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 a place called Ali Musjid,
ten years later; and afterward he 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.
[Illustration: "KALA NAG WAS THE BEST-LOVED ELEPHANT IN THE SERVICE."]
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.
[Illustration: "'HE IS AFRAID OF ME,' SAID LITTLE TOOMAI, AND HE MADE
KALA NAG LIFT UP HIS FEET ONE AFTER THE OTHER."]
"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 hullaballoo 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.
[Illustration: "HE WOULD GET HIS TORCH AND WAVE IT, AND YELL WITH THE
BEST."]
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. "_Maîl, maîl, 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 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. 'T is 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 plain-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?"
[Illustration: "'NOT GREEN CORN, PROTECTOR OF THE POOR,--MELONS,' SAID
LITTLE TOOMAI."]
"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' ballrooms,
but even these are found only 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
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. Any one but a mudhead 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.
"_Ohé_, 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
sweatmeat-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.
"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, bare-footed, 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 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 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 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.
[Illustration: "LITTLE TOOMAI LOOKED DOWN UPON SCORES AND SCORES OF
BROAD BACKS."]
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 altogether 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 Peterson 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 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
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 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. Peterson
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 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 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 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!_"
[Illustration: "'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!