Sweet and gentle, but also a little bit of a ham, Ma Chaw would fuss and resist care for a few minutes before standing still. She had to endure several steps of a ghastly procedure in which Williams would slice open those hidden chambers of infection running under the skin of her back, scoop out rank-smelling pus, and then use a syringe to apply disinfectant. Because purified antibiotics wouldn’t be widely available until 1941, Williams used what he could. One treatment he’d had some success with involved packing sugar into the wounds. It provided antimicrobial and even granulation-inducing properties, helping form the matrix of tissue that would knit together and heal.
Still, it took three full weeks of nearly around-the-clock care for Miss Smooth to make it out of danger. During that time, the two had shared moments of happiness. Williams gave her sweet tamarind balls, bananas, and sugarcane for being such a good patient. He learned where she liked to be rubbed on her trunk and forehead. He spoke to her quietly in Burmese. She expressed her feelings with low rumbles of contentment that he could feel in his chest, and sometimes she squeezed her eyes shut and produced high-pitched chirps of delight.
Finally, Williams left Ma Chaw in the hands of a reliable worker and requested regular reports on her progress until he could rejoin her two months later.
On arrival back at Ma Chaw’s camp, he sat out in a folding chair in a clearing in front of his tent to have a cup of tea. The camp’s seven elephants were being bathed in the creek, close enough for him to hear the ritual commands and the splashing and trilling of the elephants. When they were marched by afterward, Williams called out, “How is Ma Chaw’s back?”
At the sound of his voice, his old patient rushed straight at him in a floppy trot. He patted her trunk and gave her a banana. When she had finished it, Miss Smooth did something odd: She lowered her rump to the ground, with her back toward him.
With her uzi looking on with amusement, Williams patted Ma Chaw’s back and quietly told her to get up: “Htah.” She did as she was instructed, leaving with her rider.
Williams had never seen such a display. Was it submission? Politeness? He thought it was gratitude. But he wondered if he was making too much of it. In any event, it was time for inspection. He drained the last sugary swallow from his teacup and headed for the line of elephants.
Ma Chaw was at the end. When it was her turn, Williams ran his hands over her wrinkled hide. Working her flesh, he discovered that though her back looked normal, it was not. As he pressed and squeezed some of her skin, he lingered at an area about nine inches long. There was heat and just the tiniest opening to signal the problem—one of her old wounds that had not healed.
She didn’t fight him for a moment; in fact, she seemed to welcome his invasive treatment. It was as though she had asked for it. “I can never be quite sure that she came and showed me her back in order to tell me that it was still painful,” Williams wrote with scientific caution. But, he added, “I am sure that she liked me, trusted me, and was grateful.”
Like his counterparts back home, Billy Williams, as a young workingman, was learning to negotiate the adult world. But here in the jungles of Burma, elephant society was his model. He didn’t emulate middle-aged bankers or scholarly old college dons. For him it was matriarchs and bulls. His bosses taught him some. The uzis, too. But mostly it was the elephants. And as their characters revealed themselves to him, he absorbed their wise lessons.
Particularly where mothers and their young were concerned, he witnessed an astonishing display of loyalty and bravery. There were two pairs of elephants who helped him form his own personal standard of courage, giving him the backbone, he later said, he never would have gained from fellow humans.
The first involved Bandoola’s mother, and it occurred one afternoon just before darkness fell at the beginning of the rainy season. With this first downpour, the headwaters had built up and begun to sluice down the waterway, a fast and quickly rising tide. It was just what a forester wanted—torrents that would wash all the teak from the mountainsides so it could begin its route to Rangoon. Williams listened, hoping to hear in the distance the telltale boom of two-ton logs knocking into one another as they rammed their way along at high speed. He walked through the soaking rain down to the edge of the river. Here the riverbank was like a canal with twelve- to fifteen-foot shale walls. He could see that the waters, at a depth of about six feet, were gaining fast. Just then he heard the roar of an elephant in a tone that chilled him. He practically spoke their language by now, and he recognized this as a cry of terror. Along the opposite side of the river, about 150 feet away, he made out through the curtains of rain several uzis rushing around in agitation. He raced over to investigate.
There in the fading light, pummeled by the downpour and trapped in the torrent, was one of his favorites, the elephant who had given birth to Bandoola, along with her tiny three-month-old female calf. He didn’t know how she got there or what had happened. But Ma Shwe was up to her shoulders and barely holding her own against the current. Using every bit of her strength, she pressed the baby against the shale with her whole body—keeping the calf’s head above water and preventing her from being swept away. It was a life-and-death struggle. The current kept claiming the baby—setting her in motion “like a cork in the water.” But Ma Shwe was just as relentless. Each time the calf was pulled off, the mother, with extraordinary strength, would use her trunk to grab her and reel her back.
The high, sheer banks gave her no purchase—no possible way out. Worse, Williams knew this river well, and he felt certain Ma Shwe did, too: Just below them, three or four hundred feet away, were deadly rapids. The elephants would be lost forever if they were pulled toward them.
As he tried to come up with a rescue strategy, there was, as is typical in monsoon, a sudden two-foot surge in the water level. With that swell, the calf washed right over her mother’s hindquarters, bobbing downriver. Ma Shwe threw herself into the tide, frantic. She finally got to the little one on the same side of the river where Williams stood. Ma Shwe clutched the calf with her trunk and again pinned her to the bank. Williams felt helpless. He could do nothing but watch, and it seemed there wasn’t much more Ma Shwe could do, either. Sooner or later, she would be too tired to hold on. Several agonizing minutes had ticked by when the exhausted elephant got her trunk around the calf’s body, and she reared up out of the water. “Then as if with one mighty super animal effort” she lifted the baby as she would a log, stretching herself to the limit, placing her up on a narrow ledge five feet above the waterline, but still well below the top of the wall. With this last act of strength, Ma Shwe fell back into the river, which hurled her down toward the rapids.
There was only one spot before the falls where she would be able to exit. Given her intelligence and determination, Williams hoped she would reach it. But even if she did, she would then be on the opposite side of the river from her calf. Williams turned to the baby, who, on a ledge just wide enough to hold her feet, “stood, tucked up, shivering and terrified.” Her “little, fat, protruding belly was tightly pressed against the bank.”
How could he save her? He thought about attempting to raise her to the bank with ropes, but worried he would scare her back into the dark waters. After another half hour, Williams realized he was losing time and light. He might have lost hope, too, when he heard what he said was “the finest call of the wild I ever heard. Ma Shwe had reached her bank and was making her way back as quickly as she could, calling the whole while—a defiant roar—but to her calf it was music. The two little maps of India, the shape of the calf’s ears, were cocked forward, listening to the only call that mattered, the call of her mother.” Then, in the fading light and pouring rain, a figure that matched the gray dusk emerged from the jungle on the opposite shore.
As soon as Ma Shwe saw her baby, her voice changed. “She stopped roaring and began rumbling,” Williams noted, “a never-to-be-forgotten sound, not unlike that made by a very high-powered car when accelerating.” It was a “phut, phut
, phut” sound that was the audible tip of one of those secret elephant calls too low for human ears. Williams could literally feel her joy.
But the drama wasn’t over. Night was falling fast, and under near biblical rains, the two animals remained on opposite sides of a raging river from each other. For hours, in the pitch blackness, Williams heard the chest-rattling thunder of those deadly giant teak logs crashing into one another. He wasn’t doing the elephants any good standing out in the rain, so he went back to his bamboo hut. But he could not change into dry clothes, nor even sit down, knowing Ma Shwe and her baby were still out there.
He grabbed a few things and ran back to the spot above the ledge. He shone the beam of a flashlight down and saw the poor baby still on her precarious perch. He went back to his tent and then again returned to check on the calf. The glare only seemed to disturb her, so he forced himself to leave. He could only hope that the elephants, as they usually did, would puzzle out the solution.
With the first dim light of day, Williams bolted back to the river and found a beautiful sight: mother and calf reunited; the boiling river reduced to a coffee-colored trickle. How had it happened and when? No one witnessed the reunion, but Williams had a hunch that Ma Shwe had gotten across the river and found a way to lift her baby out. It’s something elephant mothers do.
Later, when the calf turned five, the traditional age for naming since their real personality would have emerged by then, the men christened her Ma Yay Yee. Miss Laughing Water.
Williams would come to see that the heroic love between mothers and babies was reciprocal. Often it was expressed in small gestures—a tiny baby threatening someone who approached his mother, for instance—but there was one case that stunned Williams and would stay with him. One November, a new class at school was convened, and all mothers with five-year-old calves were summoned for the new academic year.
Among them was a female in her midthirties named Mahoo Nee, or Fire Opal, whose extraordinary eyes “were of a rich dark brown illuminated by a flickering light, like flames.” Mahoo Nee was leading her male calf over the many miles from her camp to the school grounds. Along the way, her uzi had been riding atop her as they waded through some dense vegetation. To make it easier for her and the baby, the uzi would reach down in front of Mahoo Nee’s head as they walked, slashing at some of the branches with his knife. But in doing so, he inadvertently cut a type of vine that when broken open can burn and blister the skin.
When they arrived in camp Williams walked over to greet them and assess the new little student. But as he drew close, looking up into the gentle face of his old friend Mahoo Nee, he was horrified. Some skin was burned, and her eyes were covered with an opaque film.
He spoke with the uzi about what had happened. Her eyes must have touched the vines, the rider said. With a growing sense of alarm, Williams examined her. He wanted to find out if there was some vision remaining, any ability to distinguish light and dark or movement. “When I waved my fingers to within a quarter of an inch of her long lashes, there was no flicker of an eyelid,” he said. She was completely blind.
The elephant hospital was nearby, but there was no salve to treat the damage, no hope that her sight could be restored. At least she would be safe with him, Williams thought. There was plenty of forage gathered for her, and she could be bathed in the cool stream nearby. The gentle elephant deserved a little pampering.
When the mother and calf were led away Williams noticed something extraordinary. “I saw the calf back his hindquarters towards his mother’s head,” Williams wrote. “When she felt him, she raised her trunk and rested it on the calf’s back; and in this way they moved about the clearing. It was like a little boy holding his blind mother’s hand and steering her down the street.”
Generally, Williams had found calves at this age to be unruly. Able to feed themselves, they begin to wander off on their own and exert some independence. When they are close by, they tend to be nuisances to their mothers. He was surprised to see a sense of responsibility and maturity in the calf, he wrote, “until I remembered that human family relationships can alter enormously, if either parent or child is injured. Instinctively a sort of balance is struck and the normal instincts are modified.”
The care of his mother “would give him the discipline which he would have had to be taught at school, a discipline of devotion, but all the stronger for that.” Williams wondered if the calf would eventually tire of the burden and escape into the wild. Without him, Mahoo Nee would have to be hand-fed for the rest of her life.
Mahoo Nee and her son were sent together to a kind of elephant retirement village, called the “Old Crocks’ Home,” British slang for something broken down. It was near a river where the terrain was flat and the tasks easy (pushing stranded logs from sandbanks). Older elephants or ones with minor physical problems who could still handle light work were sent there. Even Bandoola had been employed at the spot once during a time when Po Toke was trying to keep the growing bull from strenuous work. Retired elephants didn’t have to work at all; in fact, their fetters were removed forever, and they received extra rations of salt and tamarind fruit to help digestion.
Very quickly, the men in camp had a name for the new calf. They called him Bo Lan Pya, or the Guide Man.
At the Old Crocks’ Home, the calf and his mother developed a routine: Mahoo Nee would work a regular shift, her rider directing her movements. In the afternoon when she was done, the Guide Man would come by. They’d have their daily bath and then “off he would take her to find the six hundred pounds of fodder which she needed as her daily ration,” Williams wrote. “They would spend an hour feeding in the kaing grass. Then, trunk on back, she would follow her son to the bamboos for a couple of hours more, then off again for a few hours in creeper and cane brake jungle. Another hour or so, browsing and resting under a shady tree and then down to the water to drink.”
The steadfast calf had all day to himself, but never even seemed tempted to run with a wild herd. Mahoo Nee and Guide Man were always together by choice. Their movements, and it even seemed their thoughts, became intertwined. An exquisite communication, Williams noted, developed between the two of them. Those infrasonic rumbles had special meaning to them. They spoke to each other in a way that the men couldn’t hear.
Completely without sight, Mahoo Nee thrived. She worked, she foraged at night, she had joys, and she experienced intrigues. Her bond with Guide Man was a revelation. The calf doted on her. “The proof of his good work was Fire Opal’s condition,” Williams wrote. “For three years she was physically perfect.” Williams went to the camp whenever he could to see her. Invariably he left in high spirits. Just seeing her happy life cheered him.
At the beginning of one monsoon season, he seized a chance to call on the blind elephant’s camp. When he arrived, it was raining and the river was rising quickly. Mahoo Nee was among the several elephants pushing logs into the water, and he could see Guide Man on the far bank, roaming around but sticking close to home base.
For some reason Mahoo Nee looked unhappy, and since the current was picking up speed, Williams called for her rider to bring her onto the shore near him. As the uzi did this, the blind elephant called out for Guide Man. “I looked across the river,” Williams recalled, “and in a moment or two I saw the grand little head of the calf appear out of the tall elephant grass about four hundred yards away. His ears were cocked forward. His little tusks stood out like toothpicks. He bellowed back, as much to say, ‘Wait a mo’, mum, I’m coming!’ But the river bank at the point where he had emerged had a sheer drop of twelve feet.”
Swollen, rapidly changing rivers during monsoon are dangerous, but what happened next was a freak accident. As Guide Man raced to find a gentle slope on the bank for his descent, he hit a spot that had turned into a precarious ledge—the earth below it scooped out by the churning water. The whole structure gave way under him. When he hit the water, more heavy mud came sliding down, trapping him.
Williams hollered
for a canoe, though before it was even put into the water he realized it was hopeless. The little calf had drowned. It was agony enough for Williams, but then he looked over at the solitary figure of Mahoo Nee. She stood silently in the shallows of the river, straining to hear, as the waves slapped against her flanks and the rain poured down. Her uzi directed her to the section of the river where her son had drowned. She began to call out for him—bellowing over and over. Though Guide Man had not made any sound the humans could hear as he slipped under, Williams felt sure that Mahoo Nee knew what had happened. “It may have been my fancy,” Williams wrote, but “in her calls there was no hope of answer.” She seemed to be expressing shock and grief as she stood over the buried body of her son. She reluctantly moved away when commanded, crying out as she pushed against the current, crying still as she heaved herself up onto the shore. And all the way back to camp. By nightfall, she was silent. Heartbroken, Williams and the uzis hand-fed her all her favorite treats. She did eat some, but something was now terribly broken inside her.
Three weeks later, she was dead. Williams held no postmortem, though that was standard procedure in such cases. “The cause of death,” he said, was “obvious.”
CHAPTER 12
THE JUNGLE FAMILY HAS NO WIFE
BY THE SUMMER OF 1925, WILLIAMS WAS A TRUE JUNGLE MAN—not a spare ounce of flesh on his bones, hair buzzed down to a military minimalism, skin browned by the sun. He worked like a jungle salt and played like one, too—keeping a polo pony or two at his regional headquarters so he could join in organized games when he came in from the forest. He had made lifelong friends with some of his colleagues, and admired others—men such as Colin Kayem, “the bravest and maddest” forest man Williams knew; Harold Langford Browne, as handsome as a matinee idol and beloved by the uzis; and big Geoff Bostock, a highly respected teak man moving up the company ranks. Williams’s satisfactions were enormous, and yet as he drew closer to the age of thirty, he began to take stock of his life as a whole.
Elephant Company: The Inspiring Story of an Unlikely Hero and the Animals Who Helped Him Save Lives in World War II Page 11