I felt my eyes filling with tears. I tried to blink them back. But it was no good – they kept coming anyway. I sat down beside the river, clasped my knees to my chest and let the tears flow. I was sobbing not out of self-pity or grief. There were no thoughts any more of Mum or Dad. I was crying out of fury and frustration, and hunger too. I buried my face in my hands and rocked back and forth, moaning in my misery.
When at last I did look up again, I saw that the howdah had now become firmly wedged between rocks. It was obvious that there was no possible way I could retrieve it from the river. Without it, I knew I could never ride Oona again. And without Oona how was I ever going to be able to find my way out of this forest, and back to safety? Strangely, it was only now, as I came to understand all this, that I finally stopped crying, and began to calm down and collect my thoughts. If I couldn’t ride the elephant, and if she wouldn’t find me food, then she couldn’t save me. In which case I’d have to search for food myself, fend for myself. I’d have to find another way altogether of saving myself. There had to be a way out of the jungle. There was a way into this place, so there was a way out. I’d just have to find it, that’s all.
Only moments later I knew what I had to do. It came to me as I watched the river running by. It was obvious. Why hadn’t I thought of it before? I’d follow the river downstream. Didn’t rivers always end up sooner or later in the sea? If I followed the river, at least I’d always have water to drink, and I’d be bound to find something to eat on the way – berries, nuts, roots, fish even. I could catch fish. Yes, I’d leave the elephant. That’s what I’d do. There and then I made up my mind. I’d go it alone.
Tiger, Tiger…
ut the very next moment something happened that changed my mind altogether. I was still sitting there by the river when I felt Oona’s trunk touching me softly on the back of my neck. It moved along on my shoulder, snuffling at me, exploring me. I watched it encircling my chest, pulling at me gently, yet insistently. She was turning me round to face her. She stood over me for a moment, looking down at me, groaning at me reproachfully, as if she knew I’d been doubting her, as if she realised I’d been thinking of leaving her.
She began to lower herself down on to her front knees. At first I thought she was probably tired after all her exertions in the river, and was just going to lie down beside me and rest. And indeed that’s what she did, but it soon became apparent to me that this wasn’t because she was tired at all. She was reaching out her trunk again towards me, curling it round my waist and then drawing me in towards her. It took a while for me to understand why she was doing this.
Then I knew what she was trying to tell me. There could be no doubt about it. This had to be an invitation to climb up. She was helping me all the way, nudging me, lifting me, supporting me until I found myself astride her neck, sitting there behind the twin domes of her head. Until now I had only really thought she had one dome on the top of her head, but now it was clear to me there were two.
Oona heaved herself up then, her trunk steadying me all the while, until she was standing upright again on all fours. But without the howdah there was no rail for me to hold. I panicked, and threw myself forward on her neck, clutching it. Then I found Oona’s trunk right there in front of me. She was offering it to me. She knew I had to have something to cling on to. And cling on I did. I dared not let go of it. Terrified she’d take it away, all I could do to make myself feel more secure was to grip hard with my knees and my heels.
But I found my legs were too short and splayed too wide apart, so that any real grip was impossible. If Oona’s trunk wasn’t there to hold on to, if she took it away – and sooner or later I knew she’d have to – I could see I was going to have to rely almost entirely on balance to prevent myself from falling off. I really did not know if I could stay on her once she began to move. And if she started to run, then I knew I’d be in real trouble.
But to my great relief, when Oona did begin to walk on up into the jungle she moved only slowly. She took me on a gentle wander, meandering through the trees, and all the time her trunk was there for me to hang on to. I hung on tight with two hands, because at first, even though she was going so slowly, every step she took was nerve-racking for me.
But after a while, when I found I was still up there, that I hadn’t fallen off, I began to feel my confidence growing. I was already learning how to attune my balance to the rhythm and sway of Oona’s walk. And what I was beginning to sense as well, was that she was adjusting her walk to me all the time, that she was teaching me, helping me, that she would not let me fall. In no time at all I found I was more relaxed, that I was enjoying riding her again. I was beginning to look around me, at the parrots flying through the forest, cawing at me, squawking, cackling, then at the dizzying height of the trees, and the sunlight filtering through.
It wasn’t long before I trusted myself enough to take one hand off her trunk, and for a few moments even two. She left her trunk there for me all the same, which was just as well, because my new-found bravado was more fragile than I thought. More than once, when I became too overconfident, my balance failed me, and I did come very close to falling off. But each time this happened and I didn’t fall, it gave me new self-belief, that I could do this, that I could stay up there, that Oona would always do what she could to look after me.
As soon as the fear of falling left me though, my hunger pains came back, sharper and more insistent than ever now, gnawing at my stomach. And as the hours passed, I began to feel an irresistible weakness coming over me. I could feel that the little strength I had left was fast draining away. I forced myself to concentrate harder, told myself that I mustn’t loosen my grip on Oona’s trunk. But my head was swimming now. I felt I might lose consciousness and slip off at any moment. Sometimes I couldn’t work out whether I was daydreaming or sleeping. I kept imagining I was in the aeroplane with Mum, that I was asleep beside her and dreaming I was riding on an elephant along a sandy beach, with Mum running alongside taking photographs of me, and telling me to smile and wave.
Time and again I came out of my daydream to discover that it was only partly true. I was riding on an elephant, but Mum was not with me. I was in a jungle not on a beach, and I kept wondering where Mum was. I called for her, but she never answered. I was so weak by now that I could barely sit upright at all. I have no idea how long I rode up there in and out of my dreams, only that the sun was above me sometimes and then the moon, that there was rain, and heat, and flies. But always Oona’s trunk would be round me, holding me up there.
Then once when I woke, there was suddenly no trunk to hold me steady, no trunk to cling to. Oona wasn’t walking any more. She was standing still, her ears wafting slowly. With no trunk to hold on to, I took fright at once. I gripped tight with my knees and legs, threw myself forward on to her neck and clung there. It was some moments before I had the nerve to sit up again, and look to see what Oona was doing. All I could see at first was the blinding glare of the sun shafting through the canopy above.
Then I saw them. Figs. Dozens of them, hundreds of them, hanging there above us, and Oona’s trunk was reaching out to wrap itself around a branch and pull it down towards me. Food, food at last! Oona had understood.
For an elephant this may have been an average meal. For me it was a fabulous feast. I gorged myself. Nothing had ever tasted this good, not fish and chips, not the best beef burger in the world. Oona was eating the figs a great deal faster than I was of course, but I was doing my best to keep up, peeling the next one at the same time as I was trying to finish eating the one before, and while still trying to swallow the one before that. I was stuffing them in. Oona seemed quite happy to reach up and pull down yet another fig-laden branch for me whenever I reminded her, and this I did often, again and again until the time came when I knew I could not eat any more.
But Oona’s appetite for figs was insatiable. I looked on in awe and admiration as she stripped the tree of the last reachable fruit. Clearly this had been just a st
arter course for her, because when she’d done with the figs, she set about stripping a nearby tree of its leaves and twigs as well – they all went into the munching machine together. There was a rhythm about her eating that I found almost musical: from tree to trunk to mouth, from tree to trunk to mouth, accompanied all the while by the sound of those great grinding jaws, and a constant groaning drone of contentment from somewhere hollow deep inside her.
All of this did go on for rather a long time, long after I had ceased to find it at all fascinating. Soon I had more urgent concerns. I really did need to get down. I couldn’t put it off for much longer. I kept telling her I needed to go ‘to the bathroom’, as Grandma had always insisted I called it. But Oona wasn’t at all interested in what I wanted because Oona was eating, and I knew by now that nothing was going to interrupt that, that I was in for a very long wait, and there wasn’t a thing I could do about it, except to try to think of something else. But that didn’t work either. Only when she had eaten her fill did she at last pay me some attention, and it was only just in time.
This was one of the reasons why, from then on, as the days passed, and the weeks, as the rains came and went, I chose more and more not to ride up on Oona, but instead to walk alongside her, particularly when the jungle was not too dense around us. Sometimes it looked quite impenetrable, and then I always rode, because nowhere was impenetrable, I discovered, to Oona. Riding up on Oona, or with her behind me, beside me, or ahead of me, I felt no fear whatsoever. She was queen of the jungle, I could see that. The gibbons that swung and sang through the trees seemed to be doing it just for her. Toucans flew overhead from tree to tree above us, an escort in scarlet uniforms and yellow bills. Bright blue peacocks strutted close by, sounding out their raucous fanfare.
In fact the whole jungle, it seemed to me, was welcoming her, celebrating her arrival. Sometimes she would trumpet back her response, in appreciation perhaps, or simply to announce her arrival as she went. Then one day, high, high above us, swinging through the branches of the forest canopy, I saw the dark and distant shape of my first orang-utan, watching us, following us, I thought, keeping his distance.
Like this orang-utan, so many of the forest creatures looked down from a respectful distance, obviously intrigued by this awesome giant that was meandering majestically through their world. But they seemed to understand that her presence among them was entirely benign, that she posed no threat whatever. None of them ran away at our approach. Only the insects – and these came in all sizes and colours and shapes, but all of them, it seemed to me, with an insatiable appetite for blood, whether elephant or human – showed Oona no respect whatsoever. And that was another reason why I so often decided to go on foot, because in the end I found that the further I was from Oona, the less the flies bothered me. But there was a downside to this.
Leeches.
I soon discovered that the more I walked, the more exposed to leeches I became. They would attach themselves to me without my knowing it, mostly to my legs, where they would feed on me surreptitiously, until I discovered them. I learned to loathe these hideous, blood-sucking slugs more than anything in the forest, more even than the flies. They were drinking me alive. I could see my blood pulsating inside them. It disgusted me to have to look at them, and it was worse still to have to deal with them, but I had to, every time I prised them off – I found a sharp-edged stone was the best leech remover. I had to force myself to do it, sometimes several times a day.
Compared to leeches, not even the snakes bothered me, however menacing they looked. Large or small, all of them made way for Oona. One look at her, and they slithered away into the shadows. They were no real trouble. So to walk alongside her was all the snake protection I needed. Even the crocodiles kept their distance. But I did notice that Oona took no liberties with crocodiles. There was mutual respect here. She would always pause, and wait for me to get up and ride on her, whenever we came to a river or a swamp. I needed little persuasion. I recognised by now that Oona knew well enough what was safe for me, and what was not. I had come to trust her judgement implicitly.
As we wandered on ever further, ever deeper into the jungle, the rains came down more and more often, not rain as I had known back on the farm in England, but sudden and, thunderous on the canopy of leaves above me, so loud that the noise of it drowned out all the whooping and whirring of the forest. When it came, both Oona and I were instantly soaked to the skin. We might have been shielded to some extent, by the dense canopy above us, from the full force of each downpour. But if we ever emerged into the smallest of clearings, the rain fell on us with such violence that it hurt. Sometimes it felt more like warm hailstones than rain. In time, I found out that the only effective protection from the ferocity of storms like these was to tear off a great leaf from a tree and hold it above my head like an umbrella. I felt quite clever doing it too. I once told Oona, “I’d do the same for you, Oona, only there isn’t a leaf big enough, is there?”
I talked to her more and more often now. My chatter became a kind of running commentary, a mishmash of all my observations and feelings, jokes even, whatever came into my head at the time. I found that talking to Oona came to me quite naturally. I felt that she liked me to talk, liked the sound of my voice, that she was listening because she liked me to be there, because we had become friends, proper friends who trusted one another.
There was a lot I had come to love and respect about this elephant, especially how nothing seemed to perturb her, or irritate her. Flies she simply dealt with by wafting her ears or shivering her skin. Rain or sun, it didn’t seem to matter to her. Only that once when she had run from the tidal wave had she ever shown any fear whatsoever. Nothing since then had seemed to upset her at all. She ambled on through the forest, aware of every creature around her, and utterly unafraid. I did think sometimes that this might be because her mind was always on her stomach.
Oona was on a perpetual quest for food, browsing constantly as she went, whether in the midst of a downpour or not, her trunk reaching out to explore the branches ahead of her, searching out the most succulent leaves, the ripest fruit. If the fruit on a likely looking tree was too high and inaccessible she’d simply push the tree over, or pull a branch down and break it off. If a fruit was too hard, she’d seem to know how to crack it open, or break it apart, with her trunk or her teeth. No fruit was ever too awkward for her. I loved to watch her trunk at work, almost, it seemed to me, with a mind of its own. I wondered at how skilful and delicate an instrument it could be, how powerful, how sensitive, how infinitely manoeuvrable.
Downpours in the jungle could go on for days at a time, I discovered, and they could stop as suddenly as they had begun. For me this moment always came as a great and welcome relief, leaving the jungle steaming and dripping around us, and slowly finding its musical voice again, all the whooping and howling and croaking, joining together in unison to celebrate the end of the storm. This jungle chorus was so familiar to me by now that I missed it when it was not there filling my head. I felt that the forest was soaking up its own music, as well as all the rain that had fallen, as if it were a living, breathing sponge. There were times now when I thought that in some strange way I was being soaked up too, that I was fast becoming a part of this gigantic, all-consuming sponge.
It was easier to talk to Oona when I was not competing with the thunder of rain. I had long since abandoned any idea of teaching Oona some understanding of English, because I had come to realise as time passed that Oona did not need to know exactly what words meant, but that she understood everything quite instinctively, without the need for language at all. After all, no one had told her the tsunami was on its way. She had just known it, and long before she could ever have seen it too. Without being asked, hadn’t she knelt down for me and taught me how to climb on to her neck, how to ride her, and feel safe about it too?
The more I thought about it, the more I believed that she knew absolutely which fruit was right for me to eat, and therefore which fruit was not,
and maybe what water I could drink too. She had been looking after me all along, not because I’d told her what to do or how to do it, and certainly not because she understood my language. This elephant was knowing. She was intelligent, thoughtful, and deeply sensitive to my needs. It was becoming clearer to me with every day that there was nothing whatsoever I could teach her, that it was in fact she who was the teacher here, not me.
My actual words in themselves might have meant little to her, but I knew for sure that she was listening, and that she understood the feeling behind them, the gist of what I was telling her. That was enough for me. Besides, I needed someone to talk to. And I have to admit that I talked to her also because I liked to hear the sound of my own voice in this place. Everyone else had their voice in the jungle, so why shouldn’t I have mine? I knew I must be repeating myself all the time, but Oona didn’t seem to mind that. In those early days in the forest I would keep coming back again and again to what it was that still troubled me most, despite every attempt to put it out of my mind. It helped me to speak it out, to have someone to tell.
I’d always begin my monologues in much the same way: “Oona, are you listening?” Even as I was saying this, I knew it was a silly thing to say, because she was always listening. “I’ve been thinking a lot, trying to sort things out in my mind, you know? There’s no point in trying to find my way back – I can see that now. What would I go back for anyway? Mum’s not there. I still keep hoping she might be, but I know she’s not. And Dad’s not there. I keep thinking about them and I mustn’t. I keep talking to you about them, and I mustn’t. It’s like Grandpa said – I’ve just got to put a plaster over it, and it’ll get better. He was right about that, Oona; Grandpa was right about a lot of things. I’ve got to put Mum and Dad out of my mind. But then if I do, I’ll forget them, and I don’t want to do that, not ever. They’ll always be my mum and dad.”
The Classic Morpurgo Collection (six novels) Page 26
