EPISODE: 24

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 faces, and trunks like rough

bark; savage old bull elephants, scarred from shoulder to flank

with great weals and cuts of 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 elephant. 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 moving 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 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 torchlight and shouting, but here he was all alone in

the dark, and once a trunk came up and touched him on the

knee.

Then an elephant trumpeted, and they all took it up for five or

ten terrible seconds. The dew from the trees above spattered

down like rain on the unseen backs, and a dull booming noise

began, not very loud at first, and Little Toomai could not tell

what it was. But it grew and grew, and Kala Nag lifted up one

forefoot and then the other, and brought them down on the

ground—one-two, one-two, as steadily as trip-hammers. The

elephants were stamping all together now, and it sounded like a

war drum beaten at the mouth of a cave. The dew fell from the

trees till there was no more left to fall, and the booming went

on, and the ground rocked and shivered, and Little Toomai put

his hands up to his ears to shut out the sound. But it was all one

gigantic jar that ran through him—this stamp of hundreds of

heavy feet on the raw earth. Once or twice he could feel Kala

Nag and all the others surge forward a few strides, and the

thumping would change to the crushing sound of juicy green

things being bruised, but in a minute or two the boom of feet on

hard earth began again. A tree was creaking and groaning

somewhere near him. 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 three little calves squeaked

together. Then he heard a thump and a shuffle, and the booming went on. It must have lasted fully two hours, and Little Toomai

ached in every nerve, but he knew by the smell of the night air

that 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 been an order. Before Little Toomai had got

the ringing out of his head, before even he had shifted his

position, there was not an elephant in sight except Kala Nag,

Pudmini, and the elephant with the rope-galls, and there was

neither sign nor rustle nor whisper down the hillsides to show

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 the undergrowth and the jungle grass at the

sides had been rolled back. Little Toomai stared once more. Now

he understood the trampling. The elephants had stamped out

more room—had stamped the thick grass and juicy cane to

trash, the trash into slivers, the slivers into tiny fibers, and the

fibers into hard earth.

"Wah!" said Little Toomai, and his eyes were very heavy. "Kala

Nag, my lord, let us keep by Pudmini and go to Petersen Sahib's

camp, or I shall drop from thy neck."

The third elephant watched the two go away, snorted,

wheeled round, and took his own path. He may have belonged

to some little native king's establishment, fifty or sixty or a

hundred miles away.

Two hours later, as Petersen Sahib was eating early breakfast,

his elephants, who had been double chained that night, began to

trumpet, and Pudmini, mired to the shoulders, with Kala Nag,

very footsore, shambled into the camp. Little Toomai's face was

gray and pinched, and his hair was full of leaves and drenched

with dew, but he tried to salute Petersen Sahib, and cried

faintly: "The dance—the elephant dance! I have seen it, and—I

die!" 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 two hours he was lying very contentedly in Petersen Sahib's

hammock with Petersen 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 old hairy, scarred hunters of the

jungles sat three deep before him, looking at him as though he

were a spirit, he told his tale in short words, as a child will, and

wound up with:

"Now, if I lie in one word, send men to see, and they will find

that the elephant folk have trampled down more room in their

dance-room, and they will find ten and ten, and many times ten,

tracks leading to that dance-room. They made more room with

their feet. I have seen it. Kala Nag took me, and I saw. Also Kala

Nag is very leg-weary!"

Little Toomai lay back and slept all through the long afternoon

and into the twilight, and while he slept Petersen Sahib and

Machua Appa followed the track of the two elephants for fifteen

miles across the hills. Petersen Sahib had spent eighteen years in

catching elephants, and he had only once before found such a

dance-place. Machua Appa had no need to look twice at the

clearing to see what had been done there, or to scratch with his

toe in the packed, rammed earth.

"The child speaks truth," said he. "All this was done last night,

and I have counted seventy tracks crossing the river. See, Sahib,

where Pudmini's leg-iron cut the bark of that tree! Yes; she was

there too."

They looked at one another and up and down, and they

wondered. For the ways of elephants are beyond the wit of any

man, black or white, to fathom.

"Forty years and five," said Machua Appa, "have I followed my

lord, the elephant, but never have I heard that any child of man

had seen what this child has seen. By all the Gods of the Hills, it

is—what can we say?" and he shook his head. When they got back to camp it was time for the evening meal.

Petersen Sahib ate alone in his tent, but he gave orders that the

camp should have two sheep and some fowls, as well as a

double ration of flour and rice and salt, for he knew that there

would be a feast.

Big Toomai had come up hotfoot from the camp in the plains

to search for his son and his elephant, and now that he had

found them he looked at them as though he were afraid of them

both. And there was a feast by the blazing campfires in front of

the lines of picketed elephants, and Little Toomai was the hero

of it all. And the big brown elephant catchers, the trackers and

drivers and ropers, and the men who know all the secrets of

breaking the wildest elephants, passed him from one to the

other, and they marked his forehead with blood from the breast

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 logs made the elephants look as though they had been

dipped in blood too, Machua Appa, the head of all the drivers of

all the Keddahs—Machua Appa, Petersen Sahib's other self, who

had never seen a made road in forty years: Machua Appa, who

was so great that he had no other name than Machua Appa,—

leaped to his feet, with Little Toomai held high in the air above

his head, and shouted: "Listen, my brothers. Listen, too, you my

lords in the lines there, for I, Machua Appa, am speaking! This

little one shall no more be called Little Toomai, but Toomai of

the Elephants, as his great-grandfather was called before him.

What never man has seen he has seen through the long night,

and the favor of the elephant-folk and of the Gods of the Jungles

is with him. He shall become a great tracker. He shall become

greater than I, even I, Machua Appa! He shall follow the new

trail, and the stale trail, and the mixed trail, with a clear eye! He

shall take no harm in the Keddah when he runs under their

bellies to rope the wild tuskers; and if he slips before the feet of

the charging bull elephant, the bull elephant shall know who he

is and shall not crush him. Aihai! my lords in the chains,"—he

whirled up the line of pickets—"here is the little one that has....