TOOMAI OF THE ELEPHANTS
I will remember what I was, I am sick of rope and chain-- I will remember my old strength and all my forest affairs. I will not sell my back to man for a bundle of sugar-cane, I will go out to my own kind, and the wood-folk in their lairs.
I will go out until the day, until the morning break, Out to the winds' untainted kiss, the waters' clean caress: I will forget my ankle-ring and snap my picket-stake. I will revisit my lost loves, and playmates masterless!
TOOMAI OF THE ELEPHANTS
KALA NAG, which means Black Snake, had served the Indian Government inevery way that an elephant could serve it for forty-seven years, and ashe was fully twenty years old when he was caught, that makes him nearlyseventy--a ripe age for an elephant. He remembered pushing, with a bigleather pad on his forehead, at a gun stuck in deep mud, and that wasbefore the Afghan war of 1842, and he had not then come to his fullstrength. His mother, Radha Pyari,--Radha the darling,--who had beencaught in the same drive with Kala Nag, told him, before his little milktusks 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 hesaw a shell burst he backed, screaming, into a stand of piled rifles,and the bayonets pricked him in all his softest places. So, before hewas twenty-five, he gave up being afraid, and so he was the best-lovedand the best-looked-after elephant in the service of the Government ofIndia. He had carried tents, twelve hundred pounds' weight of tents, onthe march in Upper India: he had been hoisted into a ship at the end ofa steam-crane and taken for days across the water, and made to carry amortar 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 comeback again in the steamer entitled, so the soldiers said, to theAbyssinian war medal. He had seen his fellow-elephants die of cold andepilepsy and starvation and sunstroke up at a place called Ali Musjid,ten years later; and afterward he had been sent down thousands of milessouth to haul and pile big baulks of teak in the timber-yards atMoulmein. There he had half killed an insubordinate young elephant whowas shirking his fair share of the work.
"KALA NAG WAS THE BEST-LOVED ELEPHANT IN THE SERVICE."]
After that he was taken off timber-hauling, and employed, with a fewscore other elephants who were trained to the business, in helping tocatch wild elephants among the Garo hills. Elephants are very strictlypreserved by the Indian Government. There is one whole department whichdoes nothing else but hunt them, and catch them, and break them in, andsend 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 beencut off short at five feet, and bound round the ends, to prevent themsplitting, with bands of copper; but he could do more with those stumpsthan any untrained elephant could do with the real sharpened ones.
When, after weeks and weeks of cautious driving of scattered elephantsacross the hills, the forty or fifty wild monsters were driven into thelast stockade, and the big drop-gate, made of tree-trunks lashedtogether, 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 hammerhim and hustle him into quiet while the men on the backs of the otherelephants roped and tied the smaller ones.
There was nothing in the way of fighting that Kala Nag, the old wiseBlack Snake, did not know, for he had stood up more than once in histime to the charge of the wounded tiger, and, curling up his soft trunkto be out of harm's way, had knocked the springing brute sideways inmid-air with a quick sickle-cut of his head, that he had invented all byhimself; had knocked him over, and kneeled upon him with his huge kneestill the life went out with a gasp and a howl, and there was only afluffy 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 hadtaken him to Abyssinia, and grandson of Toomai of the Elephants who hadseen 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 willlive to see four."
"He is afraid of _me_ also," said Little Toomai, standing up to his fullheight 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 takehis father's place on Kala Nag's neck when he grew up, and would handlethe heavy iron _ankus_, the elephant-goad that had been worn smoothby his father, and his grandfather, and his great-grandfather. He knewwhat 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 himdown to water as soon as he could walk, and Kala Nag would no more havedreamed of disobeying his shrill little orders than he would havedreamed of killing him on that day when Big Toomai carried the littlebrown baby under Kala Nag's tusks, and told him to salute his masterthat was to be.
"'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 longstrides up to Kala Nag, called him a fat old pig, and made him lift uphis feet one after the other.
"Wah!" said Little Toomai, "thou art a big elephant," and he wagged hisfluffy head, quoting his father. "The Government may pay for elephants,but they belong to us mahouts. When thou art old, Kala Nag, there willcome some rich Rajah, and he will buy thee from the Government, onaccount of thy size and thy manners, and then thou wilt have nothing todo but to carry gold earrings in thy ears, and a gold howdah on thyback, and a red cloth covered with gold on thy sides, and walk at thehead of the processions of the King. Then I shall sit on thy neck, OKala Nag, with a silver _ankus_, and men will run before us with goldensticks, crying, 'Room for the King's elephant!' That will be good, KalaNag, 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 Governmentservice. I am getting old, and I do not love wild elephants, Give mebrick elephant-lines, one stall to each elephant, and big stumps to tiethem to safely, and flat, broad roads to exercise upon, instead of thiscome-and-go camping. Aha, the Cawnpore barracks were good. There was abazaar 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 longhours when there was nothing to do except to watch Kala Nag fidgeting inhis pickets.
What Little Toomai liked was to scramble up bridle-paths that only anelephant could take; the dip into the valley below; the glimpses of thewild elephants browsing miles away; the rush of the frightened pig andpeacock under Kala Nag's feet; the blinding warm rains, when all thehills and valleys smoked; the beautiful misty mornings when nobody knewwhere they would camp that night; the steady, cautious drive of the wildelephants, and the mad rush and blaze and hullaballoo of the lastnight's drive, when the elephants poured into the stockade like bouldersin a landslide, found that they could not get out, and flung themselvesat the heavy posts only to be driven back by yells and flaring torchesand volleys of blank cartridge.
"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 asthree 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 theKeddah, that is, the stockade, looked like a picture of the end of theworld, and men had to make signs to one another, because they could nothear themselves speak. Then Little Toomai would climb up to the top ofone of the quivering stockade-posts, his sun-bleached brown hair flyingloose all over his shoulders, and he l
ooking like a goblin in thetorch-light; and as soon as there was a lull you could hear hishigh-pitched yells of encouragement to Kala Nag, above the trumpetingand crashing, and snapping of ropes, and groans of the tetheredelephants. "_Mail, mail, Kala Nag!_ (Go on, go on, Black Snake!) _Dantdo!_ (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 thewild elephant would sway to and fro across the Keddah, and the oldelephant-catchers would wipe the sweat out of their eyes, and find timeto 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 andslipped 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 theleg of a kicking young calf (calves always give more trouble thanfull-grown animals). Kala Nag saw him, caught him in his trunk, andhanded him up to Big Toomai, who slapped him then and there, and put himback on the post.
Next morning he gave him a scolding, and said: "Are not good brickelephant-lines and a little tent-carrying enough, that thou must needsgo elephant-catching on thy own account, little worthless? Now thosefoolish hunters, whose pay is less than my pay, have spoken to PetersenSahib of the matter." Little Toomai was frightened. He did not know muchof white men, but Petersen Sahib was the greatest white man in the worldto him. He was the head of all the Keddah operations--the man who caughtall the elephants for the Government of India, and who knew more aboutthe 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 whyshould he go hunting these wild devils? He may even require thee to bean 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 thisnonsense ends safely. Next week the catching is over, and we of theplains are sent back to our stations. Then we will march on smoothroads, and forget all this hunting. But, son, I am angry that thoushouldst meddle in the business that belongs to these dirty Assamesejungle-folk. Kala Nag will obey none but me, so I must go with him intothe Keddah, but he is only a fighting elephant, and he does not help torope them. So I sit at my ease, as befits a mahout,--not a merehunter,--a mahout, I say, and a man who gets a pension at the end of hisservice. Is the family of Toomai of the Elephants to be troddenunderfoot 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 nothorns in his feet; or else Petersen Sahib will surely catch thee andmake thee a wild hunter--a follower of elephant's foot-tracks, ajungle-bear. Bah! Shame! Go!"
Little Toomai went off without saying a word, but he told Kala Nag allhis grievances while he was examining his feet. "No matter," said LittleToomai, turning up the fringe of Kala Nag's huge right ear. "They havesaid my name to Petersen Sahib, and perhaps--and perhaps--andperhaps--who knows? Hai! That is a big thorn that I have pulled out!"
The next few days were spent in getting the elephants together, inwalking the newly caught wild elephants up and down between a couple oftame ones, to prevent them from giving too much trouble on the downwardmarch to the plains, and in taking stock of the blankets and ropes andthings that had been worn out or lost in the forest.
Petersen Sahib came in on his clever she-elephant Pudmini; he had beenpaying off other camps among the hills, for the season was coming to anend, and there was a native clerk sitting at a table under a tree, topay the drivers their wages. As each man was paid he went back to hiselephant, and joined the line that stood ready to start. The catchers,and hunters, and beaters, the men of the regular Keddah, who stayed inthe jungle year in and year out, sat on the backs of the elephants thatbelonged to Petersen Sahib's permanent force, or leaned against thetrees with their guns across their arms, and made fun of the drivers whowere going away, and laughed when the newly caught elephants broke theline and ran about.
Big Toomai went up to the clerk with Little Toomai behind him, andMachua 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 tosend that young jungle-cock to moult in the plains."
Now Petersen Sahib had ears all over him, as a man must have who listensto the most silent of all living things--the wild elephant. He turnedwhere 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 torope even a dead elephant."
"This is not a man, but a boy. He went into the Keddah at the lastdrive, and threw Barmao there the rope, when we were trying to get thatyoung calf with the blotch on his shoulder away from his mother."
Machua Appa pointed at Little Toomai, and Petersen Sahib looked, andLittle Toomai bowed to the earth.
"He throw a rope? He is smaller than a picket-pin. Little one, what isthy 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 inhis trunk and held him level with Pudmini's forehead, in front of thegreat Petersen Sahib. Then Little Toomai covered his face with hishands, for he was only a child, and except where elephants wereconcerned, he was just as bashful as a child could be.
"Oho!" said Petersen Sahib, smiling underneath his mustache, "and whydidst thou teach thy elephant _that_ trick? Was it to help thee stealgreen corn from the roofs of the houses when the ears are put out todry?"
"'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 ofthem had taught their elephants that trick when they were boys. LittleToomai was hanging eight feet up in the air, and he wished very muchthat he were eight feet underground.
"He is Toomai, my son, Sahib," said Big Toomai, scowling. "He is a verybad boy, and he will end in a jail, Sahib."
"Of that I have my doubts," said Petersen Sahib. "A boy who can face afull Keddah at his age does not end in jails. See, little one, here arefour annas to spend in sweetmeats because thou hast a little head underthat great thatch of hair. In time thou mayest become a hunter too." BigToomai scowled more than ever. "Remember, though, that Keddahs are notgood 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 elephantsdance. That is the proper time. Come to me when thou hast seen theelephants dance, and then I will let thee go into all the Keddahs."
There was another roar of laughter, for that is an old joke amongelephant-catchers, and it means just never. There are great cleared flatplaces hidden away in the forests that are called elephants' ballrooms,but even these are found only by accident, and no man has ever seen theelephants dance. When a driver boasts of his skill and bravery the otherdrivers say, "And when didst _thou_ see the elephants dance?"
Kala Nag put Little Toomai down, and he bowed to the earth again andwent away with his father, and gave the silver four-anna piece to hismother, who was nursing his baby-brother, and they all were put up onKala Nag's back, and the line of grunting, squealing elephants rolleddown the hill-path to the plains. It was a very lively march on accountof the new elephants, who gave trouble at every ford, and who neededcoaxing or beating every other minute.
Big Toomai prodded Kala Nag spitefully, for he was very angry, butLittle 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 hehad 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 ofthese hill-buffaloes of trackers. _That_ was what he meant. O
h you infront, 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 goodbehavior. Why should Petersen Sahib have chosen _me_ to go down with youdonkeys of the rice-fields? Lay your beast alongside, Toomai, and lethim prod with his tusks. By all the Gods of the Hills, these newelephants are possessed, or else they can smell their companions in thejungle."
Kala Nag hit the new elephant in the ribs and knocked the wind out ofhim, as Big Toomai said, "We have swept the hills of wild elephants atthe last catch. It is only your carelessness in driving. Must I keeporder 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 neversaw the jungle would know that _they_ know that the drives are ended forthe season. Therefore all the wild elephants to-night will--but whyshould I waste wisdom on a river-turtle?"
"What will they do?" Little Toomai called out.
"_Ohe_, little one. Art thou there? Well, I will tell thee, for thouhast a cool head. They will dance, and it behooves thy father, who hasswept _all_ the hills of _all_ the elephants, to double-chain hispickets 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 aboutdances."
"Yes; but a plains-man who lives in a hut knows only the four walls ofhis hut. Well, leave thy elephants unshackled to-night and see whatcomes; as for their dancing, I have seen the place where--_Bapree-Bap!_how many windings has the Dihang River? Here is another ford, and wemust 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 newelephants; but they lost their tempers long before they got there.
Then the elephants were chained by their hind legs to their big stumpsof pickets, and extra ropes were fitted to the new elephants, and thefodder was piled before them, and the hill-drivers went back to PetersenSahib through the afternoon light, telling the plains-drivers to beextra careful that night, and laughing when the plains-drivers asked thereason.
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 anoise in an irregular fashion. He sits down to a sort of revel all byhimself. And Little Toomai had been spoken to by Petersen Sahib! If hehad not found what he wanted I believe he would have burst. But thesweatmeat-seller in the camp lent him a little tom-tom--a drum beatenwith the flat of the hand--and he sat down, cross-legged, before KalaNag as the stars began to come out, the tom-tom in his lap, and hethumped and he thumped and he thumped, and the more he thought of thegreat honor that had been done to him, the more he thumped, all aloneamong the elephant-fodder. There was no tune and no words, but thethumping made him happy.
The new elephants strained at their ropes, and squealed and trumpetedfrom time to time, and he could hear his mother in the camp hut puttinghis small brother to sleep with an old, old song about the great GodShiv, who once told all the animals what they should eat. It is a verysoothing 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 eachverse, till he felt sleepy and stretched himself on the fodder at KalaNag's side.
At last the elephants began to lie down one after another as is theircustom, till only Kala Nag at the right of the line was left standingup; and he rocked slowly from side to side, his ears put forward tolisten to the night wind as it blew very slowly across the hills. Theair was full of all the night noises that, taken together, make one bigsilence--the click of one bamboo-stem against the other, the rustle ofsomething alive in the undergrowth, the scratch and squawk of ahalf-waked bird (birds are awake in the night much more often than weimagine), and the fall of water ever so far away. Little Toomai sleptfor some time, and when he waked it was brilliant moonlight, and KalaNag was still standing up with his ears cocked. Little Toomai turned,rustling in the fodder, and watched the curve of his big back againsthalf the stars in heaven, and while he watched he heard, so far awaythat it sounded no more than a pinhole of noise pricked through thestillness, the "hoot-toot" of a wild elephant.
All the elephants in the lines jumped up as if they had been shot, andtheir grunts at last waked the sleeping mahouts, and they came out anddrove in the picket-pegs with big mallets, and tightened this rope andknotted that till all was quiet. One new elephant had nearly grubbed uphis picket, and Big Toomai took off Kala Nag's leg-chain and shackledthat elephant fore foot to hind foot, but slipped a loop of grass-stringround Kala Nag's leg, and told him to remember that he was tied fast. Heknew that he and his father and his grandfather had done the very samething hundreds of times before. Kala Nag did not answer to the order bygurgling, as he usually did. He stood still, looking out across themoonlight, his head a little raised and his ears spread like fans, upto the great folds of the Garo hills.
"Look to him if he grows restless in the night," said Big Toomai toLittle Toomai, and he went into the hut and slept. Little Toomai wasjust going to sleep, too, when he heard the coir string snap with alittle "tang," and Kala Nag rolled out of his pickets as slowly and assilently as a cloud rolls out of the mouth of a valley. Little Toomaipattered after him, bare-footed, down the road in the moonlight, callingunder 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 boyin the moonlight, put down his trunk, swung him up to his neck, andalmost before Little Toomai had settled his knees, slipped into theforest.
There was one blast of furious trumpeting from the lines, and then thesilence shut down on everything, and Kala Nag began to move. Sometimes atuft of high grass washed along his sides as a wave washes along thesides of a ship, and sometimes a cluster of wild-pepper vines wouldscrape along his back, or a bamboo would creak where his shouldertouched it; but between those times he moved absolutely without anysound, drifting through the thick Garo forest as though it had beensmoke. He was going uphill, but though Little Toomai watched the starsin 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 andfurry under the moonlight for miles and miles, and the blue-white mistover the river in the hollow. Toomai leaned forward and looked, and hefelt that the forest was awake below him--awake and alive and crowded. Abig brown fruit-eating bat brushed past his ear; a porcupine's quillsrattled in the thicket, and in the darkness between the tree-stems heheard a hog-bear digging hard in the moist warm earth, and snuffing asit digged.
Then the branches closed over his head again, and Kala Nag began to godown into the valley--not quietly this time, but as a runaway gun goesdown a steep bank--in one rush. The huge limbs moved as steadily aspistons, eight feet to each stride, and the wrinkled skin of theelbow-points rustled. The undergrowth on either side of him ripped witha noise like torn canvas, and the saplings that he heaved away rightand left with his shoulders sprang back again, and banged him on theflank, and great trails of creepers, all matted together, hung from histusks 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 aswinging bough should sweep him to the ground, and he wished that hewere back in the lines again.
The grass began to get squashy, and Kala Nag's feet sucked and squelch
edas he put them down, and the night mist at the bottom of the valleychilled Little Toomai. There was a splash and a trample, and the rush ofrunning water, and Kala Nag strode through the bed of a river, feelinghis way at each step. Above the noise of the water, as it swirled roundthe elephant's legs, Little Toomai could hear more splashing and sometrumpeting 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-folkare out to-night. It _is_ the dance, then."
Kala Nag swashed out of the water, blew his trunk clear, and begananother climb; but this time he was not alone, and he had not to makehis path. That was made already, six feet wide, in front of him, wherethe bent jungle-grass was trying to recover itself and stand up. Manyelephants must have gone that way only a few minutes before. LittleToomai looked back, and behind him a great wild tusker with his littlepig's eyes glowing like hot coals, was just lifting himself out of themisty river. Then the trees closed up again, and they went on and up,with trumpetings and crashings, and the sound of breaking branches onevery side of them.
At last Kala Nag stood still between two tree-trunks at the very top ofthe hill. They were part of a circle of trees that grew round anirregular space of some three or four acres, and in all that space, asLittle Toomai could see, the ground had been trampled down as hard as abrick floor. Some trees grew in the center of the clearing, but theirbark was rubbed away, and the white wood beneath showed all shiny andpolished in the patches of moonlight. There were creepers hanging fromthe upper branches, and the bells of the flowers of the creepers, greatwaxy white things like convolvuluses, hung down fast asleep; but withinthe limits of the clearing there was not a single blade ofgreen--nothing but the trampled earth.
The moonlight showed it all iron-gray, except where some elephants stoodupon it, and their shadows were inky black. Little Toomai looked,holding his breath, with his eyes starting out of his head, and as helooked, more and more and more elephants swung out into the open frombetween the tree-trunks. Little Toomai could count only up to ten, andhe counted again and again on his fingers till he lost count of thetens, and his head began to swim. Outside the clearing he could hearthem crashing in the undergrowth as they worked their way up thehillside; but as soon as they were within the circle of the tree-trunksthey moved like ghosts.
There were white-tusked wild males, with fallen leaves and nuts andtwigs lying in the wrinkles of their necks and the folds of their ears;fat slow-footed she-elephants, with restless, little pinky-black calvesonly three or four feet high running under their stomachs; youngelephants with their tusks just beginning to show, and very proud ofthem; lanky, scraggy old-maid elephants, with their hollow anxiousfaces, and trunks like rough bark; savage old bull-elephants, scarredfrom shoulder to flank with great weals and cuts of bygone fights, andthe caked dirt of their solitary mud-baths dropping from theirshoulders; and there was one with a broken tusk and the marks of thefull-stroke, the terrible drawing scrape, of a tiger's claws on hisside.
They were standing head to head, or walking to and fro across the groundin couples, or rocking and swaying all by themselves--scores and scoresof elephants.
Toomai knew that so long as he lay still on Kala Nag's neck nothingwould happen to him; for even in the rush and scramble of a Keddah-drivea wild elephant does not reach up with his trunk and drag a man off theneck of a tame elephant; and these elephants were not thinking of menthat night. Once they started and put their ears forward when they heardthe chinking of a leg-iron in the forest, but it was Pudmini, PetersenSahib's pet elephant, her chain snapped short off, grunting, snufflingup the hillside. She must have broken her pickets, and come straightfrom Petersen Sahib's camp; and Little Toomai saw another elephant, onethat 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 wentinto the middle of the crowd, clucking and gurgling, and all theelephants began to talk in their own tongue, and to move about.
"LITTLE TOOMAI LOOKED DOWN UPON SCORES AND SCORES OF BROAD BACKS."]
Still lying down, Little Toomai looked down upon scores and scores ofbroad backs, and wagging ears, and tossing trunks, and little rollingeyes. He heard the click of tusks as they crossed other tusks byaccident, and the dry rustle of trunks twined together, and the chafingof enormous sides and shoulders in the crowd, and the incessant flickand _hissh_ of the great tails. Then a cloud came over the moon, and hesat in black darkness; but the quiet, steady hustling and pushing andgurgling went on just the same. He knew that there were elephants allround Kala Nag, and that there was no chance of backing him out of theassembly; so he set his teeth and shivered. In a Keddah at least therewas torch-light and shouting, but here he was all alone in the dark, andonce a trunk came up and touched him on the knee.
Then an elephant trumpeted, and they all took it up for five or tenterrible seconds. The dew from the trees above spattered down like rainon the unseen backs, and a dull booming noise began, not very loud atfirst, and Little Toomai could not tell what it was; but it grew andgrew, and Kala Nag lifted up one fore foot and then the other, andbrought them down on the ground--one-two, one-two, as steadily astrip-hammers. The elephants were stamping altogether now, and it soundedlike a war-drum beaten at the mouth of a cave. The dew fell from thetrees till there was no more left to fall, and the booming went on, andthe ground rocked and shivered, and Little Toomai put his hands up tohis ears to shut out the sound. But it was all one gigantic jar that ranthrough him--this stamp of hundreds of heavy feet on the raw earth. Onceor twice he could feel Kala Nag and all the others surge forward a fewstrides, and the thumping would change to the crushing sound of juicygreen things being bruised, but in a minute or two the boom of feet onhard earth began again. A tree was creaking and groaning somewhere nearhim. 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 threelittle calves squeaked together. Then he heard a thump and a shuffle,and the booming went on. It must have lasted fully two hours, and LittleToomai ached in every nerve; but he knew by the smell of the night airthat 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 beenan order. Before Little Toomai had got the ringing out of his head,before even he had shifted his position, there was not an elephant insight except Kala Nag, Pudmini, and the elephant with the rope-galls,and there was neither sign nor rustle nor whisper down the hillsides toshow 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 theundergrowth and the jungle-grass at the sides had been rolled back.Little Toomai stared once more. Now he understood the trampling. Theelephants had stamped out more room--had stamped the thick grass andjuicy cane to trash, the trash into slivers, the slivers into tinyfibers, and the fibers into hard earth.
"Wah!" said Little Toomai, and his eyes were very heavy. "Kala Nag, mylord, let us keep by Pudmini and go to Peterson Sahib's camp, or I shalldrop from thy neck."
The third elephant watched the two go away, snorted, wheeled round, andtook his own path. He may have belonged to some little native king'sestablishment, fifty or sixty or a hundred miles away.
Two hours later, as Petersen Sahib was eating early breakfast, hiselephants, who had been double-chained that night, began to trumpet, andPudmini, mired to the shoulders, with Kala Nag, very foot-sore, shambledinto the camp.
Little Toomai's face was gray and pinched, and his hair was full ofleaves and drenched with dew; but he tried to salute Petersen Sahib, andcried faintly: "The dance--the elephant-dance! I have seen
it, and--Idie!" 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 twohours he was lying very contentedly in Petersen Sahib's hammock withPetersen 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 oldhairy, scarred hunters of the jungles sat three-deep before him, lookingat him as though he were a spirit, he told his tale in short words, as achild will, and wound up with:
"Now, if I lie in one word, send men to see, and they will find that theelephant-folk have trampled down more room in their dance-room, and theywill find ten and ten, and many times ten, tracks leading to thatdance-room. They made more room with their feet. I have seen it. KalaNag took me, and I saw. Also Kala Nag is very leg-weary!"
Little Toomai lay back and slept all through the long afternoon and intothe twilight, and while he slept Petersen Sahib and Machua Appa followedthe track of the two elephants for fifteen miles across the hills.Petersen Sahib had spent eighteen years in catching elephants, and hehad only once before found such a dance-place. Machua Appa had no needto look twice at the clearing to see what had been done there, or toscratch with his toe in the packed, rammed earth.
"The child speaks truth," said he. "All this was done last night, and Ihave counted seventy tracks crossing the river. See, Sahib, wherePudmini'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 theways of elephants are beyond the wit of any man, black or white, tofathom.
"Forty years and five," said Machua Appa, "have I followed my lord, theelephant, but never have I heard that any child of man had seen whatthis child has seen. By all the Gods of the Hills, it is--what can wesay?" and he shook his head.
When they got back to camp it was time for the evening meal. PetersonSahib ate alone in his tent, but he gave orders that the camp shouldhave two sheep and some fowls, as well as a double-ration of flour andrice 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 searchfor his son and his elephant, and now that he had found them he lookedat them as though he were afraid of them both. And there was a feast bythe blazing campfires in front of the lines of picketed elephants, andLittle Toomai was the hero of it all; and the big brownelephant-catchers, the trackers and drivers and ropers, and the men whoknow all the secrets of breaking the wildest elephants, passed him fromone to the other, and they marked his forehead with blood from thebreast 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 logsmade the elephants look as though they had been dipped in blood too,Machua Appa, the head of all the drivers of all the Keddahs--MachuaAppa, Petersen Sahib's other self, who had never seen a made road inforty years: Machua Appa, who was so great that he had no other namethan Machua Appa--leaped to his feet, with Little Toomai held high inthe air above his head, and shouted: "Listen, my brothers. Listen, too,you my lords in the lines there, for I, Machua Appa, am speaking! Thislittle one shall no more be called Little Toomai, but Toomai of theElephants, as his great-grandfather was called before him. What neverman has seen he has seen through the long night, and the favor of theelephant-folk and of the Gods of the Jungles is with him. He shallbecome a great tracker; he shall become greater than I, even I, MachuaAppa! He shall follow the new trail, and the stale trail, and the mixedtrail, with a clear eye! He shall take no harm in the Keddah when heruns under their bellies to rope the wild tuskers; and if he slipsbefore the feet of the charging bull-elephant that bull-elephant shallknow who he is and shall not crush him. _Aihai!_ my lords in thechains,"--he whirled up the line of pickets,--"here is the little onethat has seen your dances in your hidden places--the sight that neverman saw! Give him honor, my lords! _Salaam karo_, my children. Make yoursalute 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! ToToomai of the Elephants. _Barrao!_"
"'TO TOOMAI OF THE ELEPHANTS. BARRAO!'"]
And at that last wild yell the whole line flung up their trunks till thetips touched their foreheads, and broke out into the full salute--thecrashing trumpet-peal that only the Viceroy of India hears, the Salaamutof the Keddah.
But it was all for the sake of Little Toomai, who had seen what neverman had seen before--the dance of the elephants at night and alone inthe heart of the Garo hills!
SHIV AND THE GRASSHOPPER
(THE SONG THAT TOOMAI'S MOTHER SANG TO THE BABY)
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!_
Wheat he gave to rich folk, millet to the poor, Broken scraps for holy men that beg from door to door; Cattle to the tiger, carrion to the kite, And rags and bones to wicked wolves without the wall at night. Naught he found too lofty, none he saw too low-- Parbati beside him watched them come and go; Thought to cheat her husband, turning Shiv to jest-- Stole the little grasshopper and hid it in her breast. _So she tricked him, Shiva the Preserver. Mahadeo! Mahadeo! turn and see. Tall are the camels, heavy are the kine, But this was least of little things, O little son of mine!_
When the dole was ended, laughingly she said, "Master, of a million mouths is not one unfed?" Laughing, Shiv made answer, "All have had their part, Even he, the little one, hidden 'neath thy heart." From her breast she plucked it, Parbati the thief, Saw the Least of Little Things gnawed a new-grown leaf! Saw and feared and wondered, making prayer to Shiv, Who hath surely given meat to all that live. _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!_