Chapter-8
Kala Naag began to move towards the forest. He kept moving through Garo forest and Little Toomai kept watching the stars trying to make out in which direction they were going. A tuft of high grass would wash along the elephant’s sides as a wave washes along the sides of a ship. A cluster of wild-pepper vines would scrape along his back, or a bamboo would creak where his shoulder touched it. But he kept on moving without any noise.
Little Toomai felt that the forest was awake below him—awake and alive and crowded as he could hear a variety of sounds. A big brown humming bee brushed past his ear; a porcupine’s quills rattled in the thick jungle; and in the darkness between the tree stems he heard a bear digging hard in the moist warm earth.
Soon Kala Naag reached the crest of the ascent and stopped for a minute to take some rest. Little Toomai could see the tops of the trees even under the moonlight as a dark blue mist covered the entire forest.
A few minutes later, Kala Naag began to go down into the valley walking very slowly because of his tired legs. But since the slope was getting steeper downwards, he had to move his huge limbs steadier and faster. The saplings that he heaved away right and left with his shoulders sprang back again and banged him on the flank. 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. Little Toomai laid himself down close to the great neck and he wished that he was back in the lines again.
The grass began to get squashy. Kala Naag’s feet sucked and squelched as he put them down, and it was getting cold and the night mist at the bottom of the valley chilled little Toomai. Later, Kala Naag had to stroll 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.
Kala Naag 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. 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. They went on and on, with trumpetings and the sound of breaking branches on every side of them.
At last, Kala Naag stood still between two tree-trunks at the very top of the hill. Little Toomai kept noticing the place. These two trunks were part of a circle of trees that grew round an irregular space of some three or four acres. In all that space, the ground had been trampled down as hard as a brick floor. There were some tress at the centre of the cleared land and even their barks were rubbed and the white wood beneath showed all shiny and polished in the patches of moonlight. There were creepers hanging from the upper branches fast asleep. Little Toomai was surprised to see that even though there were some trees around but there was no sign of greenery in that place.
It was due to the dull moonlight that everything looked iron grey to Little Toomai and the other elephants that joined them appeared to be inky black. Little Toomai kept looking as 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 his count. All of them appeared within the circle of the tree trunks and moved like ghosts.
All the wild male elephants were white-tusked with fallen leaves, nuts and twigs lying in the wrinkles of their necks and the folds of their ears. The she-elephants were fat slow-footed and there were some restless little pinky black calves only three or four feet high running under their stomachs. The young elephants with their tusks just beginning to show seemed to be proud of them. They came and stood head to head and some of them were walking to and fro across the ground in couples.
Toomai was scared now but he knew that till he was lying on Kala Naag’s neck nothing would happen to him. He knew that even at Keddah drive, when they used to catch wild elephants, he had never seen a wild elephant reach up with his trunk and drag a man off the neck of a tame elephant. Suddenly, they heard two more elephants coming near to them as Little Toomai could hear the chinking of iron in the forest.
It was Pudmini, Petersen Sahib’s pet elephant. Her chain snapped short off. She was grunting, snuffling up the hillside. She must have broken her pickets and come straight from Petersen Sahib’s camp. There came 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.
Finally, Toomai could not hear sounds of any more elephants moving in the forest. Kala Naag rolled out from his station between the trees and went into the middle of the crowd. All the elephants began to talk in their own tongues, and to move about.
Little Toomai was still lying on Kala Naag and kept looking on what was happening. He heard the click of tusks as they crossed other tusks by accident. The dry rustle of trunks twined together with the chafing of enormous sides and shoulders in the crowd. Then, a cloud came over the moon and it was all dark. But the noises kept on coming louder and louder. He knew that many elephants were surrounding Kala Naag and he had no chance of backing out.
Then, an elephant trumpeted, and everyone followed him. The dew from the trees above spattered down like rain on the unseen backs. And suddenly, there was a noise, not very loud at first. Little Toomai could not identify what it was. But it grew and grew, and Kala Naag lifted up one forefoot and then the other, and brought them down on the ground as steadily as 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 sound went on increasing. Little Toomai put his hands up to his ears to shut out the sound. It was like stamping of hundreds of heavy feet on the raw earth. Once or twice, he could feel Kala Naag and all the others surge forward a few strides.
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. He put out his arm and felt the bark, but Kala Naag 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 the booming went on. It lasted two hours, and Little Toomai ached in every nerve. He knew that it was almost dawn.
It was morning soon and there were green hills behind the place where they were standing almost the whole night. The booming sound stopped with the first light of the morning. Before Little Toomai got the ringing out of his head, before even he shifted his position, there was not an elephant in sight except Kala Naag, Pudmini, and the elephant with the rope-galls. There was neither sign nor rustle nor any whisper down the hillsides to show where the others had gone.
Little Toomai could not believe his eyes and kept staring all around. 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 fibres, and the fibres into hard earth.
His eyes were very heavy. After a while he said, “Kala Naag, we should go to Petersen Sahib’s camp along with Pudmini. Move now or I will drop from your neck.”
The third elephant watched the two go away, snorted, wheeled round and took his own path. He might have belonged to some little native king’s establishment, fifty or sixty or a hundred miles away.
They reached the camp two hours later where 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 Naag, very footsore, shambled into the camp. Little Toomai’s face was grey and pinched, and his hair was full of leaves and drenched with dew, but he tried to salute Petersen Sahib. He cried faintly, “The dance—the elephant dance! I have seen it!” As Kala Naag sat down, he slid off his neck in a dead faint.
“I am not lying and you can send men to see. 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 Naag took me, and I saw.”
Petersen Sahib didn’t believe Little Toomai. Instead, he took him to his tent and mad him lie on the bed and offered him some milk and food to eat. He was still confused about what Little Toomai had told him really happened or it was just a bad dream that Little Toomai saw last night.
Suddenly, Little Toomai lay back and slept at once as he was tired. He slept all through the long afternoon and into the twilight.
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.
Soon, they reached there and they were surprised to see that Little Toomai was speaking the truth.
“The child speaks the truth,” said Machua Appa, “The thing that the kid was telling really happened 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.
“I have been following elephants for the last forty-five years. They are my lord. But I have never heard someone see such a thing that this child has seen. I really have no words to speak about how lucky this child is and god of hills has bestowed his blessings upon him.”
They returned to the camp at the time of evening meal. Peterson went to his camp to see Little Toomai but no one was there. Peterson Sahib sat in his camp all that evening and Petersen Sahib ate alone in his tent. 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 gone to search for his son and his elephant. He came up to the camp in the plains as soon as he heard the news that they both returned in the morning.
There was a feast by the blazing campfires in front of the lines of picketed elephants. Little Toomai was the hero of it all. And the big brown elephant catchers, the trackers, the drivers and the ropers, and the men who knew all the secrets of breaking the wildest elephants, passed him from one to the other. 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, leaped to his feet, with Little Toomai held high in the air above his head, and shouted, “Listen, my brothers. Listen, I, Machua Appa, am speaking! This little one should no longer be called Little Toomai, but I give him the name, ‘Toomai of the Elephants’, as his great-grandfather was called before him. Last night, he saw something that an ordinary man never gets to see and the favour of the elephant-folk and of the gods of the jungles is with him. He will become a great tracker. He will become greater than I am today, even I, Machua Appa! He will follow the new trail, and the stale trail, and the mixed trail, with a clear eye! He will take no harm in the Keddah when he runs under their bellies to rope the wild tuskers. If he slips before the feet of the charging bull-elephant, the bull elephant shall know who he is and shall not crush him. Give him honour, my lords! Salute him, my children. Make your salute to Toomai of the Elephants! Gunga Pershad, ahaa! Hira Guj, Birchi Guj, Kuttar Guj, ahaa! Pudmini,—you have seen him at the dance, and you too, Kala Naag, my pearl among elephants!—ahaa! Together; to the Toomai of the Elephants. Come on!”
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.
But it was all for the sake of Little Toomai, who had seen what man never saw before—the dance of the elephants at night and alone in the heart of the Garo hills!
