Kari the Elephant Page #12

A nine-year-old boy raises and trains Kari the elephant, learning about the law of the jungle and the intelligence and the dignity of elephants.

• Fiction

								


Again the angry growl fell on the jungle, but this time it was ahead of us. The beaters cried out again close by, but all were silenced by the roar of the approaching tiger. With one bound he appeared in the clearing, but immediately disappeared again. We could see him passing from one bush to another; and when he stopped we caught a glimpse of his hind legs. Without any warning the magistrate fired and like a thunder bolt, the tiger leaped in front of the elephant with one roar. Kari reared; he walked backwards and stood with his back against a tree. The magistrate could not shoot at the tiger without sending a bullet through my head, so he had to wait.

Then with a leap the tiger was by the side of the elephant, so close to the howdah that there was not the distance of even a rifle between him and the magistrate. I stopped my flute playing to swear at the magistrate. I said, "You brother of a pig; why did you not give him warning before you shot? Who has ever heard of killing an animal without seeing him face to face? Can you kill a tiger by breaking his hind leg with a bullet?"

The man was livid with terror. He had the rifle in his hand but the tiger was reaching over the howdah and stretching out his paw to get him. He did not know what to do. Kari shook himself with all his strength but he could not shake the tiger off. He trumpeted in great pain because the tiger's claws were cutting into his flesh. He raised his trunk, swayed his body and bounded against a tree behind him; but still the tiger could not be shaken off. The nearer the tiger's paw came, the more the magistrate tried to lean against the side of the howdah. Pretty soon he moved towards the elephant's rear, and thus reached a corner of the howdah which gave him almost as much space as the length of a rifle. I saw the eye of the tiger turn first red and then yellow, and heard the terrible snarl which he gives only when he is sure of his prey. The quality of the snarl is such that it paralyzes his victim.

[Illustration: WITHOUT ANY WARNING THE MAGISTRATE FIRED]

Seeing that the Englishman could do nothing and feeling sure that he would be killed, I knew I had to do something. I stopped swearing and with one terrible yell gave the elephant the master call. He went forward and put his trunk around a very thick branch of a tree and pulled it down with a great crash. That instant the tiger looked at the direction from which the noise had come. His head was near me now, and he did not know whether to attack me or go back to his former prey. It seemed as if hours passed. I was petrified with terror, yet I knew that if I let my fright get possession of me, I would be killed. So I controlled myself. Kari was now trying to strike the tiger with this trunk, but he could not get at him.

Suddenly I realized that the Englishman not only had the rifle's length between him and the tiger but was raising the rifle to take aim. Knowing this, I took my flute and hit the tiger's knuckles with it. He came toward me with his paw outstretched and caught the shawl which was loosely tied around my waist. I was glad to hear it tear because he had just missed my flesh. That instant I saw the Englishman put the barrel of the rifle into the tiger's ear. All I remembered was hot blood spurting over my face. Kari was running away with all his might and did not stop until he had crossed the clearing and disappeared beyond the trees. He was not hurt, except that his side was torn here and there with superficial wounds. When the beaters came, I made the elephant kneel down. We both got off. The Englishman went to see how big the tiger was while I led Kari in quest of my broken flute. Toward sun-down when they had skinned the tiger, they found its length to be nine feet, not counting the tail.

CHAPTER VIII

KARI AND THE QUICK-SAND

Though elephants are very unselfish animals, they behave like human beings when brought to the last extremity. The following adventure will show you what I mean.

One day, Kari and Kopee and I went to the river bank to help pull a big barge up the river. The towmen could not pull the ropes hard enough to make progress against the current. All that they could do was to stand still without getting ahead at all. So word was sent on to us and we three went to help out. I harnessed Kari with the tow rope. It was very amusing, as he had never pulled a weight in his life. At first he pulled very hard. The rope almost broke and the barge swayed in the water, almost toppled, and then drifted to its previous position. The swift current was going against it and the people in the barge were shaking their hands and swearing at us as they were afraid that the vessel would capsize.

Kari did not care. After he had pulled the barge about two hundred yards he stopped; the rope slackened and then the current pulled against us. The rope became taut again and the men shrieked from the barge. When you tug a boat, you must not jerk at the rope but pull it gently, so I urged Kari to pull it smoothly. In the course of an hour, he had actually drawn the boat in, and at the end of our journey he had learned to pull evenly.

After that we went on playing on the river bank. Kopee jumped off the elephant's back and ran along the shore. I urged Kari to follow him, and as we kept on going, I lost all sense of direction and trusted to the intelligence of the animals. The monkey, however, had led us into a trap. We had run into quick-sand and Kari began to sink. Every time he tried to lift his feet he seemed to go deeper into the mud and he was so frightened that he tried to take hold of the monkey with his trunk and step on him as something solid, but Kopee chattered and rushed up a tree.

Then Kari swung his trunk around, pulled down the mattress from his back, and putting it on the ground tried to step on it. That did not help, so he curled up his trunk behind to try to get me to step on. Each time he made an effort like that, however, he sank deeper into the mud. I saw the trunk curling back and creeping up to me like a python crawling up a hillside to coil around its prey. There was no more trumpeting or calling from the elephant, but a sinister silence through which he was trying to reach me. He had come to the end of his unselfishness. In order to save himself, he was willing to step on me.

The monkey screamed from the tree-top and I, jumping off the elephant's back, fell on the ground and ran. Kari kept on trumpeting and calling for help, and by this time he was chest deep in the mud. The rear of him had not sunk so far, so he was on a slant which made it all the more difficult for him to lift himself.

I ran off to the village and called for help. By the time we got back with ropes and planks, he was holding his trunk up in order to breathe, as the mud was up to his chin. There was only one thing to do, and that was to lift Kari by his own weight, so we tied the rope to the tree and flung it to him. He got it with his trunk and pulled. The rope throbbed and sang like an electric wire and the tree groaned with the tension, but all that happened was that the elephant slipped forward a little and his hind legs fell deeper into the mud.
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