Kari the elephant

by Dhan Gopal Mukerji

hen Kari was about five years old, another adventure befell him. We took him to see the town, but before we had started, we tried to train him to like dogs and monkeys. Elephants are proverbially irritated by dogs. When an elephant goes through a village, every dog barks at him, and while most elephants are too dignified to pay any attention, there are some who get extremely annoyed and try to chase the dogs. Sometimes, in fact, an elephant will chase a dog so hard that he will lose his way in the village.

Knowing that there were many unknown little hamlets between our village and the city, we thought we would train Kari to like dogs before we started, for we did not want to be led astray into all sorts of little alleys while he chased the dogs who had annoyed him.

But as all the dogs of our village had seen Kari grow up they never paid any attention to him, and that made it all the more difficult to train Kari to like other dogs. He always thought the dogs in our little village were the right kind since they did not bark at him. Whenever a strange dog barked at him, he would chase the poor creature through the whole village and waste hours in finding his way back to the road.

We tried to train Kari by taking him to villages that he had not yet seen. There were no dogs in the first village we came to. We went through it without any trouble. In the second village we came across one or two dogs that barked a few times, then disappeared in the distance. Then, as we were leaving this village we heard terrible snorts and growls all around us and were suddenly surrounded by a pack of angry mongrels, curs and wild dogs. It was terrible to see Kari trying to chase them with his trunk. Sometimes he would try to step right on the back of a dog, but the dog would slip away from under him. Little by little as the dogs began to bark all around him, he started to go round and round in a circle, faster and faster till he was spinning like a top.

We had a hard time sitting on his back because we felt terribly dizzy. We were almost falling off, when we heard a piercing yell and saw the whole pack of tormentors running away. Kari had stepped on one of the dogs and killed it and that frightened the others away.

We then brought Kari home, gave him his bath in the river and offered him nice saplings and twigs, but he would eat none of them.

From that day on, Kari was never upset by the barking of dogs, but went through strange villages without paying any attention to them, no matter how hard they barked at his heels.

Now that he had become immune to dogs, we tried to make him like monkeys. Monkeys, as you know, are very annoying little creatures. I had a pet monkey of my own named Kopee, who was red-faced and tawny-coated. He never came near the elephant, and Kari never thought of going near him. Whenever we went out, this monkey used to sit on my shoulder, and if we passed through bazaars where mangoes and other fruits were sold, it was very difficult to keep Kopee from getting into mischief. In India everything is shown in the open, and the mangoes lie in baskets piled up one above the other like little hills. There were places where oranges were heaped up like big burning rocks. Here and there you could see brown men robed in white sitting near these mountains of fruit, bargaining about the prices.

Now it is very good to smell the fragrance of fruit, and one day while going through the lane of a village, as the fragrance of the fruit grew stronger, I forgot all about Kopee, and did not realize that I was carrying him on my shoulder.