But this Kachin mahout was telling me about transport elephants getting there from the other direction: from Burma. It was raining hard as we spoke together inside a cabin. His son, a schoolteacher, was there to translate. The old mahout said that the Chaukan Pass was still the main passageway across the border for riders of elephants—though other, even more isolated passes could be used as well. The Chaukan was especially useful to the Kachin soldiers during the wet summer months. When the rain came, leeches made the terrain totally inhospitable to foot patrols. Riding on pachyderms with thick-skinned, leech-resistant legs, the KIA mahouts dominated the Chaukan environs during monsoon time. As thunder echoed above, the mahout, his son, and I discussed the “great game” of Trans-Patkai geopolitics, and the organization (whose identity I’ve chosen to keep anonymous) that, according to the mahout, was bringing supplies to the elephant-borne rebels.32
Shelby Tucker gives us a good sense of what it must be like for the KIA’s elephant brigade to approach this outpost along the difficult Chaukan paths. Tucker’s elephant escort in 1989 brought him in this direction by following the Tawang Hka watercourse. “With their trunks,” Tucker wrote of the elephants along the Tawang Hka, “they explored the always-tricky bottom before committing themselves, and whenever need arose they were superb swimmers.”33 But Tucker’s elephant-mounted party didn’t actually cross into India. He and his companion Mats parted ways with the Kachin soldiers prior to reaching the Indian border, and the two proceeded the rest of the way on foot. They made use, of course, of that same mountain pass, Chaukan, through which the railway party had fled in 1942, to be rescued by Rungdot and many other elephants in the foothills above Assam.
The history of elephant-mounted movements through the Chaukan Pass stretches even farther back in time. Centuries ago elephant convoys through the Chaukan linked the Hkamti Long kingdom of the Putao Plain in northern Burma with fledgling areas of Hkamti settlement along the Brahmaputra Valley in India.34 Likely, the Hkamti flight from far northern Burma during the Kachin invasions there was aided by elephants through the same passage, as well as through the Pangsau Pass. For anyone without elephants, the pass was an unforgiving upland barrier. But for people with elephants, it was an intercultural bridge, escape hatch, smugglers’ gate, and means of militant revolt, all rolled into one.
AN EASTERN ARC of the KIA’s convoy network branches off from the training camps on the upper Tanai and crosses the Kumon range at Daru Pass.35 Here in the summer months, air blowing from the Himalayas brings in icy mists, which patter fine crystalline hail against tents in the early morning. The route passes by swidden farms lined with coxcomb flowers. From these small hill farms, which shift in location every few years, people grow dry rice, maize, ginger, chilis, gourds, taro, coarse peas, mint, lemongrass, and other mountain-friendly crops. There are jungle deer here, mountain ox, and wild pigs. These animals are sometimes hunted, the meat then left to dry out on pikes in the sun or cooked over slow fires. Mixed with herbs and wild mushrooms, the hill food of the Kumon range can be mind-expanding for visitors.
Beyond the Kumons is the Triangle, and here the convoys pass over the two main feeder streams to the Irrawaddy: the Mali Hka and the N’mai Hka. The convoys then bend their way southward toward China, exiting the range of wild elephants, who find these eastern mountains along the border too high and cold. The convoy route continues along the international border, where the mahouts might cross paths with muleteers from Yunnan.36 Hugging the frontier, the convoy reaches Laiza.
“So the routes make a kind of circle,” I remarked.
Nan considered. “That’s partly true, but it’s misleading, because really the elephants can go anywhere, and the whole point of them is that the Burmese military can’t predict where they’ll be or where they’ll go. A route might be used once and then never again.” Even the mountain passes, he further explained, were not “single point” locations where the Tatmadaw could simply crouch and wait for a KIA convoy to approach. The passes were really fields of many different possible trails across the broad “saddle” of a mountain range. The trails could be many miles apart, separated by especially difficult and isolated jungle terrain. Furthermore, the annual monsoon storms tended to obliterate the previous year’s configuration—as the railway party had discovered to its dismay when crossing through the Chaukan Pass in 1942.
Certainly, this wasn’t a transport circle like Chicago’s Loop or London’s M25 highway. But it was, perhaps, a symbolic circle: a belt enveloping the official Kachin capital at Myitkyina, with branches going toward India, and an eastern terminus at the Kachin “alternative” capital, Laiza, with its jade markets serving buyers from China. During these interviews, Nan had been marking routes with his pencil on my map. The paper now showed a circular pattern. Beneath the penciled-in routes, the original published ink of the map showed a transportation infrastructure as conventionally conceived by a modern state: lines symbolizing the routes of railroads, highways, and country roads. Some of these inked-in lines were, I knew from personal experience, mere projection: the highways were sometimes just dirt tracks, and the back roads might not even be footpaths. But most of the inked routes referred to permanent thoroughfares that were used by motor vehicles for most of the year.
By contrast, the penciled lines, composing a ringlike shape, marked the projection of an alternative kind of power, hovering in the background of the “hard” network of railroads and highways. This alternative was hidden in the shadows of the jungle and rarely acknowledged on maps or in writing. And yet it connected the world’s two most populous nations—India in the west and China in the east—and commanded the movement of significant resources: gems, arms, and timber. The penciled lines conveyed the possibility of clandestine connections between forest communities, and of such secret journalistic tours as those taken by Lintner and Tucker. Motor equipment and road-bound patrols attempting to follow the brigades found themselves blocked by spiraling forces of land, water, and air: the vortex of churning plates and jagged topography where the Patkais crash into the Himalayas; or the swirling veil of clouds and rainfall, which stir a muddy rebellion against the advance of the Ledo Road.
WHY DOESN’T the Tatmadaw use elephants? The Burmese state has, by far, the world’s most sophisticated bureaucratic relationship with work elephants, employing thousands in the government-managed teak industry. Why not send some of those elephants to the Kachin Hills to do patrol work? Then the central military’s patrols would no longer be confined to the region’s sparse network of roads.
The main obstacle, for the Tatmadaw, is the practice of the morning elephant fetch. It’s impossible for an outside power to set up local elephant patrols without having strong loyalties from a local group of mahouts . If the military brought in outside mahouts (say, ethnic Burmese or Karens from the south), they would have to fetch elephants every morning in unfamiliar, hostile forest terrain. If, on the other hand, the military attempted to coerce local mahouts into assisting in patrol work, the mahouts might use the morning fetch as an opportunity to desert. In either scenario, the government patrol would risk winding up stranded in the forest. Nor could the military solve the problem by simply keeping the elephants chained up at night, cutting the morning fetch out of the patrol scenario altogether. The elephants’ daily feeding requirements are just too large: the soldiers on the patrol would have to work day and night to gather the hundreds of pounds of fodder per elephant.
In theory, local political, ethnolinguistic, or religious wedges could emerge among the Kachin Hill mahouts, which could become, at some future stage, substantial enough for the Tatmadaw to exploit. The Hkamti mahouts, who as Nan pointed out have drifted away from the KIA in recent years, are generally Buddhist, while the Kachins are generally Christian. But the Hkamti-Kachin relationship is intricate and complex: the two groups’ histories are interwoven in ways that the present-day religious divide does not at all capture or reflect. At any rate, the Hkamti mahouts seem to want nothing to do with
the central military, preferring to stick to “civilian” elephant work.
Other internal differences exist as well, such as language, but none of these differences has proven meaningful enough for the central military to manipulate for the purpose of creating its own local elephant corps. For the foreseeable future, then, the Kachin Independence Organization will likely remain the world’s only governing body with an elephant-based system of transportation. As the last entity of its kind, the Kachin system presents a model for governments, and quasi-governments, throughout South and Southeast Asia that are looking for ways to incorporate elephants into human-inhabited landscapes. If elephants are to thrive by doing forest work that does not destroy forest cover, the insights of the KIA’s elephant brigades will prove invaluable. Kachin mahouts and brigade leaders like Nan offer rare, irreplaceable knowledge about the elephants’ capabilities and limits. During the rest of this century, the region’s violence will hopefully fade. But usefulness of the elephants, for linking communities separated by jungle and monsoon conditions, need not fade as well.
Chapter 9
FLOOD RELIEF ELEPHANT
I’LL SKETCH OUT ONE HOPEFUL SCENARIO FOR THE ASIAN elephants’ future. This scenario begins, though, with a premise that is perhaps not so hopeful: that the species’ future cannot be secured through tourism or through wildlife preserves. This grim assumption merits some explanation.
For elephant tourism parks to generate revenue, a tourist infrastructure has to be in place: roads, hotels, restaurants, and so on. All this development creates a significant pressure on forests. In 2015 I visited an elephant park designed for tourists in North Sumatra. From the point of view of the elephants, the conditions there were excellent. The park was located deep in the forest. Near the elephants’ large leafy stockade flowed a wide, fast-moving river that the elephants happily walked along every day, both for exercise and to give tourists spectacular forest rides. But this park was a five-hour drive from the nearest city—a mostly industrial metropolis with very little tourist appeal of its own—along poor roads that passed by mile after mile of unattractive palm plantations. The park’s issue wasn’t so much its remoteness, perhaps, as its remoteness from other tourist sites. And due to its isolation, it was not drawing a sufficient number of visitors to expand its operation beyond a mere ten elephants.
An elephant park I visited in Thailand exemplified the opposite problem. Here the park was conveniently set in a city amid other key tourist attractions, which included museums, restaurants, markets, and ancient ruins. The city had a large railroad station and a major bus hub, with convenient connections to Bangkok. It was easy for visitors to get to the elephants, and the elephant park drew many people. The park was making plenty of money and was able to afford several dozen elephants. With more space, it could have had many more—but there was no forest. The same forces and conditions that had made these elephants accessible to tourists, and therefore so profitable, had negated virtually all this particular region’s forestlands, leaving the elephants with nowhere to roam, nowhere to forage for fresh leaves and shrubs, and no wild herds with which to mate. The elephants mostly ate dried fodder, brought to them in barns: the same dietary situation as elephants living in zoos.
Some elephant tourism parks do manage to be a kind of “best of both worlds,” drawing a substantial number of tourists to remote forest locations. A park located outside Chiang Mai, in northern Thailand, is a standard-setting example. But such parks aren’t just rare—they have to be rare. It is the rarity of the experience that makes tourists willing to spend large amounts of time and money to get to such locales. And this is probably the most fundamental limitation of elephant tourism as a strategy of elephant conservation: the more elephants are in such parks, the smaller the revenue-generating capacity of each individual elephant becomes. Where “best of both worlds” parks exist, they are best understood as a reflection of the current rarity of elephants rather than as models for other parks—let alone as a basis for a future re-expansion of the species.
Elephant wildlife preserves funded primarily through the altruism of taxpayers and donors, rather than through tourism revenues, present a somewhat different, though comparable, set of problems. Such wildlife preserves have been most successful in South India, which has a quarter of the world’s remaining Asian elephant population but very little remaining tradition of training and utilizing elephants for work. Most of this region’s elephants live in wildlife preserves—but the preserves exist in large part because the region as a whole has been intensively developed. Large tax revenues from both urban and agricultural economies, combined with a deeper aristocratic tradition, in India, of protecting elephant forests from encroaching farmlands, have created the economic and institutional resources necessary to sustain these preserves.
But the preserves are surrounded on all sides by deforested land and cannot possibly be expanded. The limitation of these wildlife preserves is the same as for well-managed elephant tourist parks. The preserves’ existence, and size, reflects the extent to which local forces of deforestation proved willing to leave a few pockets of forest—of rareness—behind. Creating a comparable system of preserves in, say, the Trans-Patkai region would almost certainly require intensified urban and agricultural development, to create a taxpayer base willing to support the new parklands. Paradoxically, formal forest preservation would require deforestation.
By contrast, elephant-based logging is able to pay for the elephant caretakers’ troubles (that is, the income of the mahouts) without depending upon an expansion of tourist infrastructure, or on adjacent urban and agricultural activities. Nor does it depend upon the elephants’ rareness. Rather, the funding comes from economic activities that give the elephants periods of freedom in the forest. Of course, the logging industry requires periodic destruction of forestlands, but unlike urban development and irrigated mass-agriculture, logging—at least when well managed—does not replace forestlands permanently. Generally, harvested areas are left alone for many decades, to permit new saplings to take root and mature.
Nonetheless, an industry predicated on the destruction of scarce forestlands offers limited possibilities for conservation. Furthermore, as all-weather road networks proliferate, and as the global timber industry gradually converges around motorized methods, the logging industries of Burma and northeastern India may well abandon the timber-skidding elephant altogether.
BUT THERE IS, we know, another vital use for elephants: for transportation across flooded areas. We know this from following Burmay-Moti and Pradip across the Sissiri River near the village of Dambuk, observing the pair’s provision of a monsoon-time “ferry” service for local travelers. We know it from following elephants like Maggie and Rungdot across many swollen mountain river courses in May and June 1942. We traced the path of the Kachin rebels’ elephants across the Irrawaddy River and through forests where the roads were washed over.
In some areas, all-weather roads will make elephants redundant. In recent years, the Indian government has been building an all-weather highway to link the mountain valleys of Arunachal Pradesh, a project that will open many new areas to urban and agricultural development. But even when this project is completed, there will still be large swaths of the state that will be hard to reach during monsoon. The Indian government might be able to “all-weatherize” one or even several road corridors—but to do so with every road, in one of the most rain- and flood-prone areas on the planet, would be a Herculean feat. Thoroughfares would have to be carefully reengineered to permit the runoff of huge amounts of rainfall, elevated above seasonal high-water marks, and buttressed against mudslides. Public works at this scale would be unlike anything currently found in rural and agricultural areas of far wealthier countries than India.1 As for the Burmese side of the Patkai Mountains, roads here are still primitive compared with India. It appears elephants will remain essential to travelers in much of the Trans-Patkai during monsoon.
It should be stressed, here, t
hat some of these communities that become especially isolated during the monsoon flooding do also have other means of flood-time transport at their disposal. In addition to mahouts and their elephants, the Arunachali village of Dambuk has a number of extremely skilled raftsmen, most of them ethnic Adis. On my last day in that remote village, during the monsoon season of 2017, both rivers surrounding the Dambuk environs—the Sissiri and Dibang—flooded. I could not get hold of a local mahout to get me across the water back to the “mainland.” (I had a flight to catch in Dibrugarh.) The village’s taxi service, which coordinates with the mahouts, had learned of a landslide on the Pasighat highway, meaning that with or without the elephant crossing, the trek to Pasighat would still be extremely slow going. The taxi men had determined to wait until later in the week to try to organize transport across the flooding Sissiri. With no fording work to do, the mahouts had all taken their elephants into the forest for the day, for logging or hunting.
I appeared to be trapped. But then some local boatmen offered to take me across the Dibang in their rubber whitewater raft. It was well past the point in the season when rafting would be considered the safe, normal way across. But these Adi boatmen had some experience racing in national whitewater rafting competitions. They were eager to show off their skills.
That crossing was far more dangerous than the elephant ride I’d been expecting. First we rode for twenty minutes on a tractor, with the rubber raft in tow, across a flooding swamp to the river’s edge. Then we bushwhacked sharp thistles and creepers out of our way. Then came the frightening boat ride itself, down and across four white-capped river channels that were heaving with water runoff from the mountains. The channels were broken up by rocky shoals, where we portaged with the raft on our shoulders. It was pouring rain, and wave after wave splashed into the little vessel. By the end of this ordeal, which took about an hour overall, my luggage was soaked through. Nonetheless, the Adi boatmen had proved their mettle.
Giants of the Monsoon Forest Page 19
