by M. M. Kaye
There were a great many elephants in India even in my day; and when my father was a young man their numbers must have been far larger, for in those days the Army used them to haul guns and carry tents, baggage, ammunition and stores. They were also the normal, everyday transport of forest officers and their families and assistants, as well as of countless Sahibs on shooting leave. They worked in logging camps, moving, lifting and stacking huge tree-trunks; and in timber yards all over India, handling the great balks of seasoned wood — the sleepers on which the railway tracks ran for thousands of miles, criss-crossing the subcontinent, and the logs and planks that were used for building houses, bridges and factories. They and their mahouts were used for keddahs: the driving of herds of wild elephants into huge stockades in the jungles of Assam and Mysore, where they were roped between two tame elephants and taken away to be trained to work. Princes and potentates, Maharajahs, Rajahs, Nawabs and Ranas, with their Queens and Princesses and Ministers, rode on them in processions at weddings or religious festivals and on state occasions. And so also, in those days, did Viceroys and Governors of Provinces.
Pramekali’s mahout would come of an evening to the verandah of the forest hut in which my father stayed when shooting in the Terai, to smoke his hookah and gossip and tell enthralling stories about the elephant-folk and their ways. He told Tacklow that the mahouts speak to their elephants in a special language that is the last remnant of the language that was spoken in the days when the world was new and elephants were the masters and men their servants. He taught him some of that language, and Tacklow taught it to me when I was a child. But by now I can only remember two words of it, perhaps because I myself heard them used fairly often by other mahouts — though I am ashamed to say that I have forgotten which means what! The two words were ‘Dutt’ and ‘Dug’: one means ‘Take a long step’ and the other ‘Push it down with your head’. And as Tacklow said, even the most intelligent dog would be hard put to tell the difference between those two very similar monosyllables. Yet an elephant never makes a mistake. He may be loafing across the countryside in the manner of one who has his hat over one eye and his hands in his pockets, paying no attention to the scenery, when his mahout taps him on the head and says ‘Dutt!’ (or it may be ‘Dug’) and without pausing he will lengthen his stride and pass safely over the yawning ditch, or alternatively, pause to push over a young tree that is obstructing the path; putting it down with his head if it is a large one, or using one foot if he judges that to be sufficient. Yet there are gaps in their intelligence: which is just as well. Because there was an occasion when Tacklow, on local leave down south, accepted an offer to cross the Bay of Bengal on a tramp steamer that was taking a consignment of elephants to Burma; and very nearly did not live to tell the tale.…
The elephants were below decks tethered in two rows, each in a separate stall, and on the second day out, with the sea as flat as a skating rink, one of them decided to relieve the tedium by rocking gently from side to side. Presently another and then a third took it up, until the ship itself began to sway. The elephants found the movement delightful and soon they were all doing it. The steamer, which was not a large one, began to tip from port to starboard and back again like a canoe in a cross sea, and it became alarmingly clear that it was only a matter of time — and not much of it either! — before one gunwale or the other dipped below the water level and the sea rushed in and sent the entire ship to the bottom.
Seamen and mahouts together raced below to put a stop to this blissful but deadly game. But to no avail. Until at last, and only just in time, some genius suggested tethering every other animal the opposite way round. This was done with frantic haste. And it worked! The elephants, who had been enjoying themselves just as much as kids enjoy a swing or a see-saw, continued to rock from side to side, but could not work out that if number one swayed to the left his neighbour must now sway to the right. Fortunately, they never did work it out; for if they had, nothing could have stopped the steamer from sinking like a stone in that enormous, glassy sea. And since launching a lifeboat in those circumstances would have been out of the question and there was no wireless on board, the chances are that there would have been no survivors and the total disappearance of the steamer in a flat calm sea would have become another ‘Unsolved Mystery of the Sea’.
* He was once even suspected of being Jack the Ripper!
* Royal Military Academy.
* The man who sits on the elephant’s neck, knees clamped behind its leathery ears, and guides it.
Chapter 4
Tyger, tyger, burning bright…
Blake, ‘The Tyger’
The reason why I know so much about my father’s childhood and his early years in India is because he used to reminisce to me about those times. He had a fund of real-life stories that I treasure. As I treasure the claw of his first tiger and the tale of how he came to shoot it. This last took place somewhere in the Terai, which is (or was) a wide belt of jungle and grassland that skirted the foothills of the Himalayan range for almost two thirds of its length, but which at present is shrinking rapidly before the encroachments of India’s exploding and rapacious population. The tiger’s claw must by now be almost a hundred years old; which I find difficult to believe, because I can remember so clearly Tacklow telling how he acquired it; and the tale is still so real to me that like Mother’s first visit to the Bombay Zoo, it seems as though it happened only yesterday.…
Seated on the backs of a line of elephants, the shooting-party had been waiting for what seemed like hours; rifles at the ready as they listened to the noises of the jungle and the far-off sounds of the approaching beaters. Tacklow, as the most junior member of the party, was on the extreme left of the line; a spot from which it was highly unlikely that he would get so much as a glimpse of a tiger, since immediately in front of him, separating him from the jungle, lay a dry ravine full of elephant-grass and thorn-scrub that the head shikari* who had planned the beat, judged would dissuade the tiger from coming that way and ensure that it would make for the centre of the line and the rifle of the Commissioner-Sahib for whose benefit the beat had been laid on.
Tacklow’s position being little more than that of a stop, he was able to give his undivided attention to the varied and entertaining assortment of jungle wildlife that emerged from cover ahead of the beat to scud through the waiting line of elephants and vanish into the jungle behind them. The beaters were still a long way off when his eye was caught by what he took to be a jungle-cock — a bright flash of colour among the scrub in the ravine. He could see the vivid orange neck ruff and the white eye of the bird, but as he watched it idly, wondering how long it would be before it decided to run for it, the patch of colour between the grass stems and the thorn boughs seemed to cohere and become clearer: ‘like a photographic print in a tray of developing solution’ was the way he put it. And suddenly, he was looking at the face of a crouching tiger. It was staring directly at him and he lifted his rifle very, very slowly — hearing the whispered protest of his shikari, who had not seen it — and pulled the trigger.
The crack of the shot was not followed by any noticeable movement from the spot he had aimed at, and the orange and white patches were still there; though in a slightly different position. But everyone seemed to be shouting at him, and the Commissioner’s elephant came trundling down the line with the Commissioner himself bellowing furiously from his howdah,* demanding to know what the devil young Kaye meant by loosing off like that and ruining the whole dam’ shoot? ‘Not at nothing, sir,’ replied Tacklow politely. ‘It was the tiger. And what’s more, I think I must have got it.’ And he had. Smack between the eyes. The Commissioner was not pleased: true, he had served for many years in India and had taken part in a great many tiger-shoots, but he had yet to bag his first tiger and this particular one had been specially marked down for him. It should by rights have emerged near the centre of the line, and the sportsmen on either side of him, who knew the form, would certainly have held their fire a
nd let him have first shot. Instead of which the wretched animal had elected to sneak up at the far end of the line and get picked off by a scrubby little ‘griffen’ fresh out from home, whose sole function had been to act as a stop.
Tacklow, on the other hand, was delighted. People did not go around armed with loaded cameras in those far-off days, so there is no photograph of him posing with a foot on the King of the Jungle. But when the skin was cured he sent it to his school-friend, Cull Brinton, then working in the family firm of Brinton’s Ltd in Kidderminster, where I saw it many years later — faded by time to a pale beigy-grey and denuded of most of its hair by reason of being walked on for so long. It still retained a claw or two, and Cull gave me one as a memento of his friend and my father’s first tiger. That is the one I still have. Tacklow was not a keen shikari. Only one more tiger and, much later on, a single tigress, fell victim to his rifle. And I fancy those, like that first one, were lucky flukes, because he was the first to admit that as a marksman he was firmly on the wrong side of ‘average’.
To any animal-lover-cum-conservationist who reads this and immediately suffers a rise of blood-pressure, I would like to point out that back in the last century — and right up to the day that the Raj ended — the tiger population of India was very large. Too large, according to the villagers who suffered most from their depredations. It was only after the British left and every peasant who could afford it bought a gun and a woodman’s axe — using the former to kill any wild animal that preyed on his crops and his cattle, and the latter to hack down trees and decimate the jungle in order to increase his holding — that the number of tigers, together with their one-time habitat, began to shrink like a water-hole in a year of drought; almost to vanishing-point. And if anyone does not believe this, I would suggest that they write to the headquarters of the World Wildlife Association and ask for the actual figures: which will (I hope) shock them more than somewhat.
Among my favourite shikar stories were those that Tacklow told me about his pad-elephant, Pramekali, who when he was on shooting-leave in the Terai used to present herself daily at chota-hazri* time before the verandah of whatever forest bungalow he happened to be staying in. Fruit is always served with chota-hazri and if there was one food that Pramekali really fancied above all others it was fresh fruit. When Tacklow gave her apples, oranges or bananas, or any ordinary-sized fruit, she would take it elegantly with the tip of her trunk and pop it into her mouth. But when he gave her something like a melon or a papaya (pawpaw, to you!) she would place it carefully on the ground, and then lift up a foot like a trip hammer and bring it down so gently that instead of smashing the fruit to pulp she merely broke it into suitably-sized pieces.
He told me, too, of a day when the entire line of elephants, plodding in single file through the thick jungle, was brought to a halt by a single king cobra who reared up in the middle of the narrow, marshy track and weaved its spectacled hood and its small, wicked head from side to side in a menacing manner, daring the leading elephant to move one step further. The dare was not accepted and word passed back down the line to send up Pramekali who, being a lady of strong common-sense, took in the situation at a glance and dealt with it competently. She merely plucked a trunkful of the tall grass that formed a high, impenetrable wall on either side of the path, and brandished it in the cobra’s face, simultaneously bombarding the creature with fids of wet mud kicked up with her forefeet. The cobra lowered its hood and departed at speed and Pramekali tossed away the grass and led the procession forward. Tacklow always swore he heard her sniff in a contemptuous manner.
Yet another of his Terai stories was about a tiger-shoot in which a half-circle of pad-elephants, each carrying a rough-and-ready howdah containing one or two Sahibs in addition to its mahout, were listening to the shouts and yells of the approaching beaters and waiting for the tiger to emerge into the clearing ahead, when a porcupine scuttled wildly out of the jungle scrub. Faced with a line of elephants it made straight for the nearest one who, being young and nervous, lost his nerve and attempted to kneel on it.
The porcupine fought back gamely, shooting off quills in a manner that would have done credit to Robin Hood and his Merrie Men, until the elephant, realizing its mistake, scrambled to its feet and began to fling itself to and fro in an endeavour to rid itself of the quills; dislodging its mahout, who lost his grip and was catapulted into a clump of pampas grass while his three Sahibs and their shikari were thrown from side to side of the howdah like peas in a drum. The tiger, emerging suddenly from the jungle, took one shocked look at this disgraceful scene before streaking past the firing-line to disappear into the safety of the tall grass behind — closely followed by the hysterical elephant, the occupants of its howdah, the infuriated mahout, and the victorious porcupine; in that order. Not a single shot was fired, for the simple reason that the rest of the assembled company, Sahibs, shikaris and mahouts alike (and possibly the elephants as well), were so helpless with laughter that when a second tiger loped out of the jungle ahead of the beat, it too got off scot free. The hunt had to be called off and the rest of the day was spent pulling quills out of the elephant and applying arnica to the bruised and battered occupants of its howdah.
There were also other kinds of stories; four of which I put into my Mutiny novel, Shadow of the Moon, from which they were removed by an editor. So I put them into The Far Pavilions instead. There was the story of the Higher-standard Languages Examination that my hero, Ashton, fails; the one about the three drops of water on a biscuit-tin which he used to explain the Trinity; his verdict on the sepoy who shot at an unknown man riding a supposedly stolen horse; and lastly the death of an incautious Brass-hat who took an evening stroll on the Frontier.
It was Tacklow who failed that examination paper and whose munshi* rushed to his Colonel, insisting that he get back the papers because there must be some mistake — Kaye-Sahib was the best pupil he had ever taught and it was not possible that he could have failed! The Colonel complied, and when the papers were returned they were found to have written across them in red ink: ‘Flawless. This officer has obviously used a crib’! Unlike my hero, my father sat the exam again, put in a few deliberate errors and passed with higher marks than anyone had ever achieved before; or since.
It was also Tacklow, not Ash, who, when asked to explain the Trinity by a group of his sepoys with whom he had been sitting round a campfire discussing theology (the regiment was out on Autumn Manoeuvres), picked up the lid of a biscuit-tin they had been using as a makeshift frying-pan, and after pouring a drop of water into each of three corners, tilted the lid to make the three separate drops run together, and said: ‘Those three are now one, are they not? Yet all three are still there.’ And it was a local missionary doctor who, riding homeward by moonlight on a grey pony, was challenged by a sepoy on sentry duty whose orders were to look out for a grey horse that had recently been stolen. The pony took fright and bolted without giving the doctor a chance to reply, whereupon the sentry, convinced that this must be the thief and that he was attempting to escape, fired at the rider and fortunately missed — but by such a narrow margin that the infuriated doctor laid a complaint and the sentry was duly brought up for judgment. The sentence delivered by the Colonel, and received with loud and appreciative applause by the rank-and-file, was three days’ detention with loss of pay for having shot at a Sahib, and a further twenty for having missed him when he did.
I allowed Wally Hamilton, one of the real-life characters in The Far Pavilions, to tell how a red-coated and bemedalled General, who had ridden out from Peshawar to inspect a Frontier Force battalion on manoeuvres, had taken a stroll beyond the perimeter of the camp to admire the view, and been shot by one of the local tribesmen for no better reason than that his red coat presented such an alluring target in that waterless, treeless, dun-coloured region that the temptation to take a pot-shot at him had proved irresistible. That story too I had from Tacklow, who told me that the elders of the tribe had brought the marksman in for judg
ment, explaining that the General-Sahib had been greatly to blame for putting temptation in the way of a young man with a brand new jezail.* No harm, they urged, had been intended.
A conversation that I put into Shadow of the Moon in fact took place between Tacklow and his Pathan orderly in the 1890s. The orderly had just returned from the rifle range, and Tacklow, having asked him how he’d done at the butts and been told that he had scored a bullseye, two inners and two outers, said that he presumed they were in the opposite order: the outers first and the bullseye last, since the reverse would be poor shooting. ‘Not so,’ returned the Pathan grimly. ‘In my country it is the first shot that counts; if you miss with that you may not get a chance to fire another!’