“Oh! that minds me o’ the elephants,” cried Junkie, jumping up and running to Jackman, who was assisting. Barret to arrange plants for Milly. “We are all here now—an’ you promised, you know.”
A heavy patter of rain on the window seemed to emphasise Junkie’s request by suggesting that nothing better could be done.
“Well, Junkie, I have no objection,” said the Woods-and-Forester, “if the rest of the company do not object.”
As the rest of the company did not object, but rather expressed anxiety to hear about the hunt, Jackman drew his chair near to the fire, the boys crowded round him, and he began with,—“Let me see. Where was I?”
“In India, of course,” said Junkie. “Yes; but at what part of the hunt?”
“Oh! you hadn’t begun the hunt at all. You had only made Chand somethin’ or other, Isri Per-what-d’ee-call-it, an’ Raj Mung-thingumy give poor Mowla Buksh such an awful mauling.”
“Just so. Well, you must know that next day we received news of large herds of elephants away to the eastward of the Ganges, so we started off with all our forces—hunters, matchlock-men, onlookers, etcetera, and about eighty tame elephants. Chief among these last were the fighting elephants, to which Junkie gave such appropriate names just now, and king of them all was the mighty Chand Moorut, who had never been known to refuse a fight or lose a victory since he was grown up.
“It was really grand to see this renowned mountain of living flesh towering high above his fellows. Like all heroes, he was calm and dignified when not in action—a lamb in the drawing-room, a lion in the field. Even the natives, accustomed as they were to these giants, came to look at him admiringly that morning as he walked sedately out of camp. He was so big that he seemed to grow bigger while you looked at him, and he was absolutely perfect in form and strength—the very Hercules of brutes.
“The trackers had marked down a herd of wild elephants, not three miles distant, in a narrow valley, just suited to our purpose. On reaching the ground we learned that there was, in the jungle, a ‘rogue’ elephant—that is, an old male, which had been expelled from the herd. Such outcasts are usually very fierce and dangerous. This one was a tusker, who had been the terror of the neighbourhood, having killed many people, among them a forester, only a few days before our arrival.
“As these ‘rogues’ are always very difficult to overcome, and are almost sure to injure the khedda, or tame elephants of the hunt, if an attempt is made to capture them, we resolved to avoid him, and devote our attention entirely to the females and young ones. We formed a curious procession as we entered the valley—rajah and civilians, military men and mahowts, black and white, on pads and in howdahs—the last being the little towers that you see on elephants’ backs in pictures.