ELEPHANT MOON

by John Sweeney

  But it turned out that he could still be surprised, surprised by the speed and ferocity of the Japanese attack, surprised by the chaos and, yes, the lack of the right stuff from the British forces, and lately surprised by a bloody Hants and Dorset bus arriving in the middle of his jungle, crammed full of kids and their schoolmarm to boot.

  The jungle had played perhaps one last trick on him. A bloody great big lump of rock just where he hadn’t been expecting it. An owl hooted somewhere close by, and Sam twitched. A real owl? Or a Japanese jitter party? His men were too few to put out pickets to guard their approaches. He relied on his jungle skills and the antennae of his men, but neither was infallible.

  Once, a bull elephant that had already killed three men charged at him. Armed only with a one-chambered elephant gun, he’d taken aim, fired, but the round was dud. He’d broken the shot-gun, extracted the dud, rammed in a fresh round, taken aim and shot the bull. It slumbered to a slow fox-trot, swayed and collapsed a single yard from Sam. After that, word got round High Burma that Sam Metcalf had nerves of steel. If a hoot from an owl could turn him into a scared little bunny rabbit, his nerves were shot.

  The reddening sky cast the rock into dark shadow. If the worst came to the worst and there was no way through, then he wondered how he would break it to the main party, travelling two days’ march behind him now. They could try and sneak past the Japanese, but he feared the elephants would be shot up, and the children would be helpless if forced to make it to India on their own, having to carry what food they had left. Many of them, the little ones, and that little lad who was a bit simple, they would die.

  Oh, Christ, perhaps they should never have tried it.

  One of the chaps came to Sam to explain that they’d pretty much run out of food. Sam had an answer to that – and sod the Japanese. The echoes would fool them. A few hundred yards down from their camp ran a branch of the stream they had been climbing up, which filled out into a deep pool. Hurrying to catch the available light, he scampered down, fetched his knapsack off his back and took out a hand-grenade, pulled out the pin and lobbed the grenade into the still water.

  Bang! A great whoosh of water, soaking him, enough noise to wake the dead in Thibet, the sound of the explosion echoing against the rock. As the water in the pool settled, a dozen perch, two or three a respectable size and one enormous, ugly thing, with long barbels extruding from its mouth, like the tendrils of a tramp’s beard, floated belly-up, on the surface. Very satisfying. He gave permission for the men to light a fire. True, the Japs were out there in the jungle, somewhere. But there was another jeopardy, that his men, over-worked, exhausted, half of them coming down with malaria, under-nourished and cold to the marrow, wouldn’t be able to push on, if they didn’t have some fresh hot food and a warm fire through the night. He’d picked a heavily wooded spot in a cleft in the mountain for their camp, so the chances of anyone seeing the fire through the tree cover from far away was dim. But the bang had been loud enough. Still, lobbing the odd hand-grenade in a pond remained, to Sam, the finest way to fish. No messing about with trying to put a worm on a hook. Bugger that.

  His Burmese seemed happy as Larry, roasting the fish on a hand-made spit, laughing and making a little too much noise. Once more, he weighed the risk of being caught napping by a Japanese scouting party. What were the odds? Hard to judge. They were on the very far edge of the Emperor of Japan’s domain, taking a route which, it turned out, made no military sense whatsoever.

  He loved his elephants, missed them more than it would appear proper to say. In the old days he’d hunted, killed elephants for game too, something he now regretted. These days, after all his time working with the great beasts, he put special store by the human-elephant relationship, but he wasn’t a bloody Buddhist. Jungle leeches? He’d exterminate them, quick as a flash.

  Somebody had had to scout the route to India ahead and he had been best-placed to do so, to shoulder the responsibility. If someone had to make a decision and it ended up being a terrible mistake, then it was better him than anyone else. They had only one shot at it. A mistake like walking into a slab of rock 500 feet high. But he also knew that a little part of why he had elected to go on the scouting mission was his dislike of people, of getting tangled up in the lives of others.

  Take Grace. A woman of stunning beauty, but half-crackers too, raving on about how that wounded sergeant had shot her Jemadar. Hmm– maybe there was something in it. He’d given orders to the Havildar to keep the sergeant out of her hair and to keep an eye on him at all times. But he was sceptical, suspected that she might have got the wrong end of the stick. The Jemadar could well have been felled by a stray bullet. Somebody else could sort that one out, when they got to India.

  If they ever got there.

  Po Toke approached with roast fish, a little black around the edges, wrapped in a shiny banana leaf.

  ‘Fish, but no chips,’ said Po Toke in his passable English and the two men laughed. Sam had explained the weird culinary pleasures of the British to the Burman long ago. Sam hadn’t had fish and chips in a very long time. It was funny what you missed, what you had fantasies about. Not lobsters or oysters or a great salmon, but simple fish and chips wrapped up in yesterday’s Western Daily Post, a bottle of beer and, as the sun dipped, the flash of the nearest lighthouse. No chance of that here.

  He ate. The cooked fish was good, the first proper meal, not out of a tin, that he’d had in ages. He was more hungry than he’d realised, and when he’d eaten, he slumped into his hammock, cursing their luck. All this way, but no way out.

  In the morning: ice-grime.

  A coating of frost covered their bedding, their faces, their feet where they protruded out of their blankets. The Burmese had never seen anything like it, tiny crystals of coldness, which burnt the tongue. Sam told them about snow, so deep it could bury a man, and they looked at him as if he had turned idiot.

  They shivered violently as they rolled up their hammocks and prepared for the day’s work. Sam divided up the party into five groups of two, and set off to explore the rockface. The fittest, youngest ones were sent off to the furthest extremities, north and south, while Sam and Po Toke had given themselves the task of examining the rock immediately in front of them. To the north for two miles, nothing. They retraced their steps and found, almost immediately in front of the camp, a landslip tumbling down towards them, strewn with boulders and overgrown with lianas and bamboo.

  He doubted whether he could get up the fifty feet of the landslip, let alone an elephant. Po Toke, who knew what elephants could do, better than any man alive, shook his head. But still, they had no choice but to explore it.

  They spent two long hours hacking through the undergrowth to climb forty feet or so. The last ten feet were almost perpendicular, Sam having to jump from one stony outcrop to another, but eventually he hauled himself up onto a goat track, invisible from below, which slowly ascended, running to the south-west around the side of the rockface. Gingerly, Sam and Po Toke followed the path upwards. Much of the time, it was ten feet wide, maybe more, but they came to a narrow point, just twelve inches wide, curving around a bend in the rock, the path out of view, as if ending in the sky itself. Sam made himself go first, edging his way along, facing the wall of rock, eyes on the path ahead, not daring to look down to the drop below.

  Four feet along and the path narrowed an inch or two. A spasm of fear gripped him. Going back now would be more dreadful. His legs froze, his arms extended, fingers scrabbling and flailing to gain some traction on the smooth-as-soap surface. Despite himself, he looked down the sheer wall beneath his feet to the jungle far below, as green as a bottle, welcoming, seductive, deadly.

  They had no hope. The path was barely wide enough to allow one man, impossibly narrow for an elephant, let alone fifty-three. The smallest calf would be knocked off the goat-track by the fatness of his belly.

  To the north, a mass of clouds piled up, punctured by the sun. The wind, cold and fresh from Thibet, soughed
over the rocks. Hard – no, impossible – to judge the distances made by sounds. Was that the soft crump-crump of the big guns? And, not so far off, the fire-crackers of small-arms fire? Or thunder and lightning from fifty miles away?

  Out loud, Sam heard himself say: ‘Get a grip, old man,’ and he straightened his back and started moving, imagining that he was about to plunge into the sea off Cornwall. Five, six, seven steps, a bend – and the path widened to a large space, covered by an overhang of rock, shading him from the sun, almost dark, as spacious and restful as a hay barn. Giddy with suppressed fear, he made for the ground furthest from the drop and pressed his back against the rock, luxuriating in its solidity.

  Forcing himself back to the cliff edge, waiting for Po Toke, he tried to affect an air of nonchalance, but in his heart he had to deal with facts.

  There was no way out.

  They had lost. He’d have to shoot the elephants.

  Chapter Twelve

  They trekked on and on, slow, sluggishly, looking over their shoulders at the impassive wall of green behind them, half-wanting the Japanese to be there to put an end to the relentless anxiety. The trudge through jungle came to a halt as they watched Henry VIII toboggan on his haunches down a muddy bank into a dried-up riverbed. The rest followed, finding themselves in a sandy gulley with both banks above them steep walls of rock. At the start, the dried-up bed was much, much easier-going than the jungle and they made good progress on sand and cracked mud, picking their way through boulders as big as houses and side-stepping deep pools of water.

  They walked on, locked inside the funnel of rock, the banks getting steeper and more forbidding as the riverbed twisted and turned. Halfway through the afternoon, a long, drawn-out rumble sounded from the north.

  Thunder.

  To Eddie Gregory’s ears practised, from his days with the gunners, it made a bigger noise than artillery, easily distinguished. The rain came, even harder than before, a relentless curtain of water falling, connecting up the deep pools by a thread, then a tracery, soon a blanket of water, until you’d take a step and plunge in down to your waist and struggle to hold upright. Thank God he’d parked all his kit, apart from his knife, in the big elephant’s basket.

  Whoever the bright spark was who’d thought of taking a short cut along the dried-up riverbed hadn’t worked out what might happen if it started to rain, big-time. Because pretty soon the river wasn’t dried up at all, but running freely, the water level rising and rising fast. One inch, two inches. A trickle turned into a sluggish flow. Five inches, six inches. The flow started to move little stones, bits of dead wood began to be carried away by the current.

  The rain thrummed down through the trees that arced overhead, the job of sloshing uphill against the current becoming harder, with every step.

  Sick of plunging out of his depth, Gregory studied the great elephant’s progress. The animal never put a foot wrong. It must be something in the pads of the creature’s feet. When unsure of himself, the animal had a way of testing a step, to make sure it would carry the burden of his great weight, before he would move. But the elephant was even smarter than that. For much of the time the beast ploughed on up the stream, making quite good going, keeping an eye out for signs that the bed of the stream was sound. He could work out, Gregory realised, when he could walk steadily and when he had to slow down and take soundings. The oozies knew this, and never pushed the tusker when he suddenly stopped, and started dipping his toe into the water and testing his weight rather than plodding robotically on. If he ever got out of here, and sorted out that bitch of a schoolmarm, then he would have some tales to tell about his time with the elephants.

  How long would they stay in the riverbed? Gregory raised his eyes and studied the slabs towering above them. Sheer rock, sprouting a bit of jungle here and there, a good thirty feet on one side, maybe a hundred on the other. If the river kept on rising at the current rate – and the stream was being fed from the hills and mountains to the north, where the thunder was coming from – then pretty soon it would be a forceful torrent, down which dead trees would come, smashing everything in their wake, and then they’d have to look out.

  Reading the faces of the oozies, he could tell that they didn’t like it one bit. There was no panic, not yet, but a growing jitteriness amongst the Burmese. To prove the point, a biggish tree trunk idled past them, and then locked still for some seconds, a branch snagging on the bottom, before it spun free. As it passed Gregory, a high branch brushed against his face. He jerked his head away fast, but not fast enough, and the left side of his face bore a nasty tracery of scratches.

  That set him thinking. The oozies by him were leading the most powerful elephant of the whole pack, walking with the fittest men, and they looked worried. Further down the march, the schoolgirls and the baby elephants, would be in trouble.

  An opportunity, maybe, to settle things with the schoolmarm? No harm in taking a look, was there? Gregory made a thing of asking the lead oozie on the big one, using sign language, for his permission so that he could go back down the stream to see how the others were coping, whether they needed to quit the riverbed now. That was a bit academic, like, because they were trapped in the funnel of rock until it opened out. The oozie, high up on the tusker’s neck, grasped Gregory’s meaning, nodded, and the sergeant turned on his heel and began to saunter downstream. It was easy-going compared to slogging uphill, but every now and then something caught his feet underwater and he would stumble and stagger, working hard to keep upright. His boots filled with water but he didn’t dare risk taking them off lest he tread on something sharp. Remembering where the elephant had hesitated, he managed to avoid the deep sumps of water, and came to a bend in the riverbed. Far to the side was a kind of cave, a shelter made by a misshapen roof of rock and a spread of thick waxy ferns. Underneath the ferns the ground, standing proud of the stream, was dry-ish and quite comfortable to sit down on. He could rest, hidden behind the greenery, and people and elephants could pass him a few feet away and have no idea that he was watching them.

  Smart. And so he sat down and waited to see who would pass by.

  The Havildar came first, almost running, scowling, looking anxious, followed by a troop of pack elephants, moving faster than normal. Not running exactly, but kind of trotting, if elephants could be said to trot, calves skipping after mothers, little trunks flapping this way and that. Nearly all of the children were being carried in panniers, which was against Sam’s rules. By foot came a group of the older girls, Emily passing only a few feet from him, chatting to another girl, beak-nosed and lippy, a Jewess, and finally, there she was, the princess schoolmarm, rain plastering her blonde hair wet over her shoulders, her frock – once cream - a muddy brown and, to the delight of the secret watcher, all but see-through.

  And what was bloody marvellous, she was alone.

  Gregory checked upstream: all clear. The older girls had rounded a bend and had disappeared, out of sight.

  Thirty feet away from him, blissfully unaware, she was walking towards him.

  Now?

  Hold the knife to her long, lovely throat, drag her under the ferns, make sure everybody had passed – it would not take that long, because they were all hurrying up the riverbed – wait until the last of them had gone. He’d wait five minutes, maybe ten, just to be sure.

  Then he’d tie her up with a liana, her hands behind her back, cut away that old dress with his knife. Have her, nice and slow.

  And then…

  With a bit of luck, if the rain kept on pouring and the river level rising, her body would be flushed downstream so fast no one would ever find it. He’d have to do a bit of explaining about why he was so late, so far behind – he’d fallen down a sump, knocked his head, the old concussion. Strange no one had spotted him lying by the side of the bank, but that was hardly his fault, was it? They’d missed him in their panic to get out of the river before it became a torrent. Sam and the Havildar might suspect some funny business but, with no body, they
wouldn’t be able to pin anything on him. No evidence, see?

  Better wait until she had passed him.

  A few more steps.

  So close to him he could reach out and stroke her hair, could see her shoulderblades sculpted through the sodden fabric of her frock.

  In the dull green light, the blade of his knife not shining…

  Chapter Thirteen

  There was something awesome about the force of the melt-water powering down from the Himalayas, surging like great Atlantic breakers crashing against boulders as big as a house; something awesome about the finality of what it meant to the raggle-taggle army of last-ditchers.

  The end of hope.

  The men slumped against mossy-green rocks, enjoying the relief of the spray, cooling after the heat of the forced march. They had clattered down from the plateau above and were now at the very bottom of the ravine. The waters were hellishly strong.

  ‘Cross that?’ The sergeant-major gestured with the slightest twitch of his head. ‘Fat chance.’

  One man, tall, gaunt, paddled into the shallows, squinted across to the west bank, fuzzy in the cloud of mist.

  ‘We’ve got to move.’ Desperation in his voice.

  ‘The lads need a break, sir. You’re killing them at this pace. Besides, there’s not a man among us who could cross that and live. That goes for you too. We can’t swim that. We’re fooked this time, sir.’

  It was not much more than 100 yards to the far bank. In the old days, at school, he could have run that distance handsomely in a twinkling of an eye. Now, the force of the water would knock him flying in the first five feet and he would certainly drown– and he was probably the fittest, or, rather, the least poorly man, out of the nine of them. Some of the chaps could barely hobble.

  He was angered by the sergeant-major’s realism. They had been following the river downstream for hours and they had not seen a single place where they could get across. They had been moving fast, every one of them knowing that the Japanese had time on their side. If they could not ford the torrent, they were trapped and they knew that sooner or later, the Japs would hunt them down. Only nine of them were left, haggard, pitifully thin, all of them beyond exhaustion. Only the officer’s mad insistence that they must catch up with the others, must at all costs reach them, drove them on. Had it not been for Peach, they would have dawdled to a halt hours ago.