TOOMAI OF THE ELEPHANTS




KALA NAG, which means Black Snake, had served the Indian
Government in every way that an elephant could serve it for
forty-seven years, and as he was fully twenty years old when he
was caught, that makes him nearly seventy -- a ripe age for an
elephant. He remembered pushing, with a big leather pad on his
forehead, at a gun stuck in deep mud, and that was before the
Afghan war of 1842, and he had not then come to his full
strength.

His mother, Radha Pyari, -- Radha the darling, -- who
had been caught in the same drive with Kala Nag, told him before
his little milk tusks had dropped out, that elephants who were
afraid always got hurt; and 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 baulks of teak in the
timber-yards at Moulmein. There he had half killed an
insubordinate young elephant who was shirking his fair share of
the 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 hullaballoo of the last night's drive
when the elephants poured into the stockade like boulders in a
landslide, found that they could not get out, and flung
themselves at 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 looking like a goblin in
the torch-light; and as soon as there was a lull you could hear
his high-pitched yells of encouragement to Kala
Nag, above the trumpeting and crashing, and snapping of ropes,
and groans of the tethered elephants. "Mail, mail, Kala Nag! (Go
on, go on, Black Snake!) Dant do! (Give him the tusk!) Somalo!
Somalo! (Careful, careful!) 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
Little 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 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 account, 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 devils? 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 Keddah, 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 pension
at the end of his service. Is the family of Toomai of the Elephants
to be trodden underfoot in the dirt of a Keddah? 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
together, in walking the newly caught wild elephants up and down
between a couple of tame ones, to prevent them from giving 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 Pudmini;
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 back 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 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 behind
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 moult 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 Barmac 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' ballrooms, but even these are found only 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 who 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 behaviour. 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. Any one but
a mudhead who never saw the jungle would know that they know
that the drivers 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 plains-man who lives in a hut knows only the
four walls of his hut. Well, leave thy elephants unshackled
to-night 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 burst. 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 honour 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.

"Look 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,
bare-footed, 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
up-hill, 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 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 up-stream 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 to-night. 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 trumpeting
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 count only 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
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 torch-light 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 fore foot and then the other, and brought them down on the
ground -- one-two, one-two, as steadily as triphammers. The elephants
were stamping altogether 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 foot-sore, 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 each other, 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 hot-foot 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 camp-fires 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 favour 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 that 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 seen your dances in your hidden places -- the sight that
never man saw. Give him honour, my lords! Salaam karo, my
children. Make your salute to Toomai of the Elephants!
Gunga Pershad, ahaa! Hira Guj, Birchi Guj, Kuttar Guj, ahaa!
Pudmini, -- thou hast seen him at the dance, and thou too, Kala
Nag, my pearl among elephants! -- ahaa! Together! To Toomai of
the Elephants. Barrao!"

And at that last wild yell the whole line flung up their
trunks till the tips touched their foreheads, and broke out into
the full salute -- the crashing trumpet-peal that only the
Viceroy of India hears, the Salaamut of the Keddah. But it was
all for the sake of Little Toomai, who had seen what never man
had seen before -- the dance of the elephants at night and alone
in the heart of the Garo hills!




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