ELEPHANT MOON (21 page)

Grace nodded, not trusting in her judgment to challenge him.

Sam’s scouting party climbed up and up, ascending three, four thousand feet, the jungle thinning dramatically as they entered a new world of Alpine meadow, sparsely covered with brush, often treeless. Six thousand feet high, maybe more.

No man’s-land, a void, where immense foothills higher than any mountain in Scotland ran down from the Himalayas and formed the backbone which split India from Burma. No one had ever built a road here, no one had bothered to cross it and certainly no one had ever bothered to map it. Marco Polo had crossed the Gobi Desert centuries ago and the Sahara was like Piccadilly Circus compared to this. Well, Sam conceded that he might be over-egging the pud a bit. That was the trouble with spending too much time without company of your own kind. You started chattering on to yourself. Stop that talk, Sam, stop it now.

They marched on.

Until just before sundown, a full stop. Dead ahead lay a wall of rock, tinting red in the dying light, God knows how many miles long and impossibly high. After the Great War, he’d spent a month’s leave in Rome. The Coliseum was just short of two hundred feet high. This rock was maybe two and a half times that, perhaps 500 feet. From what he could see through his binoculars, the rock was sheer. No man could climb it, certainly no animal. Making a tree-bridge across the ravine had bought them half a day – he was pretty sure that the Japanese didn’t have the professional lumberjacks amongst their men that he had – but they weren’t far behind the main party led by the Havildar. To the south, the Japanese. To the north, more Japanese, pressing on towards Imphal. They heard the artillery duels in the neighbouring valleys more clearly now they were high above them, making short, sharp bangs, more snappy than thunder. It was plain as a pikestaff to Sam that the war was catching up with them. Their only route was straight ahead, due west, but they weren’t tunnel men.

And elephants can’t fly.

He could be wrong, but it looked as though they were finished, that his dream of taking his jumbos out of Burma by a route that didn’t exist was dead. It had been a good dream while it lasted, but soon it would turn into a bloody nightmare.

A thin chimney of smoke rose above the jungle a few hundred feet away. He ordered a halt, and complete silence, and took Po Toke with him, crawling through the undergrowth to discover a few huts in a clearing by a stream, abandoned. They got up and walked towards the smoke and found a pot of stew still bubbling over an open fire.

On the edge of the clearing, something moved, a blur, vanishing into the jungle. Sam called out to whoever it was in Burmese or Urdu, but he remembered that someone had once told him that up here, the Naga people spoke something quite different, half-Thibetan, half-Stone-Age-ish.

The elephant men were on edge. They didn’t much like the idea of taking over someone else’s village. None of them had been this far north in their lives. Come to think of it, no one he knew had. They were uneasy about the Naga people, believing that they still hunted heads, despite the official line from the Governor in Rangoon – not that there was a Governor in Rangoon any more – that cannibalism was a thing of the past.

‘No shrivelled heads here,’ said Sam to Po Toke, the others listening in. The claim fell on silence. His elephant men weren’t having any of it. The power of their traditions was not to be taken lightly, and out of respect for them, he slogged upstream another quarter of a mile, pitching camp not far from the base of the rock. It loomed over them, blocking out the stars of the western sky.

Sam hadn’t shared his pessimism with Po Toke, still less the other Burmese, but it was obvious that the rock spelt trouble. His men hurried to pitch hammocks and make a camp before the light died.

As night fell, it grew shockingly cold. The chill got to the Chin and the oozies, bringing out malarial fevers in some of his chaps. Long ago they’d abandoned blankets and warm clothes, since it was ludicrously hot down in the jungle, but up here, you could almost smell the snow blowing in the wind from the north, from the Himalayas.

And now they had to climb a bloody mountain of rock and that looked impossible. Just before the light died to the west, he studied the rock with his binoculars, once again.

No way out.

Twenty-two years he’d spent in the jungle in Upper Burma, and it had taught him one thing above all: never take the jungle for granted. During the Great War he had served in the Camel Corps in the Transjordan, doing his utmost to keep the ill-tempered ships of the desert healthy in the service of the British as the Ottoman Empire crumbled to dust. Sam was a natural when dealing with animals. He’d find foot-rot in one camel missed by the vet, soothe a red-eyed beast famous for being obnoxious, dangerous even to any European master, disappear for days and then reappear with a score more semi-trained beasts he’d tracked down in the desert. Back at their base in East Jerusalem, he had spent hours with the Bedouin and a translator, soaking in their knowledge of how a thirsty camel can taste water on the wind, how many days a camel could go without food and water, what were their tolerances before they gave up the ghost. Soon, word got out that if you needed a camel train for a journey into the desert, there was no point in leaving until Sam Metcalf had checked out the beasts, adjusted their saddles, talked to the Bedouin, planned the route from well to well. But, best of all, you’d better take Sam with you.

At the end of the war, just as they were winding down the Camel Corps, news of a job came up in Upper Burma, handling elephants. Sam knew nothing about them, apart from the fact they had bigger ears, were occasionally more dangerous but on the whole wiser and more intelligent than camels. At least, they didn’t spit. He got the job on the strength of his
references from the Camel Corps and he sailed for Rangoon, and then took a stern-wheeler up the Irrawaddy into the jungle. At that time in the early twenties the Burma Teak Corporation pretty much owned all the teak in the country, as of right. All they had to do was to get it down to the sawmills of Mandalay and Rangoon, though that wasn’t quite as easy as it sounded.

High up in the forests, the loggers would bring the teak crashing down, great monsters of trees. Using hand saws seven feet long, they would hack off branches, reducing the tree to a series of roughly smooth sections, twenty or thirty feet long. Enter the elephants. They would push, shove or drag the logs tumbling into dry riverbeds, pointing sweetly downstream, not blocking the flow. Come the monsoon, the rains would turn a sandy riverbed into a raging torrent in a few hours, violent with energy, lifting the great logs as if they were as light as lily-pads, and sending them floating down a series of bigger and bigger tributaries. Once they entered the larger rivers, the Corporation’s flotilla of barges would capture the logs, lash them to each other to make enormous floating rafts, then nudge them downstream to the sawmills. From the moment a tree was felled to its floating to the sawmill in Rangoon could take a year. Or four. When you had the timber rights for the whole country, time didn’t matter that much.

None of this could happen in the road-less wastes of jungle were it not for the elephants and their extraordinary relationship with man. Immense strength, tamed by guile and goodness. Sam had got to know his animals so well that a famous man-killer like Rungdot – Henry VIII was how the kids called him – in musht, trusted him enough to allow him to pierce an abscess the size of a football with a hammer and a knife. One powerful strike and the boil was burst, then wiped clean with disinfectant, all the while the elephant eyeing him attentively. Had Sam dithered or faltered, the beast could have knocked him over and
stamped on his head in a flash of time. But Rungdot had trusted him. Soon the great tusker was back at work, nuzzling 20 ton monster logs of teak into line as if they were matchsticks.

Twenty-two years, the prime of his life. He’d married, had children – they were safe and sound in India, God bless them – but still he kept on going back, when a chap of his years could easily have got a desk job, running an inkwell and a typewriter in Simla or some damnfool place. But now his hubris had come to haunt him. How was he going to explain to the others, especially the children, that they were road-blocked by a lump of rock? That it was now very likely that they would never make it out to India.

He reflected on what High Burma had taught him.

That fear of a nat – a jungle spirit – could kill a man, as surely as a shot to the heart.

That elephants had real intelligence.

And that men were stupid and cruel to one another, and to creatures too. Which was why he’d spent so much of his time alone, apart from his dog and the Burmese oozies and the elephants, which wasn’t alone at all, really.

But it turned out that he could still be surprised, surprised by the speed and ferocity of the Japanese attack, surprised by the chaos and, yes, the lack of the right stuff from the British forces, and lately surprised by a bloody Hants and Dorset bus arriving in the middle of his jungle, crammed full of kids and their schoolmarm to boot.

The jungle had played perhaps one last trick on him. A bloody great big lump of rock just where he hadn’t been expecting it. An owl hooted somewhere close by, and Sam twitched. A real owl? Or a Japanese jitter party? His men were too few to put out pickets to guard their approaches. He relied on his jungle skills and the antennae of his men, but neither was infallible.

Once, a bull elephant that had already killed three men charged at him. Armed only with a one-chambered elephant gun, he’d taken aim, fired, but the round was dud. He’d
broken the shot-gun, extracted the dud, rammed in a fresh round, taken aim and shot the bull. It slumbered to a slow fox-trot, swayed and collapsed a single yard from Sam. After that, word got round High Burma that Sam Metcalf had nerves of steel. If a hoot from an owl could turn him into a scared little bunny rabbit, his nerves were shot.

The reddening sky cast the rock into dark shadow. If the worst came to the worst and there was no way through, then he wondered how he would break it to the main party, travelling two days’ march behind him now. They could try and sneak past the Japanese, but he feared the elephants would be shot up, and the children would be helpless if forced to make it to India on their own, having to carry what food they had left. Many of them, the little ones, and that little lad who was a bit simple, they would die.

Oh, Christ, perhaps they should never have tried it.

One of the chaps came to Sam to explain that they’d pretty much run out of food. Sam had an answer to that – and sod the Japanese. The echoes would fool them. A few hundred yards down from their camp ran a branch of the stream they had been climbing up, which filled out into a deep pool. Hurrying to catch the available light, he scampered down, fetched his knapsack off his back and took out a hand-grenade, pulled out the pin and lobbed the grenade into the still water.

Bang!
A great whoosh of water, soaking him, enough noise to wake the dead in Thibet, the sound of the explosion echoing against the rock. As the water in the pool settled, a dozen perch, two or three a respectable size and one enormous, ugly thing, with long barbels extruding from its mouth, like the tendrils of a tramp’s beard, floated belly-up, on the surface. Very satisfying. He gave permission for the men to light a fire. True, the Japs were out there in the jungle, somewhere. But there was another jeopardy, that his men, over-worked, exhausted, half of them coming down with malaria, under-nourished and cold to the marrow, wouldn’t be able to push on, if they didn’t have some fresh hot food and a warm fire through
the night. He’d picked a heavily wooded spot in a cleft in the mountain for their camp, so the chances of anyone seeing the fire through the tree cover from far away was dim. But the bang had been loud enough. Still, lobbing the odd hand-grenade in a pond remained, to Sam, the finest way to fish. No messing about with trying to put a worm on a hook. Bugger that.

His Burmese seemed happy as Larry, roasting the fish on a hand-made spit, laughing and making a little too much noise. Once more, he weighed the risk of being caught napping by a Japanese scouting party. What were the odds? Hard to judge. They were on the very far edge of the Emperor of Japan’s domain, taking a route which, it turned out, made no military sense whatsoever.

He loved his elephants, missed them more than it would appear proper to say. In the old days he’d hunted, killed elephants for game too, something he now regretted. These days, after all his time working with the great beasts, he put special store by the human-elephant relationship, but he wasn’t a bloody Buddhist. Jungle leeches? He’d exterminate them, quick as a flash.

Somebody had had to scout the route to India ahead and he had been best-placed to do so, to shoulder the responsibility. If someone had to make a decision and it ended up being a terrible mistake, then it was better him than anyone else. They had only one shot at it. A mistake like walking into a slab of rock 500 feet high. But he also knew that a little part of why he had elected to go on the scouting mission was his dislike of people, of getting tangled up in the lives of others.

Take Grace. A woman of stunning beauty, but half-crackers too, raving on about how that wounded sergeant had shot her Jemadar. Hmm– maybe there was something in it. He’d given orders to the Havildar to keep the sergeant out of her hair and to keep an eye on him at all times. But he was sceptical, suspected that she might have got the wrong end of the stick.
The Jemadar could well have been felled by a stray bullet. Somebody else could sort that one out, when they got to India.

If they ever got there.

Po Toke approached with roast fish, a little black around the edges, wrapped in a shiny banana leaf.

‘Fish, but no chips,’ said Po Toke in his passable English and the two men laughed. Sam had explained the weird culinary pleasures of the British to the Burman long ago. Sam hadn’t had fish and chips in a very long time. It was funny what you missed, what you had fantasies about. Not lobsters or oysters or a great salmon, but simple fish and chips wrapped up in yesterday’s
Western Daily Post
, a bottle of beer and, as the sun dipped, the flash of the nearest lighthouse. No chance of that here.