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Updated: May 28, 2025
The only really dependable elephant that I have ever ridden was a tusker belonging to the Commissariat at Jubbulpur in 1880; this fine male was named Moolah Bux.
Tusker tried, with all his strength to break the ropes, but they only slipped easily around the tree, from which the bark had been taken to make it smooth and slippery for this very purpose. "Be quiet, big, wild elephant," said one of the tame ones with a man on his head. "Be quiet and tell your friends to be quiet also. No one will hurt them.
And Umboo was big enough, now, to get along without his mother. "Were you once living in the jungle, as I was?" asked Umboo of Chang, which was the name of one of the tame elephants. "Surely," answered Chang, "I was as wild as Tusker, your big herd- leader. But when I was caught in the trap, as you were, and sent to school, I found the life here was much easier than in the jungle.
Dermot spoke his name and the elephant turned and went straight to him, to the amazement of the peelkhana attendants watching from behind trees on the hillside. Yet they feared lest his intention was to attack the sahib, for when a tame tusker is seized with a fit of madness, it often kills even its mahout, to whom ordinarily it is much attached. Dermot raised his hand.
This fellow was a small 'tusker, who formed one of a herd in thick thorny jungle. There were several rocks in this low jungle which overtopped the highest bushes; and having taken my station upon one of these, I got a downward shot between the shoulders at the tusker, and dropped him immediately as the herd passed beneath.
The tusker stands still. He looks nowhere, out of eyes like burning cellars. That is as near as you can come with words trapdoors opening into cellars, smoke and flame below. At this moment you are like a negative, being exposed. There is filmed among your enduring pictures thereafter, the raking curving snout, yellow tusks, blue bristling hollows from which the eyes burn.
The ponies, obedient to their riders, had at first bounded forward, but when that frightful trumpeting broke out, and they saw the huge tusker thundering upon them, they were seized with such fear that they stopped and stood still, trembling in every limb. Before their riders could urge them on, the immense brute was upon them.
When the elephants crash their way through the jungle, on their way to the salt, they come to one of the fences. This turns them aside, and they go along until they come to another. Then, just as did Tusker, and his friend Umboo and the other elephants, being between two strong fences, there is only one other thing to do. They can go between them toward the salt spring, or away from it.
But I have not reached that part of his story yet. Sometimes, instead of being made to pile the logs in the lumber yard, Umboo would be taken into the forest, where the Indians cut the trees down. The forest was something like the jungle where the boy elephant had once lived with Tusker and the others, and where he had played, and once been lost.
He had grown fast since I began telling you about him as a baby drinking milk, and now, though of course he was not as large as his mother or father, nor as strong as Tusker, I must not call him "little" any more. "Come, Elephant brothers!" cried Tusker. "We will break down the trap fence, and then we shall be free to go out into our jungle again."
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