Kari the Elephant Page #15

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

								


I must explain why animals are afraid of fire. Fire, you see, is the one thing that they can never fight. They are not afraid of water, as most of them can swim, but if they are caught in fire, they are generally burned to death. For this reason they have built up a protective instinct against fire. Whenever there is fire of any sort, they run. As they have seen the jungle set on fire from time to time for generations and generations, the sight of fire frightens them more than anything else. As long as they have inherited this fear from their ancestors, it is very wise not to play with fire in the presence of animals. If an animal as powerful as an elephant were frightened by fire, he would run mad and do the greatest amount of mischief.

One noon when we had suspended work for the day, I tied Kari in his shed and lay down in my hammock to rest. Toward late afternoon, I heard the same terrible trumpeting that I had heard before. The same thing had happened again. The two engineers, being idle, had drunk liquor and were trying to tease the animals nearby. The shed had a thatched roof of straw. The walls were of clay, but there was a lot of bamboo lying on the floor. Kari was eating twigs, some of which happened to have dry leaves.

I came up to the elephant, and seeing what was going on, told the white men to stop teasing him. They would not hear of it, however. Just then I saw a flame rising from the leaves. Kari raised his trunk and trumpeted fiercely. As I was afraid that he would be burned to death, I hastened to loosen his chain and with one terrible trumpet he rushed out of the shed, trampling down one of the drunken men and killing him instantly. Kari then trumpeted more and more loudly, waving his trunk and rushing madly around.

Realizing the danger we were in, I went up a very heavy banyan tree out of Kari's reach and lay among the leaves. The first thing he did was to go and put his foot on the automobile of the chief engineer, which happened to be standing outside of the shed. In a few minutes there was nothing but a mass of twisted steel on the ground, over which the elephant danced in anger. Then he saw the chief engineer and two other men standing on the porch of a bungalow. He rushed at them, but they knew what it meant to have a mad elephant about, and ran into the house. Kari then pulled down part of the thatched roof of the bungalow with his trunk, and finding no one there made straight for two new trucks that had only been in use a fortnight and broke them to pieces. Then he rushed at a bull which was grazing in a field, and wound his trunk around his neck. The bull dropped dead. In a few moments Kari was out of sight.

[Illustration: IN HIS MADNESS HE MUST HAVE GONE BACK TO THE JUNGLE]

For a fortnight no one heard anything of him. I expected him to return to me, but he never came back. Even to this day no one knows what happened to him. Evidently those miserable engineers had driven him out of his mind. In his madness he must have gone back to the jungle and by the time he recovered his senses was so lost in its depths that he could not come back. When his mind returns to him, an elephant can never remember the road that he took in his insanity, and if he runs very far into the jungle he may never come back because the Spirit of the jungle seizes him. Kari's last impression of human beings must have been so terrible that when the Spirit of the jungle asserted itself in him, he allowed it to lure him away forever from the habitations of men.

That is how it came about that I lost my friend and brother, the elephant. Though as an animal Kari is lost to me, my soul belongs to his soul and we shall never forget each other.
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