Giants of the Monsoon Forest
Page 8
Russell’s memoirs, recalling his own group’s journey from Mohnyin through the Pangsau Pass and into safety in India, is a remarkable piece of writing, rich with drama as well as classical and biblical allusion. Entitled Muddy Exodus, its references to the ancient Israelites’ flight out of Egypt and across the Red Sea loom large. Russell refers to his party’s march across the Hukawng Valley toward the Pangsau Pass as a trek “down the old slave road”—for “down this road had come, in past years, the Kachin slaves who had escaped from their masters in the Valley.”16
Russell’s party was small, some half-dozen people who were colleagues from his hospital or evacuees from Myitkyina whom he’d met along the Hukawng Valley trail. Many other parties of evacuees were marching toward the Pangsau Pass as well—on the trail Russell met Karens, Kachins, and Burmese, along with Britons and Indians.17 The Hukawng Valley itself was something of a terra incognita for colonists. The colonial commercial interests had never considered the area profitable for teak, nor was it along a corridor that naturally linked two railway hubs. The Hukawng Valley was, perhaps, less out of the way than the Putao Plain, but colonial administrators had always given the latter more attention, perhaps because of the way it jumped out on a topographic map of Burma. While the British had developed an important base in Putao Plain, Fort Hertz, there was no similar outpost in the Hukawng Valley. Hukawng was an easy place to overlook. Many people here kept domesticated elephants. There were also large herds of wild elephants and prides of tigers.
Due to its setting, the valley was especially flood-prone. “Before our journey ended,” Russell would write, “we were destined to learn a good deal about mud, of different qualities.” During the torrential downpours,
the path became a rushing cataract of yellow water, each great footprint left by an elephant, a deep puddle. On the slopes, it was difficult to stand; one looked desperately for any projecting root or stump, against which to place the foot, or for any overhanging branch or bamboo, by which to haul oneself up.
Conditions did not improve during the brief letups between storms. The mud was so sticky and glutinous that, as Russell put it, “one learnt to sympathize heartily with a fly on a fly-paper.”18 This adhesive type mud stuck to the travelers’ boots, which took on a new stratum of mud with each step, until eventually the boots came off from the sheer weight of the mud. Some tried tying their shoes in place with string or canvas, but these wraps disintegrated or unraveled from the water and the friction of the march. Others gave up and went barefoot. But there were leeches, which released anticoagulants into the skin. This allowed bitemarks to become open wounds, which led to dangerous infections from dirt and dung.19
Another traveler through this pass described the grim milieu:
As we trudged through the jungle, in dark overgrown places which for thousands of years had remained undisturbed, I felt a strange feeling of insecurity among those stately, wicked, bearded trees which seemed to conspire with their long-clawed parasitical creepers to seize our clothing. . . . The rain pattered down as hard as ever. . . . The soggy drenched ground was churned into numerous muddy pits.20
But the transport elephants along the road had no problem with the mud. Their feet contracted along a complex pattern of musculature, allowing their legs to sink down several inches through the mire, to a point where it was neither slippery nor sticky. Here the toes would expand for stability. Every elephant performed this maneuver instinctively and automatically with each step. They’d practiced it with every passing generation since being pushed out of the grassy valleys of India and China and into these rainy hills, thousands of years ago.21 The elephants were a bright spot in an otherwise bleak and frightening march. The Russell party had with them a female elephant named Maggie, or magwi, the Kachin word for elephant.22
Approaching the Pangsau Pass, Russell passed by morbid scenes. Next to wrecked trucks huddled groups of the injured. Elephants were sometimes employed in turning the trucks upright or in pulling them out of the mud.23 Mostly the vehicles were abandoned. The track was increasingly less usable for such machines as the journey went on. A recent “cyclonic storm” had torn a narrow lane through the jungle, felling huge timbers and blocking the path.24 Around this area, the Hukawng Valley’s main river, the Tanai, forces its way through a narrow gorge in the Patkai foothills—an obstruction that causes a greater part of the lower valley to flood during the rains, and the rains were already falling heavily.
On the approach to this gorge, the marchers encountered fewer trucks. Russell now saw only other weary refugees, some mules (who like the humans struggled in the mud, their hooved legs sinking into the earth like signposts), and elephants. A group of some thirty timber elephants came up from behind Russell’s group on the road and overtook them. They’d been marched to this spot from some timber area to the southeast that had fallen into Japanese hands, Russell supposed. Likely, they were being taken to the Pangsau Pass to assist in evacuations and to carry supplies for the initial stages of the all-weather Ledo Road, whose construction, it was hoped, could help turn the tide of the war. The elephant herd came to a large, rumbling river and waded to a broad sandbank in the middle of the channel. Beyond the sandbank, the current became much swifter. A great tusker led the way, and some of the bolder elephants followed, swimming through the oncoming rush of the current. But many elephants stayed put on the sandbank, some looking back to the east from whence they came. In all, only half completed the crossing. The rest “strode into the further jungles and were seen no more,” going over into the wild.25
The refugees continued through more Kachin villages where fellow refugees occupied every available foot of space. The mud was worse than ever. Maggie was heavily laden and breathing hard through the ascent through the hills. The Russell party heard rumors (that “curled over the hillsides like the mists”) that a recent rainfall had rendered the upcoming Namyung River uncrossable, “a swelling Jordan.” This was the river that the airdropped leaflet had promised could be crossed by a suspension bridge. There was none to be found. In a scene mirroring that of the railway party at the confluence of the Dapha and the Dihing, hundreds of people were stranded at the Namyung. Some built makeshift bamboo rafts and tried to get across that way. The rafts capsized or broke apart, and the passengers either struggled back to shore or were lost in the current.26
Russell and his fellow travelers arrived at this ford. The place was called Tagap. Upon seeing the condition of the river, Maggie’s Kachin mahout refused to go any farther. Like the porters who’d refused to proceed to the Chaukan Pass, this mahout had family back in the Kachin Hills. He saw that crossing through the mountains would strand him in India for many months. Before he left to return back to Burma, he did his best to teach Russell and his colleagues the needed command terms for Maggie. “We were determined to do our best to drive her ourselves,” Russell later wrote. “But the real difficulty was the finding of Maggie in the early morning.” They considered tying her up at night, against custom, but realized they wouldn’t be able to fetch enough food for her. Releasing her at night was the only option, yet the party hadn’t any idea how to do it. “The situation seemed hopeless”—when another refugee, an ethnic Burmese, happened to arrive at the Tagap ford. The man had owned and ridden elephants earlier in his life and agreed to drive and ride Maggie into Assam.
Now joined by the Burmese mahout, Russell’s small party waited for calm weather and, when it arrived, made the river crossing borne by Maggie. Wishing to help the hundreds of people still stranded on the other bank, Russell and his fellow travelers then spent the day riding Maggie up and down nearby slopes to fetch cane from the surrounding woods. From the gathered cane, they wove a very long rope. Recrossing the Namyung, they linked their rope to trees on both sides of the river, so that other refugees, lacking elephants, could at least have a chance of hoisting themselves across by hand. It was a fine idea, but they could not fully fasten the line, and a group of refugees became stranded midway across the rive
r.27
“This was to prove Maggie’s finest hour,” Russell recalled. The powerful elephant, already exhausted from the climb through the mountains, returned again and again for more passengers and their bags of food and supplies—loading men, women, and children, “ever returning for another burden.” Russell described her combination of perseverance and acute situational awareness over the course of these labors. At one point, while stepping down a slope toward the river, she stiffened, refusing to take another step. The Burmese mahout above her, and several other humans, yelled for her to move. She wouldn’t budge. Investigating the path, those present realized that it had become dangerously undercut by the water. Another step, and it would collapse under her bulk. Maggie had detected the problem well before the humans did. They found a different path.
At another point, while crossing the river, the mahout noticed a group of women who were stranded midstream. There they huddled together, clearly overwhelmed and exhausted, and the current seemed likely to sweep them off their feet at any moment. The mahout, yelling, steered Maggie in the women’s direction. Maggie intuited what was needed. She waded alongside the women, on their upstream side, breaking the current. She then proceeded across the river more slowly than usual, so the women could follow along in this pocket of tranquillity.28
Everywhere the scene was full of life and death and mist and mud. There were wounded soldiers on one bank, from the China front, the smell of whose wounds filled the air. Elsewhere a woman was in labor. “The poor family had been on the move from faraway Lashio,” Russell would write. “The third member had decided to enter this unfriendly world at a most inopportune time.”29 Grateful for some way to be useful, Russell fetched what medical instruments he could—a knife, a piece of parachute cord, a bottle of rainwater—and assisted in delivering the child, a girl. Russell called the crossing a “jungle Styx,” a reference to the river in Greek mythology separating the worlds of the living and the dead.30
THE SAME WEEK that Russell and his party finally traversed the Pangsau Pass, the railway party refugees camped beneath Chaukan. Without elephants, the party was trapped at the deluged confluence of the Dihing and Dapha rivers, deep in the Patkai wilderness.
Somehow an SOS would have to reach one of the British stations farther down the Dihing Valley. The Nung porters proposed that somewhere upstream on the Dapha, there was likely still a wadable crossing point. However, as the monsoon worsened, the location of that crossing would surely migrate farther and farther upstream. During the high monsoon months of July and August, it might disappear altogether. A small group of healthy men might be able to “catch” that last crossable point, before it retreated up into the high mountains. Then this group could walk into Assam and deliver the SOS. Two British men, Leyden and Millar, went to find this last crossing, along with a dozen of the Nung porters.
From the records, one gets a strong sense that the real leaders of this SOS mission were the Nungs (none of whose names appear to have been recorded), and Leyden and Millar were sent along simply to give the message a veneer of credibility when, hopefully, they reached a British station down in the valley.31 And it was indeed one of the Nungs who found that hypothesized last crossable point. The SOS party had already hiked a day’s trek from the main camp of refugees, when a Nung who’d run up ahead returned to them with bad news to report. The river ahead was mostly rapids, full of dangerous rocks and debris. There was a waterfall and precipice eventually, and the advance scout thought it likely that above the waterfall the river would be gentle. But it would take another full day’s march to get up the precipice and another day to get down, and the SOS party was already exhausted and half-starving.32
Suddenly another Nung was at the river below, wading across—barely. For much of the crossing, the man permitted himself to be swept along a bit by the current. But by keeping his feet pressed against the rocks and periodically pushing off at an angle, he made progress and reached the opposite bank. Having achieved this, he made his way back toward the rest of the party, which had been watching him with amazement. The party then formed a human chain and crossed together. This was likely the last day that year that such a crossing over the Dapha River was feasible.33
The Leyden and Millar party delivered their SOS at a British station called Simon in early June. The message was handed off to the British official responsible for organizing work elephants in the area, a tea planter named Gyles Mackrell. During May, Mackrell had coordinated the mobilization of elephants from Assam up toward the Pangsau Pass area. These elephants were there to help Pangsau refugees cross the difficult fords near the pass, especially at the Namyung River. Upon learning of the party trapped at the Dapha-Dihing confluence near the Chaukan Pass, Mackrell organized a rescue convoy of one hundred elephants. The elephants were hired from Kachin and Hkamti chiefs in the Dihing and Lohit valleys.
The rescue party set off toward the Chaukan Pass. The elephants, as usual, were permitted to roam for fodder at night. At one point on their way up the Dihing, the rescue convoy crossed paths with a herd of wild elephants, and a work elephant absconded with the wild group. But mostly the elephants remained focused on the task at hand.34
The rescue team reached the river confluence on June 9. A large group of refugees could be seen on the opposite shore, waving, their shouts drowned out by the roar of the river. But this was not the entirety of the railway party. Desperate and starving to death, the group had split into multiple smaller parties, mostly along linguistic lines. Anglos, Sikhs, Gurkas—everybody was spread out in the soggy wet forest, looking for safe passage and for food. None of the splinter parties had found a way across the river.35 Mackrell’s rescue convoy would have to find as many of these lost parties as they could.
But first, the convoy would have to cross the Dapha. The conditions along the river were far worse than when the SOS party had departed two weeks before. The river’s white-capped waves produced a deafening roar. Furious collisions between unstable boulders and drifting logs created billowing clouds of white mist. The elephants hesitated. Mackrell demanded that the convoy’s best elephant be summoned, a huge tusker named Rungdot. The previous month Mackrell had been with Rungdot in a similar, if less intense, situation at a river called the Namphuk, near Ledo. Here a rainstorm had swept away a cane suspension bridge. The other elephants had followed Rungdot’s lead across the ford.36 Rungdot was now asked to do the same thing, at a much larger river, leading a much bigger group of elephants, with hundreds of human lives at stake.
Mackrell, incredibly, had brought a movie camera with him, and he filmed the efforts of a large tusker, likely Rungdot.37 In the footage, the tusker and his mahout can be seen stepping into large undulating waves. The elephant leans his head into the current for stability, while the mahout, soaking wet, clings to the elephant’s neck, communicating entirely with foot-taps to the ears, as the thundering noise of the rapids must have drowned out speech.38 Mackrell indicates in his notes that this particular moment caught on film was not a successful crossing, and that the elephant and mahout had to wait until the weather calmed to try the ford again. Rungdot finally got across the next morning, and the other elephants followed, just as Mackrell had anticipated.39 Soon Rungdot and the elephant convoy ferried dozens of people at the encampment to safety.
The rescue still wasn’t over. The many splinter parties that had abandoned the main refugee group still had to be found. Over the remainder of the summer, the site at the river confluence became a sprawling elephant camp, a logistical nerve center for the rescue operation. One wartime writer whimsically called this camp “Paradise Regained.”40 The rescue team needed the elephants not only to ferry people across the rough current of the river but also to carry search parties in the surrounding forest and to retrieve supply crates dropped by plane.41 These heroic efforts mitigated the scope of the disaster but could not recover everybody. A large fraction of the original railway party—apparently as much as a third—was never accounted for.42
THE RECORDS from the Chaukan rescue provide precious little information about Rungdot, and nothing at all about Rungdot’s mahout. Mackrell’s notes refer in passing to the mahout as an ethnic Hkamti, but the British tea planter’s understanding of tribal affiliations seems blurry. Mackrell sometimes used the ethnonym “Mishmi” as a blanket term for the local porters and trackers, and “Kamti” as a blanket term for the mahouts.43 He does not mention the Kachins at all (or Singphos, as they likely would be called in that region).
According to tribal elephant mahouts living in the Chaukan region today, the mahouts who went with Mackrell were all Kachin and Hkamti.44 Furthermore, Rungdot was certainly a Kachin elephant, lent by a Singpho-Kachin chief, Bisa. The Bisa family is still influential in the region. I visited their main house, in the tea gardens beyond Ledo, in January 2016. The Bisa elder who greeted me, Bisa Laknung, was the grandson of Bisa Jonga, the man who lent Rungdot and many other elephants to Mackrell for the huge rescue operation. The Bisas are the kind of powerful local tribal family without whose help the rescue would have been utterly impossible. It’s said that the Bisas first attained power in the seventeenth century, by offering refuge to a deposed monarch, Gadadhar, from the Ahom kingdom farther down the Brahmaputra Valley. Gadadhar rebuilt his strength in the Singpho Hills and eventually retook power in the Ahom kingdom. The Bisas were rewarded with royally mandated landlord status in the Singpho Hills. During the nineteenth century, the Bisas reinvigorated their privileged political position in the area by helping the British establish tea plantations along the Old Dihing River. (The river bifurcates into a new and an old branch after it exits the Patkai Mountains at Miao.) Under the British they became formal majumdars, tribal leaders responsible for collecting revenues from the surrounding hills.45