To the Elephant Graveyard Read online

  “So what happened to him?” I asked as we prepared to set off once again.

  “The lady not see hathi again,” replied Churchill. “The poacher mens, they were both killed.”

  “Who did it?”

  Churchill’s eyes bulged.

  “Both mens were killed by one wild hathi,” he said, his voice suddenly mysterious. “One man from village, he saw hathi. Said strange thing. Said hathi had big bandage wrapped around leg!”

  ♦

  Silence reigned over the Brahmaputra valley as the kunkis plodded on through the night. We crept through sleepy hamlets where the farm animals were dozing, through fields where water buffalo lay snoring, and past brick factories where the kiln fires had long died out and bonded labourers slept on charpoys, huddled in threadbare blankets.

  Only the jackals watched our progress as we continued over fallow fields and down deserted lanes, passing under rows of betel-nut and mango trees. Churchill had grown quiet, and behind me the apprentices had fallen asleep, their heads bobbing up and down in time with Raja’s gait. I too was beginning to feel drowsy and, despite the constant chafing against my legs, sleep threatened to overtake me as I listened to the hypnotic padding of Raja’s feet.

  Then suddenly, somewhere off in the darkness, the silence was rent by a deafening explosion and a great flash of light. Raja reared up in alarm, trumpeting fiercely, his ears spread wide and alert. I leapt up in fright, my heart pumping so hard that it felt as if it might burst. The apprentices awoke with a start. Prat only just prevented himself from falling off. Up in the trees, birds took to the air amidst a great flapping of wings.

  “What the hell was that?” I cried.

  But before anyone could answer, another thunderous noise crashed through the valley, echoing off the hills to the north. In the distance, flashes pierced the night, accompanied by bursts of what sounded like machine-gun fire. Then, absolute silence. The kunkis came to a complete stop. Their trunks probed the air nervously. Their chests rumbled and their ears flapped like enormous butterfly wings. I could feel Raja’s heart pounding beneath me. He blew down his trunk, making a sound like a didgeridoo. Jasmine, who stood just a few yards behind us, squealed in fright.

  Churchill sat upright and alert, staring with anticipation into the darkness. Behind me, Prat switched on his torch, but the beam was feeble and shone for only a few yards, revealing nothing of interest except a bunch of feathers under a hedgerow where some creature had evidently met its fate. A couple of minutes passed. Nothing stirred. Even so, I readied myself for further explosions, gripping the sacking beneath me tightly. When the next bang came, it was even louder and I felt myself flinch involuntarily.

  “What’s going on?” I whispered to Churchill. “It sounds like fighting. Where is Mr Choudhury?”

  The mahout held up a hand to silence me as a succession of thuds, not unlike anti-aircraft fire, pierced the night. Next came the tremendous whooshing noise of two rockets streaking across the sky, trailing clouds of brilliant purple stars in their wake as they shot into a forest and exploded amidst the tree-tops. Bursts of incandescent greens and reds erupted into the air, showering the earth with white-hot sparks that fizzled out harmlessly. A flare shot upwards. It hung above us by its parachute, spitting and twisting back to earth, its brilliance illuminating patches of the land below with a heavenly light. In nearby fields, I spotted figures running helter-skelter. Men shouted to one another in panicked voices. Firecrackers danced at their feet.

  “The farming mens, they shoot fireworks,” explained Churchill at last. “Come. We must go, no?”

  The mahout urged Raja towards the battle zone. Rockets and Indian bangers, appropriately known as ‘bombs’, continued to explode in the fields about half a mile ahead and to our left. As we drew closer, some of the farmers lit flaming torches which they waved like members of the Ku Klux Klan at a cross burning; others blew whistles and beat on drums. A bugle trumpeted a series of jarring notes.

  We were just nearing the centre of the action when a powerful beam of light streaked across the fields like a prison searchlight. It illuminated trees, faces, huts, bushes and thick clumps of towering bamboo. Clouds of firework smoke hung in the air. At length, the beam settled on two dozen or so grey lumps clustered together in a trampled sugarcane field. In the darkness, frightened little silvery eyes reflected back the light.

  “There! Over there! You see?” shouted Churchill, pointing to where the elephants stood together pulling up sugarcane. “Wild hathis. Crop raiders. Look. There is thirty at least, no?”

  The beam jerked up and down, and I caught glimpses of trunks, tails and ears. One or two babies cowered in between their mothers’ legs. A defiant matriarch stood guard before them, paying only scant attention to the farmers’ assault, while nearby rockets were exploding. Behind her, a pair of tusks glinted in the torchlight. I wondered if they belonged to the rogue.

  Churchill reached for his walkie-talkie and, turning a couple of knobs, talked into the receiver. Mr Choudhury’s voice came back, interrupted by the pops, whoops and whizzes of static. The mahout listened carefully, signed off and gave fresh instructions to the rest of his squad.

  “What’s going on? Has Mr Choudhury seen the rogue?”

  “No. Rogue not here. Farming mens drinking and throwing rockets.”

  “Why? What are they trying to accomplish?”

  “Hathi eat crops. Farmer mens, they try to save crops but all too drunken and stupid. Hathi fight war.”

  During harvest-time, battles between Assam’s wild elephants and farmers rage nearly every night. The herds sneak on to the farmland under the cover of darkness and, given half a chance, will eat and eat until dawn. Often, the crafty elephants also break into the farmers’ storehouses, tearing open gunny bags and smashing clay pots to get at harvested crops. All this can mean catastrophe for the locals. A wild elephant can eat up to eight hundred pounds per day. One or two elephants can wipe out a farmer in a single night; a herd can bankrupt an entire village within a matter of days.

  But as Mole had pointed out back at the compound, the animals are hardly to blame. Their habitat – the forests and jungles – has been hacked down; their traditional migratory routes, which they have followed for millennia, have been blocked or destroyed by countless new houses, factories, drainage ditches, roads, railway lines and a thousand other human infringements upon the landscape. Assam’s dwindling pachyderm population is confused, disorientated and angry. But most of all, they are just plain hungry.

  The animals are especially clever and, over the years, have come to ignore the farmers’ firecrackers and burning torches. If a ditch is dug to prevent them from entering a particular area, they topple trees, thereby creating their own bridges. If a farmer erects an electric fence, it is simply short-circuited by the elephants squirting water on the wires. However, superstition prevents Assam’s farmers from killing elephants. Only occasionally will they take pot-shots in order to drive the animals away.

  “Many people think that if they kill an elephant, they’ll be cursed,” Mole told me later. “They’re very superstitious, man.”

  Also, as Hindus, they believe in ahimsa, non-violence or compassion, towards animals.

  “That’s what’s saved the elephant in India so far,” he said. “No one wants the blood of an animal on their hands.”

  ♦

  Another ten minutes passed before we reached the Land Rover. It was parked on the far side of the village where the rogue had made his last kill. Mr Choudhury and Mole were standing nearby, surrounded by a group of angry locals, some of whom I recognized from the funeral. To a man, they were drunk, all shouting, raising their fists and pointing their fingers accusingly at our two friends. Apparently the local men felt that the Forest Department had not done enough to prevent the wild elephants from entering their fields and were demanding to know what action Mole planned to take.

  The forest officer was trying to explain the situation, his hands held up before him i
n a vain effort to calm the crowd. But his voice was lost amidst the uproar, and he was being forced to take quick steps backwards.

  The farmers inched their way towards him. Mr Choudhury and Mole looked frightened. In the past, mobs like these had lynched officials. But with the arrival of the squad, the farmers backed off, muttering uneasily to one another.

  “You arrived just in time,” said Mr Choudhury to Churchill as he walked up to Raja.

  He took hold of the elephant’s right ear and then spotted me and frowned.

  “What are you doing here?” he asked sternly. “I told you to stay in the camp.”

  I opened my mouth to explain, but before I could say a word Churchill took over, talking rapidly in Assamese. Mr Choudhury shook his head.

  “Well, I suppose you had better stay for now,” he said. “The rogue is not here so there is no apparent danger, but I will talk to you later.”

  I didn’t like the sound of that, but Churchill gave me a reassuring wink.

  “No worry, Tar-win. All okay, no?”

  Mole, Mr Choudhury and Churchill huddled together to plan how best to tackle the herd, while I popped behind a bush for a pee. In the darkness, I nearly bumped into Rudra.

  “No chicks here,” he said, disappointed. “Village girls ugly. You want betel-nut?” he continued, dipping into his tin and taking out a chunk.

  “Uh, no thanks,” I replied. “Maybe later.”

  “Yes, later. Come to Land Rover. I have picture of Raveena Tandon. Very big mangoes!”

  As I returned to the squad, one of the farmers walked up to Raja, gaping up at him like a curious child at the zoo. Timidly, the other locals gathered in a semicircle behind him. Then, to my amazement, they all knelt before the kunki and began to pray, imploring the elephant to stop the wild herd from eating their crops.

  The elephant watched his devotees disdainfully, like some haughty monarch. As they chanted in unison, he lifted his trunk in salute, making a noise that started off as a squeal and ended as a roar. I was told later that this was how Raja behaved when he was annoyed or scared. However, the farmers took his action as a favourable sign and prayed even harder. Two or three of them prostrated themselves on the ground; several of them began to cry, raising their hands to heaven; while one madman shouted hysterically and pulled at his hair, his eyeballs rolling back in their sockets.

  The farmers carried on like this for nearly ten minutes until Churchill, who was beginning to grow thoroughly irritated, ordered them to leave his elephant alone. Reluctantly, they picked themselves up off the ground and backed away, gathering in a group nearby to knock back bottles of rice wine and smoke cheroots.

  “These men are not very intelligent,” said Mr Choudhury with masterful understatement.

  ♦

  It was time for the elephant squad to go into action. Churchill and I got on board Raja, and Chander mounted Jasmine, while Mr Choudhury, Mole, the apprentices and the forest guards remained on foot. The aim of Operation Hathi, as Mr Choudhury called it, was to drive the herd into the rain forest at the foot of the hills to the north-west. We set off from the east, making sure the wind was behind us.

  “The wild ones are afraid of kunkis because they’re used to capture wild calves. The herds have come to recognize the kunkis’ smell. They know it is a threat,” explained Mr Choudhury, as he walked beside Raja. “It usually drives them away.”

  Skirting the edge of the fields to avoid trampling any crops, we soon covered the distance that separated the farmers’ village from the area where the wild elephants had last been spotted. With military precision, the squad fanned out in a line stretching two hundred yards across. The kunkis remained in the middle, while Mr Choudhury walked a few yards ahead of us.

  All of us remained quiet. Lamps were extinguished and torches switched off. In the darkness, I caught glimpses of figures walking on either side of me, their faces impossible to make out. A twig snapped to my right; keys jingled nearby; to my left, someone tripped, stumbled and cursed. My eyes strained, trying to make out several shapes up ahead. There was something directly in front of us that looked as if it might be an elephant. It was large, grey and seemed to have a trunk.

  Perhaps it was the rogue, I thought for one dreadful moment. As we drew closer, I could see that it was a pump-house. What I had mistaken for a proboscis was in fact a thick hose-pipe.

  Just then, without any warning, Mr Choudhury called out a single word in Assamese. Hearing it, Raja came to an abrupt halt; to my left, Jasmine did the same. Waiting with anticipation, the elephant squad stood stock still. No one made a sound. I sat up straight, alert as a guard dog. Dead ahead, something was moving in the fields.

  Mr Choudhury let out a loud bark. This was the prearranged signal for everyone to make as much noise as they could. All at once, the apprentices began to blow hard on plastic whistles; Mr Choudhury rang a hand-bell with a resonating clang; the guards beat on cooking pots, clashing them together like cymbals. Churchill blew on a kazoo, Mole rattled a tambourine and I squeezed on a bicycle horn. Prat shook a rotating rattle made of tin cans with pebbles inside. And everyone shrieked and hollered, sounding like a bunch of football fans urging on their team.

  Mr Choudhury barked a second time, signalling us to switch on our torches. A dozen or so beams criss-crossed the terrain, bobbing up and down as they searched for the herd. At the same time, we moved forward, crossing fields where sugarcane lay trampled underfoot, the earth pitted with elephantine footprints. We passed broken dykes, splintered bamboo fences and an uprooted telegraph pole that hung half suspended in the air.

  Soon, we spotted the herd. They were about a hundred and fifty yards away, huddled together in front of a wall of sugarcane, dazzled and frightened, their trunks raised like periscopes as they tested the air for foreign scents. In their midst stood a tusker with magnificent incisors crossed over one another like out-of-shape scissors. His head was covered in a mass of bushy hair. Enraged, he paced up and down, picking up clods of earth with his trunk and tossing them over his shoulder. Behind him, I spotted a scrawny female with a scarred trunk. Frightened calves clung to their mothers’ legs, hiding behind the grey pillars. Those elephants still holding lengths of sugarcane in their trunks now dropped them to the ground like children caught stealing from a sweet-shop. Nervous eyes blinked in the light. Ears bristled. Tails swished.

  The matriarch strode out in front of the herd to confront us. She was not the largest animal amongst them, but it was easy to see why she was the dominant female. Strong and determined, she was, judging by her defiant stance and the scars on her trunk, also tremendously brave. For a moment, she seemed prepared to take on Raja and Jasmine. But as we drew closer – still making a clamour to rival a school playground during break-time – the matriarch’s trunk shot out erect and she sounded the elephantine equivalent of the retreat.

  All at once, the herd turned and stampeded in the opposite direction, fleeing blindly towards the rain forest. Tails and hind legs, backsides and flapping ears disappeared in a cloud of dust. Sugarcane was trampled underfoot as panicked trumpeting filled the air. Calves ran as fast as their short legs could carry them, trying desperately to keep up with their mothers. Powerful feet thundered through the farmers’ livelihood, clearing a path twenty feet wide.

  “Charge! Charge!” yelled Churchill, working the back of Raja’s ears with his feet to make the kunki move faster.

  “Make sure they don’t double back!” shouted Mr Choudhury.

  The elephant squad broke into a run, the forest guards uttering manic screams as if they were going into battle. Torch beams flew about like lasers in a discotheque. Raja’s shoulder blades pumped up and down, tossing me from side to side. Sugarcane smacked into me and I had to grip hard with my legs and hold on tight to the saddle to stop myself from being swept off the elephant.

  Raja soon outpaced the rest of the squad, leaving them far behind. We emerged from the fields, crashed through a fence, crossed a lane and found ourselves by a
wide, shallow stream. There, Churchill reined in his elephant, halting by the water’s edge. The mahout turned on his torch and directed it at the fast-flowing water.

  It wasn’t difficult to locate the place where the elephants had crossed, for the stream was still murky with sediment. The torch beam followed their path, soon finding the far bank where the rain forest began. I could make out the elephants’ footprints in the mud on the other side.

  Of the herd, there was not a sign. They had disappeared inside the fortress of trees and foliage that rose up before us. Here, in one of the last remaining stretches of forest or jungle in Assam, they would be left unmolested, at least for the time being.

  But as we got down from Raja to stretch our legs, I wondered how long this last bastion would remain intact before the farmers invaded it with their axes, saws and ploughs, leaving the elephants with nowhere else to run.

  ♦

  The same locals, who just an hour earlier had been threatening to lynch Mole and Mr Choudhury, soon came running up behind us, whooping with excitement. With cheers of joy, they lit more firecrackers and congratulated the elephant squad, whom they treated like conquering heroes. Bottles of home-made booze were produced and the farmers did a jig in front of Raja and Jasmine, trying to persuade the mahouts and their assistants to join in. But despite their apparent ‘victory’, the elephant squad were not in a celebratory mood. If anything, they seemed subdued.

  “We’re not here to help these people,” said Mr Choudhury. “They’re causing these problems by cutting down the jungle. We try to keep the elephants out of the fields for their own protection. That is all.”

  Rather than join in the villagers’ celebrations, we headed back to the village where we set up camp for the night, pitching our tents around a blazing log fire. The apprentices and forest guards took turns to keep watch in case the rogue should suddenly appear. However, the night passed without incident. It was only the next morning, at around seven, that we learned that an elephant had raided another settlement several miles to the east. No one had been killed, although the description of the culprit matched that of the wanted elephant.