ELEPHANT MOON

by John Sweeney

  Joseph peeped his head over the basket. ‘I’m on the elfunt,’ he said, matter-of-factly, as if he was on a train, and everybody laughed.

  Ruby was hoisted up and then it was Molly’s turn. She stepped on the elephant’s trunk and planted a big kiss on her corrugated grey face. The elephant slowly lifted her trunk and Molly ascended to the level of the basket as if she was riding in a lift.

  ‘What’s her name again?’ asked Molly.

  Po Net, craning his neck round at them, made sense of her question and said something Molly judged ridiculously unpronounceable.

  ‘What did he say her name was?’ whispered Grace.

  ‘Mother Engine, Miss.’

  Grace pulled a face – ‘that can’t be right, Molly’ – but Mother Engine, shortened to just Mother, was the name that stuck. The teacher went up last, heart fluttering because it felt very precarious. She stowed the Jemadar’s satchel in a small wooden box, fixed to the basket. A squash, but all six of them were just getting comfortable in the basket, making cushions of their spare clothes, when a dreadful rumble came from the elephant’s nether end.

  ‘What’s that pong?’ asked Molly, mock-innocently.

  ‘I am afraid that our elephant may have broken wind,’ Grace replied and Joseph scrunched up his face in an ecstasy of disgust: ‘Mother Engine has done a poo,’ and everyone fell about.

  Po Net kicked his feet into the fold of skins behind Mother’s ears and cried out: ‘Htah!’ – ‘Get up!’ – and suddenly the elephant jerked off its fore-knees and the children looked terrified as, inside the basket, they toppled forwards and tottered backwards, and then they were sitting more than twelve feet off the ground.

  ‘Woo,’ Joseph cried out, ‘wobbly elfunt.’

  Mother began to plod towards the river, the basket yawing and lurching with every footfall.

  ‘Oh, my word, I’m getting seasick, Miss,’ said Emily as they rose and plunged, plunged and rose.

  ‘Emily, we’ve got two hundred miles to go. I’m afraid you’d better get used to it.’

  Mother shuffled to a halt. Oomy, preoccupied with his breakfast, had almost been forgotten. He lifted his head, made a little toot-toot noise with his trunk, and ran towards his mother. Only when Oomy was by the heels of Mother did she turn her great head and give his back a little pat with her trunk, making him wriggle with pleasure.

  Ahead, a long traffic jam of elephants, waiting patiently in line for the order to cross the river. Ruby stood up in the basket, one palm stopping one line of imaginary traffic, the other waving fantasy vehicles on – the naked traffic policeman. Grace wagged a finger at Ruby, who sat down to hoots and catcalls.

  Sam, riding on the very last animal at the back of the herd, raised his hand and, at the very front, Rungdot, the biggest, oldest bull, bearing a Siamese wicker basket, loaded with chains, food and other necessities of the elephant camp, led the way down to the river. An oozie rode on his neck, but two more elephant men accompanied his every step on shore, one on either side, carrying bamboo staves, tipped with a sharp iron hook. No one was taking any chances, lest he run amok. Rungdot’s oozie dug in his heels, the two other elephant men climbed up into his basket and the great bull slid down the muddy bank, his forelegs sinking deep into the mud. He struggled, lurching unsteadily, for a second or two and then his legs found bottom and he surged forward into the stream. For the first one hundred yards or so he was tall enough to walk, breasting the current, but soon the river became deeper, the current faster, and he paddled strongly off towards the other bank, more than one thousand yards away.

  For every yard the elephants crossed the river, they were pulled two downstream by the current. Their target, selected by Sam, was an eighty-foot-high tree on the far bank, bursting with orange, white and flame-red blossom, as bright as fireworks a mile or more downstream. Directly behind the old tusker came twelve cows carrying the children in their high baskets.

  As Mother got out of her depth and started swimming, water lapped over their toes in the bottom of the basket, soon swilling dangerously close to their bottoms. Anxiously, Grace examined her gang – the two boys and the three girls - who beamed back at her, at the rolling mist, at the grey monster underneath their feet. They were enraptured.

  Halfway across, with another five hundred yards to go, Grace was gazing at Oomy swimming his little heart out, keeping up with his mother, when a bank of mist rolled in, as thick as sea-fret, blanketing them. Sounding through the grey murk, a girl’s voice, piping loud and strong:

  ‘Thick jewell’d shone the saddle leather,

  The helmet and the helmet-feather

  Burn’d like one burning flame together,

  As he rode down to Camelot.’

  It was Emily, and the whole school sang out:

  ‘“Tirra lira” by the river

  Sang Sir Lancelot.’

  The otherness of war.

  ‘Bloody shut up! The bloody Japs might be listening,’ shouted an angry voice through the mist. That could only be Sam.

  Silence, broken only by the rippling of river water and the huffing and puffing of the swimming elephants. The sun scoured a hole in the mist, which widened into a tunnel, then, as suddenly as it had come, the mist was lifting fast and both banks of the great river and the green hills rising above them were visible.

  Close to the west bank, the strength of the current picked up and wavelets lapped against the baskets, soaking everyone. Oomy started to mew anxiously, but within a few seconds Rungdot hit hard ground and walked up the bank, wiggling himself dry of water.

  As Mother, the last of the elephants carrying children, and Oomy struggled against the current to step on to firm ground, fireworks from where they had just come from, the eastern bank, crackled and popped. Tiny figures scurried towards the river, spurting orange flame, and behind them were ten large brown-grey shapes.

  The reason the Japanese had caught up so fast? They, too, had found that the fastest way of travelling across a land without roads is on the back of an elephant.

  Chapter Six

  Mud sucked against Mother’s legs as she laboured up the bank, the children in the basket craning their necks to watch the commotion on the eastern bank, Oomy bleating, struggling not to get left behind. Mother waited patiently for her baby, to make sure she, too, made it to solid ground. Once there, ignorant of war, they started on a pre-luncheon snack of elephant grass. The river was so massively wide the threat from the Japanese seemed distant. Although chided by Po Net, mother and baby plodded slowly from the riverbank, stopping at a fresh clump of elephant grass and settled in for a late breakfast.

  Thump, thump! Air pressure pummelled eardrums; overhead, a branch of a tree, sliced clean through, fell to the ground, silver-green light shivering off the tumbling leaves. Another great clap of air-pressure, ending in a soft pock! as something squelched into the mud, thirty feet from Mother. Another pock!, further off, sending up a riot of waterfowl.

  ‘Mortars,’ shouted Sam. ‘Move!’

  Mother’s enormous ears cocked out, beating the air, her feet barely touching the ground, Po Net turning around, motioning to the children to get down, to flatten their bodies as much as they could and hold on, tight. They bounced about in the basket as Mother’s legs scissored to and fro, a giant steeplechaser gaining speed before it took a monster fence, hands covering faces, stray lianas and elephant grass whipping at their arched backs with wicked force. Deep in thick forest, uphill and half a mile or more from the bank, Mother slowed to a trot.

  ‘She was flying,’ said Molly.

  Grace ruffled Molly’s hair. ‘You know, it sounds mad, Molly, but you’re right. When people say that elephants can’t fly, they don’t know what they are talking about. But we know. It’s our secret. Elephants can fly.’

  Mother turned around 360 degrees and raised her trunk like a periscope, sniffing the air. The hiss and clatter of the jungle’s sounds gave way to the mother elephant breathing out a long, querulous sob.

 
‘What’s the matter with her?’ asked Molly.

  ‘Sssh,’ said Emily.

  Oomy was nowhere to be seen.

  ‘It’s the baby, Molly, he’s got lost,’ whispered Grace.

  Another sob from Mother, a low, deep-throated sound full of melancholy and ache. The mother elephant was facing back towards the river, her ears wide out, cocked to hear the slightest sound.

  The children, Grace and Po Net remained chapel-quiet, trying to pick out the baby elephant’s answering cry above the general hubbub of the jungle.

  A disturbance in the greenery to the left, the tops of the elephant grass waving this way and that. Hidden by the body of the grass, something was moving slowly, delicately, towards them. Molly yelped out, ‘He’s coming!’

  ‘Sssh,’ whispered Grace.

  They tracked the swaying of the grass from their vantage point on the elephant’s back. Soon Oomy would emerge from cover. Not a squeak from the children. The grass at the edge of the clearing rippled and a small brown deer peeked out at them, twitched its ears, scarpered across the open ground and vanished into the jungle.

  The mother elephant lifted her trunk and gave out another sobbing trump. No reply. No sign of Oomy.

  Without hurry but with determination Mother began to plod back down the path she’d just made through the elephant grass, back towards the Chindwin, towards the Japanese. Po Net turned his head to the basket and shook his head, grim-faced. He said nothing, but Grace understood the look to mean that if a mother elephant has lost her calf, there is no power on earth that can stop her from trying to track him down.

  Again the mother elephant sobbed, a long quivering note, as if from a cello, of unbearable sadness. Suddenly, a high-pitched ‘toot-toot’, like the horn on a toy car, sounded nearby and Oomy crashed through the undergrowth and ran straight to Mother.

  ‘Aah,’ said Joseph. ‘Baby come back.’

  The calf was rewarded with a great thwack of mother’s trunk on his backside. The trouble-maker trotted away a slight distance, a few steps, not far, coiled his trunk into his mouth and began sucking it, an action exactly like a small boy, having been scolded, sucking his thumb. Mother’s trunk sidled over to him and trunk entwined with trunk, they nuzzled together. Mother throbbed with a new sound, a gargling burble of pleasure.

  ‘She’s purring, Miss,’ said Emily.

  ‘Yes, Em, I do believe you’re right,’ replied Grace.

  Po Net turned round and gave one of his shy grins, as if he had understood every word.

  With a few orders from Po Net, mother and calf found the rest of the party through call and counter-call, coming to rest in a cave of foliage roofed by a jungle canopy so high it hurt their necks to look up at it. Grace marvelled at the intelligence of the elephants. They’d picked this spot, the perfect place to take stock, hide from any Japanese planes, before moving on.

  Rungdot, the monster, trumpeted his might and a few wild elephants, miles away, answered back, the sound re-echoing around the bowl of hills. As the elephants chomped peacefully at the grass underfoot, the mortar fire from the Japanese seemed a bizarre memory.

  Po Net dug his heels into the elephant’s hide and Mother buckled her hind-legs, jerking the pannier down earthwards. They scrambled out, Joseph, assisted by Grace, taking a little longer.

  ‘All well?’ asked Sam. His stern growl seemed a little softer, as if Bishop Strachan’s School had passed some kind of Elephant Man test.

  ‘Yes, no injuries,’ said Grace. ‘But when the baby got lost, Mother’s distress… They’re just like us,’ she said.

  ‘No,’ said Sam. ‘They’re better. They don’t make war,’ and he made his strange, muted elephant trump noise. ‘There are no refugees here, so you’ll walk along with us till nightfall.’ He headed off into the bush, but just before he did, he turned back. ‘By the way, no more bloody Lady of Shalott.’

  Emily blushed.

  ‘No wonder the Japs found us.’

  ‘But you and the Havildar had your noisy row by the riverbank,’ replied Grace. ‘That was much louder. Besides, Tennyson was Poet Laureate.’ Cheekily, she over-emphasised the last two words, as if Sam was a little on the slow side.

  He made his funny noise again, half-raspberry, half-bull-elephant snort. Had he spent so long in the jungle he spoke better Elephantese than English?

  ‘The Japs have got their own elephants so best not hang about. The fit children, I’m afraid to say, you’re walking.’

  Sam’s way of talking to the children was alarmingly frank but, nevertheless, it seemed to work. Not everyone could walk all day, of course: Joseph was judged too ill, and Michael too little, although that decision was partly to keep Joseph company. Another of the girls, suffering from a poor tummy, joined them on the back of Mother, the ‘hospital elephant’. As the Havildar lofted Michael up into the sky, his school cap, which he had insisted on wearing all the way from Rangoon, a talisman, fell to the ground, whereupon Mother scooped it up with her trunk and popped it into her mouth.

  ‘The elephant’s eating my cap,’ cried Michael.

  Po Net gabbled something in Burmese to Sam, who roared with laughter, telling a distraught Michael: ‘Don’t worry, old chap. Po Net will look out for you and in a few days’ time you’ll get your cap back.’

  ‘But it will be covered in elephant pooh!’ squeaked Michael, his eyes beginning to fill.

  ‘Now listen here, old chap,’ said Sam, resting on his haunches to look Michael in the eye. ‘If having your cap gobbled up by a lady elephant is the worst thing that happens to you this year, then lucky you!’

  The Havildar, glowering the whole time, produced a packet of biscuits from his knapsack and with his maimed hands passed them round the children. As they watched him walk on, Grace felt Molly pulling at the sleeve of her frock.

  ‘Miss, what happened to his fingers?’

  ‘Sssh, Molly, that’s a rude question.’ But the schoolteacher was dying to know the answer herself.

  The old school crocodile formed up as it had done countless times before. They followed the curiously narrow trail of flattened jungle made by the elephants ahead. Within seconds, the elephants began to vanish. High up in the trees a monkey screeched, insects hissed and whispered to each other, but ahead she could make out nothing but a curtain of green. The ease with which the elephants disappeared into the jungle gave her comfort that it might just be possible for them to play hide and seek with the Japanese.

  Sam marched ahead with his spaniel to pick the spot for camp that night. On they trudged, unfit by the lack of exercise after being cooped up in the bus. The rain held off and the path was not atrociously steep or the track too difficult. Yet it was never easy. The heat, suffocating and damp, sapped Grace’s strength as she stumbled through the green tunnel, the occasional pat of elephant dung the only clue to the creatures that had gone ahead.

  At midday, they stopped for lunch. ‘Usual muck for lunch, eh?’ said Ruby mutinously.

  ‘Hush, Ruby. Miss can’t help it. Don’t be so critical.’ It was Emily, coming to the defence of Grace, who mouthed a silent ‘thank you’.

  But the elephant men did come up with lots of new things to eat: slices of mango, tiny wild bananas, more sour than sweet, and even a pudding of sorts, made of cold rice in bamboo leaf and one teaspoon of cocoa powder.

  ‘Yuck!’ cried Molly.

  ‘Sssh, it’s yummy,’ said Ruby, ‘like a chocolatey rice pudding. If you don’t want it, I’ll have your share.’ Molly fell silent and tucked in.

  Grace tracked down the Havildar, deep in conversation with Po Toke.

  ‘Havildar, I have to say I am worried about our lunch. There’s almost too much to eat.’

  ‘Sam’s orders. The more we eat, the lighter the load for the elephants, the faster we can go. This applies to the first few days, while the Japanese are so closely behind. We eat now, starve later.’

  ‘Have they crossed the river?’

  Smiling at Grace, Po Toke shook his head.
‘Not yet, Miss.’

  After a short rest, the children were on their feet again. They made much poorer progress in the afternoon, struggling up a steep ravine, maybe 1,500 feet high, then over its spine and down the other side, crossing a chaung or stream at the bottom. Some chaungs were dry, but this one was a roaring torrent, bursting with snow-melt from the Himalayas. The elephant men loaded up the children and they were soon across. Instead of dismounting, the children stared at the oozies with imploring eyes. They rode on, exhilarated.

  Ruby, fit and old enough to have to walk, started to hum a tune, hopelessly incongruous in the jungle, but soon the marching army of children and oozies were joining in the hum as her smoky voice rang out:

  ‘Any time you’re Lambeth way,

  Any evening, any day,

  You’ll find us all

  Doin’ the Lambeth Walk. Oi!’

  Grace could have sworn that the elephants were taking two step forwards, one step back, in tune.

  Before long the elephant grass swung back to reveal Sam, Winston at his heels, beside himself with fury.

  ‘Shut up!’ he barked. ‘Shut up! No bloody singing. Or we will all be doing the Lambeth Walk in a Japanese prison camp.’

  ‘Aaah,’ said Ruby playfully.

  ‘No, Miss, it isn’t funny. We’re on the run from the Imperial Japanese Army. If they catch us, they may kill some and put the rest of us in the bag. They plan to steal the elephants so that they can invade India. And you are doing your level best to make life easy for them. Do you understand?’

  Ruby, one of nature’s troublemakers, looked down. It was perhaps the very first time that Grace had seen her in any way submissive.