breeds, an albino is sometimes born. A perfectly white elephant, up to a
few years ago, had never been seen, but on rare occasions elephants are
born with light-coloured or clouded hides. Such creatures are bought at
fabulous prices by the Malay and Siamese princes, to whom a white
elephant is the greatest treasure that a king can possess.
Muztagh was a long way from being an albino, yet a tendency in that
direction had bleached his hide. And the man knew that on the morrow
Dugan Sahib would pay him a lifetime's earnings for the little wabbly
calf, whose welcome had been the wild cries of the tuskers in the
jungle.
II
Little Muztagh (which means White Mountain in an ancient tongue) did not
enjoy his babyhood at all. He was born with the memory of jungle
kingdoms, and the life in the elephant lines almost killed him with
dulness.
There was never anything to do but nurse of the strong elephant milk and
roam about in the _keddah_ or along the lines. He had been bought the
second day of his life by Dugan Sahib, and the great white heaven-born
saw to it that he underwent none of the risks that are the happy fate
of most baby elephants. His mother was not taken on the elephant drives
into the jungles, so he never got a taste of this exciting sport. Mostly
she was kept chained in the lines, and every day Langur Dass, the
low-caste hillman in Dugan's employ, grubbed grass for her in the
valleys. All night long, except the regular four hours of sleep, he
would hear her grumble and rumble and mutter discontent that her little
son shared with her.
Muztagh's second year was little better. Of course he had reached the
age where he could eat such dainties as grass and young sugar-cane, but
these things could not make up for the fun he was missing in the hills.
He would stand long hours watching their purple tops against the skies,
and his little dark eyes would glow. He would see the storms break and
flash above them, behold the rains lash down through the jungles, and he
was always filled with strange longings and desires that he was too
young to understand or to follow. He would see the white haze steam up
from the labyrinth of wet vines, and he would tingle and scratch for the
feel of its wetness on his skin. And often, when the mysterious Burman
night came down, it seemed to him that he would go mad. He would hear
the wild tuskers trumpeting in the jungles a very long way off, and all
the myriad noises of the mysterious night, and at such times even his
mother looked at him with wonder.
"Oh, little restless one," Langur Dass would say, "thou and that old cow
thy mother and I have one heart between us. We know the burning--we
understand, we three!"
It was true that Langur Dass understood more of the ways of the forest
people than any other hillman in the encampment. But his caste was low,
and he was drunken and careless and lazy beyond words, and the hunters
had mostly only scorn for him. They called him Langur after a
grey-bearded breed of monkeys along the slopes of the Himalayas, rather
suspecting he was cursed with evil spirits, for why should any sane man
have such mad ideas as to the rights of elephants? He never wanted to
join in the drives--which was a strange thing indeed for a man raised in
the hills. Perhaps he was afraid--but yet they could remember a certain
day in the bamboo thickets, when a great, wild buffalo had charged their
camp and Langur Dass acted as if fear were something he had never heard
of and knew nothing whatever about.
One day they asked him about it. "Tell us, Langur Dass," they asked,
mocking the ragged, dejected looking creature, "If thy name speaks
truth, thou art brother to many monkey-folk, and who knows the jungle
better than thou or they? None but the monkey-folk and thou canst talk
with my lord the elephant. _Hai!_ We have seen thee do it, Langur Dass.
How is it that when we go hunting, thou art afraid to come?"
Langur looked at them out of his dull eyes, and evaded their question
just as long as he could. "Have you forgotten the tales you heard on
your mothers' breasts?" he asked at last. "Elephants are of the jungle.
You are of the cooking-pots and thatch! How should such folk as ye are
understand?"
This was flat heresy from their viewpoint. There is an old legend among
the elephant-catchers to the effect that at one time men were subject to
the elephants.
Yet mostly the elephants that these men knew were patient and contented
in their bonds. Mostly they loved their mahouts, gave their strong backs
willingly to toil, and were always glad and ready to join in the chase
after others of their breed. Only on certain nights of the year, when
the tuskers called from the jungles, and the spirit of the wild was
abroad, would their love of liberty return to them. But to all this
little Muztagh was distinctly an exception. Even though he had been born
in captivity, his desire for liberty was with him just as constantly as
his trunk or his ears.
He had no love for the mahout that rode his mother. He took little
interest in the little brown boys and girls that played before his
stall. He would stand and look over their heads into the wild, dark
heart of the jungle that no man can ever quite understand. And being
only a beast, he did not know anything about the caste and prejudices
of the men he saw, but he did know that one of them, the low-caste
Langur Dass, ragged and dirty and despised, wakened a responsive chord
in his lonely heart.
They would have long talks together, that is, Langur would talk and
Muztagh would mumble. "Little calf, little fat one," the man would say,
"can great rocks stop a tree from growing? Shall iron shackles stop a
prince from being king? Muztagh--jewel among jewels! Thy heart speaks
through those sleepless eyes of thine! Have patience--what thou knowest,
who shall take away from thee?"
But most of the mahouts and catchers noticed the rapidity with which the
little Muztagh acquired weight and strength. He outweighed, at the age
of three, any calf of his season in the encampment by a full two hundred
pounds. And of course three in an elephant is no older than three in a
human child. He was still just a baby, even if he did have the wild
tuskers' love of liberty.
"Shalt thou never lie the day long in the cool mud, little one? Never
see a storm break on the hills? Nor feel a warm rain dripping through
the branches? Or are these matters part of thee that none may steal?"
Langur Dass would ask him, contented to wait a very long time for his
answer. "I think already that thou knowest how the tiger steals away at
thy shrill note; how thickets feel that crash beneath thy hurrying
weight! A little I think thou knowest how the madness comes with the
changing seasons. How knowest thou these things? Not as I know them, who
have seen--nay, but as a king knows conquering; it's in thy blood! Is a
bundle of sugar-cane tribute enough for thee, Kumiria? Shall purple
trappings please thee? Shall some fat rajah of the plains make a beast
of burden of thee? Answer, lord of mighty memories!"
And Muztagh answered in his own way, without sound or emphasis, but
giving his love to Langur Dass, a love as large as the big elephant
heart from which it had sprung. No other man could even win his
friendship. The smell of the jungle was on Langur Dass. The mahouts and
hunters smelt more or less of civilization and were convinced for their
part that the disposition of the little light-coloured elephant was
beyond redemption.
"He is a born rogue," was their verdict, and they meant by that, a
particular kind of elephant, sometimes a young male, more often an old
and savage tusker alone in the jungle--apart from the herd. Solitariness
doesn't improve their dispositions, and they were generally expelled
from a herd for ill-temper to begin with. "Woe to the fool prince who
buys this one!" said the grey-beard catchers. "There is murder in his
eyes."
But Langur Dass would only look wise when he heard these remarks. He
knew elephants. The gleam in the dark eyes of Muztagh was not
viciousness, but simply inheritance, a love of the wide wild spaces that
left no room for ordinary friendships.
But calf-love and mother-love bind other animals as well as men, and
possibly he might have perfectly fulfilled the plans Dugan had made for
him but for a mistake the sahib made in the little calf's ninth year.
He sold Muztagh's mother to an elephant-breeder from a distant province.
Little Muztagh saw her march away between two tuskers--down the long
elephant trail into the valley and the shadow.
"Watch the little one closely to-night," Dugan Sahib said to his mahout.
So when they had led him back and forth along the lines, they saw that
the ends of his ropes were pegged down tightly. They were horsehair
ropes, far beyond the strength of any normal nine-year-old elephant to
break. Then they went to the huts and to their women and left him to
shift restlessly from foot to foot, and think.
Probably he would have been satisfied with thinking, for Muztagh did not
know his strength, and thought he was securely tied. The incident that
upset the mahout's plans was simply that the wild elephants trumpeted
again from the hills.
Muztagh heard the sound, long drawn and strange from the silence of the
jungle. He grew motionless. The great ears pricked forward, the whipping
tail stood still. It was a call never to be denied. The blood was
leaping in his great veins.
He suddenly rocked forward with all his strength. The rope spun tight,
hummed, and snapped--very softly indeed. Then he padded in silence out
among the huts, and nobody who had not seen him do it would believe how
silently an elephant can move when he sees fit.
There was no thick jungle here--just soft grass, huts, approaching dark
fringe that was jungle. None of the mahouts was awake to see him. No
voice called him back. The grass gave way to bamboo thickets, the smell
of the huts to the wild, bewitching perfumes of the jungle.
Then, still in silence, because there are decencies to be observed by
animals no less than men, he walked forward with his trunk outstretched
into the primordial jungle and was born again.
III
Muztagh's reception was cordial from the very first. The great bulls of
the herd stood still and lifted their ears when they heard him grunting
up the hill. But he slipped among them and was forgotten at once. They
had no dealings with the princes of Malay and Siam, and his
light-coloured coat meant nothing whatever to them. If they did any
thinking about him at all, it was just to wonder why a calf with all the
evident marks of a nine-year-old should be so tall and weigh so much.
One can fancy that the great old wrinkled tusker that led the herd
peered at him now and then out of his little red eyes and wondered. A
herd-leader begins to think about future contestants for his place as
soon as he acquires the leadership. But _Hai!_ This little one would not
have his greatest strength for fifteen years.
It was a compact, medium-sized herd--vast males, mothers, old-maid
elephants, long-legged and ungainly, young males just learning their
strength and proud of it beyond words, and many calves. They ranged all
the way in size from the great leader, who stood ten feet and weighed
nearly nine thousand pounds, to little two-hundred-and-fifty-pound
babies that had been born that season. And before long the entire herd
began its cautious advance into the deeper hills.
The first night in the jungle--and Muztagh found it wonderful past all
dreams. The mist on his skin was the same cool joy he had expected.
There were sounds, too, that set his great muscles aquiver. He heard the
sound that the bamboos make--the little click-click of the stems in the
wind--the soft rustle and stir of many leafy tendrils entwining and
touching together, and the whisper of the wind over the jungle grass.
And he knew because it was his heritage, what every single one of these
sounds meant.
The herd threaded through the dark jungle, and now they descended into a
cool river. A herd of deer--either the dark sambur or black buck--sprang
from the misty shore-line and leaped away into the bamboos. Farther
down, he could hear the grunt of buffalo.
It was simply a caress--the touch of the soft, cool water on his flanks.
Then they reared out, like great sea-gods rising from the deep, and
grunted and squealed their way up the banks into the jungle again.
But the smells were the book that he read best; he understood them even
better than the sounds of green things growing. Flowers that he could
not see hung like bells from the arching branches. Every fern and every
seeding grass had its own scent that told sweet tales. The very mud that
his four feet sank into emitted scent that told the history of
jungle-life from the world's beginnings. When dawn burst over the
eastern hills, he was weary in every muscle of his young body, but much
too happy to admit it.
This day was just the first of three thousand joyous days. The jungle,
old as the world itself, is ever new. Not even the wisest elephant, who,
after all, is king of the jungle, knows what will turn up at the next
bend in the elephant trail. It may be a native woodcutter, whose long
hair is stirred with fright. It may easily be one of the great breed of
bears, large as the American grizzly, that some naturalists believe are
to be found in the Siamese and Burman jungles. It may be a herd of wild
buffalo, always looking for a fight, or simply some absurd
armadillo-like thing, to make him shake his vast sides with mirth.
The herd was never still. They ranged from one mysterious hill to
another, to the ranges of the Himalayas and back again. There were no
rivers that they did not swim, no jungles that they did not penetrate,
no elephant trails that they did not follow, in the whole northeastern
corner of British India. And all the time Muztagh's strength grew upon
him until it became too vast a thing to measure or control.
Whether or not he kept with the herd was by now a matter of supreme
indifference to him. He no longer needed its protection. Except for the
men who came with the ropes and guns and shoutings, there was nothing in
the jungle for him to fear. He was twenty years old, and he stood nearly
eleven feet to the top of his shoulders. He would have broken any scales
in the Indian Empire that tried to weigh him.
He had had his share of adventures, yet he knew that life in reality had
just begun. The time would come when he would want to fight the great
arrogant bull for the leadership of the herd. He was tired of fighting
the young bulls of his own age. He always won, and to an elephant
constant winning is almost as dull as constant losing. He was a great
deal like a youth of twenty in any breed of any land--light-hearted,
self-confident, enjoying every minute of wakefulness between one
midnight and another. He loved the jungle smells and the jungle sounds,
and he could even tolerate the horrible laughter of the hyenas that
sometimes tore to shreds the silence of the grassy plains below.
But India is too thickly populated by human beings for a wild elephant
to escape observation entirely. Many natives had caught sight of him,
and at last the tales reached a little circle of trackers and hunters in
camp on a distant range of hills. They did not work for Dugan Sahib, for
Dugan Sahib was dead long since. They were a determined little group,
and one night they sat and talked softly over their fire. If Muztagh's
ears had been sharp enough to hear their words across the space of
hills, he wouldn't have gone to his mud-baths with such complacency the
next day. But the space between them was fifty miles of sweating jungle,
and of course he did not hear.
"You will go, Khusru," said the leader, "for there are none here half so
skilful with horsehair rope as you. If you do not come back within
twelve months we shall know you have failed."
Of course all of them knew what he meant. If a man failed in the effort
to capture a wild elephant by the hair-rope method, he very rarely lived
to tell of it.
"In that case," Ahmad Din went on, "there will be a great drive after
the monsoon of next year. Picked men will be chosen. No detail will be
overlooked. It will cost more, but it will be sure. And our purses will
be fat from the selling-price of this king of elephants with a white
coat!"
IV
There is no need to follow Khusru on his long pursuit through the
elephant trails. He was an able hunter and, after the manner of the
elephant-trackers, the scared little man followed Muztagh through jungle
and river, over hill and into dale, for countless days, and at last, as
Muztagh slept, he crept up within a half-dozen feet of him. He intended
to loop a horsehair rope about his great feet--one of the oldest and
most hazardous methods of elephant-catching. But Muztagh wakened just in
time.
And then a curious thing happened. The native could never entirely
believe it, and it was one of his best stories to the day he died. Any
other wild tusker would have charged in furious wrath, and there would
have been a quick and certain death beneath his great knees. Muztagh
started out as if he had intended to charge. He lifted his trunk out of
the way--the elephant trunk is for a thousand uses, but fighting is not
one of them--and sprang forward. He went just two paces. Then his little
eyes caught sight of the brown figure fleeing through the bamboos. And
at once the elephant set his great feet to brake himself, and drew to a
sliding halt six feet beyond.
He did not know why. He was perfectly aware that this man was an enemy,
jealous of his most-loved liberty. He knew perfectly it was the man's
intention to put him back into his bonds. He did not feel fear,
either--because an elephant's anger is too tremendous an emotion to
leave room for any other impulse such as fear. It seemed to him that
memories came thronging from long ago, so real and insistent that he
could not think of charging.
He remembered his days in the elephant lines. These brown creatures had
been his masters then. They had cut his grass for him in the jungle, and
brought him bundles of sugar-cane. The hill people say that the elephant
memory is the greatest single marvel in the jungle, and it was that
memory that saved Khusru then. It wasn't deliberate gratitude for the
grass-cutting of long ago. It wasn't any particular emotion that he
could reach out his trunk and touch. It was simply an impulse--another
one of the thousand mysteries that envelop, like a cloud, the mental
processes of these largest of forest creatures.
These were the days when he lived apart from the herd. He did it from
choice. He liked the silence, the solitary mud-baths, the constant
watchfulness against danger.
One day a rhino charged him--without warning or reason. This is quite a
common thing for a rhino to do. They have the worst tempers in the
jungle, and they would just as soon charge a mountain if they didn't
like the look of it. Muztagh had awakened the great creature from his
sleep, and he came bearing down like a tank over "no man's land."
Muztagh met him squarely, with the full shock of his tusks, and the
battle ended promptly. Muztagh's tusk, driven by five tons of might
behind it, would have pierced a ship's side, and the rhino limped away
to let his hurt grow well and meditate revenge. Thereafter for a full
year, he looked carefully out of his bleary, drunken eyes and chose a
smaller objective before he charged.
Month after month Muztagh wended alone through the elephant trails, and
now and then rooted up great trees just to try his strength. Sometimes
he went silently, and sometimes like an avalanche. He swam alone in the
deep holes, and sometimes shut his eyes and stood on the bottom, just
keeping the end of his trunk out of the water. One day he was obliged to
kneel on the broad back of an alligator who tried to bite off his foot.
He drove the long body down into the muddy bottom, and no living
creature, except possibly the catfish that burrow in the mud, ever saw
it again.
He loved the rains that flashed through the jungles, the swift-climbing
dawns in the east, the strange, tense, breathless nights. And at
midnight he loved to trumpet to the herd on some far-away hill, and
hear, fainter than the death-cry of a beetle, its answer come back to
him. At twenty-five he had reached full maturity; and no more
magnificent specimen of the elephant could be found in all of British
India. At last he had begun to learn his strength.
Of course he had known for years his mastery over the inanimate things
of the world. He knew how easy it was to tear a tree from its roots, to
jerk a great tree-limb from its socket. He knew that under most
conditions he had nothing to fear from the great tigers, although a
fight with a tiger is a painful thing and well to avoid. But he did not
know that he had developed a craft and skill that would avail him in
battle against the greatest of his own kind. He made the discovery one
sunlit day beside the Manipur River.
He was in the mud-bath, grunting and bubbling with content. It was a
bath with just room enough for one. And seeing that he was young, and
perhaps failing to measure his size, obscured as it was in the mud, a
great "rogue" bull came out of the jungles to take the bath for himself.
He was a huge creature--wrinkled and yellow-tusked and scarred from the
wounds of a thousand fights. His little red eyes looked out malignantly,
and he grunted all the insults the elephant tongue can compass to the
youngster that lolled in the bath. He confidently expected that Muztagh
would yield at once, because as a rule young twenty-five-year-olds do
not care to mix in battle with the scarred and crafty veterans of sixty
years. But he did not know Muztagh.
The latter had been enjoying the bath to the limit, and he had no desire
whatever to give it up. Something hot and raging seemed to explode in
his brain and it was as if a red glare, such as sometimes comes in the
sunset, had fallen over all the stretch of river and jungle before his
eyes. He squealed once, reared up with one lunge out of the bath--and
charged. They met with a shock.
Of all the expressions of power in the animal world, the elephant fight
is the most terrible to see. It is as if two mountains rose up from
their roots of strata and went to war. It is terrible to hear, too. The
jungle had been still before. The river glided softly, the wind was
dead, the mid-afternoon silence was over the thickets.
The jungle people were asleep. A thunder-storm would not have broken
more quickly, or could not have created a wilder pandemonium. The jungle
seemed to shiver with the sound.
They squealed and bellowed and trumpeted and grunted and charged. Their
tusks clicked like the noise of a giant's game of billiards. The
thickets cracked and broke beneath their great feet.
It lasted only a moment. It was so easy, after all. In a very few
seconds indeed, the old rogue became aware that he had made a very
dangerous and disagreeable mistake. There were better mud-baths on the
river, anyway.
He had not been able to land a single blow. And his wrath gave way to
startled amazement when Muztagh sent home his third. The rogue did not
wait for the fourth.
Muztagh chased him into the thickets. But he was too proud to chase a
beaten elephant for long. He halted, trumpeting, and swung back to his
mud-bath.
But he did not enter the mud again. All at once he remembered the herd
and the fights of his calfhood. All at once he knew that his craft and
strength and power were beyond that of any elephant in all the jungle.
Who was the great, arrogant herd-leader to stand against him? What
yellow tusks were to meet his and come away unbroken?
His little eyes grew ever more red as he stood rocking back and forth,
his trunk lifted to catch the sounds and smells of the distant jungle.
Why should he abide alone, when he could be the ruler of the herd and
the jungle king? Then he grunted softly and started away down the river.
Far away, beyond the mountains and rivers and the villages of the
hillfolk, the herd of his youth roamed in joyous freedom. He would find
them and assert his mastery.
V
The night fire of a little band of elephant-catchers burned fitfully at
the edge of the jungle. They were silent men--for they had lived long on
the elephant trails--and curiously scarred and sombre. They smoked their
cheroots, and waited for Ahmad Din to speak.
"You have all heard?" he asked at last.