Giants of the Monsoon Forest

by Giants of the Monsoon Forest- Living

  Today the stockade method typically occurs on a much smaller scale, with the open section extending outward for several hundred yards and the elephants captured in groups of five or six rather than hundreds at a time. Burma’s government-run timber industry, which employs elephants to haul teak timber out of the forest, was running these smaller kheddah operations as recently as the 1990s.9

  But these six fandis sitting atop their huge khoonkies were engaged in a third method of elephant capture, known as mela shekar (also called kyaw hpan by some masters in central Burma): the lasso or rope method.10 In this method, the lead fandi, riding his khoonkie elephant, swoops in on the flank of a wild elephant in the forest; if the fandi is right-handed, he and his khoonkie approach from the right. In the meantime, the two secondary khoonkies encroach from the left. If all goes well, the wild elephant freezes, unnerved by this unexpected behavior from the three khoonkie elephants. The lead fandi tosses a huge rope around the wild elephant’s head. The noose of this lasso is much larger than that of a typical cattle rope and must be tossed with two hands at once. With both hands occupied, the lead fandi can’t balance himself on his khoonkie elephant, who is likely pivoting and maneuvering to control the movements of the targeted wild elephant.

  To keep himself in place, the lead fandi wears thick pants made of fibrous canvas that are fastened to ropes around elephant’s chest and neck. These pants are sometimes painted in a striking rainbow scheme, which helps the other fandis and khoonkies to keep watch on the lead fandi during the commotion. The lead fandi also has an assistant behind him, who is ready to cut the ropes if the lead man’s life seems to be in danger—or to use his rifle if need be, though this is exceedingly rare. If the lead fandi succeeds with his rope, then the fandis on the other elephants throw additional ropes. Once lassoed by multiple lines, the wild elephant, grasping the severity of what has occurred, may crash into the forest in an attempt to escape, and the khoonkies all give chase. Usually this results in the ropes becoming entangled around several trees. The wild elephant at this point might put up a fight, but its struggles are controlled by the ropes and the intimidating presence of the three khoonkie elephants.11

  The most acute danger in the mela shekar process arises when the fandis have chosen to capture a wild elephant calf. Calves offer clear advantages for capture: they are easier to lasso and train, and they can provide more decades of service as work animals than a captured adult. But the mother of the calf is usually nearby, and faced with the prospect of losing her offspring, she fights more fiercely than would a huge male tusker who finds himself ensnared in rope. Multiple fandis I spoke with in this region recounted incidents where their khoonkies fought off enraged mother elephants, thus saving the fandis’ lives. Others spoke of fellow fandis—friends, brothers, uncles—who’d died this way. The breaking up of elephant families, and the subsequent aftermath, is in fact the major disadvantage of the mela shekar capturing method. The fandis worry less about the potential loss of human life due to the rage of the protective mother elephant—such deaths are rather rare—than about the trauma experienced by the captured calf, which tends to subtract from its psychological reliability and work potential. Fandis get better results if the mother and calf can be captured together, as often happens in the stockade method.12

  Nonetheless, mela shekar also has some clear advantages over the stockade method. The stockade method involves a huge outlay of human labor. Usually whole bureaucracies have to be involved. It also leaves a significant mark in the forest landscape, as trees must be felled to make pikes, and the pikes, unless removed, obstruct the movement of other forest animals. The mela shekar method is flexible, requiring relatively little advance planning (though years and years of training are needed) and only a small handful of humans and elephants. It also leaves virtually no visible mark on the forest—which, if the magistrates in some far-off capital city have passed ordinances against elephant capture, might be the most important advantage of all.

  At the riverbank with the three khoonkies, the mood was cheerful. The three fandis and their assistants had recently caught an elephant calf. Apparently the operation had gone very smoothly, with no violent attacks from a mother elephant. The calf was tied up deep in the forest country across the river, and the fandis were checking on it daily, initiating the training process. They brought bamboo shoots and rice treats for the calf to munch on while they chanted words into his ear. Soon the training process would turn grimmer, mixing negative with positive reinforcement. Eventually, the elephant would likely be sold to nearby mahouts in the region, to do transportation work during the monsoon season, and to work in forest tracts moving valuable pieces of felled timber.

  The fandis insisted I climb onto one of the big khoonkies and ride with them up the hill toward the sprawling fields above, where we would have lunch and talk. I hesitated. Up close the elephants’ size was daunting. The biggest was the largest contiguous mass of living flesh I’d ever beheld. Growing up in New England, I’d seen humpback whales in the Gulf of Maine, but I’d never seen more than a few sections of these mammals at once, as they remained largely submerged. I’d seen African savanna elephants in zoos—but those were simply not this big. Or perhaps the big khoonkie before me simply seemed bigger than an African savanna elephant, because he was carrying two people and a large jumble of heavy forest equipment, and because I knew, from my books and interviews, what this elephant could do.

  I was especially intimidated by the big one. The fandis were amused: “Borsat. Bat! Bat bat bat . . .” The huge elephant, Borsat, sat down. “You will ride Borsat,” the guide informed me.

  Tungpa, Borsat’s fandi, retreated onto the elephant’s back and helped me climb to his abandoned perch on the pachyderm’s nape. From behind me, the fandi gestured to a rope slung around Borsat’s neck. The rope had a loop on each end, into which I ought to place my feet. Looking at these loops, and also at my feet, Tungpa and I both realized that he and I were really very different sizes. The loops barely made it past my knees. I looked at the knot on the midsection of the rope that shortened or lengthened it. Fumbling with the knot seemed risky, as it required both hands, and Borsat could stand up at any moment and send me flying. The elephant, however, seemed to grasp that some adjustments to the ropework on his neck were needed, in order to transport this awkwardly proportioned human who’d suddenly been added to his burden. He stayed very still. Eventually I got the foot loops to the appropriate length, and Borsat stood up.

  Encouraged by Tungpa, I attempted to give some commands. I tried a term for “get up, go.” Borsat seemed uninterested in my voice.

  “Tap his ear with your foot! That’s how you tell him to turn!” the guide Sang shouted up to me. I tried this too. Borsat snorted scornfully out of his trunk, and the fandis laughed. Borsat remained stationary.

  Behind us, the fandis’ assistants were in the river, washing off the mela shekar equipment. A fisherman drifted by on a bamboo raft. Finally, the other two khoonkie elephants set off up the hill through the grass and brush, scattering the braying goats. Borsat, motivated more by interest in his elephant friends than by my clumsy commands, followed the other two. I leaned in toward the giant’s great domed head, to keep my balance as we made the ascent. Borsat tilted leftward and rightward navigating the slope, my spot on his neck swaying like a small boat riding an ocean swell. The path became gentler, and we made our way across the rippling yellow fields in the direction of the Patkai foothills.

  LATER I WAS eating a meal at the house of Vithaya, one of the three fandis. Vithaya lived with his wife and daughter in a bamboo house with a thatched roof. It stood a mile or so from the spot where he and the other fandis had emerged from the forest with the titan Borsat and the other two khoonkies. By this point in the day, the three khoonkie elephants had been released to roam freely in the forest nearby, where they’d remain until the next morning. Then they’d be fetched, and the whole team—the six humans and the three elephants—would go back to the captu
red calf.

  The main room of Vithaya’s bamboo house was organized around a fireplace. There was no chimney, as such a contraption would have let in too much water during the rainy season. Instead a large multileveled smoking rack, also made of bamboo, dangled from the ceiling. Here pieces of pork and deer were left to char for months on end, a method of preserving them as jerky. Above, the underside of the thatched roof was stained black from smoke. We were eating pork that had been roasted over the fire, along with a salad made of fresh ginger and herbs picked from Vithaya’s garden. There was also a kind of bitter fruit, similar to gooseberries, that turned sweet with a sip of water. One of Vithaya’s fandi friends fidgeted with a bamboo opium pipe in the corner of the room.

  “We have some important rituals for mela shekar,” Vithaya explained in his own language, and Sang translated. I was scribbling notes. “Some are secret things—”

  Vithaya’s friend in the corner cut in to say something I did not understand. There was laughter. The guide smiled and explained, “They’re joking that you don’t look like a professor.” After a pause, he added, “I think the fandis here are wondering about you and about why you are interested in mela shekar. They can understand that a Westerner would want to see wild elephants or maybe go on a safari ride. But why would you want to know about what they do, the catching elephants part?”

  I’d explained this many times in all the places I’d conducted my field research, in as many ways as I could think of. But I could never succinctly explain my whole jumble of thoughts. “I’m here to learn about people who work with elephants in the forest,” I began, “and who permit the work elephants to roam in the forest at night, so they can eat there and mate with wild herds. Very few people where I’m from know these practices exist. I’m not comparing these work elephants with elephants who live in the wild their whole lives; I’m comparing them with captive elephants elsewhere: in zoos, at tourist parks, in stables—places where the elephants don’t have the ability to roam the forest.” I was already making this too long-winded and complicated and cut myself short.

  The guide rephrased what I’d said in the local language. There was more chatter, and smoking. “They are saying that with your beard and unkempt hair, you maybe look like an ‘activist’ and not a professor,” Sang mused. But by this time he and the fandis had relaxed and were discussing what an American geography professor is “supposed” to look like. More chatter and chuckling. Vithaya, apparently satisfied, gestured to his friends to quiet down. He returned to the spiritual rituals: “For mela shekar, the main ritual is to sacrifice one farm bird at home, then bring a second bird with us into the forest. This forest sacrifice is for the wild elephant’s own ghost rider, or spirit-mahout.” The pipe was passed from fandi to fandi. “You see, every wild elephant in the forest has its own spirit-mahout. As fandis, we are taking this spirit’s elephant away. So we must bring the spirit something as compensation. And if we don’t, then the spirit-mahout will interfere with the whole mela shekar process. The spirit will conjure up bad luck and cause bad things to happen.”13

  Fandis throughout the Trans-Patkai region follow something like the ritual Vithaya described, for appeasing “spirit-mahouts” associated with the wild elephant herds. The commonality is somewhat surprising, since Trans-Patkai fandis hail from at least three ethnic groups, the Kachin, the Hkamti, and the Moran—groups that differ in many respects, including religion. The Kachins are mostly Buddhist on the Indian side of the mountains and Christian on the Burmese side; the Hkamtis on both sides are Buddhist; and the Morans are Hindus. But all three groups retain varying degrees of local animist practices: the worship of the local forest spirits, including those who ride wild elephants.

  A Moran fandi from the region, now in his eighties, told me a remarkable story involving these “spirit-mahouts.” The fandi, Miloswar, used to have an elephant named Sokona. Sokona was a fabulous khoonkie, highly intelligent and attuned to his fandis’ needs. He had naturally small tusks that limited his usefulness for logging (logging tuskers can hoist huge logs up by balancing them on their tusks) but were a good feature for a khoonkie. Without large tusks, the khoonkie was less likely to accidentally gore the captured elephant during the commotion of mela shekar. Furthermore, male elephants’ facial muscles tend to grow larger and stronger when they don’t have to spend a lifetime counterbalancing long tusks. The added size and strength are advantages for khoonkies as well.14

  Earlier in his life, Miloswar recalled, he and his fellow fandis received word that a new group of wild elephants was in the nearby woods. The migrating herd had descended from the mountains in search of fresh bamboo shoots and water. In his haste to get into the jungle, Miloswar rushed the spiritual ceremonies. He was the group’s lead fandi, and Sokona the lead khoonkie. Approaching the wild herd in the woods, the team came upon a mother elephant and her calf. Sokona approached the two, and Miloswar threw his rope, aiming for the baby. But he missed, and freakishly, the loop wound up around the mother elephant’s head instead. At this point Miloswar shouted to the other fandis, “We’ll catch the big one!” since his line was attached to her. But she was an especially powerful elephant, and the other fandis could not land their ropes. She charged through the forest. Sokona, with Miloswar and Miloswar’s assistant riding on his back, chased after her, trailing by a rope taut as a harpoon line. The rope never tangled in tree branches as was usual. After several intense minutes of pursuit, Miloswar and his assistant realized the chase was hopeless: she was too strong and fast and was having too much odd luck with the rope and the trees. Miloswar took out his machete to cut the rope, but in the tumult the machete slipped from his hand.

  Sokona meanwhile was still barreling after the wild female and pulsating with exhaustion. The assistant tried to loosen the knot that fastened the lasso line to Sokona’s rear belt, but with the speed of the chase and no hands free for balance, he was thrown from the elephant. The other fandis found the assistant on the forest floor with a broken leg. Miloswar, seeing how dangerous the situation had become for him now, released his canvas pant buckles from Sokona’s neck and leaped off. Landing on the forest floor, he was dazed but not as badly injured as the assistant behind him. Sokona and the wild female, still connected by the lasso rope, disappeared into the jungle.

  One man stayed with the assistant whose leg was broken, while everyone else climbed onto the remaining khoonkie elephants and followed the trail of broken branches blazed by Sokona and the wild elephant. Much later in the day, they caught up with the elephants. The rope had finally become entangled in some trees. Sokona and the wild elephant did not appear to have fought each other at all during the wait. They were both exhausted and stood there in the shade, eating shrubs and creepers. Miloswar cut the rope, and the wild elephant escaped. He took Sokona home.

  From that point forward, though, the khoonkie was never the same. He was never as obedient with Miloswar as he’d been before—as if his mind were always somewhere else. “He just didn’t act like a normal khoonkie anymore,” Miloswar remembered. “So I always wondered if maybe I did the ceremony beforehand too fast, and this was why this mishap occurred. I wondered if maybe while the two elephants were waiting for us to catch up with them, Sokona was taken, or possessed, by that wild elephant’s spirit-mahout.”15

  Miloswar became more and more animated as he told this story. He leaped up from his seat and gestured with his arms to convey the motions of the rope, the chase, the fall. His whole family was gathered around: his wife, his sons, their wives, and several grandchildren. Electricity ran through the room. The audience was transfixed, though perhaps they’d all heard this story before. When it was over, he retreated to his seat: an octogenarian once again.

  This belief in spirit-mahouts holds that domestic and wild elephants are like mirror images of each other. From a spirit-mahout’s point of view, the wild herd is “domesticated,” and the humans’ elephants are “wild.” Genetically, work elephants are indistinct from wild ones. An indivi
dual elephant can go from being wild to being domesticated, and though this is more unusual, it can also go back to being wild. We could think of the sacrificial ritual the fandis perform as a way of compensating for the difference between the number of elephants who go from the wild into domesticity and the number who go from domesticity back into the wild.

  Of course, there is another way of looking at the story of Sokona. Something transpired between him and the wild female while they were both tangled up together in the trees, the fandis still hours away. Some idea, or mindset, was communicated between the two giants—something that touched the khoonkie to his core and altered the burden of thoughts that he carried with him during his remaining days. After Sokona’s behavior shifted, Miloswar gave the elephant to another mahout and does not know what happened to him.

  “I DON’T SEE the mark.”

  I stared at the forest floor. It was a beautiful morning in the low mountains of central Burma, where elephants drag great logs of teak from the forested slopes to roadside timber depots. The sunlight percolated through the trees in brilliant beams. Mists from the nighttime dew rose from the horizon, turning the tall narrow trees in the middle distance into a shadow-theater of silhouettes.

  “I still don’t see it.”

  P., the guide, kept pointing. “It’s right there.” His index finger followed the sylvan floor from the spot beneath me to the mahout walking up ahead. The mahout was named Otou, and he climbed a slope in front of us. “That’s the mark the elephant left last night. We’ll find Gunjai soon.”

  I followed P. in Otou’s direction. After much studying the ground, I could make out some faint version of what the two Burmese men saw so clearly: a mark left by a long chain that Otou’s elephant Gunjai had been dragging during the night. The mark would wander through the forest soils and across piles of fallen leaves. Then a huge fallen log would obstruct our path, and the chain mark would disappear again. “Over there,” Otou would say, pointing. We’d walk for several hundred feet—and the mark would suddenly start once more. Here and there Otou would drag his foot perpendicularly across the chain mark, indicating to other mahouts in the area that this trail didn’t lead to their elephant.