Kari the Elephant Part 5

The jungle was burning to cinders. The tiger hid his face between his paws; the wild cats curled up, hiding their faces. None wanted to see the pa.s.sing of the terror. Later in the afternoon some of the birds that were flying aimlessly around were drawn by the hypnotism of the flames into the jungle where they perished.

If one is frightened beyond his control, fear possesses him so that he loses all consciousness of self-protection and he is drawn down into the vortex of the very destruction which rouses that fear.

The more I watched Kari and the other animals, the more I came to understand why Kari and I loved each other. We had a soul in common. I played the flute for him and was deeply moved. I felt that if I could be dumb like he, I could understand him better.

This was the lesson the fire taught me: do not hate and fear animals. In them is the soul that is G.o.d, as it is also in us.

Behind each face, human or animal, is the face of the Christ.

Those who have eyes to see can always find it.

CHAPTER X

KARI IN THE LUMBER YARD

Not long after this Kari was sent to the lumber yards. It was very interesting to see that he learned all the tricks of the lumber trade in a few days. He would pull heavy logs out of the forest into the open, lift the lighter ones with his trunk and pile them up, one on top of the other. He had such a good sense of symmetry that his piles were always extremely neat.

Soon an older elephant came to help him. Whenever there was a log which was too heavy for Kari to lift, they would each take one end of it and lift it on the lumber wagon. An elephant, as you see, can do the work of a truck.

We had reached a stage in the history of the world when motor engines did a large part of the work of the jungle. The elephants would bring the lumber from the forest and deposit it near these engines where it would be cut into proper lengths and then thrown out again to be piled up by the elephants.

The mechanics who ran these engines ate meat and drank liquor. It is very strange that when Western people come to the East, they do not give up their expensive ways of living. Drinking wine and eating meat is one thing in cold climates, where one has to keep warm, but in a hot climate a man is sure to go to pieces if he eats and drinks much.

Kari had no objection to wine drinking, but he did not like meat-eating men any more than he liked meat-eating tigers. He never hated them or feared them, simply he somehow did not enjoy their company. But these white engineers who came from afar did not know that an elephant had a soul.

Kari always woke up at half past five and then went to work.

Toward noon I would bathe him and put him in his shed. Early in the afternoon he would begin to work again. Later on he ate lots of rice of which he was very fond. In the evening I would tie him up in his shed while I went to sleep on a hammock outside.

One night, I heard a terrible trumpeting. I jumped down from my hammock and went into Kari's shed, where I found two drunken engineers lighting matches and throwing them at him. Kari, who was afraid of fire, as all animals are, was trumpeting angrily. I protested to the men, but they were so drunk that they only swore at me and went on flinging matches. Seeing that there was nothing else to do, I loosened all his chains except one, and let him stay there tied to the ground by one foot only.

An elephant's chain is generally driven about five or six feet into the ground and is then covered with cement and earth. An elephant can rarely break this kind of chain, but I was afraid that the matches might set the shed on fire, and I trusted Kari more than drunken men. I knew that if the shed caught fire the elephant could break one chain if he tried hard to escape. The night pa.s.sed without any further incident, however.

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 rus.h.i.+ng 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 ma.s.s 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.

[Ill.u.s.tration: 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 a.s.serted 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.