The Jungle Book 9 page

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.

‘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 Govern-

ment 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 ac-

count 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

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ankus, and men will run before us with golden sticks, cry-

ing, ‘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 val-

ley 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 no-

body knew where they would camp that night; the steady,

cautious drive of the wild elephants, and the mad rush and

blaze and hullabaloo of the last night’s drive, when the ele-

phants poured into the stockade like boulders in a landslide,

found that they could not get out, and flung themselves at

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the heavy posts only to be driven back by yells and flaring

torches and volleys of blank cartridge.

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 look-

ing like a goblin in the torch-light. And as soon as there was

a lull you could hear his high-pitched yells of encourage-

ment to Kala Nag, above the trumpeting and crashing, and

snapping of ropes, and groans of the tethered elephants.

‘Mael, mael, Kala Nag! (Go on, go on, Black Snake!) Dant

do! (Give him the tusk!) Somalo! Somalo! (Careful, care-

ful!) 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 Lit-

tle 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

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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 ac-

count, 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 dev-

ils? 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 Ked-

dah, 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 pen-

sion at the end of his service. Is the family of Toomai of

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the Elephants to be trodden underfoot in the dirt of a Ked-

dah? 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 to-

gether, in walking the newly caught wild elephants up and

down between a couple of tame ones to prevent them giv-

ing 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 Pud-

mini; 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

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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 be-

hind 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. ‘Tis a pity to send that young jungle-

cock to molt 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 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 Sa-

hib 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 mus-

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tache, ‘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, scowl-

ing. ‘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

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by accident, and no man has ever seen the elephants dance.

When a driver boasts of his skill and bravery the other driv-

ers 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 sil-

ver 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 com-

panions in the jungle.’ Kala Nag hit the new elephant in the

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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. There-

fore 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, fa-

ther 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

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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 eve-

ning 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 irregu-

lar 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 lit-

tle tom-tom—a drum beaten with the flat of the hand—and

he sat down, cross-legged, before Kala Nag as the stars be-

gan 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 sooth-

ing lullaby, and the first verse says:

Shiv, who poured the harvest and made the winds to blow,

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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 al —

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. Lit-

tle 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

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been shot, and their grunts at last waked the sleeping ma-

houts, 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, look-

ing 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

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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 ab-

solutely 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 dark-

ness 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

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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 wa-

ter, 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 upstream 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 ele-

phant-folk are out tonight. 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

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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— noth-

ing 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 start-

ing 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 only count 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 clear-

ing 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 fac-

es, and trunks like rough bark; savage old bull elephants,

scarred from shoulder to flank with great weals and cuts of

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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 el-

ephant. 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 mov-

ing 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.

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

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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

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