Bahadur Guj

I

THE elephants trooped down to the river close by the camp, jostling one another in the narrow pass, with steep earth walls on each side, which had been cut through the forest to afford access to the water. They looked curiously naked to the eye which had been accustomed to see them with their ‘pads’ or howdahs fixed; their gait was slouching and leisurely; they gurgled and rumbled; they greeted each other amiably with trunks rustling dryly against trunks; sometimes they lost their temper, and squealed or trumpeted with rage at various untoward happenings in the close-packed contact which the narrow gut imposed. But they were on holiday, and they knew it. One stretched up a questing trunk, pulled off easily the branch of a tree as thick as one’s wrist as she drifted slowly past, and tucked it nonchalantly between her trunk and her tusks, as a Burmese woman might stick a hibiscus flower behind her ear. Others amused themselves by pouring sand and dust over their head and sides; leaves, straw, and fragments of branches stuck in their strong coarse hair; and they emerged from the narrow pass, and spread out before entering the water, as disheveled a pack of anachronistic roisterers as one could ever hope to see.

I sat with my friend, a Rajput, on the high bank and watched the scene. The river, perhaps three feet deep, flowed slowly over a bed of yellow sand; it was crystal clear — which is very seldom the case in India—and completely arched over by the great sal trees that towered all round us. It was early morning on a brilliant day in June; the hot sun filtered pleasantly through the thick foliage; kingfishers, vivid points of glittering light, flashed here and there against the background of river or forest, and then poised, with rapidly beating wings, their breasts iridescent with metallic blue, or green, or gold, before darting into the stream to emerge with tiny fish, wriggling bars of silver, held transversely in their bills. Hornbills, bigger and lesser, hooted grotesquely from the forest; and the delightful paradise flycatchers crossed and recrossed the river in their curious undulating flight, their tail feathers streaming behind them in two long parallel lines of gleaming frosted silver. Far off, we could hear the longdrawn call of some workers in the forest.

Bahadur Singh lay on his stomach, absorbedly guiding ants and other creeping things that came his way to the edge of the little crater of sand at the bottom of which a concealed ant lion energetically took charge of these frequent and varied contributions to its welfare.

‘Funny beasts, elephants,’ he said. ‘Now Radha Piyari, there, would nuzzle up to you, and search in your pockets, or inside the breast of your coat, for oranges or bananas. And if I went near her she’d try to kill me. She hates all Indians, except her own mahout. Why, only God knows. I saw her cut loose once, and rage through the elephant lines; we never found out what had upset her. She sorted out everything that belonged to her own man; and the rest — clothes, pipes, betel boxes, cooking pots, drinking vessels, and what not — she stamped to powder. We had to run for our lives. When her own mahout came up, she went to him like a dog to its master.’

‘How many elephants did your State keep in the old days, Raja Sahib?’

‘We had ninety. We used to take a share in the keddah every three years or so. There are only fifteen now — and five motors.’ He drawled the last part of the sentence, in a tone of bitter condemnation.

II

Another ant went to its unhappy end. Bahadur Singh watched the convulsions at the bottom of the little crater morosely.

‘Did I ever tell you the story of Bahadur Guj and his mahout? No? It happened when I was quite a boy, but I remember it all very vividly. We had gone to Ratanpore — you remember it, by the side of the big lake — for the hot weather, because it seemed cooler there; and we had perhaps thirty elephants with us, for the big plain in front held more leopards and wolves than it does now. I was always in and about the big grove near the bungalow where the elephant lines used to be in those days. Bahadur Guj was the only male elephant we had out, and his mahout was a Tharu — Kisumbi. As you know, it is rare to have a Tharu for a mahout; when you get them to take that work they are very good. Jungle folk through and through. They live in the forest all the year; they know its ways; they know the ways of the elephants, too.

‘Well, one day, early in the morning, there was a great outcry in the grove. I was eating loquats in the garden, and climbed up by a tree to the top of the pukka wall there so as to see what was happening. I heard excited shouts and cries. When I got to the top, there was Kisumbi, running like a barren doe across the naked field between the grove and my wall; and some fifty yards behind came Bahadur Guj, striding out fast, trumpeting wickedly, and without doubt very wishful to kill him. “The gate! The gate!” I shouted; and Kisumbi made for the little door in the long wall — you know the place? ’

I nodded.

‘The wooden door was open, and Kisumbi leaped through, swinging the door back as he fled. He dashed on, senseless with terror, and took cover in the gardener’s hut. Bahadur Guj stopped at the door in the wall, squealing and trumpeting. Then he turned and went back thirty paces or so quite slowly — and into my mind it came what he was going to do. I screamed to Kisumbi. “Out! Out! Bahadur Guj will throw down the wall! Do not let him see you!" I saw Kisumbi run very fast toward the end of the wall, where it dips straight into the lake; and then the thud-thud of Bahadur Guj made me turn my head. He went straight for the wall, where the gate pierced it. You know that wall — it was pukka brick as it is to-day, twelve feet high, and thick, very thick. Bahadur Guj came at it, striding fast, his trunk curled up and his big head lowered and pushed forward to keep his tusks out of the way; and he went through it in one breath, as I would poke a finger through a chapatti. He drove through it not twelve paces from where I sat, and I felt it shiver and swing under me.

‘Though I had been screaming to Kisumbi, Bahadur Guj’s eye did not turn my way. The wall hurt him, and made him yet angrier. He stopped, stamped the earth again and again, and then went straight along Kisumbi’s track to the gardener’s hut. The gardener’s woman was inside, with her three children. Bahadur Guj lifted the thatch roof right up with his forehead, slipped his trunk in over the top of the mud wall, and felt round with it inside the hut. The woman and the children uttered scream after scream. She told me later that Bahadur Guj touched her, and each of her children, with the cold wet finger at the end of his trunk; he just smelled them — and let them alone. Kisumbi was not there; that was all he wanted to know. He picked up the scent outside, and hurried down the side of the wall to the lake.

‘Kisumbi had been clever, but Bahadur Guj was just as clever. Without stopping, he threw himself into the lake; he swung round the corner, like a boat with the rudder hard down; and he followed the scent that he picked up at once on the bank near by. I dropped from the wall, ran shouting through the garden and the house, and came out in front, facing the village. Kisumbi had taken shelter in some of the village houses, evidently. Bahadur Guj, when I saw him again, was holding up a roof with his forehead and shoulder, and was feeling about inside with his trunk, just as he had done in the garden. He hurt no one; he wanted to kill Kisumbi only; and he had but that one thought.

‘I felt safe, and ran to where I thought Kisumbi might be hidden, calling loudly for him. I threaded my way in and out among the closely packed houses of the village, calling all the time, “Ohe, Kisumbi! Ohe, Kisumbi! It is a matter of thy life!” And at last the answer came from a chamar’s hut on the edge of the settlement: “Here I am, O little sahib!” Then I told him, with great haste in my words, where Bahadur Guj was, and what he was doing.

‘Kisumbi thought for a moment, and said, “He seeks my life, and he will hunt me down. He can seize me on land or on water. I know not what the end will be, but I have had enough of being chased by my own elephant. I run no more. Look again; tell me where he is; and if that is possible I will return through the garden, and the place where Bahadur Guj threw down the wall, to the great banyan tree that grows close to it, beside the lake. There he cannot touch me; and he will stay at the foot of the tree, waiting for me, and doing no harm to the village. My word is spoken. Go, little sahib, and come back bearing news of Bahadur Guj.”

‘So I ran again hastily through the twisted paths between the village huts, and I found Bahadur Guj patiently searching house after house with his trunk. He seemed to have lost the scent of Kisumbi. Back again I went to the miserable hut on the edge of the village; and then Kisumbi and I came out very quickly and fled through the garden to the huge banyan tree that stands close to the wall, right on the shore of the lake. You know it?’

I nodded. Last cold weather I had camped close beside it; our bag of three wolves and sixty ducks — with various oddments — had been laid out in its shade; and it was there that I had my first lesson in the art of distinguishing, instantaneously, and in twenty feet of muddy water, the snapping turtle from its inoffensive colleague. It brought back to my memory the crouching fisherman, naked save for a tiny loin cloth that clung to his bronzed skin; the great turtle that he had swum ashore with, held firmly against his thigh with one hand, and now gripped between his knees from behind; the bit of wood dangled in front; the swift thrust of the wicked-looking head; and the nonchalant way in which that head was gripped, and slowly hacked off with a rusty knife.

III

Bahadur Singh went on with his tale.

‘Kisumbi climbed the banyan and lay down on a big branch that stretched out, almost level, about twenty feet up. I offered to get him food and water; he refused. “My heart is heavy,” he said. And then my father joined me; he had been out on the estate, and someone had gone to tell him what was happening. He was old, as you know; and he too had spent most of his life in the jungles. He too knew about elephants and their ways. He talked with Kisumbi. And first he asked what the trouble was about. But Kisumbi would not tell him; that was an affair between him and his elephant, he said. It was their business — private, to them. His honor, and the honor of Bahadur Guj, were mixed up in that matter. My father did not insist; he seemed to agree with Kisumbi.

‘“It is good. And what will happen now?” he asked.

“‘Bahadur Guj will find me here, soon. Then I do not know what will happen.”

‘Sorrow was upon both of them, and my heart too was very heavy within me.

‘“Kisumbi,” said my father, “there is yet time to put thee across the lake; thou canst find thy way to Singapore; and in two days thou wilt be back at thy village of Domala in Nepal. Thou shalt have pay for three months; and in three months Bahadur Guj will have forgotten. Wilt thou go?”

‘“I do not go,” was the reply. “And Bahadur Guj will not forget, and that thou too knowest. Also, there is my honor to be considered, I have been chased, by my own elephant, through the village; low-caste people have seen me hunted, by my own elephant, like a mad dog by chamars; my face has been blackened; my izzat has been destroyed; I cannot live unless this thing be put right.”

‘“It is then in the hands of God,” said my father.

‘“It is in the hands of God,” was the reply.’

With the little twig Bahadur Singh shepherded another ant to its doom; the hornbills hooted; the paradise flycatchers undulated across the stream; the elephants lazed luxuriously in the warm water, and gurgled their appreciation of it all; and the sun burned more strongly the backs of my outstretched hands.

‘We had not been there long before Bahadur Guj, all black and gleaming from swimming round the lake wall again, silently appeared in the great gap he had made when he drove through the garden wall. He scented Kisumbi almost at once, and went straight to the foot of the tree. My father drew me to one side, but Bahadur Guj paid no attention to us — we were standing not thirty paces from him. He lunged with his trunk toward Kisumbi, but could not reach him. We were all silent, and Bahadur Guj made no sound. Then he noticed, lying close to the banyan, a young tree which had been there for years; it had been brought by my father for use as a new roof beam in the house, and all the branches had been lopped off. As it had not been wanted, it had been left lying there. It was about eight to nine paces long, and you could not span it with your hands, even at the thin end.

‘Bahadur Guj tried again to get at Kisumbi, heaving himself up against the banyan and stretching his trunk upward as far as he could. But it was no use. He dropped back, crouched down, then laid himself almost flat and began slowly to get a purchase on the tree, holding the thin end between his left tusk and his trunk. He worked it gradually along till he gripped it near the middle; then he rose, very slowly, with the thin end on the ground and the tree pointing sideways and upward. He bent down again, the end still on the ground, and shifted his grip — still keeping the tree wedged between his left tusk and his trunk — till he had it vertical, and tight held, quite near the thin end, between tusk and trunk. Then he rose and stood at his full height, with the tree straight up, and perhaps half a man’s height of it only below his tusk. Kisumbi was in no danger, for the branch was twenty feet high, and very thick.

‘Then it all happened so quick that I could hardly see! Bahadur Guj tried to poke at Kisumbi with the tree, and bring him down. In the effort, the heavy end swung to one side; before Bahadur Guj could drop it, or loosen his grip, the tree whirled round like lightning. I heard Bahadur Guj scream — a scream like the scream I have heard from a man seized by a crocodile — and his tusk, broken off short at the root, dropped with a thud on the ground.

‘ Bahadur Guj stood, for perhaps ten breaths, silent and motionless; then he hurried off about fifty paces, and stood again, without movement, but one could see that every muscle was tensed with great pain. He lowered his head, rested his trunk on the ground, and breathed in gasps. From where we stood, silent, I could see his little pig eye red and fiery, could watch his side heaving, and could hear his labored breath. We were so absorbed in watching him that I started when Kisumbi passed in front of me. He was walking toward Bahadur Guj when my father stopped him.

“‘Whither dost thou go?” he said. “I go to my elephant, which hath need of me,” was the reply. My father knew the Tharus, and he knew about elephants. “Go, in the name of God. The matter is in His hands,” he said.

‘Kisumbi walked up slowly to Bahadur Guj, leaned gently against his trunk, and spoke to him as a mother speaks to her child. He rubbed the trunk with his hands, and I heard him say, “Aie! Aie! The pain is very great. We have need of each other, thou and I.” He wept, with great sobs, gentling the trunk all the time, and talking in a soft, breaking voice. Bahadur Guj never moved. Then Kisumbi’s voice changed, and he stood up straight. “Remain thou here. I go to prepare thy medicine, my son”; and he spoke then as mahouts always speak to their elephants.

‘In a little time he came back, with cloths, and a great warm poultice made of poppy heads — “post,” we call it — and nim tree leaves. That he bound on, as near as he could to the broken root of the tusk; and he gave Bahadur Guj all the opium that he had been able to get together, and promised him more.

‘Then he gave the order, “Khul baith!” Bahadur Guj dropped his great haunches, and slightly trailed his hind legs; Kisumbi scrambled up from behind and settled himself on the neck, with his bare toes tucked behind the ears. “Mail!” — and they went off slowly to the lines.

‘My father and I had watched it all, too interested to talk. He turned to me, when Bahadur Guj had disappeared in the trees, and said, “Kisumbi is a good mahout.” And then he went inside the house.’