At the top of the hill, the mahout strapped a chain to the end of the log. He fastened the other end of the chain to an X-shaped wooden apparatus resting on two cushions along the sides of the elephant’s spine. The duo dragged the slightly contorted piece of red timber along the crest of the hill, until they reached a spot where the bluff below them had no trees in the way. The mahout climbed down from the elephant and unfastened the chain. The elephant, without being prompted, kicked the log into place, so that its narrow point now faced the bluff. “Tih!” cried the mahout, and with a great heave of her forehead, the young elephant pushed the log over the precipice. Down it went! But the slope was so choked with vines that the log became caught about halfway down.
Having watched this process from the top of the bluff, then from the base having scurried down, I thought the log was irretrievable. It dangled in the middle of the cliff, ensnared by roots and vines. But the elephant proceeded to walk, headfirst, down a nearly vertical decline. She kept her hind legs at a crawl and her forelegs fully and muscularly extended at an angle against the bluff face. While the rear of her body slithered along very close to the bluff’s surface, her head was hoisted away from it and leaned at a purposeful angle to create counterweight. As they proceeded, the mahout on her neck leaned farther back to add ballast. But it was really the elephant’s trunk that permitted this extraordinary assemblage to make progress down the cliff.
An elephant’s trunk, or proboscis, is a sublimely powerful, precise, and versatile instrument. It contains nearly 150,000 muscle subunits, or fascicles, which are linked by several long probiscidean nerves that swoop down from the elephant’s dome and face, making their way in sensitive twists and turns to ultimately bifurcate across a series of tactile bristles, or feelers, at the trunk’s tip.2 These bristles are covered in dermal flaps that can perform surgically sensitive actions like cracking open a nut or retrieving a bill from a wallet. At the same time, the trunk can lift objects weighing many hundreds of pounds or break a person’s spine in a few seconds. For millions of years, the trunk was the Elephantidae family’s evolutionary analog, or retort, to Hominidae’s digits. An elephant “gathers in” much of its perceptual world, and makes sense of that world’s possibilities, through the interface of the trunk. This elephant before me, along the cliff of the central Burmese teak hill, was using her trunk as a buttress, brake, steering mechanism, and feeler all at once.
At last the elephant-mahout pair came upon the log, and the elephant used an impeccably timed step forward with her left foreleg to give the upper end of it a swift kick. The log shot forward and crashed down the bluff, landing on the dirt path at the bottom with a tidy thud. Elephant and mahout followed downward, her trunk at times seeming to support their entire combined weight, like a metal spring. At last they reached the bottom. I was stunned by the display, but they were unfazed, apparently having done this many times before.
The creative dexterity of Burma and northeastern India’s work elephants in facilitating movement across difficult forest terrain or forest channels comes up again and again in their recent history. Miloswar, the elderly Moran fandi who told the story of Sokona’s “possession” by a spirit-mahout, told me another story in which he and an assistant were crossing a swift mountain stream during monsoon, atop a female elephant. With them was a young calf, her offspring. The two had been caught in tandem during mela shekar, a difficult feat.
Coming to the rushing channel, the mother hoisted the baby upward with her trunk and rested him so that his legpits were carried by her lower jaw and two small tusks. The female, now carrying a smaller elephant with her trunk and two humans on her back, proceeded into the river. The current was very rough, and the fandi assistant on the elephant’s back lost his footing and fell into the water. He was a poor swimmer, and Miloswar thought he would likely drown. But the mother elephant, despite being freshly caught and still “raw,” grabbed the assistant with her trunk, while keeping the baby pressed against her mouth. She proceeded to complete the ford with the assistant clinging to her trunk, the calf pressed firmly between her tusks and upper jaw, and Miloswar watching from above, amazed. She was only half trained at this time; the old fandi said she was just naturally compassionate. Over the ages, such dexterity and empathy have allowed elephant men like Miloswar to build and maintain relationships with the elephants as work partners in the forest.3
I saw another display of these work elephants’ incredible dexterity along a muddy trail. I was in the Manabum hill range in Arunachal Pradesh, in a logging area the local mahouts call Mithong. Here several powerful local Hkamti and Singpho tribal families held great forest tracts.4 To get to the area, I had ridden in a jeep for an hour past the town of Chowkham, until the road became a dirt track. This track had ended at a sawmill in the forest, and the mill workers were mostly young Adivasi men. The Adivasis had come to this area from central India during the nineteenth century, to work in northeastern India’s expanding tea plantations. Harvesting tea was still their main type of work, but some were out here in the forest frontier for the superior wages offered in the timber industry.
From the sawmill, I climbed into a flatbed truck with massive thick wheels. The truck belched diesel smoke and proceeded along a dry riverbed, the “road” nothing but terrible bumpy boulders. An elephant had set out from the mill with us, a tall mokona male (that is, a male lacking the tusker gene). Like many mokonas, this male had an especially high forehead, which sloped upward and even somewhat forward. He was ridden by a Nepali, another ethnic group associated with elephant work in this area. The mokona and Nepali were making better time along the rocky dry riverbed than the truck. As the motor vehicle bounced and jolted, I watched the elephant disappear up the path in front of us and regretted not having asked to go that way. Eventually the truck reached a muddy path, which split off from the dry riverbed and snaked its way into the forest. Here the truck stopped. I walked with a guide and several lumbermen up this path, stopping on occasion to poke the mud off the soles of my boots. The lumbermen were Hkamti, and their machete scabbards were adorned in elegant carvings. After some twenty minutes, we came upon the front end of another truck, smaller and painted green and yellow. It was tipped at a steep angle: half the vehicle had sunk into the thick black mire that was everywhere along this trail. Beyond the awkward and precarious truck was a massive log, and an elephant.
It wasn’t the mokona elephant from before—that one had proceeded past this site, to a loggers’ camp up the path. This elephant, though also a huge male, was squat and broad. He was a natural tusker, rather than a mokona, but his tusks had been trimmed so that they were barely noticeable. He belonged to the main Hkamti logger who’d brought me here, a long-haired young man named Tenam. “This is Air Singh,” Tenam declared with some pride. “You’ll watch what he can do.” The mahout on Air Singh was Gam, a teenage Singpho-Kachin. With Gam calling a few commands, Air Singh pushed the truck about ten feet with his huge forehead, so the flatbed now faced the log. The truck’s engine was plainly useless for this task—if anything, spinning the axles with the diesel power would just cause the wheels to sink further. At this point I still didn’t see how the elephant was going to get the huge log, from a hollong tree, onto the truck. The flatbed was four or five feet higher than the log, which was fifteen feet long and nearly four feet in diameter and must have weighed well over a thousand pounds.
Air Singh set to work. His first step was to grab a different log with his trunk—a much narrower and lighter log—and carefully lean it against the edge of the flatbed. He did the same with another narrow log, placing it nine or ten feet farther down the long side of the truck’s rear platform. It was a makeshift ramp. Air Singh and Gam studied the two ramp beams’ placement for a moment, and after several seconds, Gam murmured some command term I could not make out. Air Singh adjusted one of the ramp beams. The pair seemed satisfied and turned their attention to the much larger and more valuable piece of timber.
Watching this spectacle,
I still didn’t understand how they were going to push the huge log up the incline. It seemed too big ever to move without a huge bulldozer or a powerful crane. Moreover, on the opposite side of the log was nothing but thick forest; Air Singh had nowhere to stand to get a head start.
Nevertheless, the elephant walked delicately into the narrow opening between the hollong log and the forest edge. As I expected, he couldn’t face the log head on, but then, he didn’t have to. He simply turned and leaned his head into it, gradually creating space for himself, so that eventually he could indeed face the log with his full force. By this point, the constant pivoting had jerked the two makeshift ramp beams out of place. One in particular was now off at a worrisome angle. Several of the lumbermen jumped onto the flatbed and attempted to straighten the beam but it proved too heavy. Gam shouted at them to get out of the way.
With a few quick, skilled motions, Air Singh hoisted the huge hollong log a few inches upward with his trunk and tapped the off-kilter beam back into place with his foot. It was a bit like watching a waiter wipe down a table with one hand while balancing a tray of champagne glasses with the other. The elephant was satisfied that the ramp was ready now. So was Gam. “Agat!” Go for it! The elephant began pushing into the log with his forehead, and Gam, to keep his own balance, leaned back so far that he was nearly lying on the animal’s back.
“My god,” I said, as I know from the sound recording I was making.
“Jesus.” My guide, Kagung, was also taken aback. He was not from an elephant area and had never seen anything quite like this.
Air Singh rolled the huge wooden mass high, high up the ramp. Near the very top, he let out an enormous breathy whoooooooshh! from his trunk, from the sheer exertion. And then—boom!—the great log finally landed onto the truck bed, the suspension coils creaking with surprise. Air Singh calmly removed the two ramp beams out of the way. Once again he and Gam studied the position of the log. Evidently it wasn’t perfectly centered. The elephant gave the log one last push, this time with his trunk. Then several lumbermen strapped the log down with chains, and a driver started the ignition. Air Singh, still not finished, went behind the truck to push it out of the sinkhole. Dislodged from the mire, it gained traction and disappeared down the muddy trail with its log, leaving a large wet pit where it had been stuck. Air Singh cooled himself down by looping his trunk into his mouth and sucking on the trunk cavity’s moisture—a common elephant trick.5
Air Singh was one of the Mithong logging area’s finest work elephants, a favorite of Tenam’s. Back at the sawmill, over a lunch of stewed chicken with potatoes, Tenam told me more about Air Singh’s life. He was named Air Singh, which means something like “Lord of the Air,” because he was born at the Tezu airfield on the other side of the Lohit Valley—a military landing strip that had been cleared by local work elephants during the 1962 border war between India and China. Air Singh’s mother was called Pagli, an Indian term meaning something like “the crazy one.” Pagli had been a wild elephant in the forests beyond the Tezu airfield. But unlike most wild elephants, she liked to come very close to the mahouts’ camp, to help herself to the rice treats left out for the domestic elephants. She would show up during both day and night, spurning her own wild herd, and the mahouts grew accustomed to her. Eventually she mated with a domestic male and gave birth to Air Singh. When the airfield work was completed, Pagli followed the Hkamti mahouts back to their usual woodlands south of the Lohit River, by the Manabum hill range. She couldn’t be trained for work tasks, but she also didn’t want to follow the wild herd. She was a pagli. The mahouts liked her, bringing her treats through her old age. She’d paid them back by producing one of the logging area’s best elephants, after all.6
More often than not, the best logging elephants do not have “pagli” mothers. Rather, they gain their skills during childhood by watching their domesticated mothers at work. Farther up the muddy trail from the spot where Air Singh loaded the massive hollong log lay the forest mahouts’ main camp, and here a mother elephant passed by on her way to some task deeper in the hills. With her was her mahout and also her calf. This is also common at the government-owned logging areas in Burma. The mother does relatively light tasks—hauling smaller logs, carrying supplies, and so forth—and takes frequent breaks to tend to her young. The calf observes his or her mother doing the work tasks and responding to the human command terms, and this supplements the separate training that the calf receives from human masters.
Nonetheless, mothers like Pagli, who show little interest in doing the work tasks, are important for understanding how these elephant-centered forest practices emerged in the first place. Pagli was abnormally friendly toward humans, as compared with the rest of her wild herd. Perhaps unsurprisingly, this unorthodox attitude on her part went hand in hand with a certain antiauthoritarian streak: she spurned the authority not only of her own wild herd but also of the mahouts who wished to train her for work. Pagli elephants are likely an important source of human-friendly traits for the population of work elephants, though they don’t always produce offspring that make fine workers like Air Singh. Tenam pointed out that Air Singh has a brother who ran away from the camp years ago and who becomes belligerent whenever he sees humans approach.7
The dexterity of the work elephants in moving massive logs also finds expression in the water: in particular, in the clearing of river logjams. This dangerous activity has been an especially important component of the government-managed Burmese teak-logging industry, where, in some areas (but fewer and fewer after the 1990s), elephants drag logs not only to trucks but also to rivers. The logs are then floated downstream to waterside depots or mills. Since teak is naturally water resistant, being immersed does not damage the wood’s quality. This method of log transport remains relatively common in Burma’s upper Chindwin Valley. The flaw in the method is that oftentimes the logs get jammed at sharp turns of the river. During the monsoon season, debris, such as fallen branches with leaves, plug the spaces between the jammed logs, and the jam becomes a huge dam. This not only entraps hundreds of valuable teak logs, it also causes dangerous flooding upstream and eventually downstream too. The logjams need to be broken up to prevent danger. This job goes to the most capable elephants.8
U Toke Gale, a Burmese elephant official, saw an elephant perform this dangerous, dramatic work in 1939. Gale was in a northern teak forest that boasted two especially memorable elephants, both tuskers. Swai-gyo, so called because he’d broken his left tusk in an accident, was unbeatable when it came to “handling teak in difficult terrain, like those stranded high and dry on the edge of rocky cliffs, or wedged in between two large boulders.” And Pegu, named for the city near Burma’s coast, was a maestro at breaking up logjams in a jungle stream. Gale remembered how both displayed so much efficiency at his particular branch of work that a local mahout coined a couplet:
On land, it is Swai-gyo,
In water, always Pe-goo.
One day during monsoon, the logging mahouts came upon a narrow bend in the river and found there a confused tangle of logs and debris spanning the eighty-foot breadth of the stream. The jam contained hundreds of tons of floating teak. No mahout in his right mind would go into the jam, Gale noted, due “to the danger of being swept away and crushed to death between the logs” at the moment of the dam’s release.
Pegu was fetched, relieved of his harness, and sent into the water. “Pegu swam cautiously towards the center of the logjam—the muddy waters surging and swirling furiously around him, sometimes submerging him altogether, leaving only his trunk above the water,” Gale recalled. The tusker placed his head against a large log, but the mahout back on shore was not satisfied that it was the “key” log that would break the jam, and he yelled at Pegu to keep looking. Finally the elephant placed his trunk on a log that the mahout thought looked promising. “Hti like, maung gyi! Hti like!” shouted the elephant man above the noise of the current. “Push it over, big brother! Push it over!” The words reached the elephant
’s great ears “above the din of incessant rain and the roar and rumble of a river in spate. Pegu heaved, loosened, pulled, lifted the offending log between his tusks and the trunk.”
When the jam broke, the pile of timber that had stood still a moment earlier “now trembled, creaked, and then moved down the stream with a tremendous force.” Pegu, sensing the danger and knowing he hadn’t a moment to lose, trumpeted and turned around sharply, swimming athletically toward the bank. The procession of logs shooting out from the growing breakage in the jam was catching up with him, but he brushed them aside with his legs and trunk as best he could. The bank was steep, and Pegu couldn’t gain a foothold to hoist himself out. So he went on swimming, hugging the bank, as logs floated past him and hit him on the rump. Eventually he found a small upward protrusion of the river bottom, a boulder or submerged shoal, barely large enough to accommodate his four feet. He was trapped. Etched on his face was “fear, desperation, anger, as log after log raced towards him.” He continued to push them away with his trunk, forelegs, or tusks. Eventually he climbed the steep muddy embankment, to escape the river, the same way the wild elephants witnessed by the Jesuit priest in the seventeenth century ascended the steep mountain slope to escape the king’s kheddah: he got out “using his trunk like a man his hands.”
Now that Pegu was on dry land, his proud head hung low with exhaustion. He was bruised and bloodied on his knees and his trunk. The mahout waited for many minutes for Pegu to grow tranquil, knowing that the elephant, still furious and excited from the river, might charge anyone who dared approach. Eventually he softly encouraged Pegu to come with him, promising boiled paddy and salt back at the camp.9
Giants of the Monsoon Forest Page 5
