<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>“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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<div class="fig"> <ANTIMG src="images/{0010}.jpg" alt="{0010}" width-obs="100%" /><br/> </div> <h5> <SPAN href="images/{0010}.jpg"> </SPAN> </h5>
<p>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.</p>
<p>“Ai!” he said, half aloud, his teeth chattering. “The elephant-folk are
out tonight. It is the dance, then!”</p>
<p>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.</p>
<div class="fig"> <ANTIMG src="images/{5317}.jpg" alt="{5317}" width-obs="100%" /><br/> </div> <h5> <SPAN href="images/{5317}.jpg"> </SPAN> </h5>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<div class="fig"> <ANTIMG src="images/{0271}.jpg" alt="{0271}" width-obs="100%" /><br/> </div> <h5> <SPAN href="images/{0271}.jpg"> </SPAN> </h5>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>“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.”</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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:</p>
<p>“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!”</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>“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.”</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>“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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<div class="fig"> <ANTIMG src="images/{5332}.jpg" alt="{5332}" width-obs="100%" /><br/> </div> <h5> <SPAN href="images/{5332}.jpg"> </SPAN> </h5>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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 seen your dances in your hidden places,—the
sight that never man saw! Give him honor, 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!”</p>
<div class="fig"> <ANTIMG src="images/{0279}.jpg" alt="{0279}" width-obs="100%" /><br/> </div> <h5> <SPAN href="images/{0279}.jpg"> </SPAN> </h5>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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!</p>
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