AS WILLIAMS TRAVELED TO THE NEXT LOGGING CAMP, THE MEN told him he was in for a surprise. There was a famous elephant in residence whose name was known throughout the forest: a tusker so blessed, he was like a god. The recruit was intrigued.
On arrival, the workers unloaded the travelers, and Aung Net set about unpacking Williams’s clothes and gear. It was soon afternoon and time for the timber elephants to quit for the day. They were bathed and then presented for inspection. In the lineup of about seven, sure enough, one tusker stood out. Strapping, substantial, and confident, he was named Bandoola. Williams approached him and, as was becoming habit, spoke a little Burmese to the bull. The elephant’s deep-set dark eyes at first seemed vicious, Williams thought, “but on closer scrutiny kind, for their true colour was the equal of the pearl, with a pupil like a black bead.” There was intelligence in the animal’s gaze, too—a sense of knowing.
Williams reached out to pat Bandoola’s trunk and felt a very odd sensation. A meeting of souls. He was certain that a current of mutual recognition had passed between him and this elephant. “It was not merely that chance or fortune brought me together with him,” he would write years later. It was destiny. Rubbing the high-up portion of the tusker’s trunk, he sensed an unbreakable bond being formed. In that instant, Williams had “a feeling of understanding him as a fellow-creature closer than many human beings.”
That thought fit Billy Williams’s ideology. A superstitious man, he jingled the coins in his pocket at the sight of the new moon for financial luck, and was adamant that peacock feathers with their circular “evil eye” patterns did not belong inside the house. He was spiritual, too, for he felt moved by forces that weren’t necessarily visible or easily explainable. Coming to Burma had only amplified those leanings. “There are ways of knowing things quite certainly but not by reason,” he would write, “and in the East both the wise and the simple accept this.”
The moment with Bandoola seemed transcendent. And yet there were earthly reasons, too, for him to feel so drawn to the tusker. They were classmates in a way: born in the same month and year, November 1897. At the time of their meeting, they had both just turned twenty-three and were beginning their adult lives in the jungle.
From Bandoola’s ledger Williams learned a great deal and wanted to know more. In halting Burmese, he spoke to Po Toke, the curious man who handled Bandoola. Williams’s interest in Bandoola was the best thing Po Toke could have hoped for. He was eager to provide a complete picture of the great bull who was on the cusp of his most powerful decades.
Po Toke, it turned out, had blueprinted a new kind of training for logging elephants, and Bandoola was the living embodiment of it. Over the loud sawing of jungle insects, Williams learned about a method of schooling that resonated deeply with him. Po Toke’s revolutionary strategy was built as much on love as it was on logic.
Bandoola had been born under a full moon on November 3, 1897, in the forested area that would later be called “Pyinmana.” His mother was Ma Shwe (Miss Gold), a formidable female who was working in a logging camp. Given her temperament and bearing, there was no doubt that as a wild elephant, she would have been a matriarch, a wise leader. But she never had the chance. She had been kheddared by a Burmese contractor before she had fully matured.
Because Ma Shwe was always released at night like the others to feed herself, it was believed that she had mated with a wild bull, a common enough occurrence among the logging elephants. What was uncommon was the mate himself, an especially wily and notorious bull, whom the locals, out of fear and awe, dubbed the “beast of the local forest” or “Bwetgi Monster.”
Thus, from both sides of his lineage, Bandoola received size and intelligence.
Although tigers and elephants generally avoid each other, a two-hundred-pound baby elephant can be very tempting for a five-hundred-pound predator. Soon after Bandoola was born, a big cat came for him in the night just outside the logging camp. Bandoola’s mother and her twai sin, or bonded female friend, bellowed, trumpeted, and fought the killer off. Bandoola was just a shuffling, rubbery little tub of energy with a shaggy coat of baby hair who couldn’t yet properly use his trunk. But during the chaos of the assault, he managed to stay with his mother.
Po Toke was among the men who raced to the scene of the attack that night. Just fifteen years old and working far from his home village, he had begun to believe that calves, raised and trained with kindness, would grow up to be better workers than grown elephants who had been beaten into submission. This calf seemed like an ideal candidate to prove his point. Then and there, years ahead of the normal naming time, Po Toke christened the fat calf Maha Bandoola (most often spelled as “Bandula” now), after a courageous Burmese military hero who had fought the British in the 1820s. It was an expression of Po Toke’s respect for the elephant and his wish for independence for his country.
Right away, the uzi’s confidence seemed deserved. The calf showed an unusual autonomy—leaving Ma Shwe’s side to explore on his own for substantial intervals. And he did something else that seemed comical, but amazed the men even as they laughed: If his mother was given a command, Bandoola followed right along with her, so that when a rider told Ma Shwe, “Hmit!” big elephant and tiny elephant sat simultaneously. A shout of “Htah!” snapped them both to their feet. Simply by observing his mother, Bandoola had absorbed all the basic commands of working elephants without being taught. In the wild, this is precisely how these babies learn.
Though the captive life would seem inherently safer, Bandoola faced dangers that wild calves didn’t. The elephant contractors and the British loggers thought that rearing elephant calves, who wouldn’t be strong enough to work until they were twenty-one, was a waste of money. Why squander resources for a growing animal, they reasoned, if a full-grown wild one could be caught and trained in a short time? When a baby was born, the men put the mothers right back to work. The calves tried their best to tag along, but they simply could not nurse as often as they should, nor even touch their mothers as frequently as they were meant to. Inevitably, they grew up smaller and weaker than their wild cousins. Worse, because they didn’t receive constant maternal protection, they often got lost, were attacked by tigers, and died. The system guaranteed high mortality rates; by some counts it was nearly 70 percent.
Tiny calves suffered high mortality rates at camps where their working mothers were forced to neglect them.
It was a lucky calf who survived, and Bandoola was nothing if not lucky. The spirits of the forest, the nats, favored him, the uzis always said. That good fortune began at birth, when Po Toke had taken an interest in him. Po Toke not only cared for the baby; against policy he made sure Ma Shwe stayed healthy and unencumbered enough to dote on her calf. But he had to do it surreptitiously. He subtly steered her away from the dangerous work zones and placed her with teams who maintained lighter loads. It would not be easy to conceal for long, especially from his fellow uzis. So he needed everyone in camp to believe, as he did, that Bandoola was exceptional. With the help of the others, and by converting the pretty daughter of the man who owned the elephants to his cause, he had a chance. In a country devoted to Buddhism and mindful of the pantheon of nat spirits, his best bet was to seek a special spiritual status for the animal.
He traveled eighty miles to consult a pone nar, or astrologer, hoping to have Bandoola designated a white elephant, for these sacred animals were part of the very soul of Burma. After all, it was in the form of a white elephant that the Buddha chose to enter the world. White elephants came to symbolize all that is pure, strong, and celestial.
Once confirmed by special holy experts, a white elephant would be honored as the earthly embodiment of the universe’s gods and godlike beings, and transported to the capital in a royal barge, accompanied by musicians and dancers. There he would live in his own palace, lavishly adorned by items blessed by monks: bangles, headdresses, necklaces, velvet robes, tusk rings of gold, and harnesses studded with precious gems.
The blessings spilled over, in the form of titles and rewards, onto the lucky jungle men who provided these animals. So Po Toke fantasized as he looked at Bandoola. In his favor were two important factors. It was said in Burma that a white elephant emerging from a bath would appear to have red skin, not black as on most other elephants. Bandoola did have a purplish-pink glow when doused with water. And, best of all, in the stiff dark tuft of Bandoola’s tail, there were four white hairs.
The pone nar agreed that Bandoola might qualify. He told Po Toke to observe the elephant closely as he grew, and he provided auspicious dates to mark for Bandoola’s training. He instructed him on specific rituals and offerings to appease the nats. Armed with this chance for sanctification, Po Toke returned to the village, conscripted the support of the other uzis, and followed the astrologer’s calendar.
When Bandoola was five, Po Toke built a teak-log holding pen for the calf and tried out his gentling process, rather than “breaking” the animal as was done to wild adults. Bandoola would do anything to get a sweet treat, while threats and abuse seemed fairly ineffective. So Po Toke avoided punishments and focused on rewards. He expanded on the commands Bandoola had learned by observing Ma Shwe. The young elephant quickly began to learn more complicated directives about moving logs that only much older elephants knew.
The method was such an immediate success that Po Toke’s status rose among the elephant men. Soon after, when all the elephants of his camp were sold to a teak firm, Po Toke married the boss’s daughter and became a high-ranking elephant man with the buyers. He and his wife, Ma Pyoo, followed the elephants to their new assignment in the western part of the country where he continued his work with Bandoola. Though he was clearly a great bull in the making, Bandoola’s conditioning was far from over. He still needed time to mature before he was assigned the heaviest log work.
Po Toke hoped that Williams, the new boss, would understand his methods. He did. More than that, Williams realized that Po Toke was a master mahout, the kind of elephant expert Williams hoped to become. For Williams, the proof of Po Toke’s gifts was Bandoola, “a rare elephant in his generation, born in captivity and educated to man’s service not through cruelty and the breaking of his spirit, but by the indomitable patience of Po Toke. He represented a new generation of elephants.”
Bandoola’s singularity was made plain by the entry in his ledger book next to “Identification scars”: “nil.” The tusker was the only unmarked working elephant Williams had come across. It was something he wanted to replicate—in fact, to establish as the standard.
Williams’s vague thoughts about elephant care were beginning to crystallize. In Bandoola, he could see the direction of his life and career. He would make sure to visit Po Toke’s camp as often as he could. To make the lives of elephants better he would need an ally in the company. Unfortunately, just as this spark hit, it was time to report back to Harding.