ratemahatmeya
to receive the ceremonial anointment with oil and make their salaams.
As the great beasts fell on their knees before the old man and
made their dumb, strange genuflections of obeisance, my eyes were
filled with a picture of the galleries of old Rome and of the German
gladiators stooped before some palsied Cæsar, and through my brain
pulsed again the echo of their grand and solemn valedictory.
But it was two o’clock, and the ladies of the Ratemahatmeya’s family
were in the tower, the village was in the tree-tops, or chattering like
schools of monkeys in the undergrowth, and all was ready for the great
spectacle of the kraal, the contests in the arena. Kalawane, on the
largest elephant, headed the procession of the seven decoys, followed
by a small army of spearmen and elephant shikarees, carrying ropes.
Each of the decoys bore on his back a mahout and a nooser, the latter
armed with a coil of rope noosed at one end and attached at the other
to a stout collar around the decoy’s neck.
For some time before the procession set out for the kraal gate the
wild herd had been clustered in thick cover on the far side of the
stream from the Ratemahatmeya’s tower. As we could neither see nor hear
anything of them, Ricalton and I ran around the stockade to a point
nearest them and no more than forty yards from the little hillock on
which they stood. We could hear the decoys pulling down the gate far
away on the other side, and it was evident that the wild herd was quite
as plainly aware that something new and decisive in their affairs was
about to occur. They stood stone-still, indifferent to our presence,
their eyes alert, but their heads a little drooping. Nothing but actual
speech could have better expressed that, though sore perplexed, they
_all but_ understood. As for us, we were so lost in the contemplation
of them in this greatest moment of their lives that we did not hear the
approach of the decoys, and they, if they heard it, gave no sign.
Suddenly we heard the sharp crackle of voices--Kalawane’s and the
mahouts’--shouting, “_Yunga! Yunga! Yunga!_” (“Charge! Charge!
Charge!”) and saw the decoys swiftly looming through the underbrush.
The wild ones saw them at the same time, and for just a moment the
whole herd, trunks uplifted in welcome, swung forward to meet them.
The next instant they realized their mistake, turned tail, and went
crashing down the slope in a panic. After them came the whole band of
decoys, spearmen, and noosers barking a staccato chorus that set the
blood tingling all over me. I never have had such a feeling. It was a
little like the first shock of a shower-bath on a frosty morning. I
found myself plunging knee-deep through the stream in the wake of the
rushing animals, with Ricalton, sixty-six years old and as white as
Mount Hood, not a foot behind me.
On the other bank the decoys overtook their quarry, and two big bulls
separated one of the yearlings from his mother for the fraction of a
second--just time enough for a nooser to drop off behind and slip the
loop around his right hind leg. He suddenly found himself being dragged
backward on his fore legs and belly, and such squalling never was
heard. At first his frantic mother fought furiously to reach him, but
two powerful bulls so unceremoniously butted her about that she gave
up and rushed off for help; for I never will believe that she deserted
him. The little fellow was dragged and butted to a convenient tree, to
which he was securely tied by both ankles, while a decoy on each side
alternately bullied and cozened him. The moment he was tied, just as he
was on the point of thinking his new-found friends not such bad fellows
after all, and was preparing to console himself for the loss of his
mother, they heartlessly left him. Oh, how angry he was! He screamed,
frothed, lunged and lunged against his fetters, bit the earth, and
broke off the point of an embryonic tusk trying to demolish a stone he
had dug up in his frenzy. But it was all in vain; and at last the poor
little baby, just like other babies, broke down and cried. I saw him,
and later I saw his mother, the terrible old cow, crying, and they shed
real tears.
Meanwhile the chase had gone on across the kraal, and on the other
side one of the cows had been wedged in between two decoys for the
needful moment. A nooser had slipped down under the decoy’s belly for
protection, and actually had the noose over her ankle when she felt
him, and let loose that four-ton kick he had sought protection from.
Luckily it missed him a hair’s-breadth; but the savage old lady got
free by it, and the nooser was a crumpled, fearful ruin for the rest of
that day. Again they caught her, but she snapped the inch-and-a-quarter
hawser as if it had been twine. The third attempt was successful, but
by now madam had regained her wits and gathered together her scattered
forces for rescue work. No doubt she ached also to avenge her baby, for
she headed a tremendous charge against the decoys, and the bulls had to
knock her off her feet time after time before she gave up the project.
Kalawane then decided that the rest of the herd would be subjugated
more easily after she had been disposed of.
This was more easily decided upon than accomplished. The old cow was a
tactician of the highest order, and her gifts as a fighter amounted to
positive genius. Several times they had her cornered, but she smashed
her way through. They scattered her followers, and finally managed to
isolate her on a small knoll between the stockade and a deep gully.
Here she successfully eluded the skill of the decoys for at least half
an hour, and it was while I was endeavoring to obtain a closer view
of this heroic last stand that I was treated to a bit of insight into
elephant cunning that I am not likely to forget.