EPISODE: 21

"He saved our lives and Teddy's life," she said to her husband.

"Just think, he saved all our lives."

Rikki-tikki woke up with a jump, for the mongooses are light

sleepers.

"Oh, it's you," said he. "What are you bothering for? All the

cobras are dead. And if they weren't, I'm here."

Rikki-tikki had a right to be proud of himself. But he did not

grow too proud, and he kept that garden as a mongoose should

keep it, with tooth and jump and spring and bite, till never a

cobra dared show its head inside the walls.

Darzee's Chant

(Sung in honor of Rikki-tikki-tavi)

Singer and tailor am I—

Doubled the joys that I know—

Proud of my lilt to the sky,

Proud of the house that I sew—

Over and under, so weave I my music—so weave I the house that I

sew.

Sing to your fledglings again,

Mother, oh lift up your head!

Evil that plagued us is slain,

Death in the garden lies dead.

Terror that hid in the roses is impotent—flung on the dung-hill

and dead!

Who has delivered us, who?

Tell me his nest and his name.

Rikki, the valiant, the true,

Tikki, with eyeballs of flame, little milk tusks had dropped out, that elephants who were

afraid always got hurt. Kala Nag knew that that advice was

good, for the first time that he saw a shell burst he backed,

screaming, into a stand of piled rifles, and the bayonets pricked

him in all his softest places. So, before he was twenty-five, he

gave up being afraid, and so he was the best-loved and the best-

looked-after elephant in the service of the Government of India.

He had carried tents, twelve hundred pounds' weight of tents, on

the march in Upper India. He had been hoisted into a ship at the

end of a steam crane and taken for days across the water, and

made to carry a mortar on his back in a strange and rocky

country very far from India, and had seen the Emperor Theodore

lying dead in Magdala, and had come back again in the steamer

entitled, so the soldiers said, to the Abyssinian War medal. He

had seen his fellow elephants die of cold and epilepsy and

starvation and sunstroke up at a place called Ali Musjid, ten

years later; and afterward he had been sent down thousands of

miles south to haul and pile big balks of teak in the timberyards

at Moulmein. There he had half killed an insubordinate young

elephant who was shirking his fair share of work.

After that he was taken off timber-hauling, and employed,

with a few score other elephants who were trained to the

business, in helping to catch wild elephants among the Garo

hills. Elephants are very strictly preserved by the Indian

Government. There is one whole department which does nothing

else but hunt them, and catch them, and break them in, and

send them up and down the country as they are needed for

work.

Kala Nag stood ten fair feet at the shoulders, and his tusks

had been cut off short at five feet, and bound round the ends, to

prevent them splitting, with bands of copper; but he could do

more with those stumps than any untrained elephant could do

with the real sharpened ones. When, after weeks and weeks of

cautious driving of scattered elephants across the hills, the forty

or fifty wild monsters were driven into the last stockade, and the

big drop gate, made of tree trunks lashed together, jarred down

behind them, Kala Nag, at the word of command, would go into that flaring, trumpeting pandemonium (generally at night, when

the flicker of the torches made it difficult to judge distances),

and, picking out the biggest and wildest tusker of the mob,

would hammer him and hustle him into quiet while the men on

the backs of the other elephants roped and tied the smaller ones.

There was nothing in the way of fighting that Kala Nag, the

old wise Black Snake, did not know, for he had stood up more

than once in his time to the charge of the wounded tiger, and,

curling up his soft trunk to be out of harm's way, had knocked

the springing brute sideways in mid-air with a quick sickle cut of

his head, that he had invented all by himself; had knocked him

over, and kneeled upon him with his huge knees till the life went

out with a gasp and a howl, and there was only a fluffy striped

thing on the ground for Kala Nag to pull by the tail.

"Yes," said Big Toomai, his driver, the son of Black Toomai

who had taken him to Abyssinia, and grandson of Toomai of the

Elephants who had seen him caught, "there is nothing that the

Black Snake fears except me. He has seen three generations of us

feed him and groom him, and he will live to see four."

"He is afraid of me also," said Little Toomai, standing up to his

full height of four feet, with only one rag upon him. He was ten

years old, the eldest son of Big Toomai, and, according to

custom, he would take his father's place on Kala Nag's neck

when he grew up, and would handle the heavy iron ankus, the

elephant goad, that had been worn smooth by his father, and his

grandfather, and his great-grandfather.

He knew what he was talking of; for he had been born under

Kala Nag's shadow, had played with the end of his trunk before

he could walk, had taken him down to water as soon as he could

walk, and Kala Nag would no more have dreamed of disobeying

his shrill little orders than he would have dreamed of killing him

on that day when Big Toomai carried the little brown baby under

Kala Nag's tusks, and told him to salute his master that was to

be. "Yes," said Little Toomai, "he is afraid of me," and he took long

strides up to Kala Nag, called him a fat old pig, and made him

lift up his feet one after the other.

"Wah!" said Little Toomai, "thou art a big elephant," and he

wagged his fluffy head, quoting his father. "The Government

may pay for elephants, but they belong to us mahouts. When

thou art old, Kala Nag, there will come some rich rajah, and he

will buy thee from the Government, on account of thy size and

thy manners, and then thou wilt have nothing to do but to carry

gold earrings in thy ears, and a gold howdah on thy back, and a

red cloth covered with gold on thy sides, and walk at the head of

the processions of the King. Then I shall sit on thy neck, O Kala

Nag, with a silver ankus, and men will run before us with golden

sticks, crying, `Room for the King's elephant!' That will be good,

Kala Nag, but not so good as this hunting in the jungles."

"Umph!" said Big Toomai. "Thou art a boy, and as wild as a

buffalo-calf. This running up and down among the hills is not

the best Government service. I am getting old, and I do not love

wild elephants. Give me brick elephant lines, one stall to each

elephant, and big stumps to tie them to safely, and flat, broad

roads to exercise upon, instead of this come-and-go camping.

Aha, the Cawnpore barracks were good. There was a bazaar

close by, and only three hours' work a day."

Little Toomai remembered the Cawnpore elephant-lines and

said nothing. He very much preferred the camp life, and hated

those broad, flat roads, with the daily grubbing for grass in the

forage reserve, and the long hours when there was nothing to do

except to watch Kala Nag fidgeting in his pickets.

What Little Toomai liked was to scramble up bridle paths that

only an elephant could take; the dip into the valley below; the

glimpses of the wild elephants browsing miles away; the rush of

the frightened pig and peacock under Kala Nag's feet; the

blinding warm rains, when all the hills and valleys smoked; the

beautiful misty mornings when nobody knew where they would

camp that night; the steady, cautious drive of the wild

elephants, and the mad rush and blaze and hullabaloo of the last....