The Jungle Book
where he was lying all along on Pudmini’s back and said, “What is that?
I did not know of a man among the plains-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?”
“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’ ball-rooms,
but even these are only found 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 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. Anyone but a mud-head 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.
“Ohe, 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 plainsman who lives in a hut knows only the four walls
of his hut. Well, leave thy elephants unshackled tonight 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 been ill. But the
sweetmeat 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.
“Tend 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, barefooted, 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