June 21, 2018
CHITWAN:
It was just after lunch. The barefooted mahout (elephant driver) jiggled his toes behind the elephant’s ear flaps and the elephant backed up. From where I stood, gazing down from a 13-foot scaffolding, the pachyderm resembled a broad gray boat carefully docking astern.
Looking upward, a corporal gave me the signal to be the first to “mount”, which is probably not the right word. Rather than hoisting up, I stretched one leg out over the edge of the scaffolding and took the long step below – onto the hathi howdah. The hathi howdah (elephant saddle) is a wooden platform. It rests atop multiple blankets and a lampat, (a jute mat packed with straw and covered with a cotton cushion), which protects the animal’s spine. Once aboard, I squatted until I was directed to sidle forward just behind the mahout.
The construction of the square-shaped hathi howdah included a foot-high guardrail connected at the four corners by knobby newel posts. I extended my legs under the guardrail on either side of my designated newel post, then dropped my feet over the top of the elephant’s front left side.
Peering over the mahout’s shoulder, I had a confidential view of his far more comfortable saddle, which was the massive neck of the elephant. The mahout’s legs straddled the thick loose skin. In one hand he held a stick for prodding if a trail situation became serious. His other hand affectionately patted the dome of the animal’s head. I was observing a long-term intimacy between the mahout and his 10,000 companion. At such close quarters, I felt like an eavesdropping alien, which of course I was – and an envious one at that.
Major Purshotum Karki, Officiating Commander of Chitwan's Batuk Battalion, plopped down next to me on the right, followed by two other men, who occupied the back two corners of the howdah. There were three elephants in our armed patrol that day, four soldiers atop each elephant.
Trained elephants can understand at least 30 verbal commands. While we waited for the other elephants to load, Major Karki handed the mahout a brass Nepali coin. The mahout casually flipped it into a nearby clump of underbrush, gave a command to the elephant, who extended its trunk, delicately extracted the coin from the brush, back-curled its trunk and returned it to the mahout’s outstretched hand. Elephant cognition – communication, memory and all the rest – is a thing to behold.
An elephant’s mode of locomotion is equally experiential. Its four-legged stride creates four-directional plunges that can clearly be distinguished by a passenger: front right dip, back left dip, front left dip, back right dip. Rock-and-roll on the rugged side. A vessel on open sea. Believe me, you learn very quickly to stiffen your back and use the newel post as a saddle horn. Mind you, that’s on level ground.
But why, in the modern era of tough-terrain vehicles, does the army still require elephants? (I am aware of the controversy surrounding the abusive treatment of domestic elephants. I witnessed none with the army’s small herd. The animals are very well cared for. And unlike the complaints leveled against the tourist industry, army elephants are not overused. In Chitwan, elephant patrols are limited to two excursions per week.) The advantage of the army having elephants for security operations is two-fold. Obviously, sitting ten feet above the jungle floor greatly improves the soldier’s range of vision and degree of safety. With rare exception, the sheer size of an elephant wards off predacious wildlife. But there is an equally important advantage. Elephants are anatomically constructed to negotiate, sustain and overpower terrain utterly inaccessible to vehicles.
Once we left the main dirt road, which was slightly elevated, we headed down a narrow jungle tract that had been cleared by the army at natural ground level. This was in mid-March, the dry season, and you could see from the tire tracks that jeeps found the road passable. But Major Karki gestured to the dense woodland on both sides of the trail and said that it was treacherous in there. It would worsen with the arrival of the three-month summer monsoon. Much of this area would become either unpredictably sodden – as mushy as a wet sponge – or completely underwater. Ergo, elephants.
If I wasn’t convinced that using elephants was essential, I soon would be.
As if on cue, the elephant ahead of us turned to the left, bullied through some saplings and slowly made a path for itself in the virgin forest. Our elephant followed suit, although it chose a different means of access. Snapping undergrowth became our soundtrack. Tree limbs a dozen feet above the ground mutated into limber whips ready and able to smack us in the face, if we weren’t quick enough to ward them off with our hands.
Adding to the jarring shift was the utter unevenness of the jungle floor. With every leisurely elephant step, the ground seemed to shift or sink. Entangled tree-root systems heaved aboveground. Colossal simal trees, which develop expansive cathedral-like buttresses at their bases, impeded the way. Dense thickets were penetrated by shear force. Gullies and unstable embankments had to be negotiated. Monstrous vines like the strangler fig, twined and looped upward, using larger trees for support until the trees collapsed under the creeping weight. A fallen tree of considerable girth was up ahead. The elephant simple stepped over it.
OK, I got it. The riverine jungle was Impossible for vehicles and dangerous for man on foot. Still, how did the elephant negotiate all the treacherous deviations?
For one thing, an elephant’s foot is designed in such a way that it actually walks on the tips of its toes. In spite of its weight, there’s a great deal of delicacy underfoot. Furthermore – and this has been discovered only recently – their legs work like a four-wheel drive vehicle, making them possibly unique in the animal kingdom. Their "four-leg-drive" system means power is applied independently to each limb, both for acceleration and braking. Elephants set the gold standard for sure-footedness.
The deeper into the forest we went, the more overwhelming the abundance of flora and fauna became. I saw numerous tree species native to the subcontinent: the saj with its distinctive bark that resembles crocodile skin; the lofty Kusum, with its new foliage sprouting in fiery red; the Haldu, which, like the simal has a gothic-otherworldly trunk; and the karam, regarded as the tree of fertility in the Hindu tradition. Now and then, we passed termite mounds with spires ten-feet high. Interlacing the trees were birds of all descriptions, including emerald parakeets, goldenbacked woodpeckers and blackheaded orioles. The most impressive fowl, pecking about the jungle floor, was a wild peacock, scratching around in leaf litter for anything that moved – from ants to poisonous snakes.
I asked the major what would happen if we encountered wild elephants. (The day before, while on jeep patrol, we had gotten word that a wild herd was just up the road and some of the males were becoming restless, if not frenzied. We pulled over until we received word that the herd had moved on.) Major Karki shrugged.
Studies have shown that domestic elephants that escape or are set free have no problem returning to the wild. Encountering wild elephants isn’t usually a problem unless there’s bull in musth. Musth is a periodic condition in which testosterone levels of males can be as much as 60 times greater than in the same elephant at other times. (I flashed on the deadly mood swings of Renaldo, the deranged and, perhaps disconsolate denizen of Chitwan.)
Eventually, the three elephants headed back toward camp, edging toward the narrow tract from which we started. Afternoon sun filtered through the foliage at an angle.
Unexpectedly, my elephant suddenly came to a halt. It uprooted a lengthy broad-leaved plant and stuffed it into its mouth. I peered over the shoulder of the mahout and checked his bare feet: They remained motionless under the earflaps, apparently content with his companion’s impromptu snack.
A few feet beyond and above my head, something flashed. I looked up. It was a sprawling cobweb quivering from tree-filtered sunlight. Toward the top of the web was a golden orb web spider with a very impressive wingspan. The elephant plucked another plant from the earth. I reached for my iphone, intending to take a photo of the spider. But then I noticed something else behind the spider’s home: CCTV surveillance was attached to a sal trunk 15 feet above the jungle floor. I was the observer being technologically observed. Should I wave to the guys monitoring things back at JCOC? Too late: My ride suddenly flapped his ears and plunged forward, taking me beyond the digital eyes of the forest.
to be continued...
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