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D. Thomas Curtin - "The Land of Deepening Shadow"

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Various - "The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 14,"

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O Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1919 by Various

V >> Various >> O Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1919




They would have long talks together, that is, Langur would talk and
Muztagh would mumble. "Little calf, little fat one," the man would say,
"can great rocks stop a tree from growing? Shall iron shackles stop a
prince from being king? Muztagh--jewel among jewels! Thy heart speaks
through those sleepless eyes of thine! Have patience--what thou knowest,
who shall take away from thee?"

But most of the mahouts and catchers noticed the rapidity with which the
little Muztagh acquired weight and strength. He outweighed, at the age
of three, any calf of his season in the encampment by a full two hundred
pounds. And of course three in an elephant is no older than three in a
human child. He was still just a baby, even if he did have the wild
tuskers' love of liberty.

"Shalt thou never lie the day long in the cool mud, little one? Never
see a storm break on the hills? Nor feel a warm rain dripping through
the branches? Or are these matters part of thee that none may steal?"
Langur Dass would ask him, contented to wait a very long time for his
answer. "I think already that thou knowest how the tiger steals away at
thy shrill note; how thickets feel that crash beneath thy hurrying
weight! A little I think thou knowest how the madness comes with the
changing seasons. How knowest thou these things? Not as I know them, who
have seen--nay, but as a king knows conquering; it's in thy blood! Is a
bundle of sugar-cane tribute enough for thee, Kumiria? Shall purple
trappings please thee? Shall some fat rajah of the plains make a beast
of burden of thee? Answer, lord of mighty memories!"

And Muztagh answered in his own way, without sound or emphasis, but
giving his love to Langur Dass, a love as large as the big elephant
heart from which it had sprung. No other man could even win his
friendship. The smell of the jungle was on Langur Dass. The mahouts and
hunters smelt more or less of civilization and were convinced for their
part that the disposition of the little light-coloured elephant was
beyond redemption.

"He is a born rogue," was their verdict, and they meant by that, a
particular kind of elephant, sometimes a young male, more often an old
and savage tusker alone in the jungle--apart from the herd. Solitariness
doesn't improve their dispositions, and they were generally expelled
from a herd for ill-temper to begin with. "Woe to the fool prince who
buys this one!" said the grey-beard catchers. "There is murder in his
eyes."

But Langur Dass would only look wise when he heard these remarks. He
knew elephants. The gleam in the dark eyes of Muztagh was not
viciousness, but simply inheritance, a love of the wide wild spaces that
left no room for ordinary friendships.

But calf-love and mother-love bind other animals as well as men, and
possibly he might have perfectly fulfilled the plans Dugan had made for
him but for a mistake the sahib made in the little calf's ninth year.

He sold Muztagh's mother to an elephant-breeder from a distant province.
Little Muztagh saw her march away between two tuskers--down the long
elephant trail into the valley and the shadow.

"Watch the little one closely to-night," Dugan Sahib said to his mahout.
So when they had led him back and forth along the lines, they saw that
the ends of his ropes were pegged down tightly. They were horsehair
ropes, far beyond the strength of any normal nine-year-old elephant to
break. Then they went to the huts and to their women and left him to
shift restlessly from foot to foot, and think.

Probably he would have been satisfied with thinking, for Muztagh did not
know his strength, and thought he was securely tied. The incident that
upset the mahout's plans was simply that the wild elephants trumpeted
again from the hills.

Muztagh heard the sound, long drawn and strange from the silence of the
jungle. He grew motionless. The great ears pricked forward, the whipping
tail stood still. It was a call never to be denied. The blood was
leaping in his great veins.

He suddenly rocked forward with all his strength. The rope spun tight,
hummed, and snapped--very softly indeed. Then he padded in silence out
among the huts, and nobody who had not seen him do it would believe how
silently an elephant can move when he sees fit.

There was no thick jungle here--just soft grass, huts, approaching dark
fringe that was jungle. None of the mahouts was awake to see him. No
voice called him back. The grass gave way to bamboo thickets, the smell
of the huts to the wild, bewitching perfumes of the jungle.

Then, still in silence, because there are decencies to be observed by
animals no less than men, he walked forward with his trunk outstretched
into the primordial jungle and was born again.


III

Muztagh's reception was cordial from the very first. The great bulls of
the herd stood still and lifted their ears when they heard him grunting
up the hill. But he slipped among them and was forgotten at once. They
had no dealings with the princes of Malay and Siam, and his
light-coloured coat meant nothing whatever to them. If they did any
thinking about him at all, it was just to wonder why a calf with all the
evident marks of a nine-year-old should be so tall and weigh so much.

One can fancy that the great old wrinkled tusker that led the herd
peered at him now and then out of his little red eyes and wondered. A
herd-leader begins to think about future contestants for his place as
soon as he acquires the leadership. But _Hai!_ This little one would not
have his greatest strength for fifteen years.

It was a compact, medium-sized herd--vast males, mothers, old-maid
elephants, long-legged and ungainly, young males just learning their
strength and proud of it beyond words, and many calves. They ranged all
the way in size from the great leader, who stood ten feet and weighed
nearly nine thousand pounds, to little two-hundred-and-fifty-pound
babies that had been born that season. And before long the entire herd
began its cautious advance into the deeper hills.

The first night in the jungle--and Muztagh found it wonderful past all
dreams. The mist on his skin was the same cool joy he had expected.
There were sounds, too, that set his great muscles aquiver. He heard the
sound that the bamboos make--the little click-click of the stems in the
wind--the soft rustle and stir of many leafy tendrils entwining and
touching together, and the whisper of the wind over the jungle grass.
And he knew because it was his heritage, what every single one of these
sounds meant.

The herd threaded through the dark jungle, and now they descended into a
cool river. A herd of deer--either the dark sambur or black buck--sprang
from the misty shore-line and leaped away into the bamboos. Farther
down, he could hear the grunt of buffalo.

It was simply a caress--the touch of the soft, cool water on his flanks.
Then they reared out, like great sea-gods rising from the deep, and
grunted and squealed their way up the banks into the jungle again.

But the smells were the book that he read best; he understood them even
better than the sounds of green things growing. Flowers that he could
not see hung like bells from the arching branches. Every fern and every
seeding grass had its own scent that told sweet tales. The very mud that
his four feet sank into emitted scent that told the history of
jungle-life from the world's beginnings. When dawn burst over the
eastern hills, he was weary in every muscle of his young body, but much
too happy to admit it.

This day was just the first of three thousand joyous days. The jungle,
old as the world itself, is ever new. Not even the wisest elephant, who,
after all, is king of the jungle, knows what will turn up at the next
bend in the elephant trail. It may be a native woodcutter, whose long
hair is stirred with fright. It may easily be one of the great breed of
bears, large as the American grizzly, that some naturalists believe are
to be found in the Siamese and Burman jungles. It may be a herd of wild
buffalo, always looking for a fight, or simply some absurd
armadillo-like thing, to make him shake his vast sides with mirth.

The herd was never still. They ranged from one mysterious hill to
another, to the ranges of the Himalayas and back again. There were no
rivers that they did not swim, no jungles that they did not penetrate,
no elephant trails that they did not follow, in the whole northeastern
corner of British India. And all the time Muztagh's strength grew upon
him until it became too vast a thing to measure or control.

Whether or not he kept with the herd was by now a matter of supreme
indifference to him. He no longer needed its protection. Except for the
men who came with the ropes and guns and shoutings, there was nothing in
the jungle for him to fear. He was twenty years old, and he stood nearly
eleven feet to the top of his shoulders. He would have broken any scales
in the Indian Empire that tried to weigh him.

He had had his share of adventures, yet he knew that life in reality had
just begun. The time would come when he would want to fight the great
arrogant bull for the leadership of the herd. He was tired of fighting
the young bulls of his own age. He always won, and to an elephant
constant winning is almost as dull as constant losing. He was a great
deal like a youth of twenty in any breed of any land--light-hearted,
self-confident, enjoying every minute of wakefulness between one
midnight and another. He loved the jungle smells and the jungle sounds,
and he could even tolerate the horrible laughter of the hyenas that
sometimes tore to shreds the silence of the grassy plains below.

But India is too thickly populated by human beings for a wild elephant
to escape observation entirely. Many natives had caught sight of him,
and at last the tales reached a little circle of trackers and hunters in
camp on a distant range of hills. They did not work for Dugan Sahib, for
Dugan Sahib was dead long since. They were a determined little group,
and one night they sat and talked softly over their fire. If Muztagh's
ears had been sharp enough to hear their words across the space of
hills, he wouldn't have gone to his mud-baths with such complacency the
next day. But the space between them was fifty miles of sweating jungle,
and of course he did not hear.

"You will go, Khusru," said the leader, "for there are none here half so
skilful with horsehair rope as you. If you do not come back within
twelve months we shall know you have failed."

Of course all of them knew what he meant. If a man failed in the effort
to capture a wild elephant by the hair-rope method, he very rarely lived
to tell of it.

"In that case," Ahmad Din went on, "there will be a great drive after
the monsoon of next year. Picked men will be chosen. No detail will be
overlooked. It will cost more, but it will be sure. And our purses will
be fat from the selling-price of this king of elephants with a white
coat!"


IV

There is no need to follow Khusru on his long pursuit through the
elephant trails. He was an able hunter and, after the manner of the
elephant-trackers, the scared little man followed Muztagh through jungle
and river, over hill and into dale, for countless days, and at last, as
Muztagh slept, he crept up within a half-dozen feet of him. He intended
to loop a horsehair rope about his great feet--one of the oldest and
most hazardous methods of elephant-catching. But Muztagh wakened just in
time.

And then a curious thing happened. The native could never entirely
believe it, and it was one of his best stories to the day he died. Any
other wild tusker would have charged in furious wrath, and there would
have been a quick and certain death beneath his great knees. Muztagh
started out as if he had intended to charge. He lifted his trunk out of
the way--the elephant trunk is for a thousand uses, but fighting is not
one of them--and sprang forward. He went just two paces. Then his little
eyes caught sight of the brown figure fleeing through the bamboos. And
at once the elephant set his great feet to brake himself, and drew to a
sliding halt six feet beyond.

He did not know why. He was perfectly aware that this man was an enemy,
jealous of his most-loved liberty. He knew perfectly it was the man's
intention to put him back into his bonds. He did not feel fear,
either--because an elephant's anger is too tremendous an emotion to
leave room for any other impulse such as fear. It seemed to him that
memories came thronging from long ago, so real and insistent that he
could not think of charging.

He remembered his days in the elephant lines. These brown creatures had
been his masters then. They had cut his grass for him in the jungle, and
brought him bundles of sugar-cane. The hill people say that the elephant
memory is the greatest single marvel in the jungle, and it was that
memory that saved Khusru then. It wasn't deliberate gratitude for the
grass-cutting of long ago. It wasn't any particular emotion that he
could reach out his trunk and touch. It was simply an impulse--another
one of the thousand mysteries that envelop, like a cloud, the mental
processes of these largest of forest creatures.

These were the days when he lived apart from the herd. He did it from
choice. He liked the silence, the solitary mud-baths, the constant
watchfulness against danger.

One day a rhino charged him--without warning or reason. This is quite a
common thing for a rhino to do. They have the worst tempers in the
jungle, and they would just as soon charge a mountain if they didn't
like the look of it. Muztagh had awakened the great creature from his
sleep, and he came bearing down like a tank over "no man's land."

Muztagh met him squarely, with the full shock of his tusks, and the
battle ended promptly. Muztagh's tusk, driven by five tons of might
behind it, would have pierced a ship's side, and the rhino limped away
to let his hurt grow well and meditate revenge. Thereafter for a full
year, he looked carefully out of his bleary, drunken eyes and chose a
smaller objective before he charged.

Month after month Muztagh wended alone through the elephant trails, and
now and then rooted up great trees just to try his strength. Sometimes
he went silently, and sometimes like an avalanche. He swam alone in the
deep holes, and sometimes shut his eyes and stood on the bottom, just
keeping the end of his trunk out of the water. One day he was obliged to
kneel on the broad back of an alligator who tried to bite off his foot.
He drove the long body down into the muddy bottom, and no living
creature, except possibly the catfish that burrow in the mud, ever saw
it again.

He loved the rains that flashed through the jungles, the swift-climbing
dawns in the east, the strange, tense, breathless nights. And at
midnight he loved to trumpet to the herd on some far-away hill, and
hear, fainter than the death-cry of a beetle, its answer come back to
him. At twenty-five he had reached full maturity; and no more
magnificent specimen of the elephant could be found in all of British
India. At last he had begun to learn his strength.

Of course he had known for years his mastery over the inanimate things
of the world. He knew how easy it was to tear a tree from its roots, to
jerk a great tree-limb from its socket. He knew that under most
conditions he had nothing to fear from the great tigers, although a
fight with a tiger is a painful thing and well to avoid. But he did not
know that he had developed a craft and skill that would avail him in
battle against the greatest of his own kind. He made the discovery one
sunlit day beside the Manipur River.

He was in the mud-bath, grunting and bubbling with content. It was a
bath with just room enough for one. And seeing that he was young, and
perhaps failing to measure his size, obscured as it was in the mud, a
great "rogue" bull came out of the jungles to take the bath for himself.

He was a huge creature--wrinkled and yellow-tusked and scarred from the
wounds of a thousand fights. His little red eyes looked out malignantly,
and he grunted all the insults the elephant tongue can compass to the
youngster that lolled in the bath. He confidently expected that Muztagh
would yield at once, because as a rule young twenty-five-year-olds do
not care to mix in battle with the scarred and crafty veterans of sixty
years. But he did not know Muztagh.

The latter had been enjoying the bath to the limit, and he had no desire
whatever to give it up. Something hot and raging seemed to explode in
his brain and it was as if a red glare, such as sometimes comes in the
sunset, had fallen over all the stretch of river and jungle before his
eyes. He squealed once, reared up with one lunge out of the bath--and
charged. They met with a shock.

Of all the expressions of power in the animal world, the elephant fight
is the most terrible to see. It is as if two mountains rose up from
their roots of strata and went to war. It is terrible to hear, too. The
jungle had been still before. The river glided softly, the wind was
dead, the mid-afternoon silence was over the thickets.

The jungle people were asleep. A thunder-storm would not have broken
more quickly, or could not have created a wilder pandemonium. The jungle
seemed to shiver with the sound.

They squealed and bellowed and trumpeted and grunted and charged. Their
tusks clicked like the noise of a giant's game of billiards. The
thickets cracked and broke beneath their great feet.

It lasted only a moment. It was so easy, after all. In a very few
seconds indeed, the old rogue became aware that he had made a very
dangerous and disagreeable mistake. There were better mud-baths on the
river, anyway.

He had not been able to land a single blow. And his wrath gave way to
startled amazement when Muztagh sent home his third. The rogue did not
wait for the fourth.

Muztagh chased him into the thickets. But he was too proud to chase a
beaten elephant for long. He halted, trumpeting, and swung back to his
mud-bath.

But he did not enter the mud again. All at once he remembered the herd
and the fights of his calfhood. All at once he knew that his craft and
strength and power were beyond that of any elephant in all the jungle.
Who was the great, arrogant herd-leader to stand against him? What
yellow tusks were to meet his and come away unbroken?

His little eyes grew ever more red as he stood rocking back and forth,
his trunk lifted to catch the sounds and smells of the distant jungle.
Why should he abide alone, when he could be the ruler of the herd and
the jungle king? Then he grunted softly and started away down the river.
Far away, beyond the mountains and rivers and the villages of the
hillfolk, the herd of his youth roamed in joyous freedom. He would find
them and assert his mastery.


V

The night fire of a little band of elephant-catchers burned fitfully at
the edge of the jungle. They were silent men--for they had lived long on
the elephant trails--and curiously scarred and sombre. They smoked their
cheroots, and waited for Ahmad Din to speak.

"You have all heard?" he asked at last.

All but one of them nodded. Of course this did not count the most
despised one of them all--old Langur Dass--who sat at the very edge of
the shadow. His long hair was grey, and his youth had gone where the sun
goes at evening. They scarcely addressed a word to him, or he to them.
True, he knew the elephants, but was he not possessed of evil spirits?
He was always without rupees, too, a creature of the wild that could not
seem to understand the gathering of money. As a man, according to the
standards of men, he was an abject failure.

"Khusru has failed to catch White-Skin, but he has lived to tell many
lies about it. He comes to-night."

It was noticeable that Langur Dass, at the edge of the circle, pricked
up his ears.

"Do you mean the white elephant of which the Manipur people tell so many
lies?" he asked. "Do you, skilled catchers that you are, believe that
such an elephant is still wild in the jungle?"

Ahmad Din scowled. "The Manipur people tell of him, but for once they
tell the truth," was the reply. "He is the greatest elephant, the
richest prize, in all of Burma. Too many people have seen him to doubt.
I add my word to theirs, thou son of immorality!"

Ahmad Din hesitated before he continued. Perhaps it was a mistake to
tell of the great, light-coloured elephant until this man should have
gone away. But what harm could this wanderer do them? All men knew that
the jungle had maddened him.

Langur Dass's face lit suddenly. "Then it could be none but Muztagh,
escaped from Dugan Sahib fifteen years ago. That calf was also white. He
was also overgrown for his years."

One of the trackers suddenly gasped. "Then that is why he spared
Khusru!" he cried. "He remembered men."

The others nodded gravely. "They never forget," said Langur Dass.

"You will be silent while I speak," Ahmad Din went on. Langur grew
silent as commanded, but his thoughts were flowing backward twenty
years, to days at the elephant lines in distant hills. Muztagh was the
one living creature that in all his days had loved Langur Dass. The man
shut his eyes, and his limbs seemed to relax as if he had lost all
interest in the talk. The evil one took hold of him at such times, the
people said, letting understanding follow his thoughts back into the
purple hills and the far-off spaces of the jungle. But to-night he was
only pretending. He meant to hear every word of the talk before he left
the circle.

"He tells a mad story, as you know, of the elephant sparing him when he
was beneath his feet," Ahmad Din went on; "that part of his story does
not matter to us. _Hai!_ He might have been frightened enough to say
that the sun set at noon. But what matters to us more is that he knows
where the herd is--but a day's journey beyond the river. And there is no
time to be lost."

His fellows nodded in agreement.

"So to-morrow we will break camp. There can be no mistake this time.
There must be no points overlooked. The chase will cost much, but it
will return a hundredfold. Khusru says that at last the white one has
started back toward his herd, so that all can be taken in the same
_keddah_. And the white sahib that holds the license is not to know that
White-Coat is in the herd at all."

The circle nodded again, and contracted toward the speaker.

"We will hire beaters and drivers, the best that can be found. To-morrow
we will take the elephants and go."

Langur Dass pretended to waken. "I have gone hungry many days," he said.
"If the drive is on, perhaps you will give your servant a place among
the beaters."

The circle turned and stared at him. It was one of the stories of Langur
Dass that he never partook in the elephant hunts. Evidently poor living
had broken his resolutions.

"You shall have your wish, if you know how to keep a closed mouth,"
Ahmad Din replied. "There are other hunting parties in the hills."

Langur nodded. He was very adept indeed at keeping a closed mouth. It is
one of the first lessons of the jungle.

For another long hour they sat and perfected their plans. Then they lay
down by the fire together, and sleep dropped over them one by one. At
last Langur sat by the fire alone.

"You will watch the flame to-night," Ahmad Din ordered. "We did not feed
you to-night for pity on your grey hairs. And remember--a gipsy died in
a tiger's claws on this very slope--not six months past."

Langur Dass was left alone with his thoughts. Soon he got up and stole
out into the velvet darkness. The mists were over the hills as always.

"Have I followed the tales of your greatness all these years for this?"
he muttered. "It is right for pigs with the hearts of pigs to break
their backs in labour. But you, my Muztagh! Jewel among elephants! King
of the jungle! Thou art of the true breed! Moreover I am minded that thy
heart and mine are one!

"Thou art born ten thousand years after thy time, Muztagh," he went on.
"Thou art of the breed of masters, not of slaves! We are of the same
womb, thou and I. Can I not understand? These are not my people--these
brown men about the fire. I have not thy strength, Muztagh, or I would
be out there with thee! Yet is not the saying that brother shall serve
brother?"

He turned slowly back to the circle of the firelight. Then his brown,
scrawny fingers clenched.

"Am I to desert my brother in his hour of need? Am I to see these brown
pigs put chains around him, in the moment of his power? A king, falling
to the place of a slave? Muztagh, we will see what can be done! Muztagh,
my king, my pearl, my pink baby, for whom I dug grass in the long ago!
Thy Langur Dass is old, and his whole strength is not that of thy trunk,
and men look at him as a worm in the grass. But _hai!_ perhaps thou wilt
find him an ally not to be despised!"


VI

The night had just fallen, moist and heavy over the jungle, when Muztagh
caught up with his herd. He found them in an open grassy glade,
encircled by hills, and they were all waiting, silent, as he sped down
the hills toward them. They had heard him coming a long way. He was not
attempting silence. The jungle people had not got out of his way.