The Jungle Book

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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 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. "Mael, mael, 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 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 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 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 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 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' ball-rooms,
but even these are only found 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 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 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. 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 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.