Giants of the Monsoon Forest

by Giants of the Monsoon Forest- Living

  Such groups all sought to keep at arm’s length the large agricultural societies that had just displaced them.48 This meant they had to adjust to forest life. But unlike the already established human inhabitants of the forest, they could not base their new lives entirely on hunting and gathering. If they infringed upon the preexisting groups’ hunting grounds, they risked starting a war. So these forest newcomers turned to activities like logging, mining, and portering.

  Now, imagine an elephant like Pagli—the “crazy” female elephant at the Mithong logging area that we learned about in Chapter 2. Imagine that a Pagli-like elephant met such a displaced band of humans in the forest and, rather than avoiding them, followed them, hoping for attention and food treats. Imagine she refused to follow a wild herd. After a period of puzzlement at the elephant’s behavior, the group might choose to befriend her. They might attempt to train her for work—or better yet, they’d try to train one of her offspring, who’d be a better candidate for domestication, being familiar with the humans from birth.

  The forest location of the work would give the Pagli-like elephant and her offspring free foraging time, which would also mean ample mating opportunities. What’s more, if the displaced human group became sufficiently wealthy and powerful, based on its cultivation of forest resources, it might be able to pressure the hunter tribes deeper in the hills, and the farmers farther down the valley, to spare its elephants should they happen to wander into these other groups’ areas. The displaced group might even have the ability to politically counteract further agricultural incursions into the forest.

  In this scheme, then, such Pagli-like elephants, cooperating with displaced or “fugitive” human cultures, would have reasonably good odds of genetic survival—and of producing especially high-performing work elephants, like Air Singh, as progeny. The forest elephants who avoided humans would have decent but lower chances of genetic survival. And the elephants who refused to flee into the forest at all, or who wound up in royal stables or as combat elephants, would have very poor chances of genetic survival.

  Thus, over time, the elephant species as a whole would gradually become more likely to possess traits conducive to the needs of the fugitive cultures. With each passing generation, the elephants would become more cooperative with these humans and more attuned to their practical needs. They would become more dexterous at handling logs, and more agile and ingenious at crossing seemingly uncrossable monsoon rivers with human passengers on their backs—more useful, then, in helping these communities keep the expanding agricultural kingdoms at arm’s, or trunk’s, length.

  And unlike the domestication of cattle or other livestock, all this would take place without the humans ever implementing a plan for selective breeding. Humans would simply catch elephants in the forest, then train them for types of work that created wealth for the community and gave the elephants freedom to wander the forest at night. Other elephant lineages would peter out due to the activities of other human groups. Thus, even without human-imposed selective breeding, a process known to environmental historians as anthropogenic evolution—the evolutionary alteration of a nonhuman species through human activity—would occur.49

  To follow the scheme further: eventually, a powerful agricultural kingdom might see in the nearby hills an abundance of highly trainable elephants and high-quality mahouts. The medieval Burmese kingdoms tended to bring Hkamti mahouts from the northern hills into the royal capital cities to train the valley Burmese in the art of mahoutship. The Burmese royal elephant minister’s main assistants were traditionally Hkamti, and numerous words in the Burmese elephant command system are Hkamti.50 Some kings, especially in India, came to value elephants to such an extent that they began to set up forest preserves for the elephants—thus reinforcing the hill tribe mahouts’ ability to discourage hunters and farmers from killing elephants. Such measures were also put into place, to a lesser degree, in many Southeast Asian kingdoms.51 By contrast, such measures were never adopted in China, where the elephant has almost entirely disappeared over the past two millennia.52

  Adding an extra layer to the dynamic, many kings in South and Southeast Asia likely found their elephants most useful not when these kings were actually in power and keeping their elephants in royal stables, as trophies of prestige or weapons of combat, but rather when the kings were overthrown and fleeing with their elephants into some forested refuge, to become bandit chiefs there—to become “Zomian.” Medieval Asian chronicles and European sources often speak of such kingly escapes: leaders’ absconding from lost battles or palace coups on elephant-back into the monsoon forest. Here too the elephants who bore the kings into the wilderness went from a poor situation for elephant reproduction to a good one.53

  The African elephant faced an entirely different situation. By the first millennium, elephants had been pushed out of North Africa once and for all, primarily because the North African grasslands had turned to desert. Some North African elephants likely migrated south and interbred with the herds there.

  In the sub-Saharan zone, humans were not destroying elephant habitat to anywhere near the same extent as in Asia. This meant that the non-Paglis of the African elephant species had at least as good a chance at survival as the Paglis. The complex dynamic in Asia—where dense agricultural kingdoms were rapidly erasing forestland, thus engendering a kind of unique socio-evolutionary “alliance” between elephants and human groups wishing to flee these expanding kingdoms—simply does not have an analog in Africa.

  The African elephant thus didn’t have to coevolve in tandem with a set of human needs. This doesn’t mean that African elephants wound up less intelligent than Asian elephants or less easy to train. The experiences of the combat elephant culture in North Africa in classical times suggest otherwise, as do the Belgian domestication experiments in the Congo during the colonial period (as do the experiences of modern elephant safari parks in Africa, and of circuses that became adept at training both elephant species for shows). It means, rather, that unlike the Asian elephant, the African elephant’s physical and cognitive abilities never became organized around sustaining codependent work relationships with groups of human beings connected to the resources of the forest. And so rather than sustaining themselves over the millennia, cultures of elephant domestication in Africa occurred far more spasmodically than they did in Asia.

  Chapter 5

  BREAKABLE CHAINS

  THE EPOCH OF THE “COMBAT ELEPHANT” ENDED TWO millennia ago around the Mediterranean and in Southwest Asia. In India and Southeast Asia, the use of combat elephants lasted much longer, up until just a few centuries ago. But the introduction of increasingly powerful guns and cannons to Indian and Southeast Asian warfare brought the era of the combat elephant to an end here as well.

  Yet the story of domesticated elephants was not subsequently disentangled from stories of warfare among human beings. We’ve already seen how important elephants were to people fleeing Burma during World War II. And just as elephants can be instrumental in such escapes and rescues, or in furtive forest work, they also can be useful for rebel soldiers seeking to avoid stronger armies. This use of elephants—for the logistical needs of rebel armies—extends into surprisingly recent decades. Indeed, since World War II, such rebel forces as the Kachin Independence Army in northern Burma, the Karen National Liberation Army in eastern Burma, and the Vietcong in Vietnam have employed elephants for logistics—transporting supplies through the forest, hidden from the watchful eyes of aircraft flying overhead.1

  As we saw in the case of Maggie—the elephant who ferried refugees across the Namyung River during World War II, then disappeared into the wild—“war elephants” who assist in emergency escapes or evasive maneuvering (as opposed to combat) can actually improve their ability to commingle and mate with wild forest herds. But this can bring about a conflict between the elephant’s awakened desire to mate with a new herd and the urgency of the surrounding human situation. A complex negotiation between elephant and mahout can ensu
e. Several accounts—both historical and based on interviews I conducted with Trans-Patkai mahouts in 2015 and 2016—indicate that the fettering chain is a focus of this negotiation, in particular its capacity to be broken. The fettering chain, we’ll remember, binds the elephant’s two forelegs when he or she is roaming at night. The chain is slack enough that the elephant can walk through the forest at an unhurried pace, and tight enough to prevent the elephant from running.

  Yet these chains often break. We saw this occur with Maggie in the forest country beyond the Namyung. Holt Hallett, a British civil engineer traveling with mahouts and their elephants through the Shan States in the nineteenth century, complained of the frequency with which the nighttime fetters failed. The travel party often became delayed as the mahouts wandered through the forest to locate their elephants.2 Tenam, the long-haired Hkamti mahout at the Mithong logging area, told me that Air Singh sometimes breaks his chains. In the same region, an Adivasi mahout named Gudu reported the same thing with his elephant. And a former commander of an elephant brigade for the Kachin Independence Army remarked to me that his elephants would sometimes break their fettering chains, thus delaying the convoy.3

  Why not use stronger chains? I asked.

  Nobody had a clear answer. I began to suspect that the breakability of the fettering chain acts as a kind of safety valve. At times, an elephant’s urge to follow a wild herd becomes so great that the giant might injure himself or herself itself while attempting to shuffle after them. Or due to pent-up spatial and psychological frustration, an elephant might pose a behavioral danger to the mahout the following morning. When the urge is very strong, the elephant exerts an extra amount of force against the fettering chain and—snap!—it breaks. This is inconvenient for the mahout the following morning, and it might be very inconvenient to the larger human operation the mahout is part of. But it helps to sustain the always-tricky balance between the humans’ and the work elephants’ needs.

  That said, in emergency situations, the stakes for the humans might be so great that this inconvenience becomes intolerable to the humans. In such moments, the give-and-take between elephant and mahout can become far more complex. A story from the Vietcong side of the Vietnam War provides a rare window into this sort of negotiation. The story is about a Vietnamese mahout, Xuan Thieu, and his elephant, Pak Chan (which seems to mean, simply, “Pack Elephant”).4

  Xuan was from a forested area of former French Indochina—his account does not say exactly where, but it seems to be someplace near the Truong Son Mountains. During the war, he was assigned to work on the Ho Chi Minh Trail, the Vietcong’s long logistical lifeline. The path wound for hundreds of miles through the rainforest, hidden beneath the cover of leaves, from North to South Vietnam. When Xuan first reported to the trail, he was recruited by an elephant convoy commander, Kien. Xuan was to become a mahout.5

  Xuan was not from a village with elephants or mahouts, and at first the assignment worried him. “I found all sorts of reasons not to accept the new job,” Xuan would later write. “Recalling all this I am still now ashamed of my first reaction.” He regarded the mahouts of the Truong Son as something of an alien group. Everyone bowed to them in respect, but nonetheless their life was secretive. He was under the impression that mahouts were banned from marriage. When pressed to join the brigade, Xuan blushed and insisted he was already married, so he couldn’t possibly take the assignment.

  The superior officer of the elephant brigade, Kien, would have none of it. “I am married too,” Kien replied. “Have you ever seen the sea? You haven’t? I come from the sea. All year round I worked in the salt marshes. I was used to the sun, sea air and wind, not to the forest like you.” Kien, a maritimer, wanted Xuan for his forest skills.

  And with that, Kien presented Xuan with Pak Chan the elephant. He demonstrated the command terms, mostly Tai-derived, and Xuan was astonished to see that the elephant understood Kien’s intentions—as if they were using a special language of their own. Pak Chan eyed the new recruit and waved his big ears.6

  Despite his initial misgivings, Xuan became very close with Pak Chan. The elephant was mischievous but also strong and intelligent: a potential lead elephant of the convoy, if not for his streak of disobedience and troublemaking. Xuan recalled an episode on the southern front where Kien took his own elephant, Pak Ve, across the Mekong on a ferry.

  When my turn came Pak Chan seemed reluctant to get onto the ferry. I urged him on. He leisurely put his trunk on the plank to test his strength. I said to myself: “What strange behavior! Pak Ve has already crossed the ferry, you must follow suit.” I let him carry on. Crack! Unfortunately, he broke the plank in two.

  Pak Chan seemed to have done this intentionally, placing his weight right where the plank was weakest. Annoyed, the ferrymen went ashore to look for another plank. Pak Chan stood by, carelessly watching the boats go by along the river. The ferrymen fastened a new plank in place. Crack! The elephant broke this one too. Pak Chan and Xuan wound up swimming across.7

  Xuan recalls another story, one that illustrates the complex relationship between elephant and soldier-mahout along the trail. It was later in the war. Kien’s elephant Pak Ve had died of pneumonia, and Pak Chan had replaced Pak Ve as the lead elephant of the convoy. Though he was the best elephant on the team, he still possessed a certain flair for mischief. One day he walked through the cassava fields of a tribal minority people in the village of Ta Noi. Xuan decided to punish Pak Chan by chaining him to a barkless ironwood tree. The villagers informed the brigade mahouts that a herd of wild elephants was nearby, so the mahouts decided to chain the other convoy elephants too for the night, to avoid trouble with the wild herd.

  But Pak Chan broke loose! He found a weakness in one of those faulty fettering chains that so often figure in forest mahouts’ tales. The next morning Xuan and several other mahouts looked for Pak Chan. They knew it would be easy to find him if he’d simply wandered off in search of food, and much harder if he’d joined a wild herd. Pak Chan was a male in his prime. But domestic males, unlike domestic females, tended not to join wild herds. More typically they mated with a female and then returned to their mahouts. So even in this scenario, there was hope of retrieving Pak Chan. Looking at their missing elephant’s footprints, Xuan and the other mahouts knew that he was after a mate.

  At last they came upon the elephant, deep in the forest—and sure enough, he was there with a wild female: “Playfully, he was twisting his trunk with that of his mate.” The mahouts hid behind some trees. One of them made a birdcall to get the elephant pair’s attention, and the sound echoed across the ravine. “Pak Chan let loose of his mate, raised his head to listen. He looked perplexed.”

  Xuan cupped his hands and yelled, “Pak . . . Chan! Pak . . . Chan!”

  The gray giant looked “stunned, like a criminal caught red handed, his trunk and ears hanging down.”

  The female, alarmed, darted into the woods. Pak Chan hesitated, and then followed after her. The two animals crashed through the woods away from the humans. This initial attempt to retrieve the lead elephant seemed to have backfired.

  The mahouts stopped to discuss what to do. One of them proposed killing the female, the obvious source of Pak Chan’s recalcitrance. The rest of the circle rejected the idea: “He would probably go wild or grow listless from missing her.” Pak Chan’s feelings and desires had to be taken into consideration. Discussing the matter further, the mahouts determined that they needed to frighten the wild female into the forest without hurting her, but also somehow warn Pak Chan of their resolve not to let him follow her again.

  The next day at around noon they caught up with the pair, who were romancing each other (“romping,” Xuan writes) by a brook. The mahouts waited quietly. Pak Chan and the female finished the activity, and Pak Chan wandered off in search of leaves. This was Xuan’s chance. He approached his elephant again and murmured, “Pak . . . Chan . . .”

  Pak Chan stopped eating and peered at Xuan. At this moment the other
mahouts fired their guns into the air, and the female raced off into the forest. Pak Chan stood still, once again uncertain what to do.

  Xuan walked straight up to him. The elephant “looked straight at me,” Xuan remembered. “His eyes were fierce and tense under the glittering sun.” The other mahouts pointed their rifles, expecting the worst. But Xuan, trusting his elephant, waved them off and stepped closer. “Would Pak Chan be so reckless as to snatch me and throw me down? Frankly speaking, I had never imagined such a situation. On seeing him, I had the feeling he was something of a prodigal son and my anger was overwhelmed by my affection for him. As for him, I was confident that he wouldn’t forget so quickly our times together.”

  Pak Chan looked bashful and tried to avoid Xuan’s eyes. “As I caressed his rough trunk I felt his skin twitch with emotion and heavy tears fall on my cheek and shoulder. He looked sad and depressed.” The elephant let the group of mahouts climb onto his back, Xuan onto his neck.

  “Pei!” said Xuan, meaning “Go.” The mahouts began to relax and laugh together, and hearing this, Pak Chan’s mood improved. The great animal “jerked up his trunk, looking far ahead, and took big strides forward.”8