by John Sweeney
Gregory had stood his ground, had stared down the Man-Killer. The oozies looked at him, more than a little afraid. Sam shook his head, worried.
No luck in it at all.
A coiled fossil. Muddle-headed by sleep, she studied the coil, like an Ammonite from the Jurassic, at its dead centre a pretty brown eye. Fossils don’t blink. This one did. Like a dripping wet dog getting out of a duck pond, her mind shook itself awake. If it blinked, it couldn’t be a fossil. Not three feet from her hammock, Grace registered the presence of a baby elephant, his trunk tightly rolled up in on itself. Beyond the trunk was a grey convexity, his stomach. She stared intently at Oomy’s trunk as it tentatively clawed at passing drifts of mist. The trunk made a fifth limb, which could pick up a pencil or, when he was older, roll a three-ton teak log uphill. Even now as a baby, one stomp from his clumping great feet could do her real harm and yet this was a species which would hardly ever abuse its great strength. The war, the wretchedness of the refugees dying by the wayside, the blitzing of Mandalay, the murder of the Jem, all of this was grim beyond the saying of it. But the few hours they had spent with the elephants… while not a consolation, since nothing could have made up for all those unnecessary deaths, had nevertheless been a time of wonderment and joy. To wake up, and the very first thing you see is the tucked-up trunk of a baby elephant, and then him blinking…
The day’s march started, a steep climb through thick forest, Sam far ahead at the front, the Havildar next, in charge of the pack elephants, the children, led by Emily and Ruby and then Grace as ‘sheepdogs’, in the centre party, and the Chin guards bringing up the rear. The killer with the bandaged head? No sign of him. High above, they heard the odd grumble of thunder from the mountains, and every now and then a patter of light showers fell. The heavy rains threatened but didn’t come.
Prickly wet heat crawled under skin. Bodies raw with salt, their clothes glued to them with sweat. Itches demanded to be scratched, but the more you scratched, the worse the itch became. It was depressing, too, not being able to see ahead for more than ten feet, not having a goal on the horizon, but just being locked inside an unchanging bubble– jungle with no end and no beginning, just foot after foot, yard after yard, mile after mile of foliage. Barred from seeing the open sky by the halo of forest canopy, the surroundings suffused by an eerie green light, it felt like being trapped inside an enormous fish tank.
The path – to glorify it with that description seemed absurd – was paved with a slime of dead leaves, rotting branches, puddles of dark liquid, a mulch of fungus. Under the pressure of the lightest footfall, the ground gave way. A first step ended in a squelch, the second a crumbling, the third a sharp snap. Waxy ferns which had been around in the time of the dinosaurs whacked into their faces. Above, the vegetable sky was pierced, every now and then, by beams of sunshine that managed to tunnel through. Lianas, as thick as ship’s cables, fell diagonally across their path. Grace stopped to draw breath, a tingling in her left foot. Numberless black ants carved a new path across her toes. She swept them off and carried on.
Downwards, they staggered and slipped. A stinking blackwater bog, a clear stream, icy cold, then more bog until their path tilted uphill. Ceaselessly uphill they walked until they hit a ridge and then, down, slipping and sliding, clawing at roots and palms and rotten sticks to break their descent. Up, down, up down, hour after hour of it. Above all, it was a passage through an alien land, of hostile, never-ending, indecipherable noise. Long ago, in the ignorance of her gilded upbringing, Grace had assumed that the jungle would be a quiet place, so quiet that you could perhaps hear a snake slither by or make out individual birdsong. This jungle was as noisy as a train station. Nearby – but invisible – a stream roared and shouted its way down from the Himalayas, sometimes above them, sometimes below, the thunder of water against old stones creating a deep murmur of sound. Overlaying that, a nonsense wild-track of grunts and buzzes and clicks and bleeps and croaks from the things that creep and crawl. And, from high above in the forest canopy, whoops and squeaks and chirrups and trills and long, piercing screams. Monkeys, insects, bats, frogs, gibbons, lizards, birds. The noise pulled a freight train of anxiety in tow. That roar just then – a waterfall a hundred yards away, or behind that fern, a tiger? That creaking sound, so soft you could barely hear it? A liana brindled by sunlight, or a black and yellow Burmese krait, its venom a dozen times more deadly than cobra?
‘Miss, listen.’ Molly identified it first.
A shudder of unease passed through the group.
‘Miss, I’m scared.’
‘There’s nothing to be afraid of, Molly,’ said Grace, knowing the opposite was more honest.
The crackle-crackle grew more violent, purposeful. Ahead, Grace made out two grey blurs at the end of the tunnel of green. Mother elephant was ripping out thick clumps of bamboo from the ground with her trunk and popping them into Baby’s mouth. Po Net, down on the ground, fussing over the leather ties and ropes which held the great cane basket in place, smiled at the arrival of the others, remounted and dug his heels in.
Mother started to march, her great backside rolling and yawing like a ship at sea, and the school party fell in behind. Instantly, their spirits lifted: it was so much easier walking in the immediate footsteps of elephants than through near-virgin jungle. Mother and baby crushed grass and ferns and palms flat, making footfalls which must have scared off every creepy spider or hungry tiger for miles and miles around. There was something wonderfully comical and yet keenly affecting about the baby following in the footsteps of a three-ton mass. A great gasp from Mother’s bottom and out popped balls of semi-digested stodge in which Grace could make out blades of grass and shoots of bamboo and, half-buried in the last one, something that had been returned from the netherworld.
‘Michael!’ squeaked Grace, delighted, and Po Net, grinning hugely, turned Mother to one side so they all could see the results of the elephant’s digestion. The old lady’s trunk coiled forward and picked up the school cap and washed it in a deep puddle, to and fro, with the fastidiousness of a washerwoman. Up in their basket, the children, Michael too, were beside themselves with glee. Now soaked but still reeking of elephant dung, Mother swished the cap around in the puddle one last time and scooped it up with her trunk and raised it aloft to Po Net, who stood up on Mother’s neck and turned round and bowed very low, before handing the cap to Michael. The po-faced five year old of a few days ago had become a hardened jungle traveller. Returning Po Net’s bow, royally, he accepted the cap, dripping wet, smelly and speckled with gobbets of pooh, and placed it on his head as if it were a top hat. Everyone cheered, but softly, in case Sam heard.
They trudged on, rising and falling, the march for those on foot made less grim by the squeals and giggles coming from within the pannier on the elephant’s back. An orchid entranced Grace’s eye – a golden orgy of tubes and stamens and scent – but Mother had chosen that instant to stop dead in her tracks and hoist her trunk to snack on a particularly juicy knot of mossy food. Colliding with the elephant’s bottom, she skidded on a wide leaf as slippery as an icy puddle, lost her footing and fell with a thump to the ground.
‘Oh, Miss, are you all right?’ called out Ruby, marching arm-in-arm with Lucy, a perilously thin ten year old.
‘I’m fine, Ruby, thank you, but I am bit worried about Mother.’ As if she had heard every word, the mother elephant turned her enormous head and treated Grace to a look of mild irritation and shrugged in a very bored kind of way. Close by, Oomy chirrupped happily. Unlike some human beings, these animals, Grace thought, do not live to kill.
They halted for lunch. Po Net opened the tins with his jungle knife and Grace was sharing out the portions as fairly as she could when Molly started to moan: ‘I’m sick of pilchards and biscuits. It’s so boring.’
‘Molly, come on,’ said Ruby, ‘it’s better than nothing.’
‘No, nothing is better than this dog food. You eat it, Rover.’
‘Hush, Molly!’
‘Miss!’ cried Emily.
‘Listen, you two, we’ve got to behave.’
‘He’s eating all the jam, Miss, the baby.’
Oomy tipped over the jam tin in his haste; it was virtually empty.
‘Stop it, thief!’ Grace yelled. He eyed her shiftily, head down, sulkily apologetic, and trotted off, docking at the far side of Mother, to peek his head out from underneath her legs, checking to see whether Grace was still angry with him. It was so utterly like the reaction of a naughty boy caught red-handed that she found it impossible to be cross.
‘He’s so cute,’ cried Molly. The little girl watched Oomy’s trunk hesitate over a hedge of grasses, like a fat boy hovering over a buffet before plumping for a clump of what looked like dark green shamrock and wolfing it. Molly stood up, walked to the far end of the hedgerow and tugged up a fresh clump of the favoured grass. She held it out to Oomy at arm’s length; he paused, eyeing the gift warily, before plucking it from her outstretched hand and tucking it into his mouth. He rewarded her with a dry touch, not slobbery at all, of his trunk on her hand and trotted off to hide behind his mother once more.
The lunch-break ended all too quickly and they were back inside the green tunnel again, up and down, monotonous, exhausting.
How long could the children keep this up? Three days? Another week, mused Grace, perhaps, but by that time the elephant men would have gone their own way and the children would have to walk along with the thousands of refugees on the main track. But what if the monsoon came early and they were stuck in the jungle for three weeks, even a month? Already the weaker ones were wilting, and it was only the first full day.
In the afternoon trek she had hoped to get her party to pick up its pace, intent on catching up with Sam to press home her fears about the sergeant. But as the hours passed, more and more of the girls tripped on hidden branches or just gave up the ghost, collapsing onto the ground to nurse minor scratches. The group lagged far behind and any hope of catching up with the front of the party before nightfall faded.
Around four o’clock the path grew crazily steeper, their progress pitifully slow. A sudden crash-crash and the head of the Chin rearguard emerged, followed by a dozen or so of the last group of elephants. Grace tried to maintain the order to march, but it was too late in the day and too many of the girls were done in. Only she, Emily and Ruby were walking alongside the elephants, pretty much the opposite of Sam’s orders, when they arrived at the night’s camp, in a glade of high trees, close by, a ravine carved by a jungle stream. There was plenty of water and fodder for the elephants but neither sign nor sound of the Japanese, nor of the other refugees, nor of Sam, nor of the sergeant.
She had planned to have it out with Sam there and then, but first she had to organise the children’s camp for the night – where to tie their hammocks, then ensure they had been fed. By the time she had finished, night had come, and she could feel exhaustion creep into her bones. Grace resolved to find Sam once she had five minutes’ rest in her hammock. She closed her eyes, only to feel the sun shining into her face, and her hammock rocking to and fro, to and fro.
A demented giant was swinging her awake. Eyes wide open, sleep banished, the stout bamboo tree supporting the foot of her hammock was being gobbled up. In a frenzy of alarm, she dived out of the hammock, scrambling to wrap her blanket around her half-naked body, and put a safe distance from her and the monster eating her bedroom for breakfast.
Greed for the fresh, juiciest young bamboo shoots was the root of the problem. Standing on hind legs and extending his trunk, the elephant, a young powerful tusker, could just reach the shoots of the bamboo high above but one hind leg had been tied to a foreleg, sabotaging his natural agility. Hobbled, he was bound to fail, and just as Grace dived to safety he overbalanced, front legs crashing down the side of the bamboo tree, smashing through branches and shredding Grace’s hammock. The culprit shrugged off his fall, trumpeted irritably and staggered away in search of a less challenging meal.
La Mah, the deputy head elephant man, and another oozie emerged from behind a thicket of bamboo, displaying a glee that Grace found indecent – and she realised that was a fair description of her state of dress, too. Was there something a little forced about their humour? Had they deliberately led the elephant towards the bamboo her hammock was tied to? Perhaps. But the comedy of the moment broke in, relief that no real harm had been done, too, and she joined in their laughter. The two elephant men picked up the torn hammock with an apologetic air. From their faces, if not their words, she could tell that they would prefer it if she did not share this story of elephant chaos with Sam. Giving them a deep smile, she tried to convey that what had happened was not the end of the world but a small misfortune.
And then she saw her dress, originally pale cream, a Parisian design, decorated with red and yellow roses and, now planted on the bosom, a very large muddy footprint of an elephant. Lost in the jungle with a circus, and nothing to wear! Her shoulders shook, and she half-wept, half-exploded with the ridiculousness of it all, and set off for the stream a couple of hundred yards away, wrapped in her blanket.
The logic of the elephant camp came alive with the half-light of early morning. Men and animals were used to the routine, of pitching camp one night and upping sticks at dawn, all part of the nomadic life of harvesting the teak forests, and moving on when the work was done in that part of the woods. Elephant men, bent double, were returning from the bush, carrying great sheaves of bamboo on their backs.
Rice from a black pot, a spoonful of jam, washed down by foul-tasting chlorinated water. Back at the school in Rangoon in the old days, the children would have rioted at this breakfast, but out here, in the jungle, it was a banquet.
The Havildar stood over it all, looking as though he might chop off someone’s head at a moment’s notice, or strangle them with his two and a half fingers. The ferocious appearance was just a foil, she realised, the children sensing that he was not a man they should fear, that his fiery gaze and grisly hands were some sort of comic trick, like a gun that fired a little flag bearing the word: ‘bang!’
Looking at the food fast disappearing into the mouths of the children, she sensed something of the scale of the logistical nightmare that her orphans presented to Sam and the elephant men. They didn’t have enough food for a week, let alone a month, he’d told her the day before.
She called over to the Havildar: ‘Where’s Sam?’
‘He got up very early this morning, Miss. He’s gone ahead with Po Toke to scout the trail ahead. We’ll catch up with him later.’
‘When?’
‘I don’t know.’ He stabbed his kirpan knife into a tin of sardines, opened it with the thumb and half-finger of his right hand and gave it to a ten-year-old girl with the sternest of frowns.
Grace stared at his maimed fingers and her curiosity got the better of her manners. ‘Forgive me, what did happen to your hands, Havildar?’
‘A tiger ate them.’
Thinking that the Havildar would never be good company at breakfast, she headed down to the stream, walking a good way on from the camp, upstream, past a clump of high elephant grass, to gain some sense of seclusion from prying eyes. At the water’s edge, she unwrapped the blanket, laid it out on a bush, knelt down in her underwear and began to wash her frock, soaking it and rubbing soap into the elephant footprint. As she did so, her mind went over the elephant men’s route out. Very few Europeans had ever been due west out of Upper Burma into Bengal, over the mountains, and certainly not a party of fifty-three elephants. The tusker that had stamped his footprint on her dress had been enjoying a breakfast of an enormous amount of bamboo. With no clear idea of what they would find when they pitched camp of an evening, they would have to take a huge cargo of bamboo with them, in case there wasn’t enough food for the elephants later in the day. And the humans needed feeding too. That was why Sam was so keen to see the back of them.
Examining her dress critically, she saw that her washerwoma
n’s work had broadened the mud-smudge, not removed it. It would have to do. A bird squawked derisively, suggesting to her a sound Miss Furroughs used to make when scolding her: ‘I hope you haven’t come all this way to take part in a fashion parade, Miss Grace. Rangoon is not Paris.’
Smiling at the memory of her vanity – it belonged to a different time - she decided to have a quick dip. The stream was deep, quickly flowing and clear down to the stony bottom. No monsters, only a feather of minnows darting in and out of the current. A gorgeous yellow butterfly skimmed the water and fluttered off into the jungle. But still she hesitated.
‘Grace Collins,’ she said out loud, ‘you have been torpedoed. You are not afraid of a little water, are you?’ And with that she plunged in, squealing at the shock of the cold. Not having had a proper wash for weeks, this was the first time when complete responsibility for the children had been lifted from her by the elephant men. It felt wonderful to get some of the grime off. She ducked down and held her breath for as long as possible. Bubbles of air passed between her lips and floated up but still she stayed below the surface, exhilarating in the sense of weightlessness, savouring the clear green-blue light, before she paddled up, gasping for air.
A bowl of mist had descended on the pool, walling it off from the rest of the world by a curtain of grey fog. She moved towards the rock where she had left her frock to see, standing by it, a man with a bandaged head.
‘We haven’t been introduced. Sergeant Edgar Gregory. You can call me Eddie.’
Not like this. Not half-naked, shoulder-deep, shivering in a jungle stream.
‘Cat got your tongue?’ His voice edged with mockery.
