Kari the Elephant Page #4

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

								


We had a hard time sitting on his back because we felt terribly dizzy. We were almost falling off, when we heard a piercing yell and saw the whole pack of tormentors running away. Kari had stepped on one of the dogs and killed it and that frightened the others away.

We then brought Kari home, gave him his bath in the river and offered him nice saplings and twigs, but he would eat none of them.

From that day on, Kari was never upset by the barking of dogs, but went through strange villages without paying any attention to them, no matter how hard they barked at his heels.

Now that he had become immune to dogs, we tried to make him like monkeys. Monkeys, as you know, are very annoying little creatures. I had a pet monkey of my own named Kopee, who was red-faced and tawny-coated. He never came near the elephant, and Kari never thought of going near him. Whenever we went out, this monkey used to sit on my shoulder, and if we passed through bazaars where mangoes and other fruits were sold, it was very difficult to keep Kopee from getting into mischief. In India everything is shown in the open, and the mangoes lie in baskets piled up one above the other like little hills. There were places where oranges were heaped up like big burning rocks. Here and there you could see brown men robed in white sitting near these mountains of fruit, bargaining about the prices.

Now it is very good to smell the fragrance of fruit, and one day while going through the lane of a village, as the fragrance of the fruit grew stronger, I forgot all about Kopee, and did not realize that I was carrying him on my shoulder.

Somehow the little monkey always knew when I was not thinking of him. At such moments he would invariably jump off my shoulder and run straight for the oranges or mangoes, take one or two of them and then make a dive for a sheltered spot. This upset the whole bazaar. Hundreds of men would pursue him from tree to tree, yelling and throwing stones till he vanished out of sight.

Of course, I used to get terribly frightened, fearing that the men would attack me for carrying such a mischievous monkey. I would hurry out of the bazaar and make for home as fast as I could go. Then in an hour or two I would find Kopee on the house top, looking perfectly innocent and scratching himself. No one could ever tell by his face that he had stolen fruit a short while before.

When the time came for me to go to town, I was anxious to take Kopee and Kari with me, and I wanted the elephant to like the monkey and the monkey to behave like a gentleman toward the elephant. One day I brought the monkey on my shoulder and held him tight with both hands in front of the pavilion where the elephant was busy eating all kinds of saplings. Sometimes he would take a strong twig and unravel the top into a soft, fluffy tuft; then he would seize the other end of it with his trunk and brush himself. The moment he saw the monkey, he snorted and raised his trunk to grab him. With one wild scream the monkey jumped off my shoulder, climbed up the pavilion post and disappeared on the roof.

I went to Kari and spoke to him. I said, "Kari, in order to like dogs you killed one, now don't kill my monkey in order to like monkeys." He was very displeased that I should ever want him to like monkeys, because elephants are very much like some people who don't like to associate with others who have come from nowhere and whom they consider their inferiors. Elephants don't like to associate with monkeys, for they came from nowhere. You must remember, too, that elephants rarely see monkeys because monkeys are above the elephants most of the time, jumping and squealing among the trees in a manner most annoying to a quiet and sedate creature like an elephant.

It did not take more than a week, however, to bring Kari and Kopee together. One day there was a pile of fruit lying in the open, and the elephant stood at one end eating and the monkey at the other, both enjoying the feast. Of course, the elephant ate faster than the monkey, and realizing this, Kopee began to eat more quickly and soon had enormous pouches on each side of his face. Before long all the fruit was gone and the two animals were left facing each other. The monkey trembled with fear. He was almost on the point of running away to a tree-top, but, no one knows why, the elephant turned away from him and went into his pavilion. This gave the monkey great courage, so he went straight up to the roof of the pavilion, and peering down through the eaves, found out that the elephant lived on twigs and fruits and saplings just like himself. Having watched all this, I then got up on Kari's back and whistled to the monkey. He leaped down from the tree onto my shoulder. The elephant shivered for a moment and then was absolutely still. When I ordered him "mali," he walked on.

One day I took them to the bazaar, I on the elephant and the monkey on my shoulder. When we had reached a mountain of mangoes round the corner of a lane, the monkey jumped off and climbed up to the top of the pile. At this the owner of the fruit chased him away, yelling and shouting. The monkey climbed up the roof of a house, followed by a crowd. Kari, however, put out his trunk and helped himself to whatever fruits he liked, eating them with great relish. The moment he heard the people coming back from the monkey chase, he ran away--and you may be surprised to know that when an elephant runs, he can go more than ten miles an hour. By the time we reached home, Kopee had buried his face in an enormous mango and was covered with the juice. And you know that mangoes taste very much like strawberries and cream with sugar on them.

[Illustration: ONE DAY I TOOK THEM TO THE BAZAAR]

At last we set off for the city, Kari, and Kopee now the best of friends. It was very interesting at night going through the jungle country. The moonlight was intense, falling like white waters on the land. You could see the tree-tops, and at midnight almost clear down to the very floor of the jungle where the shadows were thick like packs of wolves crouching in sleep. The elephant went through these regions perfectly care-free. He did not care who came or went or what happened.

But not so the monkey. Monkeys, you know, are always afraid of snakes, and do you know why? Snakes go up trees and eat birds and their younglings. Monkeys also live by stealing eggs from different birds' nests. Now it sometimes happens that the snake eats all the birds' eggs in the nest and is resting there when the monkey puts his hands in to grab the eggs, so the monkey instead of getting the eggs is stung to death. As this sort of thing has been happening for thousands of years, it is natural that they fear snakes.
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