Toomai of the Elephants
I will remember what I was, I am sick of rope and chain--
I will remember my old strength and all my forest affairs.
I will not sell my back to man for a bundle of sugar-cane:
I will go out to my own kind, and the wood-folk in their lairs.
I will go out until the day, until the morning break--
Out to the wind s untainted kiss, the water s clean caress;
I will forget my ankle-ring and snap my picket stake.
I will revisit my lost loves, and playmates masterless!
Kala Nag, which means Black Snake, had served the Indian Government in
every way that an elephant could serve it for forty-seven years, and as
he was fully twenty years old when he was caught, that makes him nearly
seventy--a ripe age for an elephant. He remembered pushing, with a big
leather pad on his forehead, at a gun stuck in deep mud, and that was
before the Afghan War of 1842, and he had not then come to his full
strength.
His mother Radha Pyari,--Radha the darling,--who had been caught in the
same drive with Kala Nag, told him, before his little milk tusks had
dropped out, that elephants who were afraid always got hurt. Kala Nag
knew that that advice was good, for the first time that he saw a shell
burst he backed, screaming, into a stand of piled rifles, and the
bayonets pricked him in all his softest places. So, before he was
twenty-five, he gave up being afraid, and so he was the best-loved
and the best-looked-after elephant in the service of the Government of
India. He had carried tents, twelve hundred pounds weight of tents, on
the march in Upper India. He had been hoisted into a ship at the end of
a steam crane and taken for days across the water, and made to carry a
mortar on his back in a strange and rocky country very far from India,
and had seen the Emperor Theodore lying dead in Magdala, and had
come back again in the steamer entitled, so the soldiers said, to the
Abyssinian War medal. He had seen his fellow elephants die of cold and
epilepsy and starvation and sunstroke up at a place called Ali Musjid,
ten years later; and afterward he had been sent down thousands of miles
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