Flight by Elephant (20 page)

We saw earlier that he feared he might have to shoot a wild elephant. The problem was not that he couldn’t shoot a wild elephant; it was that he didn’t want to. In one of his most famous essays, ‘Shooting an Elephant’, George Orwell describes his own shooting of a rogue elephant while a policeman in Lower Burma. After his first bullet, the elephant went down, but it got up again after the second. Orwell expended five bullets from one rifle and ‘bullet after bullet’ from a second one but ‘The tortured gasps continued as steadily as the ticking of a clock.’ It took half an hour for the elephant to die. Even a Burmese policeman doesn’t come across rogue elephants very often, and Orwell had never shot one before, and would never do so again, whereas if the shooting of rogue elephants ever did come up in conversation, Gyles Mackrell could mention that he had shot twenty of them.

Most of the tea planters hunted, usually informally. After a hard day’s work they would plod down to the nearest watering hole and blast some duck. But for a longer break, they might go on a proper hunting expedition, a shikar, thus themselves becoming shikari.

Mackrell ran a shikari business as a sideline, which is why he took up cinematography: to provide mementos for his customers. Certainly, the film archive he left behind shows many white men and women in sola topees standing behind dead tigers or dead elephants, or sometimes live elephants with dead tigers strapped to their backs, and always with a penumbra of Indian servants. The Europeans don’t quite know how to act. Every so often, one will go forward and change the position of the tiger.

Mackrell only shot elephants if they were rogue, and by the 1930s the British in India were becoming slightly embarrassed by the proliferation of tiger skins in their bungalows, and it was becoming necessary to have a reasonable pretext for shooting tigers as well. So Mackrell would keep an ear out for Assamese villages where tigers were attacking livestock or people. He would then arrange an expedition to that place, and we have an account of one of these written in 1934 by a woman called Elswithe Williams, the wife of a man who was being shown the ropes by Mackrell. The letter is headed, ‘In camp, near Kokrajar’ (a town in northern Assam), and addressed ‘Dearest Family’. It begins, ‘We really are having the most marvellous time, this place is literally alive with tiger …’

Not for long, it wouldn’t be.

Besides her husband, Fred, Elswithe was also accompanying a man who was probably her brother. He was called Oliver, and he had been set up for a shoot by Mackrell. A tame buffalo had been tied to a tree. A machin, or small house, had then been built in the branches of a nearby tree, and Oliver had been installed in this for the night with his rifle poised, and an electric torch on the end of the barrel, which Elswithe describes as ‘a very creepy business but awfully interesting’.

Oliver killed the tiger when it came for the buffalo and, hearing the shot, the villagers came out and escorted him in a celebratory procession back to the village with flaming torches held aloft to deter other tigers, all of which Elswithe also thought ‘a very creepy business, I should think’, although it saved Oliver having to wait for the elephant that Mackrell planned to have sent out to collect him at dawn.

Oliver had only killed the tiger after it had killed the buff, and this did bother Elswithe – a bit. ‘It sounds rather cruel to tie up a live beast, but actually it doesn’t seem to worry them, you see they are tied up somewhere anyhow, and the tiger kills them immediately, they hardly make a sound, spring on them and break their neck.’

Another nearby village was being terrorized by another tiger, and one of Mackrell’s guests, referred to by Elswithe as ‘The General’, had been assigned to this tiger; he had ‘various shots at him and made a complete mess of things, just letting buffalo after buffalo get killed’. The villagers had got ‘pretty fed up’ with The General, and so had Mackrell. He decided to do the job himself. So one of the half-eaten buffs was laid under a tree, and Mackrell went up another one. He didn’t bother with a machin or anything like that, but just strung a cane chair up in the branches, and parked himself on it, with his pipe on the go. ‘Sure enough he [the tiger] came back at about 8.30pm, and Gyles got him,’ Elswithe wrote. ‘There is no nonsense about this camp,’ she continued, ‘Gyles is excellent, and we jolly well have to do as we are told. He won’t let us women sit with them [on the tiger vigils] since it is far more difficult for two people to keep absolutely quiet than for one … but he has promised that, if the chance arises we shall sit up with him, so I do hope it does.’ She concludes that Fred, her husband, had shot a deer, ‘so he is by no means disgraced.’

Mackrell had dispatched the Mishmi guide he had recruited for ten rupees back to his village, Tinguan. In return for more silver rupees, he had asked the guide to come back with some more Mishmis, and on the morning of Sunday the 14th the man returned to the Dapha camp with a further ‘fifteen splendid fellows’. Here were the makings of Mackrell’s own advance party, since they were willing to cross the Dapha and go forward with rations to look for anyone else who might be coming from the Chaukan. But before a party drawn from these men could set off, extra supplies would have to be brought up to the Dapha. Mackrell was banking on these coming from two sources: first, on the backs of the ten elephants he had dispatched with the rescued Gurkhas, and, secondly, on the backs of the elephants that Mackrell’s associate at Namgoi Mukh, the Kampti Raja called Chaochali, would bring. Chaochali, a very reliable man, was about due, according to Mackrell’s calculations. As for the ten elephants, Mackrell calculated that, since they had left on the 10th, they should be at Miao, and its store of rice, on the night of the 12th. Provided they set off back from there on the 13th, they ought to reach the Dapha camp on the 16th at the latest, then ‘all would be well’. Meanwhile, Mackrell was ‘dangerously short of food’.

The good news was that the Dapha was down. The hot rain continued to pour, but the level of the river was determined by the weather miles away. So on the afternoon of Sunday the 14th, Mackrell and Millar’s ‘boy’, Goal Miri, crossed the Dapha by elephant carrying sacks of such food as could be spared. The aim was to create food dumps for anyone else who might turn up with the river uncrossable once again. They went into the jungle beyond the river, but could not locate the path Millar and Leyden had taken, which roughly followed what Mackrell called ‘the Chinese cut’ – that is the succession of tree cuts made by the Chinese cold weather survey of late 1941. That track had skirted the right bank of the Noa Dehing, and was now submerged beneath the seething and
still rising
waters of that river.

The problem was this: if the level of the Noa Dehing dropped, and the Millar–Leyden track reappeared, anyone coming from the Chaukan would likely be on it. Therefore they would miss any food left at a higher point. Mackrell and Goal Miri found compromise trees midway between the two routes, and Goal Miri climbed them and tied the sacks out of reach of wild elephants. Mackrell then made a cut in the bark to alert any passer-by to what was above.

While recrossing the river that morning – after leaving two sacks of food suspended from two trees – Mackrell and Goal Miri saw elephants arriving at the camp from the direction of Miao. Sitting on the first of them was the dignified figure of Chaochali, the Kampti Raja – dignified but ill. He had brought more supplies, but was feverish and ‘quite done up’. Mackrell gave him aspirin, then quinine, and put him to bed in a tent. In the afternoon, Mackrell wandered along the river towards the crossing point again, rifle in hand. Looking east through the mist, he saw a grassy plateau above the riverbank on his own side. There were deer on it, but they were no more than vague brown shapes amid the rain and the tall grass. He couldn’t ‘get at them’ with his rifle. He then looked
across
the river, seeing more mist, more tall grass.

And then a turbaned head: a Sikh soldier. There were Gurkhas with him as well – about thirty men in all. No shout could carry over the river, but Mackrell signalled to the men that they should stay put. He then ran back to the camp, and returned with some elephants on which the men were brought over. They were all starving – apparently proof of the failure of Mackrell’s food drop of that very morning. In fact, the Sikhs had seen the tracks made by the elephants that Mackrell and Goal Miri had been riding on – the freshly broken branches, and the fresh elephant dung (elephants excrete turnip-sized lumps fairly frequently) – and they’d thought these must be the tracks of
wild
elephants in close proximity. Therefore they had avoided the tracks – and avoided the sacks of rice in the process. These men were the balance of the hundred soldiers who had come into Sir John’s camp behind Fraser and Pratt, plus – it appears – some men who’d avoided the orbit of Sir John altogether. Either way, fifteen of these men’s comrades had died of starvation before reaching the Dapha. They explained this as they sat under the tarpaulin drinking tea just brewed in the kerosene tin, and eating biscuits. Rice was on the boil some distance away – Apana had lit his cooking fire under trees this time, even if they
were
crawling with leeches.

When the rescued men had finished their meal, Mackrell had no dall or salt left, and the Sikhs had had to take their tea without sugar, since there was none of that either. Mackrell had also given the last of his quinine and aspirin to Chaochali.

Chaochali (who had now developed dysentery) had not brought enough extra food, but early that evening Mackrell sent the fifteen newly arrived Mishmis off over the river with all he could spare. They would try to establish a line of food dumps to sustain anyone approaching from the east. Mackrell made sure the Mishmis had plenty of tea with which to greet anyone they might encounter, and tins of sausages (already established as Mackrell’s trademark ‘rescue’ meal), rice and Marmite. He also armed the Mishmis with an open chit – written in Assamese and English – urging anyone who met them to treat them well, and take only such food as they needed in the immediate term, since the Mishmis were on a mission of mercy. Mackrell himself would wait at the camp, in the hope that the ten elephants he’d dispatched would come back soon with a lot of food on their backs.

Under the tarpaulin, Mackrell took out his stationery wallet and wrote a chit. He put it in an empty can of Klim, to protect it from the rain, and gave it to one of the Mishmis together with some silver rupees. The chit was addressed to the officials at the Margherita base camp. It began, ‘It would have been easy just to say we heard people were likely to be here and we came and got them, but it would have been unfair to the mahouts and elephants to minimise the difficulties. The report can wait. The important points are these.’ He then asked to be told what arrangements were being made to receive the men he was sending back to Miao. He added, ‘I must have medical help.’ It was futile really because the chit would take a week to reach Margherita, and Mackrell needed food before then.

He lit his pipe; it suppressed appetite.

Tuesday 16 June was the day on which the ten elephants were due to return from Miao to the west. They did not do so. Instead, there was an arrival from the east: another thirty-eight Gurkhas and Sikhs, all waving from the far side of the Dapha, all starving. They were brought over and taken under the wide tarpaulin, where they were given biscuits and tea – not only now without sugar, but also without Klim, since that, too, had run out. They were then given a small amount of rice each. First thing the following morning, Mackrell spotted ‘another batch’ on the far bank, ‘mostly Gurkhas and Nepalis and Garwalis’. He brought them over as well.

Mackrell was now running a veritable refugee camp-cum-ferry terminal, yet he had run out of food. Where were his ten elephants?

In the early afternoon, there
was
an arrival from the west, but it was not the ten elephants. Instead, Captain Reg Wilson walked into the camp accompanied by his sixty ‘political porters’ (actually, more like fifty now, some having defected in disgust on the way from Margherita), the two detachments of Assam Rifles, Dr Bardoloi, and
four
elephants that looked vaguely familiar to Mackrell. Mackrell took his pipe out of his mouth and watched the approach of Wilson. He had been expecting no such personage, and he was on his guard. As the two men shook hands, Chaochali, the Kampti Raja, stood beside the tent in which he’d been lying ill and watched the Assam Rifles. All these uniforms, all of a sudden. None of the tribes of Assam (Chaochali was a Naga) were very keen on the Assam Rifles, whose job it was to keep them in line.

Mackrell asked Wilson to join him under the wide tarpaulin, where Wilson showed him the chit by which he, Wilson, had been placed in charge. Mackrell read it, nodding, and handed it back. Tea was served – tea with sugar and milk (or, at any rate, Klim) in it, thanks to the extra supplies that Wilson had brought. Under the tarpaulin Wilson smoked, but Mackrell did not relight his pipe. This was going to be a rather tense conversation. Mackrell was looking at the four elephants. He asked whether by any chance Captain Wilson had seen the other six? Wilson nodded. He would come to that in a minute.

He explained that it had not been an easy journey from Margherita via Miao. Yes, they had begun by punting canoes along the Burhi Dehing river from Ledo to the place the British called Simon. But beyond Simon they had been ‘foot-slogging’ through the low jungle, following the trail made by Mackrell’s elephants, which was clear enough … the elephants’ feet having made nine-inch watery holes in the mud, into which Wilson and his men kept stumbling. On 9 June, as they approached Miao on a hot, dark, dank day, the leeches attacked. In his diary, Wilson had marvelled, ‘Some places if you stop they catch you faster than you get others off.’ On 10 June, they arrived at Miao, where they had to cross the river. By now, Wilson was liberally decorated with Elastoplasts covering his leech bites. His boots, he noticed, were full of blood. He wrote, ‘ABCD vitamins should soon counteract this!’ which seems, incredibly in the circumstances, to have been some sort of jungle wallah’s in-joke.