To the Elephant Graveyard Page 11

  ♦

  Each time I looked down at my watch, hoping the hours had slipped past, it seemed as if the minute hand had hardly advanced at all. I pulled my jacket tight around me and shivered, burying my hands in my armpits and pushing my chin down on to my chest. After five hours on the masang, I could hardly tolerate sitting on the hard boards a moment longer.

  To my relief, shortly after four o’clock Mr Choudhury decided to call it a night. None of the other teams had reported any sightings, and the likelihood of the elephant venturing into the village so close to dawn was remote.

  We climbed down, all aches and pains, and Mr Choudhury and I made our way on foot towards the village where Latif the farmer had promised us a cup of tea. We had gone only a few yards when the hunter suddenly stopped dead in his tracks and grabbed me by the arm, hard.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  He didn’t answer but stared intently ahead. In the darkness, all I could make out was the faint outline of a few bushes and a tree.

  “There’s nothing there,” I whispered.

  Yet one look at Mr Choudhury told me I was wrong. The muscles in his face were rigid, as if he were gritting his teeth, and his eyebrows were raised in alarm.

  Cautiously, still holding on to my arm, he drew me backwards, whispering to Mole who was now just behind us. The forest officer quickly switched on his torch and the beam shot along the ground and up into the bushes. Soon, it settled on a large, motionless, grey lump camouflaged in shadows. I might have mistaken it for a boulder. But from the moment I laid eyes on it, I knew it could only be one thing.

  It was the rogue tusker.

  Releasing his hold on my arm, the hunter motioned for me to step behind him. He slipped his rifle off his shoulder. As he did so, the animal moved through the bushes and half-emerged into the open. Dry brushwood snapped beneath his feet. I felt the hairs rise on the back of my neck.

  The elephant was a menacing sight, with two long, curved tusks that glinted in the torchlight, and a powerful trunk, which he swung from side to side like a bullwhip. Compared to Raja, he was large, his ears spread wide, exaggerating his overall size. He kicked at the ground with his front feet, sending clods of earth flying through the air.

  Seized with terror, I tried to decide whether to run for it or stay put. The masang was only a hundred yards away. With a quick sprint, I might just make it…

  I backed away, while Mr Choudhury, who was standing no more than thirty feet from the elephant, held his ground. Here was his opportunity to end it all.

  He slipped the safety catch off, raised the rifle butt to his shoulder and took aim.

  My heart and stomach quivered. “Any second now,” I thought to myself, braced for the sound of the powerful Magnum rifle.

  Mr Choudhury’s finger curled round the trigger. He was just about to fire when the rogue stopped kicking the ground and raised his trunk, as if in salute. Then he bowed his head, shaking it from side to side, and disappeared into the night, dragging his bad foot behind him.

  Mr Choudhury lowered his rifle, turned and walked past me. Still shaking, I raised my hands, stupefied.

  Why hadn’t he fired?

  5

  The Horse Might Talk

  “Till now man has been up against Nature, from now on he will be up against his own nature.”

  Dennis Gabor, Inventing the Future

  Back at the camp on the edge of Bruiser Harry’s tea garden, Dinesh Choudhury fiddled with his good-luck charm, a solid silver rupee coin dated 1802, cast with the coat-of-arms of the East India Company. It had been given to him by his grandfather, a memento from the days when his family were influential Assamese land-owners and collected thousands of such coins from their tenants every month.

  The hunter turned the piece round and round in his fingers, caressing the worn image of George III with his thumb as he contemplated the events of that morning.

  “The rogue was waiting for us,” he said ominously. “Somehow he knew we were in the masang.”

  “Why didn’t you kill him? Wasn’t there enough light?”

  “No, no. There was plenty of light from Mole’s torch,” replied Mr Choudhury. “I could see his head very clearly.”

  “So why didn’t you shoot?”

  The hunter slipped the silver medallion back into his pocket and smiled at me wryly.

  “I wanted to give him a warning,” he said.

  “A warning?” I spluttered. “What kind of warning?”

  “I have thrown down the gauntlet. Now the rogue will either mend his ways or I will deal with him. Last night, he didn’t charge because he knew it would be suicide. Let us hope he continues to be so wise.”

  Mr Choudhury was beginning to sound like Churchill. Indeed, as I was about to discover, when it came to dealing with elephants, he had a sixth sense.

  “Sometimes when I arrive in an area to shoot a rogue, he runs away,” he continued. “The elephants know when I am coming for them.”

  A year earlier, he had been dispatched to shoot another killer tusker in the southern part of Assam. On the day he arrived in the neighbourhood, the animal disappeared and has not been seen or heard of since.

  “If a human kills, he is given a fair trial before sentencing is carried out. Therefore, I always give each elephant a chance to redeem himself. I say to him, ‘If you stay, you will die. If you go, you will live.’”

  As well as elephantine ESP, Mr Choudhury believed in fate. In his opinion, providence and providence alone dictated when a bullet should be used.

  “But you’re a hunter,” I pointed out, still puzzled. “Don’t you get a thrill from hunting?”

  He shook his head vehemently.

  “Not for elephants. I’ve told you before, I love them. Traditionally, we Assamese have never hunted elephants. We have only ever captured and trained them. They are our friends.”

  He patted Raja on his flank and the animal nodded his head as if in agreement. Churchill, who sat in front of me, was uncharacteristically quiet, although I could tell he was listening to every word of our conversation.

  “So why do you agree to shoot them?” I asked, still trying to come to terms with his real motives.

  “If I hadn’t taken this assignment, then another hunter would have come in my place,” he said. “Any other hunter would be only too happy to shoot the animal and collect the reward. At least with me in charge, the elephant has a chance.”

  I sat quietly mulling over these new revelations. It seemed that I had misjudged Mr Choudhury.

  “Why didn’t you explain all this to me before?” I asked.

  “I knew you wouldn’t believe me,” he said. “You had already decided certain things about me. The only way to show you the truth was to bring you here. Also, I did not know whether I could trust you. You might have been some crusading environmentalist out to portray me in a bad light.

  “I could not have kept you from travelling here. But you would have got in the way and might even have ended up dead. So I allowed you along this far to keep an eye on you.”

  “So where does that leave us?” I asked, chagrined.

  “Nothing has changed. We still have to deal with the rogue and I think you will find that you still have lots to write about.”

  That didn’t mean, however, that I shared his superstitions. There had to be a plausible explanation for the rogue’s behaviour that morning. Surely he had been waiting in the bushes because he wanted to stick his trunk in that barrel of homemade booze. And as for the idea that he could somehow recognize Mr Choudhury as his Angel of Death…well, the very idea seemed, at best, fanciful.

  In my opinion, Mr Choudhury’s approach ran the risk of getting more people killed. Certainly, Mole was not altogether pleased with the hunter’s strategy. The tusker had proved himself dangerous and the officer was only prepared to go so far to put the animal’s life before those of the local population.

  ♦

  After the tusker’s sudden appearance, Mr Choudhury had
sent two forest guards armed with one sub-machine gun and a walkie-talkie to follow the rogue, who had gone into the rain forest. Now, having met up with the kunkis at the camp, we packed our gear and set off once again on elephant-back.

  Entering the rain forest felt like walking into one of the hot-houses at Kew. The atmosphere was damp and sultry, the hissing sound of the sprinklers mimicked by legions of bugs and insects. We picked our way through dense vegetation as the midday sun pierced the canopy of leaves. Overhead, monkeys swung from creepers, their chattering mixing with the incessant screeching of hidden parrots. Raja and Jasmine brushed aside tall elephant grass and meandered through groves of bamboo whose gigantic poles arched thirty feet or more above us, some of them as thick as tree-trunks.

  Until relatively recently, the whole of Assam had been covered in a rain forest that stretched on through Myanmar, or Burma, and into South-East Asia. According to local legend, the elephants maintained their own secret route through this immensity of jungle, a highway or tunnel that allowed the animals to pass unseen by man from as far away as Malaya. It was said by the Assamese that once every hundred years, thousands of wild herds travelled along this route to a hidden meeting-place in Upper Assam. There, a council headed by the mythical white elephant, the four-tusked Airavata, would hold celebrations, settle disputes and appoint new matriarchs.

  Sadly, however, the tea companies and the burgeoning population had eaten away at the rain forest to such an extent that it was now just a few miles wide – barely enough to sustain the few thousand remaining elephants, let alone a mythical highway. Indeed, in patches, the flora petered out altogether and only tree stumps and scorched earth were left in its place.

  As we headed east, marching deeper into the rain forest, Mole tried calling the guards assigned to the rogue on his walkie-talkie, but for some reason they didn’t respond. With no way of knowing their position, we could not decide which direction to take. So it was left to Badger to find the way by deciphering the guards’ footprints from the dozens of others in the soft sand.

  “Blimey. There’s more bloomin’ tracks ’ere than if an army ‘ad marched through,” said Badger, as he set to work. “Not to worry, though. I could track a turd through a sewer.”

  The Gurkha wasn’t boasting. It took him less than half an hour to find the right footprints.

  “They went that way,” he said, pointing east. “The rogue’s tracks lead in the same direction. Judging by ‘is prints, ‘e’s shifting it.”

  We set off with the former soldier leading the way and humming an old Gurkha folk-song.

  Lack of sleep had left the rest of the squad exhausted. The apprentices, who were following on foot, were beginning to lag behind. Mole, who was riding Jasmine, was yawning repeatedly. The two forest guards accompanying us appeared to be sleepwalking. I could barely keep my eyes open.

  “This place full of insurgent mens. Very bad, no?” said Churchill.

  “Which group?” I asked.

  There were dozens of rebel outfits in North-East India. The TNVF, the ATTF, the PREPAK, the ULVA, the ULMA, the BSF. The list read like alphabet soup.

  “They are ULFA. Big danger. Mahout no like these mens.”

  I asked Mr Choudhury whether he sympathized with the insurgents’ cause, but it was the one subject he refused to discuss. Fortunately, I could count on Mole to give me the ‘low-down’, as he put it.

  “These guys are wasters, the lot of them,” he said in his inimitable fashion. “I went to school with many of them. They’re just out-of-work kids making easy money, man.”

  “But what are they fighting for? Don’t they want independence?”

  Not for the first time, Mole chuckled at my ignorance.

  “Does Bill Clinton tell the truth? Give me a break,” he said. “That independence stuff is just talk. Everyone knows Assam will never split away from India. No chance. They’re just in it for the money. They kidnap people, blackmail them. They’re scum.”

  “So they’re dangerous?”

  “Oh yeah, they’re dangerous all right,” he replied. “We’d better hope we don’t bump into any of them in here.”

  I asked him what had happened to Sanjay Ghoshe, an aid-worker whom they had kidnapped and allegedly killed.

  “He messed with them,” said Mole. “From what I heard, they put a bullet in him and dumped the body in the Brahmaputra.”

  ♦

  Not long after Mole had finished talking, we heard something coming through the undergrowth.

  Churchill and Chander reined in the kunkis. Mr Choudhury pulled back the bolt on his rifle with a clunk-click. The guards raised their sub-machine guns. The rest of us froze.

  Dead ahead, we spotted two men running blindly towards us. As they came closer, I recognized them as the two forest guards.

  Quickly we dismounted and rushed towards them as they both collapsed on the ground, gasping for breath and babbling incoherently.

  “Give them some room,” said Mole, urging us to step away as we crowded round. “I’ll handle this.”

  We stepped back to a respectable distance as the officer plied the guards with water from a hip-flask. Had they been attacked by insurgents? Or had the elephant turned on them? Where was their walkie-talkie?

  It took a full ten minutes before we got our answers. It was Rajesh, the older guard, who spoke first.

  “We were a mile or so behind the elephant,” he began. “He was moving at a steady pace, I could tell from his tracks. After an hour or so, we spotted a local farmer illegally felling a tree, so we arrested him. We planned to take him with us and charge him later back at HQ.”

  The guards, with the farmer now in tow, continued along the main path. Several miles on, the ground became harder and it was increasingly difficult to make out the elephant’s tracks. Then, just as they emerged from a particularly thick area of bamboo, the rogue stepped out on the path directly in front of them. Rajesh, who was carrying the sub-machine gun, raised his weapon to fire, but it jammed.

  “We turned and sprinted as fast as we could with the elephant right behind us,” said Rajesh, who, in the confusion, dropped the walkie-talkie.

  The three men ran for their lives. But after a couple of hundred yards, the farmer suddenly broke rank and turned left, sprinting down another pathway.

  “The elephant ignored us and charged after him,” said Ashok, the younger guard. “We didn’t see what happened. The elephant caught up with him quickly. We heard him screaming. But he must have been killed instantly.”

  I looked to see how Mr Choudhury was reacting to this story. Had it occurred to him that if he had killed the rogue the night before, none of this would have happened? Did he feel guilty, I wondered. If he did, it didn’t show.

  “What happened next?” the hunter asked Rajesh.

  “We climbed up a tree and waited,” continued the guard. “When the elephant had finished with the farmer, he came after us.”

  For nearly twenty minutes, the tusker rampaged through the undergrowth, trumpeting and tearing up saplings with his trunk as he tried to locate the guards. At one point, he unwittingly smashed into their tree, almost shaking them from the branches.

  “I thought I was going to fall out,” said Ashok, “but eventually he gave up. We waited for some time and then came down. Just then we thought we heard him again, so we ran.”

  That had been about an hour earlier and the two men hadn’t stopped running since.

  ♦

  It took us roughly half an hour to reach the scene of the rogue’s latest attack. We found Rajesh’s walkie-talkie lying undamaged on the path, hissing static. Further on, behind a clump of bamboo, Mr Choudhury discovered the tusker’s footprints, clearly defined in a patch of mud.

  “This is where the rogue waited,” concluded the hunter. “See. He was here for some time.”

  “You make it sound like an ambush,” I said, as sceptical as ever.

  “That’s precisely what it was,” he replied. “He knew he was bein
g followed. The guards had the wind behind them. It gave them away.”

  Badger soon located the farmer’s remains, several hundred yards off the main path.

  “You don’t wanna see that, mate,” he said to me. “He’s been done over good and proper. Never seen anything like it – except in Silence of the Lambs or somethin’. This elephant’s like a serial killer.”

  Mysteriously, the body was partially covered with earth and branches torn from a nearby tree – as if some thoughtful passer-by had attempted to hide the corpse from wild animals before going for help. That, at least, was the only possible explanation I could think of.

  However, as usual Mr Choudhury saw things differently and slipped into his detective routine, studying the crime scene for seemingly invisible clues. His attention was particularly drawn to a row of gouges in the earth near the farmer’s feet and, after emitting two or three ‘Hmmms’ and a decisive ‘A-ha’, he stood up and announced: “The rogue covered him.”

  “You must be joking,” I said, exasperated.

  I could just about believe that an elephant might spring an ambush. I could even come to terms with the concept of elephantine ESP. But an elephant burying the dead?

  “Let me guess,” I said, unable to prevent myself from sounding sarcastic. “The elephant came back here to hide the evidence and then slipped into a cunning disguise before fleeing the country.”

  Mr Choudhury smiled, raising his hands defensively.

  “I know, I know. It sounds fantastic. But it’s true,” he told me, pointing to the gouges in the earth. “See here. He dug up the soil with his tusks. Elephants often bury bodies,” said the hunter, as Churchill and the others covered the farmer with a sheet. “Their attitude towards death is very similar to that of humans.”

  Over the years, Mr Choudhury had often come across the carcasses of wild elephants killed by poachers and subsequently ‘buried’ by their herd, behaviour verified by experts in Asia and Africa who believe elephants recognize death and mourn their lost ones. Indeed, when wild elephants discover the body of a fallen comrade they treat it with what can only be described as reverence, touching and feeling it with their trunks.