The Jungle Books (18 page)

“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 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, 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 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.

“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. 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 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!

T
HE
S
ONG
T
HAT
T
OOMAI’S
M
OTHER
S
ANG TO THE
B
ABY

I
T
had been raining heavily for one whole month—raining on a camp of thirty thousand men and thousands of camels, elephants, horses, bullocks, and mules all gathered together at a place called Rawalpindi, to be reviewed by the Viceroy of India. He was receiving a visit from the Amir of Afghanistan—a wild king of a very wild country. And the Amir had brought with him for a bodyguard eight hundred men and horses who had never seen a camp or a locomotive before in their lives—savage men and savage horses from somewhere at the back of Central Asia. Every night a mob of these horses would be sure to break their heel-ropes and stampede up and down the camp through the mud in the dark, or the camels would break loose and run about and fall over the ropes of the tents, and you can imagine how pleasant that was for men trying to go to sleep. My tent lay far away from the camel lines, and I thought it was safe, but one night a man popped his head in and shouted: “Get out, quick! They’re coming! My tent’s gone!”

I knew who “they” were, so I put on my boots and
waterproof and scuttled out into the slush. Little Vixen, my fox-terrier, went out through the other side, and then there was a roaring and a grunting and bubbling, and I saw the tent cave in, as the pole snapped, and begin to dance about like a mad ghost. A camel had blundered into it, and wet and angry as I was, I could not help laughing. Then I ran on, because I did not know how many camels might have got loose, and before long I was out of sight of the camp, ploughing my way through the mud. At last I fell over the tail-end of a gun, and by that knew I was somewhere near the artillery lines where the cannon were stacked at night. As I did not want to plowter about any more in the drizzle and the dark, I put my waterproof over the muzzle of one gun, and made a sort of wigwam with two or three rammers that I found, and lay along the tail of another gun, wondering where Vixen had got to, and where I might be. Just as I was getting ready to go to sleep I heard a jingle of harness and a grunt, and a mule passed me shaking his wet ears. He belonged to a screw-gun battery, for I could hear the rattle of the straps and rings and chains and things on his saddle-pad. The screw-guns are tiny little cannon made in two pieces, that are screwed together when the time comes to use them. They are taken up mountains, anywhere that a mule can find a road, and they are very useful for fighting in rocky country. Behind the mule there was a camel, with his big soft feet squelching and slipping in the mud, and his neck bobbing to and fro like a strayed hen’s. Luckily, I knew enough of beast language—not wild-beast language, but camp-beast language, of course—from the natives to know what he was saying. He must have been the one that flopped into my tent, for he called to the mule: “What shall I do? Where shall I go? I have fought with a white Thing that waved, and it took a stick and hit me on the neck.” (That was my broken tent-pole, and I was very glad to know it.) “Shall we run on?”

“Oh, it was you,” said the mule, “you and your
friends, that have been disturbing the camp? All right. You’ll be beaten for this in the morning, but I may as well give you something on account now.”

I heard the harness jingle as the mule backed and caught the camel two kicks in the ribs that rang like a drum. “Another time,” he said, “you’ll know better than to run through a mule-battery at night, shouting ‘Thieves and fire!’ Sit down, and keep your silly neck quiet.”

The camel doubled up camel-fashion, like a two-foot rule, and sat down whimpering. There was a regular beat of hoofs in the darkness, and a big troop-horse cantered up as steadily as though he were on parade, jumped a gun-tail, and landed close to the mule.

“It’s disgraceful,” he said, blowing out his nostrils. “Those camels have racketed through our lines again—the third time this week. How’s a horse to keep his condition if he isn’t allowed to sleep? Who’s here?”

“I’m the breech-piece mule of number two gun of the First Screw Battery,” said the mule, “and the other’s one of your friends. He’s waked me up too. Who are you?”

“Number Fifteen, E troop, Ninth Lancers—Dick Cunliffe’s horse. Stand over a little, there.”

“Oh, beg your pardon,” said the mule. “It’s dark to see much. Aren’t these camels too sickening for anything? I walked out of my lines to get a little peace and quiet here.”

“My lords,” said the camel humbly, “we dreamed bad dreams in the night, and we were very much afraid. I am only a baggage-camel of the 39th Native Infantry, and I am not as brave as you are, my lords.”

“Then why didn’t you stay and carry baggage for the 39th Native Infantry, instead of running all round the camp?” said the mule.

“They were such very bad dreams,” said the camel. “I am sorry. Listen! What is that? Shall we run on again?”

“Sit down,” said the mule, “or you’ll snap your long stick-legs between the guns.” He cocked one ear and listened. “Bullocks!” he said. “Gun-bullocks. On my
word, you and your friends have waked the camp very thoroughly. It takes a good deal of prodding to put up a gun-bullock.”

I heard a chain dragging along the ground, and a yoke of the great sulky white bullocks that drag the heavy siege-guns when the elephants won’t go any nearer to the firing came shouldering along together. And almost stepping on the chain was another battery mule, calling wildly for “Billy.”

“That’s one of our recruits,” said the old mule to the troop-horse. “He’s calling for me. Here, youngster, stop squealing. The dark never hurt anybody yet.”

The gun-bullocks lay down together and began chewing the cud, but the young mule huddled close to Billy.

“Things!” he said. “Fearful and horrible things, Billy! They came into our lines while we were asleep. D’you think they’ll kill us?”

“I’ve a very great mind to give you a number one kicking,” said Billy. “The idea of a fourteen-hand mule with your training disgracing the battery before this gentleman!”

“Gently, gently!” said the troop-horse. “Remember they are always like this to begin with. The first time I ever saw a man (it was in Australia when I was a three-year-old) I ran for half a day, and if I’d seen a camel, I should have been running still.”