AT SIX O’CLOCK THAT EVENING, THE LIGHT DRAINING FROM THE sky, Williams rejoined Harding at the table where two full bottles of black label whiskey—one at each place setting—had materialized. Exhausted from his journey, Williams would have to wait to challenge Harding in a drinking competition. Both men had changed into clean, pressed clothes and sat glumly across from each other with a campfire burning nearby. No matter where the outpost in Burma, forest managers had their dinners served properly—white tablecloths, bone china plates, and perfectly cooked English meals, starting with a soup course.
Williams removed the lead foil from the top of his whiskey bottle and pulled out the cork. They drank. When Harding emptied his glass, Williams lifted his own bottle. “May I fill yours, sir?” With a withering look, Harding informed him, “It’s the custom to stick to our own bottles.” The silence persisted through dinner with only the hum of the jungle insects amplifying the sullen formality of it all.
After about half an hour, Harding finally spoke up to ask Williams about his skill with firearms: Was he “safe with a shotgun”?
More silence. While Williams seethed over this treatment, Harding refilled his glass several times then spoke again.
“I drink a bottle a night, and it does me no harm. If I never teach you anything else, I can tell you this: There are two vices in this country. Woman is one, and the other ‘the bottle’—take which one you please, but you cannot mix them. Anything to do with jungles, elephants, and your work you have to learn by experience. No one can teach you but the Burman, and you’ll draw your pay for ten years before you will ever be earning your salary.”
As a forest assistant, Williams would labor all year round, in hot weather and monsoon, touring in succession the logging camps in his district. He would witness plenty of trees being felled, but chopping wood was not his job. Instead, he would oversee the men, the elephants, and the camps where the work was done. Forest assistants brought cash to pay the men, they doctored the elephants, and they made sure that the task of dragging logs was proceeding at the proper pace. They were constantly on the move following a circular route, often made up of nothing more than a narrow game trail that connected all the camps in their domain.
Harding told him that the next day he’d be given maps to study, in preparation for being sent off for three months on his own. Williams’s mood brightened at this news. Harding said, “You can do anything you like, including suicide if you feel lonely, but don’t come back to me until you speak some Burmese.”
Despite the bottle of liquor in him, the old man managed to stand and stagger off to his tent without saying good night. Williams swiveled his chair toward the fire and stared into the flames.
Harding was right about speaking Burmese, and Williams knew it. One fellow recruit said that he began to have an insight into the work only when he had mastered some of the language. “A knowledge of Burmese is a necessity for every jungle man and it entails many months of hard and serious work,” A. W. Smith wrote in National Geographic magazine. “It is a difficult language in itself, a language that depends on an infinite variety of vowel sounds that, written in English character all have the same appearance.” Williams also felt strongly that in order to connect with the men, he needed to be able to joke with them, and Burmese would be “the gate to local humour.”
Harding had not said much, yet he had left his recruit with a lot to think about. When Williams turned in, he found his tent glowing with the warm, dancing light of an oil lamp. His cot was dressed with soldierly precision, his trunks were neatly stacked next to it, and there was a lovely six-by-four dhurrie rug set out. There was only a thin canvas wall between him and Harding’s own tent, but he was happy for the refuge. He slipped out of his clothes and sat down. Surrounded by the dark jungle, Williams was alert to every sound and sensation, the repetitive chounk-chounk-chounk of a large-tailed nightjar or the mournful kwo-oo of a collared scops owl. A few elephants scrounging near camp snapped branches as they passed. The teak box with his traveling library was within easy reach. His reading materials underscored his heated and hallucinatory nighttime impression of the place. “This is Burma,” Rudyard Kipling had written, “and it will be quite unlike any land you know about.”
Company maps showed Williams that the country was about the size of Texas, shaped like a kite—including the long tail—and was carpeted in diverse forests, with everything from mangrove swamps to thickets of pine, evergreen, and deciduous trees across tropical, subtropical, and temperate forest types. Much of it was still unknown to travelers, and whole swaths of it remained largely unmapped. Over its thousand-mile length, it changed from steamy tropics in the south to snow-capped mountains in the north, and all of it was teeming with wild animals—three hundred kinds of mammals and a thousand bird species. An old volume on game listed many of them: elephants, tigers, leopards, bears, and an astonishing three species of rhino (Indian, Javan, and Sumatran).
It was easy to see on these maps how Burma had retained its secrets. It was cut off from the rest of the world by natural barriers: to the north, west, and east, a horseshoe of mountains; to the south, the sea. The British framed the country as Upper and Lower Burma. Lower Burma included the capital city, Rangoon, and the plains, valleys, and deltas of the southern portion of the Irrawaddy River, shot through with hundreds of streams that found their way past mangrove forest out to the Bay of Bengal. Upper Burma, where Williams sat this night, was different country. Here was the heartland, marked by mountains and forest. This region stretched to the borders of Assam, Tibet, China, French Indochina, and Thailand. It was home to many tribes including Shans, Kachins, Chins, and the notorious head-hunting Nagas. Burma was an ethnically diverse country: Two-thirds of the population was Burmese, with several other groups and subtribes making up the rest.
At the very crown of the country, past the northern city of Myitkyina, where the rail line ended, was some of the roughest and most remote wilderness—what was often referred to as the back-of-beyond country.
The maps only hinted at the ruggedness of the terrain. Burma was not only tough to enter, with mountains and sea at its borders, its interior was, significantly to Williams, extremely difficult to negotiate, too. The land was corrugated: Its many mountains and rivers ran north to south, making horizontal movement—east to west—nearly impossible. No highways or railroad tracks penetrated these obstacles: the Arakan Mountains to the far west, the Pegu Range in central Burma, and the Shan Plateau to the east. In between these mountain ranges lay fertile valleys and rivers. Burma’s great rivers, including the Chindwin and the Irrawaddy, originated in the north, the “hills,” the area that according to Time magazine, was “where God lives.” These waterways all ran southward into the Gulf of Martaban and the Bay of Bengal.
To Westerners, Burma was an icon of the exotic East and all its mysteries. During his boat trip up, Williams had caught glimpses of village life along the banks of the river. The country was almost entirely Buddhist. Williams constantly noticed the golden spires of pagodas rising above the green forest. Monasteries were ubiquitous, and at sunrise, the saffron-robed priests would emerge to tend to nearby villages.
It was late. The new recruit extinguished the light, and, as he did every night, said a silent prayer and got into bed. He hoped for a fresh start with Harding in the morning.
SUNUP THIS TIME OF year was chilly. Williams rose from wool blankets shivering and discovered that attendants had warmed his clothes by the fire. Logging camps throughout the country were coming to life in just the same way—clearings were quiet, shrouded in a thick mist. Sunlight would begin to filter in hazy shafts through the surrounding trees, and birds would be singing. A hearty English breakfast, including bacon, awaited him.
Even in the most remote outposts, Williams would find lovely pagodas.
After the morning meal, Williams continued to tiptoe at the fringes of camp life until he was suddenly in the heated center. Without telling Williams, Harding had ordered the camp workers to speak only Burmese to him. When Harding overheard Williams speaking some broken Urdu, which he had picked up in India, to the cook, the poor man was fired, no appeals allowed. Williams was stunned by the swiftness and cruelty of Harding’s command, eaten up by the fact that he had caused the man’s unemployment and that he was helpless to intercede. Harding’s decisions were final.
That evening, the elephants were once again paraded into camp. This time, Harding told the novice to inspect his own four elephants. Williams decided the wise course was to mime what he had seen his boss do the night before. This would be his first intimate moment with an elephant. He walked up as Harding had done and ordered an elephant down. This was Chit Sa Yar, or Lovable, a calm male who could stand stoically even when his rider fired a rifle from his back. Williams would later choose him as his personal elephant to carry only his belongings. When the animal lowered himself, Williams approached. Strangers always inspire curiosity in elephants. As Williams looked Lovable over, the animal’s trunk naturally followed.
Up close, Williams was astonished by the size of the great head. It was longer, wider, and heavier than he was himself. Lovable swiveled his trunk around and oriented his wet nostrils toward the new man, likely targeting the richly aromatic regions on Williams’s body—his mouth, armpits, and crotch. Lovable was taking in the lanky white youth before him. Williams was trying to do the same thing, but with his arsenal of human tools. He didn’t have the analytical olfaction of an elephant, but he appreciated Lovable’s wholesome smell. Reaching up, he made contact. That trunk was remarkable: the weight of it, the obvious strength, the tough tire-tread ridges on the underside that could leave a friction burn on his arm. The elephant’s exhalation could blow his hair back with a great whoosh, or gently tickle his skin.
Williams ran his palms along the male’s spine: rough, wrinkled skin punctuated all over by harsh, wiry hairs. Sand and dirt, which had lodged in the folds of the tusker’s hide when he had dusted himself, loosened and rained down on Williams’s head and arms. It was an elephant baptism.
As the elephant was commanded to stand, he rose, as solid as a tree, but still yielding, breathing, warm. Williams felt a strong connection, even as his hands throbbed from the rasping coarseness of the contact. He moved on to the next animal.
There were two healthy females, including Chit Ma, who was in the prime of her life. But then came Pin Wa, whose tough old hide hung gaunt from her bones. There were more hollows than heft to her. And the filminess of her eyes gave her a mystical aspect.
Each elephant seemed to enjoy engaging with him. Just as they had the day before, they rumbled audibly and also inaudibly, as Williams could feel but not hear. In fact, there were maybe three times as many of the silent kind, which caused a rippling of the skin on a small patch of the elephants’ foreheads—the highest area of the trunk, where the nasal passage enters the skull.
As he pressed his hands along so much elephant hide, Williams had no idea what he was meant to be groping for, but it didn’t matter. Inch by inch, he was learning elephant.
At dinner Harding was as stony as before. During the soup course, he produced a homemade condiment—a shaker-topped bottle of sherry in which lethally hot Asian chili peppers had been fermenting for more than a month. Since it looked like ordinary Tabasco sauce, Williams hammered out several mean doses into his bowl. Harding kept a poker face as Williams raised the spoon to his mouth. The first swallow scorched a path from his mouth all the way down his throat. Even his stomach seemed set afire.
But Williams refused to give his tormentor the satisfaction of seeing him surrender. He ladled the blistering soup, spoonful after spoonful, into his mouth. His eyes watered, beads of sweat formed on his brow, and, still, he kept eating. Deflated, Harding upped the ante, prodding Williams to speak by asking a simple question: Was he homesick? Williams patiently finished his bowl, wiped the water from his eyes, and finally answered “No.”
It was his turn to surprise the old man. Far from being afraid to leave the nest, he told him he wanted to launch his first tour far sooner than Harding had decreed. In fact, he said, “I’d like to start off on my jungle trip tomorrow.” Harding struggled but failed to conceal his surprise.
“That remark got inside his guard,” Williams later noted with pleasure.
From the start, Harding had been deliberately trying to break Williams. But his effort, Williams would come to believe, was a kindness. If a recruit could be broken, Harding felt, it was better to uncover it in the safety of camp rather than out in the forest. It was said of Williams that his Cornish and Welsh heritage made him “self-reliant and tough in many ways, and yet gave him his sensitive and sometimes almost psychic qualities.” This combination of traits found expression in the odd friendship that he was developing with Harding: Williams craved Harding’s respect, but he was also brassy enough to want to fight, and even triumph over him in the process.
When Harding rose from his chair at the end of the night, he was “a bit staggery,” Williams noticed. Harding took his empty bottle of whiskey, corked it, flipped it upside down, and steadied it on its head. “By dawn that bottle will have drained its last [jigger] into the neck, and will lace my morning tea,” he said.
Williams said good night to Harding’s back as the old man lurched toward his tent.
The next morning when Williams emerged, Harding, already scrubbed and dressed, glared at him from the breakfast table. “Good Lord!” he cried out. “You still here?”
The boss soon gave him his orders: Williams was to hike into the Myittha valley, a lush forested area between the Chindwin and a string of hills close to the Indian border. Here a village leader named U Tha Yauk (“U,” or uncle, is a polite form of address for a mature male) would begin his training in forest life. Harding would give Williams those four elephants to serve as pack or baggage animals, known as travelers.
Before dawn on the day he was to depart, Williams silently rose and peeked out at the darkened camp. The flaps to Harding’s tent were down. The old man was still asleep. Hallelujah. At least he could embark on his first expedition without ridicule. He conveyed to the uzis that he wanted to pack up quietly. They, too, were eager to leave without waking Harding, and had already silenced the knockers on the elephant bells by tying them tight. After Williams watched his last bit of gear handed up and placed in the kah, on the back of an elephant, they started off: four elephants, four uzis riding them, a cook, two bearers, and two messengers; a good-sized entourage for a twenty-three-year-old rookie.
Williams was heading into the forests of Upper Burma with enthusiasm, despite the fact that so many experienced outdoorsmen had lost their lives in the field there, including, just the year before, the forty-year-old famed botanist Reginald Farrer, who had died of diphtheria. For Williams, the jungle was already restoring some of the wonder of his boyhood.
He was outfitted for a good hike—wool socks, well-made boots, khaki shorts and shirt. Sunbeams burst through the branches of the tall trees. Exotic birds called out. Ahead of him was the unknown. The war, Billy had thought, had drained him of the kind of innocence required to appreciate all this. He had feared he was “past the age of adventures.” But now he gratefully realized he was wrong.
Right away, there was a commotion among the elephants. Back at camp, a female named Me Tway was trumpeting, and Williams’s elephants stopped the procession to respond, cocking their ears forward to listen. After some back-and-forth, the most vocal and strong-willed among them, Chit Ma, broke away, rampaging back to camp with her rider on board. Williams’s men and those back at camp had to sort it out. The elephants won: When Chit Ma returned to the expedition, her friend Me Tway came with her, which meant one of the other travelers had to be returned to camp.
Already Williams was seeing how strong the bonds among the elephants were. When Harding had split the group in two, it had taken an emotional toll. Captive elephants did not form the mother-daughter-sister dynasties that wild ones built over generations. Circumstances didn’t allow it. But they did cleave to one another just the same. Among the logging elephants, blood kinship wasn’t necessary—they had figured out how to sustain ties just as enduring among themselves. Often the uzis would witness a kind of shared parenting, in which females bonded with one another so closely that they reared their calves together. The men used the term twai sin in reference to these inseparable female elephants: aunties. When a calf bellowed in distress, not only his mother, but his auntie would come running. Separating such bonded elephants was wrong, “indeed cruel,” Williams thought as soon as he saw the consequences.
With peace restored, Williams was off on his first elephant journey. What would become the musical score to his life—the warm, resonant tolling of the elephant bells, soon began. Carved from teak by each uzi, with two clappers on the outside, every bell delivered a slightly different note, allowing one to distinguish his own elephant even when he couldn’t see her. As the animals stepped in natural unison, the four bells layered into song.
Williams’s boots became wet with the morning dew, and he breathed in the pungent scent of the vegetation, which in the deep shade still carried its nighttime perfume. He marched his group nine miles, stopping just short of the clearing where they would pitch camp. Following protocol, the elephants were halted outside the compound while they relieved themselves. Four big bladders noisily emptied about three gallons each (over the course of a day, the small group would expel enough urine to fill a rain barrel). Plus, there were the unmistakable thuds of defecation. Asian elephants produce about eight boluses twelve to twenty-four times a day, which for some individuals could total more than two hundred pounds. It was best to keep their output away from the camp perimeter. When they were finished, the animals came into the clearing to have the packs unloaded. Then, after all the saddlery, harnesses, and straps were removed from the elephants’ backs, the animals headed into the forest, snatching and stuffing bushels of vegetation into their mouths as they walked. Williams’s tent was then set up and a cooking fire started, and the uzis began constructing a rough bamboo platform about a foot up off the ground, with a baggage tarpaulin as a roof. It would serve as their communal bunk. An uzi, Williams noted, had “a pretty hard life.” He worked to exhaustion, put up with meager accommodations, ate what was available, faced danger not only from the elephants, but from the game he might meet in the forest, and often lived a hundred miles or more from his native village.
In camp that night, Williams had some time and privacy to reflect and record his thoughts. He lit a cigarette, took a long drag, and stared into the roaring campfire. He wrote simply, “My jungle life, to be spent with elephants as my breadwinners had started.”
The following four mornings, he moved camp quickly at dawn so as to be safely out of Harding’s reach. Then, he could afford to slow down and take in his surroundings. November in the forests of Upper Burma, he discovered, is a time when “every day was like a perfect English summer’s day.” Clear air, mild sunshine, no humidity. Each evening he relaxed by a log fire. When he could, he indulged in his great passion: recording the life around him in small watercolor scenes. Most of his compositions would be mailed off in weekly dispatches to his mother. Perhaps a few would go to the girls he had met on the way to Burma. He certainly wrote letters to them.
A page from Williams’s photo album showing his typed caption. Each day, the elephants were eager for this moment, which marked the end of their work shift and the beginning of their night life in the forest.
Away from Harding, Williams could be himself. That meant getting to know elephants, and there was so much to learn. As he did with all animals, he opened himself to them. “I have never studied them as a naturalist,” he said, “but I have tried to establish an understanding with them, to find some common ground, some way of seeing the world through their eyes rather than through my own.”
Williams was a talented artist and loved sketching and painting scenes from the jungle.
Dogs, camels, rabbits, horses. And now, the most magnificent creatures he had ever been near. During working hours, they were at the disposal of their handlers—marching, carrying kit, and obeying orders. But there was a change—in attitude, behavior, and movement—as soon as their packs were removed, and they were set free from the afternoon until the next morning to forage and socialize. These captive elephants, he realized, were creatures of two worlds. They lived by one code during the day and quite another at night, transforming themselves with ease from disciplined workers to free jungle animals. He saw that they could go back to free living when on occasion they eluded capture. Over the years, foresters found they lost dozens in this way. Williams thought they were closer to their wild state than any other working animal he had seen. In fact, he wrote, these elephants could be considered “domesticated for only eight [hours] out of the twenty-four.”
Because elephants need little sleep, only two or three hours a day, their nightly immersion into the wild world was leisurely and lengthy. The bulk of their time was spent foraging for food. Elephants need a lot of it—they’re big and their digestive efficiency is low. Asian elephants consume anywhere between two hundred and seven hundred pounds a day in forage. The working elephants in particular burn up calories, so they might spend as much as twelve hours feeding.
While their uzis slept, the animals would wander the forests and stands of fifteen-foot-tall kaing grass. They rarely went far, usually less than eight miles, because they didn’t have to. Camp was almost always set up in an area with their needs in mind: plenty of fodder and a close water source. While they were roaming, they might interact with wild bulls who liked to mate captive females and challenge captive tuskers. Over time, young working males learned to stand their ground with a glare, a shove, or even a fight.
At sunup, the wild animals became working stiffs again. They weren’t eager to return, and the forest was so thick that they couldn’t be seen from a high perch, but the bells around their necks, called “kalouks,” revealed their location to the searching uzis. The elephants appeared to know that the kalouks betrayed them: Almost all of them had a technique for evading their uzis in the morning. It was a trick they played when they didn’t want to be interrupted from an especially pleasurable activity, such as feasting in a cultivated banana grove, where they could eat not just bunches of bananas, but sometimes a whole tree.
Williams was amazed to learn the elephants’ tactic. “Many young animals develop the trick,” he reported, of muffling the effect of the exterior clappers by stuffing the inside of “the wooden bell which they have suspended around their neck, with good stodgy mud.” In darkness and complete silence, they could stealthily clean out even a guarded field. It was almost like a well-executed bank heist.
The more Williams saw of elephants, the more he wanted to know. So he investigated them as he had the wrens and rabbits on the moors back home, recording his observations with a fountain pen in his two-penny notebook.
The elephants of the night, the free elephants, especially drew Williams in. “It is impossible to understand much about tame elephants unless one knows a great deal about the habits of the wild ones,” Williams wrote. Right away, he established a routine unlike that of any other recruit. Like the elephants, he became two different characters by day and night. During working hours, he was the boss of men, a kindly one, who wanted to learn from the uzis. But starting in the afternoon, when the elephants were discharged, he would follow quietly on foot, turning into a field biologist.
Me Tway and Chit Ma, of course, stuck together. They left camp in each other’s company and returned together in the morning. Lovable, the male with short, blunted tusks, went off on his own, and poor Pin Wa ambled slowly and, it appeared, painfully into the forest.
But even following old Pin Wa wasn’t easy for Williams. He occasionally had to climb or descend fifteen-hundred-foot hillsides, and his progress was slowed by thick undergrowth and all kinds of jungle tortures: reedy canes whose long tendrils were dotted with hidden barbs as sharp as “trout hooks.” Prickly canes, “edged with teeth as sharp as the finest saw,” that tore his clothes and cut his body. A bamboo that would shower anyone disturbing it with a fiery dust that would have its victim clawing his skin. A stinging nettle called petya, which caused painful welts. And one frightening and common plant that provoked intense skin irritation, and could, on contact with the cornea, cause permanent blindness. Harding would have been enraged if he knew of Williams’s pursuits. Any forester would have said following dangerous, loose elephants in the dark was insane. But he kept at it.
By moonlight, he saw elephants sleep, lying down or going into a standing slumber. Sometimes, he even heard one or two of them snoring. But one aspect of their life eluded him in those early days and for long after. No matter how closely he tracked them, he was unable to observe them mating.
The uzis, as mahouts were called in Burma, were brilliant observers of elephant biology and behavior.
What Williams couldn’t learn directly from the animals, he could pick up from the uzis. He was fascinated by their communication with the elephants: the way they spoke to them and how much was conveyed by their body language. Leaning back rigidly meant stop. Leaning forward and down commanded an elephant to kneel. Pressure on one side was to turn left, the other to turn right. When the uzi dragged his foot up one side of the elephant, the animal would raise the foot on that side.
Most of all, Williams was charmed by the intimate relationships he witnessed. The men seemed to have been born with an uncanny elephant proficiency, and in a way they had. They often grew up around the animals, helping their fathers who were uzis, and from the age of fourteen, they could start earning a wage as apprentices, helping with harnesses and chains. By the time they were uzis themselves, they were walking encyclopedias of the art and science of elephant life.
Williams couldn’t yet speak their language, but he watched them closely. The astonishing skill of an uzi was displayed each morning when he set off to retrieve his elephant. First, he’d study the trampled ground at the edge of camp. “He knows the shape and size and oddities of his own elephant’s foot print with such certainty that having determined it,” Williams wrote, “off he sets following the trail.” Williams found the uzis to be infallible, never confusing their own elephant’s prints with another’s. The trail showed the uzis not only which direction the elephant had gone, but where his elephant had rested and with whom. If there had been a disagreement between males, there might be trampled vegetation, broken branches, or even blood.
Usually, the morning report was peaceful, the trail marked by evidence of digestion, not duels. The uzi would examine droppings, kicking them open and checking the contents. A bolus revealed what the elephant had already eaten, and perhaps what she would crave next. After consuming bamboo, for instance, the elephants tended to seek out succulent kaing or elephant grass, which grew on the banks of the creeks. So the uzi who found bamboo in his elephant’s excrement would head for the water to look for her.
Once there, he would listen for her kalouk. Upon hearing it, he would begin his approach, first with song. Elephants have fairly poor vision, seeing the world mostly in shades of gray. So as not to startle the animal, a rider would serenade her from a distance, his voice acting like his own kalouk, alerting her to his advance. If the uzi were in the kaing grass, which grows to nine feet, he might find a safe high rock to sit on and then call to her: “Lah! Lah! Lah!” “Come on! Come on! Come on!”
The elephants were not like dogs; they didn’t run with wagging tails to the handlers. It was a ritual. When an elephant showed herself, the patient rider would speak softly to her: “Do you think I’ve nothing else to do but wait for you?” He might rub her trunk. “You’ve been eating since noon yesterday, and I haven’t had a bite of breakfast.” Williams couldn’t translate all the words yet, but he grasped the forbearing attitude the men had toward the elephants. The uzi would then unfasten the cane or chain shackles on the elephant’s legs and order her down so he could scramble aboard and head back to camp. Once returned to the clearing, the uzi would eat his first meal and then wash his elephant to start the day’s work.
Williams’s study of the animals became an addiction. “Everything of interest became elephants, elephants, elephants,” he wrote. In particular, he was falling in love with his four travelers. He fed them the treats they liked—sweet tamarind balls or bananas—and learned where they liked to be rubbed or scratched. Pin Wa worried him most. Their hikes each day were not strenuous, and Pin Wa carried the lightest pack, but still the old girl looked creaky. Her skin was sagging and the tops of her ears had folded far down with age. Her movements were deliberate and dignified. She worked without complaint. Williams hoped to find a way to release Pin Wa from her toils, but nature would beat him to the punch.
One morning before sunup, he was woken by the uzis. It was sad news—“tragedy overtook me,” Williams wrote. Pin Wa was dead. The men led him through the forest to her body. It looked as though she had died in her sleep. As peaceful as she was lying there in the silence of the forest, to see the huge animal down was still a terrible sight for Williams.
He didn’t have the luxury of sustained mourning. First, he thought about Harding—“God help you if you can’t look after them”—and the rebuke he would receive. Next he saw an opportunity to learn what his elephant textbooks couldn’t teach him. He decided to hold an amateur postmortem. This was no easy task on an eight-thousand-pound animal. Without special equipment or training, he’d just have to make do. Here in the forest, men like Williams were called upon to act as mechanics, architects, veterinarians, doctors, engineers, undertakers, and even priests—whatever was needed.
He gathered the sharpest knives and machetes available and began. “Her body was scarcely cold before I was literally inside,” he wrote, “the ribs of the flank being a canopy over my head from the sun, and I ‘learnt’ about elephants from her.”
The first cuts released foul-smelling methane gas into the air. Sawing open her torso, he needed help pulling away the skin, which felt as heavy and unwieldy as a waterlogged carpet. Next there were three tough layers of muscle. And then the huge, protective omentum, an opaque apron of connective tissue laced with branching blood vessels. It supports the blood vessels for the intestines, making a kind of girdle or scaffolding for the great loops of the gut. He hacked at the tissue that kept the viscera in place. When the digestive organs slid out, they seemed to expand as they exited, and the escaping gas was noxious. Though she, like all elephants, looked portly, there was actually little fatty tissue. Her great barrel of a body was filled with the vast workings of digestion. Elephants can eat 8 percent of their own weight in vegetation every day, and they need a very big gut to process it all.
He began to excavate the organs, pulling them out and placing them with care into a straight line to study. Laid out, the intestines and stomach alone looked bigger than the elephant herself. It seemed impossible they had come from inside her. There was her heart, the size of a well-fed bulldog, with two apexes instead of the one a human heart had. This feature led another novice forest assistant to conclude that one of his elephants had died of a broken heart.
Williams had to work to slice Pin Wa’s lungs free from her chest wall. This was another puzzle, for almost all other mammals have a space around the lungs—the pleural cavity. But the elephant’s lungs are anchored right to the rib cage. No other mammal breathes this way. Elephants don’t inflate and deflate their lungs as humans do, but instead depend on chest muscles to do the work. That’s why they have trouble breathing if their chest is restricted—for instance, if they lie down too long.
He spent all day on what he called his “Jonah’s journey,” quitting at sundown covered in blood and gore. It was a sign of his determination that he had gotten so far alone, using only the knives on hand. A meticulous man who regularly pumiced tobacco stains from his fingers, he scrubbed himself clean before returning to his tent to transcribe his report. Sitting at a makeshift desk in front of the typewriter, he struggled. Though he had learned a great deal, he could not see any obvious reason for Pin Wa’s demise. That night as he pecked out his observations, it dawned on him that Harding had saddled him with an old animal unfit for work. Under cause of death, he simply reported “Found dead.”
Because Pin Wa’s pack had been so light, it was easy to redistribute her load among the remaining three elephants to continue their march. But the quiet old elephant remained much on Williams’s mind.
ALONG A DRY STREAMBED, almost always the most unobstructed travel lane available through the thick Burmese forest, Williams made his way forward, often leaping from rock to rock. He was well ahead of the animals when he spotted U Tha Yauk, the man he had come to meet, sitting high on a boulder. Striding toward him, he uttered the few Burmese words he had committed to memory. Unsure of his usage and pronunciation, Williams laughed at himself—and U Tha Yauk responded with a kindly laugh of his own. After the experience with Harding, Billy Williams reveled in the warmth of the moment.
U Tha Yauk led him to the village clearing, which consisted of about ten bamboo huts set high on stilts, topped with peaked thatched grass roofs. Williams, the European company man, was given the royal treatment. A beautiful young Burmese woman wearing her best htamein, or sarong, a traditional white muslin jacket, and a flower in her hair, rushed out with a cane stool for him to sit on. Others brought a little hand-forged copper cup and green coconuts to pour juice for him. Biting bugs were fanned away by a little boy as Williams gulped down the drink, his cup refilled each time he emptied it. Taking out one of his handkerchiefs from home, which was embroidered with a foxhunting scene, Williams made a hat for the boy as a gift. Everyone was so solicitous, he felt struck by the “wonderful gentleness in these jungle people.”
That night, when Williams was treated to a colonialist’s dream, he had anything but a colonialist’s response. An immaculate hut had been prepared for him, lighted by little oil lamps and decorated by pretty woven dhurries covering the floor. His bed, encircled by mosquito netting, was dressed in spotless linens. Clean flannel trousers and a white shirt were laid out. His revolver was placed, for nighttime emergencies, by his pillow. His camp furniture, which traveled with him—table and chair—were unpacked and arranged, with framed photographs from home set out.
He took a steaming hot bath in the tin tub placed in the middle of the room. And then a parade of village men served his roast chicken dinner in several courses, handing them up to his designated “valet.” After finishing the feast, as he drank his coffee, one villager quietly prepared the mosquito netting, tucking the bottom hem in securely for him, and then vanishing.
On his own in the quiet, Williams heard the faint tinkling of the many delicate village pagoda bells, like the music of fairies. He felt humbled by the care these strangers lavished on him. “Left alone, I was overcome by a great homesickness,” Williams would recall years later. “The overpowering kindness of the Burmans was too much for me, and I asked myself what I had done to deserve it.” The people in the village, he said, “wanted to show their sympathy with me in my loneliness and my ignorance of their language and all the difficulties that lay ahead.” He would never take them for granted.
The next morning, Williams was pulled gently awake by dozens of distinctive kalouks, sounding like a babbling brook. He rose to see the clearing now alive with elephants. While he had been introduced to the traveling elephants, these were the real working elephants of Burma, the ones who wrestled the giant teak logs. The sight was thrilling. It was a sea of gray, and yet he saw anything but uniformity with variations in hue and markings and in the amount and placement of pink freckling. Some even had the spotted pigmentation inside their trunks. Here were big tuskers, tuskless males, and the much smaller females, a few with babies by their side. There were so many patterns of tusk sets and physiques that there were categories to sort them. Tusks that curved up and inward, looking like a monk carrying a begging bowl, were called, appropriately enough, thabeik-pike, or bowl-carrying type. Short, fat tusks that resembled small bananas were called just that—hnet-pyaw-bu. Tusk girth, not length, helped indicate age.
The shape of the back fell into five categories, including wet-kone, which most resembled a pig’s back; kyaw-dan, which was straight and flat; and then the one considered best for logging work, a back that would slope gently down toward the tail, like the bough of a banana tree—hnyet-pyaw-gaing. For a new elephant lover such as Williams, this was an embarrassment of riches.
He quickly washed up and shaved so he could sit outside with his traditional English breakfast and watch the scene unfold. The uzis sat squatting in small groups, silently eating their own morning meal of steamed rice served on a “plate” of wild banana leaf. One by one, as each man finished, he would rinse his mouth with water from a coconut shell cup and then quietly mount his harnessed elephant to begin the day’s work. They headed up to the work site where the elephants would spend the day moving felled teak trees into a dry streambed ready for the monsoon.
U Tha Yauk came to him, carrying a map. Spreading it out before Williams, he traced his finger over five parallel creeks, all flowing west into the Myittha River. Williams understood that over and around these watersheds and hills of three or four thousand feet, they would make their journey to the ten elephant camps of his division. It encompassed an area of about four hundred square miles. Without a better command of the language, he could ask no significant questions. But he deduced from the map that the distance between camps was about seven miles.
WAITING FOR WILLIAMS IN one of those ten camps was an elephant man named Po Toke. He was a leader among the workers, and an independent thinker. Po Toke was not Bandoola’s uzi nor his owner. He was the master mahout who had trained him and oversaw his care. Handsome and slight, with his graying hair kept in a neat braid, and intricate tattoo patterns decorating his torso and legs, Po Toke looked “Siamese,” meaning his family was ethnically Shan, the Burmese word for Thai. Married and childless, Po Toke was an authority to the men. But he wasn’t entirely popular with his British bosses, who suspected him of harboring nationalist leanings.
Still, he had managed years ago to wrangle an agreement with Bombay Burmah that he would always work with the magnificent Bandoola. After all, he had helped raise the animal from infancy. Now nearly forty, Po Toke was only fifteen when he took on the elephant’s care. His entire adult life had centered around Bandoola. Their relationship was like that of father and son.
The most strenuous logging work went to the biggest, most mature bulls. At twenty-three, Bandoola wasn’t ready to compete at their level.
Po Toke had something to prove to the world, and Bandoola would be his masterstroke. But, at twenty-three, Bandoola was still a tender, immature bull. He wasn’t ready for the most strenuous logging work. The tusker was in the midst of a growth spurt that would last a decade. In fact, it might not be until Bandoola’s forties that they would see the full extent of his magnificence. So there was danger in the coming transition of management. This raw recruit, a man named Williams, who as yet knew nothing about elephants, was about to be Po Toke’s boss. His word would be law. Out of inexperience or cruelty, the young Englishman could undo a lifetime of Po Toke’s work in a matter of weeks. Sent into the heavy logging area, Bandoola could be permanently injured. The master mahout had a lot to protect. As he waited, he did what he could: He appealed to the spirits and plotted with the men.
WILLIAMS KNEW WHAT TO expect. Assistants like himself were generally given a territory “larger than an English county,” where they would be in charge of about three hundred men and one hundred elephants. He would be required to monitor the health of the elephants at each camp, oversee the logging, and take care of all administrative duties: paying the men; settling disputes; hiring, firing, and communicating with headquarters. “By continual touring during all seasons of the year,” the forest assistant “saw each camp about once every 6 weeks, so that it was a matter of time before he knew his charges, not only by name, but by temperament, and capabilities of work.” By luck, Williams had fewer elephants in a smaller area than most, which meant he could see each elephant twice a month. It was perfect for a man who wanted to really know them, not just canvass them.
This would be his life: a nomad in the forests, making the rounds of the widely distributed teak camps in his district. The people he would be interacting with included, as he wrote, “the elephant oozies and their camp followers; … jungle villagers such as firewatchers, fellers, rice traders and bazaar vendors; … elephant contractors, who might equally well be Indian, Karen, or Siamese as Burman; and dacoits—men who, for one reason or another, had put themselves beyond the law and who existed by robbery, and, on occasion, murder.” And then there would also be occasional visits with other forest men, Europeans like himself.
Each camp had its own personality, but physically they tended to look alike. Generally there were two or more bamboo-floored long huts in a clearing, raised about six feet off the ground. Some camps housed the families of the riders. These villages were often set in clearings and surrounded by rough fences. There were usually about a dozen tidy houses, all with thatched roofs and walls made of woven bamboo, set up on stilts, with ladders to climb up to the front doors. There would be a pagoda, and one bungalow would be retained for the visiting forest assistant. Palm trees provided shade. Chickens, pigs, and skinny little pariah dogs wandered around under the houses. Always, the villagers were welcoming with smiles and little gifts of food. The women, he noticed, seemed to care for each other’s children—even to the point of breast-feeding one another’s babies. It wasn’t just the human children who benefited from this nurturing attitude. More than once Williams found a village mother suckling an orphaned forest animal, such as a baby bear, kept for a time as a pet.
The logging camps were well-organized villages that always contained a clean hut for visiting forest assistants such as Williams.
Most good-sized villages also held a monastery. The monks, in their orange-gold robes, were responsible for the country’s high literacy rate, for they taught young boys to read and write.
For now, Williams would be the student of U Tha Yauk. The men packed up once again, to begin his education.
