Not quite; he had just one more thing to learn from his Mamma, to make him quite comfortable. The sun gets very hot, and when the elephants are feeding from tree to tree, or marching through the jungle, they feel the hot sun on their backs dreadfully—although they have a thick skin.
Now, how could they guard themselves from the hot sun? Just think!
Why, just as we do, you will say, by using a kind of umbrella! Of course you mean that an elephant could break off a large bough, and hold it over his head and over his back! But his trunk would soon get tired of holding anything as big as that! Besides, he has to use his trunk all the time to feed! If you had only one hand, you could not eat with it and at the same time hold an umbrella over your head with it! Then how does the elephant manage it?
Elephant Covers his Back from Hot Sun
I shall tell you. He breaks off many small boughs, one at a time, and lays them on his back with his trunk; he is careful to lay them in proper order, and to criss-cross them, so that the boughs will not fall off. In fact, he tries to arrange them very much like the thatched roof of a cottage. That is very clever of him, is it not?
But then he does something else, still more clever! When a cottager builds his thatched roof, he has to plaster the ceiling to prevent any rain or sunshine from creeping in through the little spaces between the thatches. So also the thatch on the elephant's back has many gaps, through which the hot sun can still beat down on his skin. So what does he do to fill up the gaps?
He cannot do anything to plaster his back; but I shall tell you what he does do. He just draws into his trunk a lot of dust from the ground; then he curls up the trunk over his back, and blows the dust over the gaps in the thatch on his back. Of course he has to do that many times to fill up all the gaps; but at last, when he does not feel the sun any more, he knows that his back is quite covered.
Is not that a very wonderful thing for the elephants to think out, all by themselves? And that is what Salar's Mamma taught him to do.
But, a few years later, he came to the age when boys among men usually have to go to school. Then Salar passed to the care of his Papa. In feeding through the jungle, when all the elephants march and eat from tree to tree, Salar walked with his Papa, and began to learn lessons from him. And his Papa's way of teaching him was quite different from that of his Mamma, and often very funny!