ON A CRISP NOVEMBER DAY IN 1920, JAMES HOWARD WILLIAMS, called “Billy” by friends and “Jim” by his family, saw the Chindwin River for the first time. The waterway originated far to the north near the Himalayas, in the wild Hukawng Valley, and stretched for 750 miles, eventually spilling out into the even greater Irrawaddy River near Mandalay, Burma. The Chindwin, the history books and magazines promised, ran through savage country where villagers still practiced head-hunting, performed human sacrifices to appease the spirits of rice production, and could transform themselves into ghost cats. Famous explorers wrote of remote and little-known corners of the area that harbored barbaric tribes. It was enough to scare any of the new British recruits routinely hired by the logging companies. But Billy was different. Striking a match to one of his Players cigarettes and looking out over the water and the limitless jungle beyond, he was amused by such flights of imagination. A forest teeming with monsters? He knew better and had seen worse.
Tall, clean-shaven, and built like a loping hound, Williams may have looked young in his freshly pressed khakis, but he had been through the kind of hell that quickly burns away a man’s innocence. Months earlier, on January 26, 1920, the British Army had demobilized him with the rank of captain. During four years of brutal, bitter fighting in the Great War as part of Devonshire Regiment, or the “Bloody Eleventh,” Billy had led other men into battle and served in several battlefronts in a wide sweep across North Africa, the Middle East, India, and Afghanistan. In the deserts of Egypt, he was part of the Camel Corps, facing the jihad raised by the Senussi, a group of Muslim guerilla fighters. Along the Tigris, he had been a bombing officer engaged in ghastly battles with the Ottoman Army as part of the Mesopotamia (Iraq) Campaign, in which close to one hundred thousand soldiers from the British and British Indian Armies died. Finally, in 1919, he endured his last two assignments. The first brought him into the turmoil of Lahore, India, where martial law was declared to quell rioting against the British. And later that year he fought hand to hand against fierce, well-armed tribesmen in Waziristan, a remote mountainous outpost on the border with Afghanistan.
A gallant soldier and sensitive soul, J. H. “Billy” Williams was certain that the forests of Burma would offer tranquillity, adventure, and, most of all, elephants—an antidote to all he had experienced on the battlefields of the Great War.
He knew he was lucky to be alive. Nearly a million British soldiers had died in the Great War, and those who survived were forever changed. Some obviously so—faces half blown off, hands trembling from shell shock, trouser legs folded neatly and tacked up where a leg should be. Others carried the trauma inside.
During World War I, James Howard Williams (center) served in several battlefronts in a long, wide sweep across North Africa, the Middle East, India, and Afghanistan.
Billy Williams would never write or speak about his experiences in the war, for he had a lifelong tendency to lock away his deepest emotions, especially the painful ones. The less he talked about something, the closer it was to his heart. It wasn’t in his nature to dwell on the darkness of combat. He wouldn’t mention what ailed him, only what might cure him. When he came home, he said that the vision of Burma’s lonely jungles, filled with wild animals, called to him. It was no surprise to his family. As social as he so often appeared, they knew that solitude was his true bent. He could do without the parties and pranks he was known for in school; in fact, he truly thrived in the kind of isolated wilderness that would turn other men mad.
His opportunity to do just that came from a chance meeting shortly before being discharged. An army buddy he was drinking with had a connection to a teak logging company and suggested an adventure in Burma. Williams fell in love with the idea even before locating the country on a map. Clinching it was the mention of elephants. “My way has been from a very early age the companionship of animals,” he once wrote.
His fondness extended to most creatures, but it was individual animals who affected him most deeply. He recognized their distinct personalities even when few others did. First, there was Prince, his childhood donkey, with whom he would wander the moors, hitching him up to a jingle, or carriage. “I developed a longing for big open spaces,” Williams wrote, “and used to talk it over with old Prince who seemed to understand.” The donkey, he said, “was the first animal with which I enjoyed a joke.” When he left Prince to go off to boarding school, he was bereft, feeling that the separation created a “blank in life.”
In wartime, he “really fell in love” with his camel named Frying Pan. And of more than one dog, he would simply say, “We loved each other dearly.” When circumstances such as school or war uprooted him, the worst part was saying good-bye to a pet. It created an emotional tear he believed could be mended only by time and the company of another animal. But an elephant? Was he really up to that kind of challenge?
Instinctively, he felt the answer was yes. A jungle full of elephants sounded like the ideal corrective for what he had witnessed on the battlefield. He dashed off a letter to the logging company.
It was perfect timing: The war had thinned the ranks of forest men who roamed the jungles overseeing logging work at far-flung camps for the Bombay Burmah Trading Corporation. At the moment, “Bombine,” as the company was nicknamed, was in a recruiting frenzy. And Williams was just its kind of man. The big Burma-based British companies liked to fish from different pools. Rival Steel Brothers, trading in rice, teak, and oil, sought candidates from the wealthy, elite schools. Bombay Burmah, founded by six Scottish brothers in 1863, specialized in teak, tea, cotton, and oil. And it recruited from universities, with a bias toward athletic over academic skill. “The life is a roughish outdoor one,” the company had written of the position Williams was being considered for. “A robust constitution, trustworthiness, sobriety, and ability to learn languages are the chief qualifications wanted.”
Williams was subjected to a rigorous vetting process. These firms required applicants to undergo a withering interview, a written examination, and a physical at their London offices. Candidates also had to provide stellar personal references. Williams had it all. Just under six feet tall, he was fit, smart, indefatigable, unflappable, good with languages (having easily picked up Hindustani in the service), and, by all accounts, of “good moral character.”
His official offer came via a letter dated June 30, 1920, which began, “We have the pleasure of engaging you on behalf of the Bombay Burmah Trading Corporation Ltd.” Passage out would be paid, starting salary was four hundred rupees per month, and he would be provided with housing. The one-year contract could be extended pending review.
At home, his joy over the offer was not shared. Every day during the war, British newspapers had printed long lists of the dead, and like all parents of soldiers, Jimmy’s had anxiously scanned them, praying they would not find his name. He had returned not only alive, but, just as miraculously, whole. Yet he was set on leaving again. His father, who had settled down as a country squire after his own wandering days in Australia, Brazil, South Africa, and Spain, wanted at least one of his three sons to succeed him. The elder, Nick, was a lawyer with a firm in Calcutta, while Tom, the younger, was headed for a career as a mining engineer in India. Jim was the only hope. So his father tried bribing him: He offered to buy three adjacent holdings, at formidable expense, to set Jim up as a farmer of means. When he made his pitch, he told his son not to answer right away. “Go down to Penamel cove, have a swim, and let me know when you get back,” he said. Jim sprinted along the familiar fields that led to the shore, and plunged into the icy waves. He returned, dripping wet and gritty with sea salt, carrying the answer his father had feared. On July 7, 1920, he signed the Bombay Burmah contract accepting the terms offered.
WEEKS LATER, ON SEPTEMBER 23, 1920, he boarded the cargo-passenger liner Bhamo in Liverpool with a one-way ticket to Rangoon. It was a mild, hazy Thursday without enough wind to blow away the curtain of fog that clung to the horizon. The ship was fairly empty—just eighty-three passengers—as it was still monsoon season in Burma, and travel between the two countries tended to flow westward.
As Williams found his cabin and stowed his grip, he was pining already for Cornwall. He knew that because of the company’s home leave schedule, he wouldn’t see his family for at least three years, possibly five or more. But he was also thrilling at the prospect of the coming adventure. The war had revealed to him his fearlessness, independence, and recognition that his happiness was of his own making. His old roles—Cornish loner, well-liked high school student, tough soldier, obedient son—no longer applied. He would forge a new identity: elephant wallah. It sounded electrifying, even if he didn’t know exactly what it entailed.
Williams, a fearless adventurer with boundless energy, was eager to explore the mysterious jungles of Burma.
Once on board, Williams, realizing he would spend most of the next year tucked away in a remote forest, made the most of his time meeting young women at dances and playing games such as skittles, a top-deck version of bowling. By the time the Bhamo approached the south coast of Burma and the mouth of the Rangoon River a few weeks later, the young suitor had a stack of addresses, which would serve as a romantic lifeline for his lonely journey up-country.
The five-hour-long approach to the capital on the silty waters of the Rangoon River sliced a wide brown ribbon through the lush green land, and, standing on deck, Williams saw miles of tall kaing grass, patches of mangrove swamp, and occasional huts surrounded by crops. On the horizon, ten miles upriver, he could just make out the golden dome of the famous Shwe Dagon Pagoda rising high above the city. The paddy fields began to diminish and in their place mills, sheds, refineries, factory chimneys, storage tanks, and industrial buildings lined the shore. Williams could even see elephants working the big logs at the mills. Once the ship pulled up to the wharves, and with the gangway in place, throngs of visitors and “shore boys” looking for work hauling luggage stormed aboard.
The offices of the Bombay Burmah Trading Corporation, Williams discovered, were just steps away from the dock. During the short trip to the office on Strand Road, the main thoroughfare that ran along the river, he had a whole world to take in: The wide street was impossibly congested, filled with bicycles, cars, rickshaws, and bullock carts. Colorful buses, crammed with people and poultry, were decorated with images of animals—snakes or tigers or elephants—to identify their individual routes, the way numbers or addresses did back home. Pedestrians—and not just Burmans, but many Chinese and Indians and Westerners, too—were everywhere. Dressed in bright colors, local men and women both wore long traditional skirts, the women topping them with spotless white jackets and flowers in their hair.
In no time, Williams was standing outside the imposing colonnaded white Bombay Burmah building and soon escorted into the cool of a teak-paneled office, a matting fan swinging rhythmically overhead. The manager of the firm described what would be expected of Williams in the jungles of that portion of the country referred to as “Upper Burma.” He did not sugarcoat any part of the message—just the opposite, in fact. This was the company’s last chance to scare off any unsound hires before investing any more in them. It was noted that only 4 percent of Europeans who chose the life of a teak man completed their full service. And that didn’t even take into consideration the recruits who never started the journey—those who lost their nerve the day they were due to sail from home.
The company knew that most of the arrivals would be gone within months. Loneliness may have been one of the most common complaints, but it certainly wasn’t the worst. Some of the working elephants were notorious killers. And the men frequently died from accidents or tropical disease. Recruits could become unhinged by the remoteness of the forest, their fear of the elephants, or the jungle sounds at night. There was no way of knowing in advance which men would have the peculiar, undefined traits that brought success in such outposts.
The Bombay Burmah manager in Rangoon generally spent about a half hour with each new man, providing a comprehensive overview of the work ahead. There was a lot to say: Williams was joining the biggest company in one of the country’s biggest industries. At the time, Burma, under British rule, produced 75 percent of the planet’s teak. And Bombay Burmah was the top “teak-cutting” operation. The hard, elegant wood, resistant to the elements and impervious to destructive insects such as termites, was highly sought after. The timber even contains a type of oil that prevents metal corrosion. Particularly treasured by the Royal Navy, it was used in boat-building and as decking for ships around the world.
Tectona grandis did not grow in large plots like orange groves, but was scattered among many kinds of trees. As a National Geographic from the era noted, “a teak forest 10,000 square miles in extent may be capable of producing only seven or eight thousand trees a year.”
The government’s forest department was charged with deciding which trees should be extracted. Those eligible for harvesting were killed by girdling them: A two-inch ring of sapwood (the outer, younger wood) was removed from the circumference. Then the tree would be ignored for two or three years while it died and dried out. This was a vital step, since fresh “green” teak sinks, and logs needed to be transported by floating down rivers. As one British educational pamphlet explained, “The rivers of Burma with their vast network of feeder streams make possible the economical extraction, sometimes over distances of 1,200 miles and more, of teak and other waterborne forest produce to the sawmilling and shipping centres of Rangoon and Moulmein.”
Because the country had few roads and railways, an army of elephants would drag the harvested logs to waterways. Rudyard Kipling described the process in his famous poem “Mandalay” as “Elephints a-pilin’ teak / In the sludgy, squdgy creek.”
Elephants. Finally. Billy Williams listened attentively when the subject turned to these animals. In non-monsoon seasons, the manager explained, timber was hauled by elephants to dormant, dry creeks. Then, when the rains arrived in the summer, stirring the tributaries to life, the lumber would rise with the flowing water and begin its journey to larger rivers such as the Irrawaddy. Hurtling at high speed, the logs threatened the lives of anyone foolish enough to enter the water. On the big rivers, trunks would be bundled into rafts of about 125 and guided by five-man crews. Then, from the Irrawaddy, the barges would be steered to the Rangoon River to float down to the mills of the capital city, where “their contact with primitive things would be ended.” Given all the variables of the monsoons, the mountains, and even the men who worked the forests, it could take anywhere from five to twenty years for a log to become a milled plank.
Sitting behind an ornate carved desk and glaring through his old-fashioned pince-nez, the manager asked, “What made you think you were cut out for this sort of life, Williams?”
Billy Williams could see that this was a well-worn tactic meant to intimidate new hires.
“Well, sir.… I imagine it’s difficult to know if one is until one’s been out there some time, but there were all sorts of things that appealed to me. I’m fond of animals for one thing … then the open air life … sense of adventure.”
The manager cut him off abruptly, “In fact the usual romantic illusions that bring all you youngsters out East, eh?”
Williams said, “I suppose so, sir.…”
“Hmm. Well, there’s nothing wrong in that, but because they are illusions, you’re on trial only, for one year. Is that clear?”
“Perfectly,” Williams said, understanding that the manager wasn’t really interested in his thoughts. “It seems very fair to both sides.”
“I’m glad you think so,” the manager noted sarcastically.
Williams learned that he would be under the thumb of a boss living in the forests northwest of the capital, along the Chindwin River. His own territory would be near his superior’s in the Myittha River valley.
“You better spend the rest of the week fitting yourself out from the Company stores,” the manager said. “They’ll tell you all you’ll need. And catch Monday’s boat. All right, Williams, I hope the jungle life will suit you.”
“Thank you, sir, so do I.”
The manager rang a buzzer, and one of the company’s Chinese office workers silently appeared in the doorway. The clerks had the packing down to a science. Steamer trunks were stuffed with everything a recruit would eat, read, wear, sleep in, get drunk on, and shoot with for the next six months in the jungle: portable typewriter, canteen, mosquito netting, canned goods, tea, chocolate, and even hops to bake bread. Every calorie Williams was expected to consume (including the village chickens it was assumed he would purchase for the pot) had been accounted for. There was a shotgun, a rifle, and whiskey. Packed in a teak box were magazines and reference books crucial to his education.
Williams’s days were spent preparing for departure, but at night he squeezed in some socializing. Rangoon was full of British architecture, French wine, English beef, and exclusive clubs, such as the Rangoon Sailing Club, “one of the stickiest Europeans Only clubs in Burma,” as Williams recalled.
As much fun as was available to Williams, Burma did not hold the social cachet of other colonies. In fact, government workers who lived there were given an extra allowance, since by some accounts young British officers in country had a tendency to suffer nervous collapse.
That wouldn’t be Williams’s problem—especially not with other recruits to knock around with in the exotic city. Over beers with two pals, he discovered they had a few things in common: They had given up traditional opportunities to go to Burma, and family and friends did not understand their impulse. Maybe they didn’t, either. None of the three could articulate why he had made the choice, but together they could laugh about it. “Just crackers, the whole lot of us,” one of them said. Though he took the responsibility seriously, Billy Williams acted the cool adventurer, saying, “What the hell! A year’s probation, passage home guaranteed. We’re on a marvelous wicket. And if we make the grade—which I should say is most unlikely—we might as well forget all the dames we’ve ever known, because I must remind you gentlemen that working for this outfit marriage is out for ten years.”
On nighttime escapades in Rangoon, Williams was a shy flirt. Genuinely interested in women, he would often ask them about themselves rather than dominate the conversation with stories of his own exploits. And he would rarely sit out a dance. Good-natured and good-humored, he quickly met more single women than he’d expected. Many were members of what was referred to as “the Fishing Fleet.” These were eligible Englishwomen who set sail for the far corners of the British Empire, where they could improve their odds of catching a husband. The toll of war had changed the gender balance back home in England, with women outnumbering men by 1.9 million. Some found their way to Burma, where there was a concentration of young single men, desperate for the company of homegrown girls. During his few days in Rangoon, Billy Williams gathered more names and addresses, but did not fall in love.
It wasn’t the high life but the forests that called to him. Once packed and briefed, he traveled the first leg of his journey—four hundred miles north from Rangoon—by rail. Paddy fields became thick woods, and the urban din gave way to primitive jungle sounds. He could hear the deep coo, click-hroooo of Green Imperial pigeons, and from somewhere deeper in the forest, the cries of macaque monkeys.
When he arrived at the wide, milky-brown Chindwin River, framed by lush tropical forest, he found the Burma he had dreamed of. There he was met by the company’s stern-wheel paddle steamer, a miniature version of a Mississippi riverboat. Painted a spotless white with a trim black stack and outfitted with four comfortable cabins, two saloons, a small library, and ample decks, it was a conspicuous colonial apparition.
Williams spent several days aboard the sturdy little vessel as it made its way up the Chindwin. Weaving and dodging among sandbanks and shallows, guided by painted bamboo channel buoys, the Indian crew took soundings with bamboo poles, singing out the depth to one another. The water was full of timber rafts making their way south, as well as native boats piloted by old Burmese men, shaded by umbrellas. Each evening at dusk, the stern-wheeler would tie up for the night, and at dawn winches would once again take in the mooring chains.
The skipper was a drunk “who had reached the terminus of thirst, Crème de Menthe frappe,” and the engineer played the same gramophone record over and over. Both were emblematic of the eccentric characters the jungle seemed to attract. And, in his own way, Williams figured he was a member of the misfits club, too—a nonconformist, even from boyhood.
He had been born on November 15, 1897, and grew up on the coast of Cornwall in the little town of St. Just in Penwith. From his bedroom window at night, in the little cottage set high on a hill, he’d watch the slowly turning beams of seven lighthouses. He was the middle of three brothers who rambled the moors, “as wild as March hares.” And though they sometimes banded together as the Three Musketeers, more often, young Jim spent whole days in solo expeditions into caves, over cliffs, and across fields.
He was a daredevil, exploring abandoned shipwrecks or the nearby copper and tin mines. He secreted art supplies in a remote grotto, where he would go to paint for hours. But mostly, he followed animals. He loved every creature he came across, and, with very rare exception, they seemed to like him, too. It meant, he wrote, that he was never lonely.
He spent so much time observing animals that he felt he could anticipate their impulses and movements. He developed a knack for framing the world as they did. “I never looked for a wren’s nest, I merely walked to some spot where I thought one would build, stopped, then with sure hands parted the ferns, and in some mossy overhanging bank inserted two fingers into one of a dozen holes and felt ten warm eggs—mother wren might have shown it to me,” he wrote.
His formal education was at Queen’s College, a boarding school in Taunton, for senior school, or high school, where he was a good student and popular friend. From there, in 1915, he was off to war. He was brave and able wherever he was assigned, but found the best of himself in the Camel Corps.
On the river trip, Williams’s thoughts were dominated by the hope that he had the talent to become a true elephant man. In the teak box filled with books and articles, he discovered treasures: instructions on elephant management. The standard texts of the time included “Notes on Elephants and Their Care,” written by William Hepburn, a young veterinary surgeon who had died in Burma of some tropical malady just a few years before, and “Elephants and Their Diseases,” by Griffith H. Evans, published in Rangoon in 1910.
The state of elephant medicine at the time might have been primitive, but Williams savored every detail. He chain-smoked cigarettes, enjoyed cold beers from the saloon, and read hungrily. Evans’s book was exhaustive in its tables of illnesses and treatments. Copious soap and warm-water enemas were considered a good purgative. Allspice could cure elephantine flatulence. For “inflamed and indolent boils,” there was nothing like a poultice of roasted onions. And eight to twelve ounces of diluted brandy was recommended for large cases of stomach upset.
The text, a humane treatise by a veterinarian who had spent decades with elephants, made clear to Williams that he would be interacting with one of the most enchanting species known to man. Elephants “have few vices, are gentle, obedient, and patient,” Evans wrote. But despite their formidable size, he cautioned, their health could be rather fragile. In fact, “if neglected they rapidly go to pieces.”
The elephants in Burma were Asian elephants. They usually weighed well under eleven thousand pounds and stood about seven to nine feet tall at the shoulder, as opposed to African elephants, who could weigh as much as fifteen thousand pounds and reach thirteen feet in height. Both male and female African elephants have tusks, while only some Asian males have tusks, and none of the females do. Their body shapes differ, too: Asians are more compact; Africans lankier, with a more concave back. The Africans’ ears are enormous and wide (like maps of Africa, it’s said)—the biggest mammal ears in the world—while those of the Asian elephant are smaller and closer to square.
In fact, the African and Asian elephants are not only separate species but separate genera—a whole other level of taxonomic rank, as distinct in genetic heritage as a cheetah is from a lion. And some say it shows in their temperaments—the Africans active and more highstrung; the Asians more serene.
Physically, all elephants are astonishing. They are the largest animals walking on land. And their appetites are commensurate. Hardworking logging elephants in Burma can eat six hundred pounds of fodder a day, gathering their food with those incredible trunks. Longer and heavier than a man, and much, much stronger, the trunks provide elephants with a sense of smell that may be five times more acute than that of a bloodhound. And by narrowing or widening their nostrils like musical instruments, they can modulate the sound of their voices.
They have extraordinary brains built for memory and insight, and they use them to negotiate one of the most advanced and complex societies of all mammals. To those who have spent time with them, elephants often seem philosophical and perceptive, and appear to have deep feelings. They can cooperate with one another and have been known to break tusks trying to hoist injured relatives back on their feet. Further, their behavior suggests they have an understanding of death, something believed to be rare among nonhuman animals.
And then there’s their secret language. Using infrasound, which is too low-frequency for human hearing, elephants communicate with one another not just in close range, but also over long distances—as great as five miles. They can reach others far away, and decide to meet. Identifying this sound in the 1980s explained a lot of the mysteriously coordinated movements of widely separated elephants, which to some researchers, witnessing it from the air, resembled some kind of elephant ESP.
So much about elephants—their seeming awareness of death, their ability to cooperate, their empathy, and the extent of their intelligence—were yet to be revealed to science. But Williams, who saw more in animals than most anyway, had an inkling.
AT THE FOOT OF THE CHIN HILLS, in the far western shoulder of Burma, the exact territory where Billy Williams was headed, a magnificent tusker fitted with a braided harness and thick dragging chains began his day’s work towing teak logs toward a jungle creek.
Huge and healthy, the animal carried himself differently from the other elephants around him. There was a majesty, if not yet complete maturity, to him and an ease in the company of both elephants and men. Twenty-three years old, he already stood over eight feet at the shoulder, taller than many of his elders. And because he would continue to grow throughout his life, adding perhaps half an inch a year for the next twenty years, it meant that he would likely join the tallest bulls, who measured over nine feet. He wasn’t just big; he was beautiful. He had the kind of tusks, angled up and outward, that the men, likening them to the arms of a Burmese dancing girl, called Swai Gah. Those tusks gave him a wicked, roguish appearance that was accentuated when he cocked his ears. In the company’s ledger book for him, it was noted that his feet were “perfect,” with five nails each in the front, and four on each back foot. His back was shaped like a banana bough—the most suitable for logging. His skin appeared loose and heavily corrugated; his ears were fine, “heavy-haired in orifice.” He certainly possessed a physical refinement that elephant connoisseurs admired. Burmese tradition held that “an elephant of good quality has a skin that is wrinkled like the rind of a custard apple, and darkish grey in colour.” The elephant named Bandoola unmistakably had that. The drapes of his baggy skin arranged themselves in the shape and form considered auspicious. Right under his tail, thick folds resembling a frog’s head would provide some protection from the tusks of another bull during a fight. Bandoola also had a dewlap under his chin, and a bag of pendulous skin—what the elephant men called Pyia Swai, or honeycomb—that ran all along his underbelly.
The lavender shade of his skin was exquisite, and splashed across his trunk and high cheekbones were pale pink freckles, as delicate as a field of flowers. Yet, he was as tough as any wild elephant. So superb a specimen was he that every forest assistant—no matter where in Burma he was based—would claim to have managed him at one point in his career.
It was said that he did things that no other elephant could. He had a vast understanding of human language, and while most elephants could distinguish among a few of the camp tools, Bandoola knew them all. When asked to choose a hammer from items laid out before him, the big tusker would reach with his trunk and pull it out. Though he appeared to enjoy the work, no one would call him obedient; Bandoola had a mind of his own. But from birth it proved to be a wise and generous one.
He even seemed to have a sense of humor. Occasionally, after he hefted a large log to the very edge of a cliff or the bank of a river, he would pretend he could push it no farther. He would pantomime the effort of a shove again and again, and behave as if the wood were suddenly unmovable. Only after his uzi would beg him to stop clowning would he suddenly flick the log over the precipice with no effort at all. Then, as all the people who knew him would attest, the elephant would rumble at his own joke.