Giants of the Monsoon Forest

by Giants of the Monsoon Forest- Living

  Yet overall the wider Trans-Patkai area, encompassing much of Upper Burma and northeastern India, is the last place on earth where Asian elephants can at least approximate the mobility they had before humans conquered and cleared much of the Asian forest. For the most part, these forests have not been preserved by governments (though small sections of the wider system of migratory routes, like Kaziranga National Park in Assam, are indeed protected parklands). They remain intact because the forests in the Trans-Patkai generate value: profit from trading forest commodities like timber and minerals; refuge for local militias or other political fugitives; and support for “off-grid” ways of living based on forest ecology.

  The work elephants of Burma and northeastern India are thus in a peculiar situation. On the one hand, they have been conscripted by forest-oriented humans; on the other, they “buffer” their wild counterparts deeper in the forest, helping the humans hold off potent economic, demographic, and political forces that have destroyed enormous swaths of forestland elsewhere. This vexed situation places the work elephants under varying degrees of psychological duress. Hence the elephants who are “difficult,” and hence the mahouts who deal with this dilemma, which is in part a moral one, as best they can.

  “ARE YOU EVER afraid of the big one?” I asked Mong Cho, referring to Neh Ong.

  “I try to be careful. But really, it wouldn’t make sense to be afraid.”

  “Do you think of him as your friend?”

  At this, the other mahouts laughed. “No!” cried one. “You’re not supposed to think of them as friends.”

  Mong Cho smiled, ignoring the others. He looked thoughtfully at some tools in the tent and reached over to sharpen one. “Well, I’ve been with him for a long time—since he was very little. It’s been nearly thirty years now. He is more like a son than a friend.”

  I thought of what the Vietcong mahout Xuan had said about Pak Chan: “I had the feeling he was something of a prodigal son.”

  “Would you miss Neh Ong?” I asked.

  “Of course!” the other mahouts exclaimed, laughing more.

  “Of course,” Mong Cho said too, while sharpening the ankus in his hand and smiling sentimentally.

  At night, I learned, the other mahouts usually went home to their families in the village below, but Mong Cho more often slept up here in the hill camp. At first, this seemed odd to me. Mahouts usually exit the camp at the end of each workday because the elephants have been released into the forest for the night. Even if Neh Ong got into trouble in the forest—which from everything I’d heard about him seemed likely—it would probably happen far from the tent itself, deep in the woods; having a mahout at the camp area wouldn’t achieve much. I considered the possibility that Neh Ong was actually kept chained up at night, and Mong Cho slept nearby as a kind of warden. But if this were so, then someone would have to gather hundreds of pounds of fodder for the giant elephant every day. Neh Ong was well fed, and none of these mahouts were preparing to gather six hundred pounds of bamboo leaves that afternoon. Clearly Neh Ong was free to forage at night.

  Then it occurred to me: perhaps Neh Ong wanted Mong Cho nearby. Mong Cho was one of the few creatures Neh Ong had in his life who put the huge tusker at ease. Perhaps he preferred to forage at night knowing that Mong Cho was nearby, in the tent. In that case, Mong Cho was sleeping up in the hills to soothe and comfort his powerful but troubled lead tusker, to whom he felt such paternal affection.

  Mong Cho also had a young human son, back in the valley. Despite the recent doldrums in elephant work in his area, Mong Cho hoped his son would grow up to become a mahout like him.

  Chapter 7

  CAMPS AND VILLAGES

  ARE WOMEN EVER MAHOUTS?

  I’d been asking this question for months, in both the trans-patkai area and in central burma, always receiving a firm no. Some told me it went against custom for women to be mahouts. Others claimed it was against religion and spiritual instruction.1 Still others said that the elephants themselves will not accept a female mahout—that a male elephant in particular will never permit it.2

  Such responses never satisfied me. In James Howard Williams’s World War II memoir Elephant Bill, women demonstrate excellent elephant handling skills. Williams, a British teak wallah in Burma, was doing construction and transport work with the mahouts and elephants of the upper Chindwin Valley. One day Williams found himself with more elephants than mahouts. Many of the Burmese mahouts had gone missing that morning, apparently absorbed into a Japanese work camp beyond the front lines. With no one to drive the elephants, Williams considered releasing the giants into the forest. But the mahouts’ wives (or their “women,” as Williams puts it, which could mean sisters, daughters, and so forth) were residing in a nearby village and heard of Williams’s predicament. Anticipating the eventual return of the missing mahouts to the British side, they volunteered to “ride the riderless elephants” back into a section of the forest under British control. The women did so successfully, under tense circumstances. This surprised Williams, who like me had been told that the women could not be mahouts.3

  I knew of a few contemporary cases where highly educated women in the elephant conservationist community had learned mahout skills.4 But did village women ever become mahouts? I learned of several. In central Burma, in the woods beyond a government elephant logging village, I visited a charcoal camp, comprising a few makeshift bamboo shelters amid several smoking heaps of ironwood that would later become saleable charcoal. Some mahouts lounged on matted floors inside the main shelter. Several elephants passed by, carrying ironwood logs upon their tusks and crossing the stream that snaked past the camp. The hike here from the road had taken some thirty minutes.

  A woman named Nyo was at the camp with her husband, Win, who was repairing a bamboo pipe for the main cistern while Nyo stirred rice over a campfire. At first I directed all my questions to Win, as I’d been advised, but gradually I directed more to Nyo. Smiling at my inquiries, she pointed out that even though everyone says women don’t drive elephants, she used to do it all the time.

  We were sitting in a group, some eight men and three women in all, and everyone was laughing. The topic was apparently a source of great amusement. Nyo had grown up in a farming area and learned how to ride and give commands to elephants when she first married Win. She had a few favorite elephants in her life, but in the government-run timber industry, elephants can change hands abruptly or be sent off to different logging areas, and that was what happened with the elephants she remembered best. She never did logging work, only the transport work, like moving bags of charcoal, or supplies for village life. Then Win became a head mahout, and she became pregnant, and she never worked as a mahout after that. That was twenty-five or thirty years ago.5

  I asked whether, during that earlier period, she had been an official salaried mahout, receiving a wage from the government as the male mahouts did. She said no, the government paid wages only for the logging work, not for the transport work that she was doing. The government’s timber enterprise has never shown much interest in using elephants for transporting anything other than its primary commodity, the teak logs. Anything else is “not its department” and winds up on the margins of the village’s economic life.

  Looking around this tiny charcoal-making camp, I realized why I had never seen women like Nyo—that is, women with mahoutship experience—in the tribal logging camps. At this camp, as in the elephant logging village to which it was a satellite, wives and daughters and other family members worked alongside male mahouts. Most human family members here, male or female, spent their days near the elephants. Some of the women, I was told, would sleep here overnight, while others would return to the main village a short hike away.

  By contrast, in the Trans-Patkai region, the tribal logging camps like Mithong (Air Singh’s camp) in the Lohit Valley, or like Mong Cho’s camp in the hills of southwestern Kachin State, were almost entirely male environments. A Kachin mahout in the Trans-Patkai’s Dihing Va
lley told me that wives occasionally came along to the logging areas to help load elephants or to give commands. But mostly the women attended to things in the village. Indeed, in the Trans-Patkai, the mahouts hail from villages far removed from the world of elephants. These villages have main streets with motor traffic and shops; farms growing rice and potatoes; and pigs, cows, goats and chickens roaming about. They look “normal”—one could pass through them and never know that many of the families here are mahouts’ families. Go up a dirt side road, and on the outskirts of the village, one might occasionally see an elephant brought from the forest to a mahout’s village house. Perhaps the mahout is loading the elephant. Likely, he is bringing food up to his comrades at the logging camps. His wife might be there to help, packing bags or giving a command or two to control the elephant.

  But most of the elephants aren’t here, they’re at the logging camp, many miles up the road and deep in the forest. At Mithong, this road ends at a sawmill. No women work there. The rest of the way to the actual logging area follows difficult forest and mountain paths. The array of camps, like the sawmills, are entirely full of men. A geographer or sociologist might say that when visiting elephant camps in the Trans-Patkai, one passes through a series of processional “stages,” from village center to village edge to timber mill to elephant camp. Women are more present at the earlier stages; elephants are more present at the later ones; men are present throughout.

  By contrast, the government elephant logging village in central Burma collapsed these different processional “stages” into one. The village had a main street and shops and several hundred huts full of families, but it also had elephants, some five dozen of them. All family members, of both species, were in one place. The village was the “hub” from which elephants and mahouts could reach many kinds of outposts connected to village life. Paths to the teak-logging areas passed by satellite camps for charcoal, or sites where villagers were gathering bamboo and cane to reinforce their homes in preparation for the coming monsoon storms.

  There was an endless march of elephant traffic through the village to and from these sites, going up and down the main road and its many side paths. Elephants dragged huge, heavy heaps of bamboo piled on wooden sleds; elephants went off to the teak-logging areas for the day; elephants carried nine or ten large bags of charcoal at a time to some hut or depot; elephants headed to a stream for their daily bath; elephants delivered sacks of rice to the huts of mahouts. There was even a kind of “rush hour” effect in the morning, when the mahouts had all fetched their elephants and were coming out of the forest seated on the giants’ necks.

  Everywhere the lives of the mahouts’ family members were visibly intertwined with the elephants and the elephants’ work. Family members helped unload the elephants or tied up the elephants’ dragging ropes. The mahouts’ wives handed tools up to the mahouts on the elephants’ necks or backs. One woman ordered an elephant to kneel by a section of her bamboo hut that was elevated so she could haul the cargo directly from the elephant’s back onto the hut’s main landing. I occasionally saw children playing with calves. There was a special satellite outpost for “retired” elephants, who were too old for logging work. These elephants, in their fifties or sixties, were attended to by gray-haired mahouts, who had some family members with them as well.

  I was at a campfire one night with the mahouts of this complex logging village. While drinking rum and eating rice, several of the mahouts recalled female mahouts in the area besides Nyo. A Karen woman, Naw Ko, had lived in the village some years ago. She was unusual. Not only had she had done the logging work, she had received regular government wages for it. Unfortunately she had died young. Another mahout recalled a woman who was a kind of “tomboy.” She would do everything the men did. She worked with the elephants, dragged the teak, and slept in the group tent in the forest during the peak work season in August. This woman would even work with the large male tusker elephants, something the other female mahouts I learned about never did.6

  Such examples of female mahoutship seem to stem from the spatial organization of the Burmese government’s elephant logging system. In other words, in these villages where the elephants, the mahouts, and the mahouts’ family members all share space, more opportunities open up for women to become mahouts. Yet other factors could direct the flow of mahoutship skills to women as well as to men. I met an elderly woman, Timeh, who lived with her husband, Imow, many miles down the road, at the former site of the logging village, which had since migrated to follow the mature teak. This elderly couple had moved to central Burma during the 1990s, from the town of Homalin on the upper Chindwin River, between the Chin Hills and the Kachin Hills. We sat outside their hut on a sunny afternoon, a cat circling us throughout the conversation and meowing.

  Timeh and Imow were both born in Homalin. Imow had a Hkamti mother and a Kachin father and learned his elephant skills from both sides but especially the Hkamti side. My guide P., who was half Shan, was able to converse in Shan with Imow for a portion of the conversation. Imow knew as little Kachin as I did, having not used it in many decades. Timeh, his wife, smoked a cigar throughout the conversation. She was an ethnic Burmese and was locally nicknamed “the Shan lady” (after her Hkamti-Shan husband) or “the Chin lady.” This latter nickname seemed to be based on a local misperception that she was Chin rather than ethnic Burmese, or perhaps it simply referred to her origin in Homalin, which is near the Chin Hills. Like Nyo, whom I’d met at the charcoal camps, Timeh learned her mahoutship skills from her husband, when they were first married.

  “Homalin had a lot of female mahouts in those days,” Imow explained. “There was a lot of gold panning work to be done on the Uyu River”—which joins the Chindwin around this spot—“and men who were mahouts would go off up the river to do this work.” Gold panning is mostly barge work, not elephant work. Sometimes while approaching a forest river in the Kachin Hills, one happens upon a little floating village of bamboo rafts carrying heavy dredging machinery and conveyor belts, with workers sorting through the machine parts, sifting through piles of rocks encased in mud, or lounging inside the rafts’ canvas shelters. While the male mahouts of the Homalin area were on these excursions up the Uyu, in search of a commodity more valuable than teak, someone had to carry on with the elephant work, and this responsibility often went to the women. Women also sometimes owned elephants in this area. Timeh and Imow remembered a woman who owned a dozen elephants, having inherited them from her father. Her hired mahouts, though, were mostly male.7

  Homalin is in the same general area along the upper Chindwin where James Howard Williams had been so surprised to see the women take control of the elephants. Perhaps this area has an unusually strong tradition of women mahouts, which might be connected to the boom and bust cycles of the nearby gold-panning industry that periodically draws many of the men.

  At one point earlier in their lives, Timeh and Imow wound up working for one of the Burmese government’s timber enterprises on the upper Chindwin. In 1995 government logging officials announced that a number of elephants, including two of Timeh and Imow’s, were to be transferred to the teak forests of central Burma. The married mahouts decided to follow their elephants from Homalin to the central Burmese forest, leaving two of their four children behind. The journey took several weeks. Seven elephants in all made the trip. By chance, I had already met two of these seven. Gunjai, the elephant I’d seen being fetched the previous morning by the mahout Otou—the elephant who disliked me because I was wearing pants—was one of the Homalin elephants. Another, Latai, had carried me down a large hill to a forest outpost earlier in that day.

  At mention of Latai, Timeh’s face brightened. “That was my favorite elephant,” she said. “Though I couldn’t ride him, since he was a male and a tusker. But I’d always bring Latai food treats.”

  I asked Timeh what kind of work she normally did with the elephants. “Always transportation,” she replied. “Food, canteens of water, charcoal, stones, bamboo and
timber, things like that. I wouldn’t do the logging work; that was Imow’s job.”

  The two had retired from elephant work some years ago, which was why they didn’t follow the logging village when it moved nine or ten miles up the road. The two children who moved with them to central Burma were still in the area, but neither had become mahouts. Timeh and Imow hadn’t seen their other two children in many years.

  The Burmese government’s teak-logging system is in many ways an updating of managerial organization put into place by the British colonial teak wallahs, who themselves mostly formalized methods of elephant-based logging they observed among the Karen and Mon mahouts in the hills around Moulmein in the nineteenth century. Present-day logging and forestry bureaucrats have inherited from this earlier period a strong preference for “roadless” logging, seeing trucking roads as prohibitively expensive, ecologically destructive, and damaging to the quality of the teak.8

  Currently, there are about three dozen government-run elephant logging villages in Burma, scattered among the best Burmese teak forests in the Rakhine Hills, the Bago Hills, and the upper valleys of the Irrawaddy and the Chindwin.9 Once or twice per decade, these elephant logging villages change location, following the teak harvest. The dwelling structures in these villages are usually built of biodegradable forest materials—bamboo, cane, and timber transported by elephant from the surrounding woodlands—in anticipation of these periodic moves. Visiting these teak-harvesting villages, one cannot help but be impressed by their unique organizational genius.10

  The Burmese government’s elephant logging system is also rife with problems, and its future looks uncertain. From one point of view, the villages are just large work sites—factories for roadless logging. But these are also places where people are raising families and building lives. With the economic liberalization of Burma in recent years, these families now have access to a wider array of consumer items and are investing more in their homes, turning them into permanent structures.