But those trapped cows, though frightened and no doubt bewildered beyond anything in their experience, were not foolish. The big, handsome bull, sent out to court and mollify them, continued his outrageous attempts at flirtation through the interstices of the stockade all in vain. Not that they were not flattered, perhaps, by his attentions, for they paralleled his amiable saunterings up and down the barricade for an hour, but always at the safe distance of a hundred yards; ten pairs of little, bright, malicious eyes the while keeping watch of his every movement and of every movement inside the kraal. Satisfied at last of his treacherous intentions, and, perhaps, tiring of the sport, they ignored him altogether and turned their energies again toward their human foes.
The rest of the morning was given to beating back charge after charge. The old cow, especially, was a veritable demon in temper and courage. Sometimes she charged alone, her calf bellowing and coughing his ridiculous rage in her wake. Sometimes, with one impulse, the whole herd charged with her, as if at a preconcerted signal. Once, indeed, she nearly got our photographer. The elephants were standing quiet for the moment, a hundred yards away, trunks down and slack, apparently oblivious to their enemies. A fugitive patch of sunlight, finely illuminating their heads, tempted the camera man to advance a few steps inside the gate in the hope of obtaining a picture. The next instant the whole herd was almost upon him. He had barely time to fling himself headlong between the posts when the old cow, in the lead, crashed against the gate. Another yard, and she would have got him. It took half an hour and two brandy sodas to coax his nerve back, but the imperturbable Kalawane, who had been lying sound asleep beneath the gate timbers till the crash awakened him, merely raised himself long enough to curse camera man, elephants, and beaters fluently and indiscriminately, and then resumed his nap.
I had often heard of the speed of an elephant’s charge, and had marveled without enlightenment. I had even scoffed, because those who told of it never were able to explain it. Their descriptions seemed to me the result of “nerves,” justifying effect by cause. Now that I have seen it for myself, I marvel no more, but am simply dazed. You cannot explain the charge because you do not really see him make it. One instant he is standing over there, a hundred yards away, as motionless as the tree-trunks; at the end of that same instant he is upon you, overwhelming, monstrous, like a mountain falling upon you. And you did not even see him start!
I have a theory about it. An elephant’s loose skin is a sort of bag that conceals the most flexible and finely articulated set of muscles in the animal kingdom. He has no bulge of muscles anywhere. They are all as smooth and flat as ribbons, as elastic as rubber, tempered like steel wire. Wherefore he can wheel that vast bulk of his instantly and in a space the size of a tea-table. He can hurl the whole four or five tons of him into action with a single impulse and strike his top speed in a single stride. Place an enemy in front of him, and I believe he can run ten yards or two hundred from a standing start faster than any other creature on legs.
Meantime, the decoys to be used for the noosing in the afternoon had come up from their teak-piling duties in the low country. Seven gigantic beasts, far larger than the captured ones, they moved like conquerors, majestic and grand. It was not to be comprehended that these colossi, the mightiest of the earth’s creatures, were willing servants of those pygmies astride their necks. Yet all through the subsequent proceedings the mahout’s word was law, and I never once saw a tame elephant pricked with the ankus. This is the more remarkable when it is understood that with one exception they had all been wild elephants fewer than ten years before.
After they had been bathed and scraped and holystoned till their hides shone like polished slate, the decoys were led before the Ratemahatmeya to receive the ceremonial anointment with oil and make their salaams. As the great beasts fell on their knees before the old man and made their dumb, strange genuflections of obeisance, my eyes were filled with a picture of the galleries of old Rome and of the German gladiators stooped before some palsied Cæsar, and through my brain pulsed again the echo of their grand and solemn valedictory.
But it was two o’clock, and the ladies of the Ratemahatmeya’s family were in the tower, the village was in the tree-tops, or chattering like schools of monkeys in the undergrowth, and all was ready for the great spectacle of the kraal, the contests in the arena. Kalawane, on the largest elephant, headed the procession of the seven decoys, followed by a small army of spearmen and elephant shikarees, carrying ropes. Each of the decoys bore on his back a mahout and a nooser, the latter armed with a coil of rope noosed at one end and attached at the other to a stout collar around the decoy’s neck.
For some time before the procession set out for the kraal gate the wild herd had been clustered in thick cover on the far side of the stream from the Ratemahatmeya’s tower. As we could neither see nor hear anything of them, Ricalton and I ran around the stockade to a point nearest them and no more than forty yards from the little hillock on which they stood. We could hear the decoys pulling down the gate far away on the other side, and it was evident that the wild herd was quite as plainly aware that something new and decisive in their affairs was about to occur. They stood stone-still, indifferent to our presence, their eyes alert, but their heads a little drooping. Nothing but actual speech could have better expressed that, though sore perplexed, they all but understood. As for us, we were so lost in the contemplation of them in this greatest moment of their lives that we did not hear the approach of the decoys, and they, if they heard it, gave no sign.
Suddenly we heard the sharp crackle of voices—Kalawane’s and the mahouts’—shouting, “Yunga! Yunga! Yunga!” (“Charge! Charge! Charge!”) and saw the decoys swiftly looming through the underbrush. The wild ones saw them at the same time, and for just a moment the whole herd, trunks uplifted in welcome, swung forward to meet them. The next instant they realized their mistake, turned tail, and went crashing down the slope in a panic. After them came the whole band of decoys, spearmen, and noosers barking a staccato chorus that set the blood tingling all over me. I never have had such a feeling. It was a little like the first shock of a shower-bath on a frosty morning. I found myself plunging knee-deep through the stream in the wake of the rushing animals, with Ricalton, sixty-six years old and as white as Mount Hood, not a foot behind me.
On the other bank the decoys overtook their quarry, and two big bulls separated one of the yearlings from his mother for the fraction of a second—just time enough for a nooser to drop off behind and slip the loop around his right hind leg. He suddenly found himself being dragged backward on his fore legs and belly, and such squalling never was heard. At first his frantic mother fought furiously to reach him, but two powerful bulls so unceremoniously butted her about that she gave up and rushed off for help; for I never will believe that she deserted him. The little fellow was dragged and butted to a convenient tree, to which he was securely tied by both ankles, while a decoy on each side alternately bullied and cozened him. The moment he was tied, just as he was on the point of thinking his new-found friends not such bad fellows after all, and was preparing to console himself for the loss of his mother, they heartlessly left him. Oh, how angry he was! He screamed, frothed, lunged and lunged against his fetters, bit the earth, and broke off the point of an embryonic tusk trying to demolish a stone he had dug up in his frenzy. But it was all in vain; and at last the poor little baby, just like other babies, broke down and cried. I saw him, and later I saw his mother, the terrible old cow, crying, and they shed real tears.