AFTER SEVERAL DAYS ON THE CHINDWIN, WILLIAMS, STANDING on deck dressed in new khaki shorts, shirt, and stockings, reached his destination: a clearing along the bank, where he saw a man in his fifties sitting in the portico of a large cottage tent. The man who would show him the ropes. The boss. Williams had no idea what to expect, but plenty of others like him had found strong, paternalistic forest managers who nurtured them. He hoped for the best. After all, this would likely be the sole Englishman he would see or speak to for the next six months.
Deposited on the shore by dugout canoe, Williams took several moments to survey his new world where “range upon range of mountainous country lay away to the east.” By the time he looked back over the water, the big white boat was disappearing behind a bend. The sight triggered a pang of abandonment, which Williams described as “almost a yearning.” He lifted his hat to wave good-bye but no one was looking in his direction. He pivoted and walked the short distance to the camp.
His new boss, a man he referred to in later writing by the pseudonym Willie Harding, and occasionally as Freddie, was sitting in a camp chair, sun weathered, balding, and wearing a short-sleeved gray shirt and pressed gray flannel trousers. His light blue eyes were focused far away. From his war experience, Williams could tell the boss was “down with fever.” On the table before him lay papers, a survey map, a bottle of good-quality black label whiskey, and a soda siphon. Drinking, most forest men found, helped mitigate loneliness. British companies allowed the habit for their employees working in distant outposts, and some, such as the East India Company, encouraged and underwrote it. It was just noon, but Harding was already knocking back hard liquor. He held in his hand a Burmese cigarette, or cheroot, which gave off a slight scent of incense. Though it was a simple, homespun smoke, he held it with care, as if it were an expensive cigar.
Po Pyan, the head servant, or lukalay, waited on the boss with formality, calling him “Thakin,” or “Master,” the customary address for all Englishmen. After working for the Bombay Burmah Trading Corporation his whole adult life, Harding was the picture of the colonial British “jungle salt”: reserved, taciturn, and, above all, capable. His only acknowledgment of Williams’s arrival was the deepening of his sour expression.
Striding up to the table, his right hand outstretched, Williams offered a cheery greeting. “Good afternoon, sir.”
“There’s no ‘sir’ business in the jungle,” Harding replied without looking up.
Williams dropped his hand and after a few awkward moments, went about raising his own brand-new tent next to Harding’s. One thing he knew: This was “quite certainly one of the most obvious ways of how not to receive a young recruit.”
Billy Williams was stung but not rattled by the reception. He was good at winning people over, and by four, he was ready to emerge for another try.
He sat down at the table, and when a camp attendant asked to take his order, Williams requested a cup of tea. Harding snorted. To him, anything short of a whiskey and soda was unmanly. Humiliated, Williams silently vowed to drink Harding under the table later. Since conversation did not seem welcome, he sat mute. Talking to Harding, it became clear, was a hazard that everyone in camp avoided. At about five, a worker came by and wordlessly placed seven hidebound notebooks on the table. Simultaneously, seven elephants materialized at the edge of the clearing.
They were paraded into camp, a driver sitting on each animal’s neck. Huge as they were, they made a hushed advance on broad, cushioned feet. It was just as Kipling had described—elephants walking “as silently as a cloud rolls out of the mouth of a valley.” The only noise Williams heard was the warm symphony of the teak bells under the elephants’ chins, and the crackling of bamboo as they pushed their way into the clearing. Two tuskers carried in their trunks the ends of the tying chains fastened to their back legs; this, Williams would learn later, was to ensure that the next elephant in line would not step on them.
Without a word, Harding rose from his camp chair and headed for the assembly. This was the moment Williams had been waiting for. The reason he had traveled halfway around the world. Elephants.
They were a magnificent sight, lining themselves up and then standing in perfect, swaying formation—a hypnotic movement that, Williams would come to learn, actually aids the circulation from their legs to their hearts. If he looked down, he would see that, as they shifted pressure from one foot to another, the circumference of each foot would increase or decrease nearly 10 percent.
The elephants commanded attention. And their immensity was only part of it. Their “fragrant” scent, a clean barnyard smell that Williams could almost taste, filled the clearing. They flapped their ears, some silently, some producing a sound like hands clapping. Even the air itself throbbed with their presence. It wasn’t a fanciful notion, but a physical fact, as their low vocal tones were felt as a vibration in his chest. Their chatter—everything from incongruous little shrieks to low rumbles, like a lion’s growl—seemed full of meaning.
The seven huge gray animals remained in motion even when parked. They rocked, shuffled their feet, and cocked their heads so they could stare down, focusing the nearest eye on him for a better look. Their trunks danced—touching their own bodies and those nearby. When they made contact, Williams heard a faint sound, a dry rustling or rasp, as skin scraped skin. Those long, fleshy noses became megaphones, amplifying sound.
Williams focused on individuals. There were a few males, not all of them tuskers. Because tusks are actually the elephant’s elongated incisors, even the tuskless males and females had short, mostly hidden versions of them—tushes, or nubs of ivory. One of the females, a gaunt, dignified old dame, “looked as if she were the mother of the other 6,” Williams noticed. She was called Ma Oh, or Old Lady, though her real name, given to her a lifetime ago, was Pin Wa, meaning Mrs. Fat Bottom. She was hardly that now. Her head seemed like little more than gray skin stretched over a great craggy skull. Her movements were slow and deliberate.
She might have been suffering from any number of old-age complaints, just like a human—including heart disease, cataracts, and arthritis. By this stage, she shouldn’t have still been in service. Over their lifetimes, elephants successively wear away big sets of molars that are replaced by new ones, not from underneath, but as if moved forward along on a slow conveyor belt. They have six sets in total; when there are no new ones to move in as replacements, the animals starve to death, no longer able to chew the tough vegetation that makes up the elephant diet. Ma Oh likely had reached this point.
Harding called out a name—Bo Shwe—and a tusker from the middle of the line stepped forward, stopping five paces away from him. Harding walked up to him. Holding the lobe of the animal’s ear, he told the uzi, “Hmit.” And the uzi called out to the elephant, “Hmit!”
Williams was astonished by the graceful descent of the big bull: He sank his hindquarters into a kneeling position—curiously, looking more like a churchgoer in prayer than a horse or a dog whose legs bend backward when reclining. Then came the slow folding drop of his front legs, also into a tucked position. The whole motion had a certain precise formality.
Williams observed, or thought he observed, an expression he recognized. Though Bo Shwe obeyed every instruction, the tusker’s eyes seem to convey that he found the strict rules a little ridiculous. Williams felt an immediate connection with him.
If Harding caught such a nuanced emotion, he showed no sign. He approached Bo Shwe, spreading his hands and placing his palms along the animal’s flank. He rubbed and kneaded the skin along the barrel of his back, inspecting by touch. Then came a close examination of eyes and feet. What he was looking for was still a mystery to Williams, though his reading of the dry text on elephant care might have come back to him. Griffith H. Evans, the veterinarian, had written that working elephants “are constantly disabled from sore backs and feet, the majority of such cases being due to want of a little care and supervision.” The portions of their skin likely to be irritated must be “regularly examined before and after work.” The color of their gums, their temperatures, and the clarity of their eyes gave clues about their general health, too.
The Hmit, or down position, for working elephants.
When Harding had finished, he stood back and said, “Htah.”
The elephant rose with slow dignity, returning to his place in line. The boss repeated the examination down the line, scribbling comments into separate logbooks, one for each animal.
Though smaller than African elephants, the tuskers in Burma could stand nine feet at the shoulder. To Williams they were every bit as magnificent as he had hoped.
Williams could observe the features of the elephants from front to back. And every inch held a fascination. Their trunks. The single organ that most identifies an elephant as an elephant. It acts, among other things, as a hand, an arm, a nose, a snorkel, a sledgehammer, a trumpet, and a hose. It possesses more than sixty thousand muscles. Without containing a single bone, it is strong enough to lift heavy logs, and sufficiently nimble to pick up a coin. It is both nose and upper lip. In Asian elephants there is a single “finger” at the tip while African elephants have two. The tissue of the tip, the nerve endings, and the short hairs all help elephants sense vibration, lift chemical signals, and dexterously manipulate objects.
Relaxed, their lower lips hang down like fleshy pendants behind the trunk. The skulls of Asian elephants are double-domed on top and full of ridges and hollow places below. There is a very large brain inside.
When the elephants opened their mouths for Harding’s scrutiny, Williams could see their blocky, muscular, bright pink tongues. Wet and mobile, a tongue can shift shape dramatically, so that it becomes a ball, a wave, or a trough. On either side were their huge, strange yellow molars, washboard ridged and ancient looking, like giant trilobites. Williams counted four of them, two up, two down, each about nine inches long and weighing four pounds apiece. Some of the elephants invited Harding to rub their tongues, an approximate version of their trunk-to-mouth greetings with one another.
The elephants’ ears seemed tissue thin in places, and everywhere tracked by veins. Williams would learn to look at the tops of them to help determine age. The farther they were folded down, the older the animal.
The females displayed two mammary glands, quite similar in size to a woman’s breasts, and placed as humans’ are—on their chests, rather than in rows of four or six as is typical for mammals. On the elephants’ rumps, each had the letter “C,” marking them as company animals—not seared there with a hot iron, but painted with a caustic substance that burned into the flesh permanently. It was supposed to be more humane. Just past the brands, at the very end of their bodies, were their four-foot-long tails—small in contrast to their bulk, but Harding was careful around these appendages, and Williams would soon find out why. The tails were strong enough to pack the jolt of a baseball bat. Below those tails, in the bulls, something seemed to be missing: testicles. They had them, all right, but they were nestled high up inside the abdomen.
The whole inspection process took about a half hour, during which Harding shared nothing with Williams—not even a glance. Williams, filled with curiosity, suppressed his impulse to ask questions, knowing “I should only be called a damn fool if I did so.”
As Harding handed off the book for the last elephant, he looked at Williams. “Those four on the right are yours, and God help you if you can’t look after them.” He turned and walked back toward the camp table.
Williams returned to his own tent astonished on two counts—by his first moment face-to-face with elephants, and by Harding’s order. How exactly, he wondered, does one take care of an elephant?
