south to haul and pile big balks of teak in the timberyards at Moulmein.
There he had half killed an insubordinate young elephant who was
shirking his fair share of work.
After that he was taken off timber-hauling, and employed, with a few
score other elephants who were trained to the business, in helping to
catch wild elephants among the Garo hills. Elephants are very strictly
preserved by the Indian Government. There is one whole department which
does nothing else but hunt them, and catch them, and break them in, and
send them up and down the country as they are needed for work.
Kala Nag stood ten fair feet at the shoulders, and his tusks had been
cut off short at five feet, and bound round the ends, to prevent them
splitting, with bands of copper; but he could do more with those stumps
than any untrained elephant could do with the real sharpened ones. When,
after weeks and weeks of cautious driving of scattered elephants across
the hills, the forty or fifty wild monsters were driven into the last
stockade, and the big drop gate, made of tree trunks lashed together,
jarred down behind them, Kala Nag, at the word of command, would go
into that flaring, trumpeting pandemonium (generally at night, when
the flicker of the torches made it difficult to judge distances), and,
picking out the biggest and wildest tusker of the mob, would hammer
him and hustle him into quiet while the men on the backs of the other
elephants roped and tied the smaller ones.
There was nothing in the way of fighting that Kala Nag, the old wise
Black Snake, did not know, for he had stood up more than once in his
time to the charge of the wounded tiger, and, curling up his soft trunk
to be out of harm s way, had knocked the springing brute sideways in
mid-air with a quick sickle cut of his head, that he had invented all by
himself; had knocked him over, and kneeled upon him with his huge knees
till the life went out with a gasp and a howl, and there was only a
fluffy striped thing on the ground for Kala Nag to pull by the tail.
Yes, said Big Toomai, his driver, the son of Black Toomai who had
taken him to Abyssinia, and grandson of Toomai of the Elephants who had
seen him caught, there is nothing that the Black Snake fears except me.
He has seen three generations of us feed him and groom him, and he will
live to see four.
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