No, Father-sahib, they did not have to leave him, they must have decided to leave him. What is it about families? First my family, then the Jumlis, and now this boy. Why did they not cherish us?
“We have to take him back to the stable to be treated by Doctor-sahib,” I said. Our veterinarian was also our human doctor in areas my father’s shaman skill could not cover.
Indra returned with the elephants, and the boy tried to get up but he could not move. He slumped back down to the ground. Father Autry reached into his bag and pulled out cashew nuts and handed them to the young Raute. He ate every one. We gave him a canteen full of water but he did not know how to drink from it. Indra unscrewed the lid and showed him what to do. The boy finished the entire canteen. He must have been left without water or food.
Now the problem was how to carry him back to the stable. I tried to lift him, but he made himself heavy. Then I looked over at Hira Prashad, nodding to my tusker.
Please help me, brother elephant.
Hira Prashad came over and gently sniffed the boy and caressed his head with his trunk. The boy giggled. He probably did not expect the elephant to be so gentle. Indra quickly picked up some jungle vines and branches to fashion a makeshift cover to fit over his leg for our journey. We helped him up slowly.
“Pasar!” I commanded. Hira Prashad lowered himself and sprawled to one side to allow us to load the boy on the saddle. The boy laughed at this. You could tell he was tough. I noticed his body was covered in scabs and sores. I had been left like him, too—alone in the jungle. At least this boy would know why. I would never know.
“What will we do with this Jungle Boy, Nandu?” Indra asked. That is what he called him, the Jungle Boy.
“He needs to have this leg examined. I can see the bone breaking the skin. He is lucky not to be dead already,” said my tutor.
At first the rocking of Hira Prashad was painful for the Raute. I looked back and Father Autry was cradling the Jungle Boy’s head in his hands. Then I realized our Raute might never have seen a white man before either. No wonder Father Autry had given him such a fright.
Everyone was worn-out by now. We still had at least five hours to go before we reached the stable. No one was more exhausted than this poor Raute. Only Father Autry remained energized and beaming. New experiences were like an elixir to him, and meeting the Raute seemed much more exciting than finding ten new species of fern.
“Do you realize the Raute have lived this way for thousands of years? That band passing was like watching the Stone Age come to life!”
I wanted to disagree, but I only nodded. In the Stone Age the people would have killed for food, not out of greed and cruelty. I would wait to bring it up for our next lesson about evolution, using it as evidence that humans have actually devolved since then.
Father Autry admired the Raute for living as nomads, with no village. “The Raute wander the foothills and low mountains of western Nepal. But few anthropologists have ever really had a chance to study their ways. They stay away from civilization, I have been told,” said Father Autry.
“Subba-sahib says they know a lot about jungle medicine and make much use of the chiuri fruit and seeds. It is their lifeblood, and they worship chiuri trees,” I said.
“You know, Nandu, just like animals can be classified as endangered, so can rare tribes. There might not be more than two hundred Raute left in the hills, scattered among a few wandering groups. They have their own language and customs. When they are gone, the world will be poorer,” my tutor said. “We still have much to learn from groups like the Raute, Nandu.”
Again, I did not agree but said nothing. When I am angry with the world, it is better to be silent. To leave one of their own behind, with a broken leg and no food, what could be crueler than that? They were no better than the villagers who wanted to spear the Babu’s tiger.
After the first hour, Jungle Boy fell into a deep sleep from the gentle rocking of the elephant, or from Father Autry’s lullaby. Maybe it was the same one he sang to Socrates the donkey, back when he was a boy.
he walls of Mr. Dhungel’s office were covered with large framed photographs of His Majesty the King and Her Majesty the Queen. I noticed a smaller one with the warden taken from the side, bowing low in front of His Majesty, about to receive a medal. I recognized the warden from his thick, black-rimmed glasses. This ceremony must have been the high point of his life. Now the news we were about to share could lead to that medal being stripped from him.
“Dhungel-sahib, we must send an armed patrol right away to protect the Bheri Valley rhinos. They have poached one rhino, and will surely poach the others. The guards have fled their post, so there is nothing to stop them,” my father declared.
Mr. Dhungel’s glasses slid down his nose; it happened when he was excited. Then he threw up his hands and shook his head vigorously. “Why do you bring me such unwelcome news, Subba-sahib?”
Do something, you idiot! I thought.
My hope that the warden-sahib would take bold action disappeared.
Ganesh Lal, the wildlife expert, who had been standing in the corner, stepped forward to speak. But the warden waved him off with a hand gesture. He stepped back again.
“Why did you not bring back the bullet, Nandu?” He quizzed me like I had done something wrong. “How can we be sure that this rhino died by the poachers’ hands? Maybe it was a coincidence and they were out hunting deer or a wild pig for the pot? This could have been an old rhino. Yes, that is what I believe.”
“But we saw the bullet holes, Warden-sahib,” I pleaded. “This was a healthy adult female. And they cut off her horn. They were not deer hunting.”
My father put his hand on my shoulder to calm me. I was in danger of being scolded by the dung beetle for my impudence. But the warden did something far worse.
“Do not tell anyone about this,” the warden said. “We will say the rhino died from natural causes. Porcupines chewed up the horn before we could reach the site and retrieve it. There will be too much trouble if I report a poaching incident. I will ensure that the guards return to their post and prevent any further losses. Leave this to me.”
I looked over at Ganesh Lal, who met my gaze but said nothing. His lips parted as if to speak, but then perhaps he thought the better of it and stared at his feet. That is what most adults do when there is trouble and action has to be taken. They stare at their feet.
My heart sank. Nothing would be done, and all the rhinos between here and Chisapani were likely to meet the same bloody fate. I could barely lift my head all the way back to camp. Why was the warden so reluctant to investigate? Was he afraid to have the king’s medal taken away? I was convinced there was a spy among us. Someone who could bribe the guards and easily get to the rhinos. Perhaps Ganesh Lal. But he seemed too incompetent to be involved. Perhaps the game warden—but he was even more foolish than Ganesh Lal. Perhaps Mr. Rijal, the conservator, but he seemed a decent man, if not the most energetic official. I did not know. A darker thought occurred to me then. What if the spy was from our stable? A driver. That could not be . . . but why did my father not trust the other drivers? The images of Pradhan, and then the man on the shore of the Great Sand Bar River, came rushing back to me. Was the man in the blue sneakers the ringleader? What about the man in Bichia selling elephant ivory in the middle of the bazaar? He was so brazen. I tried to puzzle it out in my head, thinking of the clues we had before us.
I had more questions than answers. And now the only people I could turn to for answers were my father, Father Autry, Dilly, and Indra.
We arrived to find that Kabita, Jayanti, and Kanchi had prepared a soak for the bath to restore tired bones. “You need to revive your spirits,” said Kanchi to our newest orphan, the Raute. She gestured as she spoke, creating a pantomime with her fingers. “We picked herbs from the jungle, mint and lemongrass, and mixed it with a powder we use in Jumla.” She pretended to pick leaves with her fingers and mix them. Then she held it up for him to smell.
&
nbsp; Father Autry and I carefully lifted Jungle Boy into a shallow tub. He was wearing my undershorts, and I had a fresh set of pants and shirt ready for him.
“Be careful with his leg, Nandu,” my tutor advised.
Kabita and Jayanti went back to their weaving on Tulsi’s loom to start on some proper clothes for our guest. Kanchi stayed and helped us fetch more warm water to add to his bath as it cooled.
That night I slept on a mat on the floor and gave Jungle Boy my cot. He did not wake up until daybreak thanks to Father Autry, who had ground up a sleeping pill in the rice and milk and raisins we fed our patient.
At sunrise, Doctor-sahib arrived at camp carrying his vet bag. He had come to check on the elephants. Little did he know we had another, more pressing job for him.
“Greetings, Nandu. How are our little jumbos? Gaining weight?”
“They are all fine, Doctor-sahib. But please take a look at someone who needs your help,” I said. I wondered if the vet had talked to the warden already. Now was not the time to bring up the dead rhino. Not yet.
I led him to the cot where the boy was resting surrounded by people. Father Autry, Kanchi, and Dilly were sitting with Rita. Kanchi had brought a hairbrush and was gently brushing his hair. The boy did not seem to mind the attention, which probably distracted him from the pain in his leg.
We tried to use sign language to explain who this stranger was and that he was a doctor there to examine his fracture. The boy seemed wary and his thin body tensed. I held out my bare leg to show him how painless this would be. Doctor-sahib pretended to be giving me an exam. I pointed to him and Doctor-sahib and to his leg and put his hand to my heart again and he relaxed. I think he understood me.
We carefully removed yesterday’s wrapping to keep the flies off the exposed bone. Doctor-sahib’s eyes widened. He cleaned the wound gently and replaced the covering. Doctor-sahib nodded to us to step outside.
“No. Stay here.” Kanchi spoke up. “If you leave, it will scare him. He does not understand us, Doctor-sahib, so speak in a soft tone and tell us what we should do.”
“This is very dangerous. If an infection gets in the bone tissue we might have to amputate his leg. We can give him antibiotics, but we have no choice. The bone has partially healed but at the wrong angle. If we do not reset it, he will remain a cripple.”
“How do we reset the bone, Doctor-sahib?” I asked, though in reality, I did not want to know.
Doctor-sahib practically whispered. “I will have to break it again, Nandu; there is no choice.”
When it was time, Father Autry stood on one side of the boy and I was on the other. We had already given him an injection of painkillers, and the Raute was babbling. When the doctor signaled he was ready, I felt my head start to spin and the nausea rise in my throat.
I staggered out of the room. I heard a sharp moan and a horrible sound as the vomit came out of me. I felt ashamed of my weakness for pain.
When I came back, Doctor-sahib said, “It is all right, Nandu. The worst is over now. When you left, Kanchi took your place and held his hand through the whole thing. She did not even flinch. Thank you, Kanchi,” he said.
Kanchi never looked up at Doctor-sahib or me. She did not need the praise. Instead she wiped Jungle Boy’s face with a soft towel.
Doctor-sahib then made a cast from plaster of paris to protect the leg while it healed. When the boy finally awoke, he looked down at his leg and let out a high, bloodcurdling shriek. He did not utter a sound for the next two days.
Kanchi stayed at his side. We all took turns visiting him, and although he probably understood almost nothing I said to him, he returned my smile. He knew we all cared, and that was all that mattered.
Only Kanchi managed to communicate with the boy through a combination of drawing pictures, sign language, and the few Nepali words the boy spoke. She pieced together his story and told it to us.
“Nandu, he is from a small clan that wanders the forests north of the Borderlands. In winter, when it grows too cold to hunt in the highlands, the Raute drop down from the mountains to where it is warmer. They eat birds, turtles, and monkeys, really anything they can shoot or snare.”
“How did he get injured and why did they leave him?” I asked.
“He was crossing over a ravine on a slippery log. He fell and broke his leg. The clan camped by the ravine for two weeks.” The boy understood at least part of what Kanchi was telling us. He held up seven fingers and seven fingers again to show us the number of days they tried to help him, but still he could not walk. He used his two fingers to show us him trying to stand and then falling over.
“The clan leader is his father,” she said. “When they had hunted all the game out of the area, he had no choice but to leave his son behind. They did leave him some food and water.”
“He must have been desperate to catch up with them, the way he was hobbling up the trail,” Father Autry said.
“It must have been very painful to keep walking on his broken leg,” I told Kanchi.
“I am so glad you brought him here, Nandu. He would have died.”
Kanchi called him Maila, the name we give to a middle brother, just as Kanchi, her nickname, means little sister. “Nandu, he is younger than Dilly and Indra but older than you. It is kinder to call him Maila than Jungle Boy.”
With all the food we brought him and the antibiotics Doctor-sahib left behind, Maila began to heal. He started to laugh and smile. Kanchi had brought him out of his shell even though they could only speak a few words together. I wondered if Kanchi had told Maila that her father had abandoned her, too, sent her away with a bandit for a few sacks of rice. But then I thought it was probably an emotion they shared without even having to say the words.
he festival of Tihar is the holiday we look forward to all year long. This year, I had forgotten entirely about it on our trip to Chisapani and the Bheri River Valley. As it happened, we had returned just in time for the festival.
We call it Tihar, but the Tharu and people across the border in India call it Diwali. It is all the same holiday, though. It means the Festival of Light. During Tihar or Diwali, even the poorest people put oil into tiny clay cups and add a simple candlewick. These tiny lamps are scattered everywhere. When the wicks are lit at dusk, it looks like a swarm of lightning bugs hovering around our world.
The death of the rhino still weighed on my heart, but the festival helped put a flicker of light into my spirit. Mine were not the only spirits lifted. The holiday asks us to honor what we take for granted, and reminds us to appreciate all we have. In Nepal, we honor the animals that we usually ignore or chase away, such as the house crow and the village dogs. Every Tihar, I ride with my elephant to the grasslands and leave fruit and saffron rice for the dhole, my dhole, who protected me when I was a baby, alone in the jungle.
While I was in the jungle doing my ritual, Dilly had gone to a nearby village to buy fireworks for the two of us. I had given him thirty rupees and told him I wanted the special bottle rockets that burst into bright colors. I double-checked that I had them in my satchel before we left for the village.
Rita, Kabita, Jayanti, Kanchi, and I took off for Thakurdwara to watch everyone prepare for Tihar. The girls sang songs from the mountain tribes along the way. I wondered if during Tihar they missed their families even more. “What is Tihar like in your village, Kabita?” I asked.
“Sometimes, like this year when there was no monsoon, we do not even have enough wheat flour left over to make sel roti. There is no oil for lamps, either.”
“I cannot imagine Tihar without eating sel roti,” I said. It is a special sweet bread that we only eat once a year.
“You eat like kings in the Borderlands,” said Jayanti. “Even the dogs here are better fed than some children in our village.” The girls were no longer as skinny as when we first met. The cuts on their wrists and ankles had long healed. Kabita had quietly told me that their legs were bound that day in the wagon because Kanchi had tried to run away.
> “Do you miss Jumla, Kanchi?” Rita asked.
“I miss my two goats and the lamb I looked after. But now I have Laxmi Kali, who needs me. And Nani. I have you as my didi, Rita, and Nandu and Indra and Dilly as my daju.” She started to sing again and the girls joined in.
We reached the fields where Dilly was waiting with Indra and a few boys from the village. I unloaded half of the firecrackers and bottle rockets from my satchel. Indra lit the firecrackers and tossed them on the ground. They went off like small gunshots. The girls shrieked.
While Dilly arranged six of the twelve bottle rockets I had purchased for the festival, Rita gave each of the girls sparklers.
“What do we do with these, didi?” Kanchi asked Rita. I lit Rita’s sparkler, and she twirled it round Kanchi’s head, making an orbit of stars around her. “You are no longer a girl from Jumla. Kanchi, you are a princess from Kathmandu!”
Kanchi took the sparkler from Rita and twirled it over her own head to make a halo. “No, I am a mahout from the Borderlands who rides her elephant, Laxmi Kali,” she sang.
“Jayanti, Kabita, watch this!” shouted Dilly over the noise of the firecrackers Indra had lit. I had noticed lately that Dilly was always trying to get Jayanti’s attention, even if he tried to hide it by including her sister.
Dilly put a match to the fuses on the first three rockets, and they shot into the sky, hissing like giant pythons. They exploded, shattering pieces of emerald, sapphire, and ruby light over the field. The next three rockets shot off and showered us in flakes of gold and silver. Kabita, Jayanti, and Kanchi had never seen fireworks. The screamed and laughed, and their eyes flashed, reflecting the fiery sparkles against the black sky.
“Dilly, we should save the rest of the fireworks for tomorrow,” I said. “We do not want to use them all up tonight.”
“You are spoiling the fun, Nandu,” he said. “We have plenty of fireworks.”
A Circle of Elephants Page 12