ELEPHANT MOON

by John Sweeney

  Down below, a fresh surge of water bore down on the waiting elephants, causing a calf to lose his footing and be swept, squealing and trunk flailing, off his feet. His mother trumpeted a terrified alarm, the eyes of her oozie flashed anxiety. Instantly two aunties downstream angled their bodies so that the calf was swept towards the bank, where in the shallower water he regained his footing. Mother caught up with him and gave him a loving clout with her trunk, and the three adult elephants penned him in against the bank, so that he wouldn’t go surfing again.

  The Havildar shouted down to the oozies to halt while he slithered down the bank, splashed into the river and shot down the current until he got to the foot of the break and managed to stand up against the flow. His breathing was deep and uneven, fear of drowning an unspoken terror. Unsheathing his jungle knife, he clamped it into his teeth and climbed up, gripping a trailing liana as a rope with his maimed hands.

  Molly, watching agog from the safety of their elephant basket, whispered to Ruby, ‘He looks like a pirate king.’

  The liana creaked and, cursing in Urdu, he scrabbled to find a firm hand-hold for his stumps, thinking back to the days when he had fingers. He heaved himself up the last few feet and was over the worst of it, sitting on a plateau of rock thirty feet above the riverbed, pressed in by thick jungle.

  Ferns, bamboo, great lianas came crashing down as he slashed away with his dah until he came out to find himself on a ridge that dropped gently down to the west, to the next watershed. He’d no idea what lay beyond but they could camp here for the night.

  As he turned back, his decision was made for him.

  The whole green sky became an upturned bucket and the storm rain sluiced down, drenching everything and everyone. By the time he got back down to the riverbed, the water level had risen another two inches, reaching his waist and he was the tallest man of the whole march. If they didn’t get out soon, they might all die.

  The elephants had sensed the danger of staying in the riverbed and were climbing out of it willingly, the pads of their feet prospecting for the strongest footholds, tempering their weight, their agility a wonder to behold as three tons of animal floated up the sides of the near-vertical bank. The baby elephants found it the hardest, too little to scale the ledges of rock, too heavy for the mothers or their oozies to lift them easily. The rain made everything worse, turning the rocks slippery-smooth, the children fractious, the elephant men at the end of their tether.

  Mother was to go up before Oomy, the last of all the elephants. Po Net struggled to untie the harness ropes that secured the basket, but did so and the empty basket was man-handled up the slope. The oozie dismounted from Mother’s neck and held her gently by the ear, using his bamboo stick to point out the best route up, the elephant powering her heft up to the top with a nimbleness that belied her size. The moment Mother was up, she turned around on a sixpence and gazed down to see her baby follow. Coaxing, shoving, pushing didn’t seem to work. The little fellow looked up at the 30-foot climb, flapped his ears, bleated, and wouldn’t budge. Po Net found three strong lianas, cut them free, lashed them together and descended to the calf. He placed the middle of his cat’s cradle behind the calf’s bottom, and climbed back to the top with the two ends of the liana. At his signal, two tuskers tugged hard on their ends of the liana, while two more oozies and the Havildar worked to keep the cat’s cradle in place around Oomy’s fat bottom. At that moment, Eddie Gregory appeared at the top of the ridge, took in the scene and climbed down from the top, taking over from one of the exhausted oozies at Oomy’s level. Slowly the calf was dragged up, piping and yelping, Mother looking on, quivering with anxiety: twenty feet away, fifteen, ten, five.

  ‘Almost there, Oomy,’ said Molly, willing the baby to safety. The rest of the school were clustered around the top of the bank, gawking at the drama.

  The tip of Oomy’s trunk touched the loose soil right at the top when, losing his footing on a slab of rock as smooth as a tombstone, Gregory’s side of the cradle slipped, the calf in danger of crashing down 25 feet. The Havildar, directly beneath the animal, braced himself as the full weight of the baby pressed down on his chest, two fingers of his left hand locked on to a snag of rock, his face blood-red with the strain. From her standpoint on the ledge above, Grace watched Gregory right himself, his fingers tugging, working on the cradle: she couldn’t quite see exactly what he was doing. Then Gregory gave a shout and the tuskers tugged on the lianas, taking the strain off the Havildar and the baby elephant began to rise again.

  The liana that Gregory had been working on just a moment before snapped with a whip-crack and Oomy tumbled out of the sling, falling away from the Havildar, sliding and tripping down the bank, squealing horribly. The Havildar lunged out to catch him by the tail, but the baby elephant fell, splashing into the river like a great boulder. Mother bellowed, a ghastly, heart-piercing cry of anguish, and the watching children stared, mute in horror, as Oomy was picked up by the racing current and, bobbing up and down like a fat brown cork, vanished around the bend.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Pinned like a beetle in a museum drawer, the knife-blade pressing yet more firmly against his neck, Peach lay rigid, unmoving. Fingers tugged at his belt, removing his own knife and the grenades, knotting his hands behind his back. A man whispered, ‘Shhh!’ into his ear and he found himself dragged upright and led off into the jungle. Close by, he heard a scuffle and a dull thud but it was too dark to see how Eric was faring. He stumbled on a stray liana and went flying face down, cutting his face above his eye on a jagged edge of rock. The blood streamed down from the cut, half-blinding him in his right eye, and tasting sickly as it wet his lips. In the green-black darkness, he could only make out a blur of shapes picking him up, and dragging him, hurriedly, away from the Japanese elephant camp. Stumbling, half-falling, they led him staggering through the jungle until the sound of the river grew noisier and noisier, and they pushed him down on his knees.

  Are they going to drown me? The thought of being thrown in the water with his hands tied behind his back made him feel as helpless as an infant. They shoved his head down into the freezing torrent – and he felt his courage drain from him.

  Chaos, utter chaos. Mother stared transfixed at the river bend where her baby had vanished. Head down, trumpeting thunderously loud, she smashed into the thick undergrowth at the top of the bank, following the route high above the swollen river. Po Net and three other oozies ran after the mother elephant, thrashing at the jungle with their dahs to carve a way through it. The remaining mother elephants grizzled and moaned and formed a tight circle, keeping their young inside, tightly guarded, their ears-flaps wide out– a danger sign.

  The sun was falling fast in the sky, a red tinge to the west. The smooth logic of the previous camps, the site carefully selected after the best scouts in High Burma had considered all the options, had gone to pot. There was no time to cut a proper clearing, carving room enough for elephants and people to have some space. Instead, they had to make do with a makeshift nest in the foliage– elephants, men and children next to other, cheek by jowl, the animals churning up the mud underfoot, the edge of the ravine and the closeness of the jungle cramping them in.

  On a vast exotic fern by Grace, a spider’s web shimmered in the crimson light, its lacework the colour of blood.

  ‘Miss, Miss, look.’

  Grace walked over and crouched down next to the little girl who was staring motionless at something in a patch of mud on the jungle floor. Marks in the mud, as if left by the hand of a giant, all thumbs, no fingers. The schoolteacher called Po Ling, one of the senior oozies, over, and he confirmed her worst fears: ‘Tiger.’

  The prints were deep and fresh, the mud not yet dry. Half an hour old, if that. Huge printmarks, too.

  ‘Tiger, eh?’ It was Sergeant Gregory. ‘I’m buggered if I’m going to be dinner for Mister Stripes.’ Coolly, he walked over to the pannier containing the elephant men’s armoury.

  He was about to help himse
lf to a rifle when the Havildar called out: ‘Don’t touch that. Sam’s orders.’

  ‘Bugger that.’

  The contempt for the Havildar’s authority was clear. Gregory made to fetch the rifle, but his arm was gripped by the Havildar.

  ‘Get your cripple fingers off me.’

  ‘Leave that alone.’

  ‘Listen, mate, I ain’t done nothing wrong. I don’t want to get eaten by a tiger, do I?’

  ‘Leave that alone.’ The Havildar towered over Gregory. For any other man, the message would have been absolutely clear.

  ‘Listen, mate, you don’t seem to be understanding the English bloody language. That’s tiger prints over there. I have got a right to protect myself. So you’re out of order. Right?’

  ‘Leave that alone.’

  The Englishman raised his eyes to the heavens. ‘Like a bloody gramophone record that’s got stuck, you are. I ain’t done anything, so shut it. Stop telling me off for something I ain’t done. Let me go. Get your crippled hands off me.’

  The Havildar released him, but placed his bulk between him and the rifles.

  ‘Just a big bag of wind, aren’t you? A nigger and a coward, that’s all.’ Gregory turned his back on him and walked off.

  The Havildar, breathing heavily, leant his back against a Y-shaped tree, watching the man with the bandaged head walk away, downhill, into the jungle.

  ‘Havildar, you shouldn’t have allowed him to talk to you like that,’ said Grace, keeping her voice down so that none of the children or the oozies could hear her.

  ‘Nobody has talked to me like that for a long time.’ A silence followed, the Havildar studying the ground. Then: ‘I’ve never spoken about this. After the Great War, I was at Amritsar. No warning was given. Just the shout of command, “Open fire!” A sepoy of the British Indian Army obeys orders.’

  Through his gun-sight he had killed, killed without number.

  ‘Three hundred and seventy-nine people were posted killed that day. It was more.’

  How many times had he relived that moment, when sweat trickled down from his forehead and he blinked and he stopped firing to wipe his eye and he became aware that his finger was on the trigger of his rifle, that he was one of the soldiers making faces splatter red, making bodies jerk. He had wiped the sweat from his murderous eye and stopped firing. An officer spotted him and berated him for his cowardice, but he suffered the abuse in silence. From that day on, he had done his duty as bravely as he could, patrolling the north-west frontier, driving supply convoys through the Pathan-controlled wild country, surviving countless ambushes where several of his friends got killed. Promoted through the ranks until he became Havildar.

  ‘Since that day in Amritsar,’ he told Grace, ‘I have never harmed a soul, never fired a bullet at anyone, never struck anyone. The more bad-tempered I have pretended to be, the more I showed off my crippled hands, offering no proper explanation, the less likely that anyone would find me out. Find out that on the very day of the terrible killing at Amritsar I made a vow to myself, never to take life again, ever. And I don’t know how, but in some way he’ – he gestured to Gregory’s retreating figure – ‘he knows that. He can smell my fear, my fear of killing.’

  Calling out from a ridge above them, Molly had made a new find. Grace struggled uphill on all fours and when she got to the flat peak she stood up. They’d made it to the top of a spine of jungle, far higher than anything they’d climbed before, and before them was a great hole in the forest canopy, the trees thinning out, the undergrowth only a few feet high. Grace wondered to herself whether the ridge had been hit by lightning, and a fire had scoured out a clearing in the jungle. Whatever the cause, the consequence was spectacular. For the first time in what seemed like an eternity they could see all around them, as far as the eye could see. Behind them, to the east, ridges of green forest descended to a great plain and there, to the south-east, the Chindwin snaked its way through a gorge, molten silver, glittering in the late-afternoon sun. Ahead, to the west, a great drop, every inch covered by forest canopy, but then the next ridge was only spotted with trees and beyond that just grass, like a meadow in Scotland, rising, rising, until it reached the sky. They were close to the edge of the jungle. And to the north?

  Above the jungle canopy, the day was dying but the air was clear, free of low cloud, and they could see an incredible distance. Far, far away, beyond the smudge of green, immense mountains papered the sky brilliant white.

  ‘Look, Miss, is that snow?’ asked Molly.

  ‘Yes, Molly, they’re the Himalayas, the highest mountains in the whole world. And that, unless I am very much mistaken, is Thibet.’

  ‘Does anyone live there?’

  ‘Why yes, people do live there. They are called Thibetans and their leader is a God-King. They call him the Dalai Lama and he is two thousand years old.’

  Immediately below them was a flattish bluff of land, the earth in places bare, populated by wooden huts on spindly stilts. They looked out for strangers, for the hill villagers, but no one seemed to be around. The first sign of humanity Grace saw was a white bandage, bobbing up and down as its wearer walked away from them, hopping over a small stream.

  Gregory knelt, scooped water over his face, then looked back at her, stared, and walked off into the bush.

  ‘What is this place?’ asked Ruby.

  ‘It looks like a village that’s been abandoned.’

  ‘Like a ghost village, Miss?’

  ‘No, dear, not like that all.’ But even as she denied it, she could feel her flesh goose-pimple.

  They made their beds out in the open, tying their hammocks to the stilts of the abandoned homes. Exhausted by the events of the day, fatigued by the endless questions – ‘when will Oomy and Mother come back?’ – she worked hard to ensure that the children were fed. The elephant men seemed tense. They dropped off the children’s hammocks and elephant baskets and hurried back towards the riverside, some unspoken anxiety troubling them.

  To the west, a memory of light. Strange, how the human animal craved the sun’s glow, how just a blur of red in the sky warmed the heart. One day their ordeal would end, one day they could snuggle into real beds and wake up in the morning and not have to march another yard. And into this waking idyll entered a face, one that had seldom troubled her day-dreams before, that of Mr Peach.

  Damn fool that he was, she knew that he would have seen through Gregory, that his very presence here now would have made her feel safe, secure. She cursed their misfortune, how the elephants had pushed the tree-bridge into the ravine just as they were about to unite. Peach was a silly thing. No, that wasn’t right. Before, he had been silly – a damned fool – and melancholic and drunk and unpleasant. But she’d seen him grow, to become an officer with the balls to ignore a foolish order, one that would have caused great suffering to a busload of refugees, one who had the courage to run towards gunfire to try and save his men. She re-read the Japanese poem he had written out for her. Fool that he was, there was something about him, the romance of sending a love poem by paper plane, that made her heart lift.

  ‘Good luck, Mr Peach,’ she whispered into the dark.

  He came up gasping for air, inhaling oxygen and the gift of life. Peach’s brain worked feverishly. If they had meant to kill him, they could have done so far more easily by slitting his throat by the Japanese elephant camp, not go to the bother of dragging him through the countryside. If they meant to interrogate him, where were the Japanese officers? Something else was going on, but what?

  Peach felt hands wipe the blood from his face, and a movement behind him in the dark.

  By the dim phosphorescent glow from the torrent he saw a man approach him – then, all but lost in the gloom, the outlines of a face. Peach said, ‘Hello’ in Burmese, the national idiom as spoken in Rangoon, but the man shook his head and gabbled something utterly beyond his comprehension. Clearly, he spoke an impenetrable dialect from this part of High Burma.

  No way through this,
no way to communicate.

  The man offered him a cigarette. One of Peach’s many idiosyncrasies was that he couldn’t abide smoking. He said, ‘No, thank you’ in English, then Burmese, then Urdu, and then, just for a laugh, in Japanese.

  His captor snapped back in the same tongue: ‘How does an Englishman speak Japanese?’

  ‘Badly,’ said Peach, and the man laughed.

  Peach pressed home his advantage. ‘I learnt from a book. And how may I ask, did a Burman learn Japanese?’

  ‘From a whip.’

  ‘Japanese is a beautiful language,’ said Peach, ‘but the ways of the Imperial Japanese Army are less so.’

  ‘They treat us like slaves. They have been bad to us, and bad to the elephants,’ said the Burman.

  ‘You are the leader of the oozies? Yes?’

  ‘No. I am not the leader. But many of us are unhappy with the Japanese. We want to run away.’

  ‘How many are you?’

  ‘Twenty men. Ten elephants.’

  Peach did a quick calculation in his head. ‘If you help us reach India, I will pay you one hundred thousand rupees for each elephant, one million rupees in total.’

  It was a king’s ransom. At that moment, Peach’s belongings amounted to the clothes he was wearing and a pair of water-logged army boots.

  ‘You promise?’

  ‘On my life.’

  ‘When do we leave?’

  ‘Tonight.’

  ‘Very well. But first we must kill our leader.’

  Before the war, Peach would have been greatly troubled at the thought of taking any man’s life without a fair trial. Now he did not give the fate of the pro-Japanese oozie a moment’s thought.