EPISODE: 23

"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 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 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 water, 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 elephant-

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 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—nothing 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 starting

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 clearing he could hear them....