BY THE SUMMER OF 1925, WILLIAMS WAS A TRUE JUNGLE MAN—not a spare ounce of flesh on his bones, hair buzzed down to a military minimalism, skin browned by the sun. He worked like a jungle salt and played like one, too—keeping a polo pony or two at his regional headquarters so he could join in organized games when he came in from the forest. He had made lifelong friends with some of his colleagues, and admired others—men such as Colin Kayem, “the bravest and maddest” forest man Williams knew; Harold Langford Browne, as handsome as a matinee idol and beloved by the uzis; and big Geoff Bostock, a highly respected teak man moving up the company ranks. Williams’s satisfactions were enormous, and yet as he drew closer to the age of thirty, he began to take stock of his life as a whole.
He had been to England on leave once to find that most of his friends were married, while he had hardly dated. He tried making up for lost time there through an intense love affair with a beautiful woman from a wealthy family. But he was soon back in the forest alone. Sometimes he experienced such an overwhelming urge to mate that he thought about quitting. His despair wasn’t unusual. Forest assistants like Williams spent most of their time in the jungle, unable to meet Englishwomen at all, but even the fortunate ones who did manage to become engaged would not marry till they ascended to the ranks of management. It was a well-established axiom that it took about ten years for a forest man to be in a position to wed. Currently at the halfway point, Williams began to wonder if he could hold out.
Williams was an avid polo player and kept a pony or two at his bungalow. In this photograph, his beloved Alsatian, Molly Mia, trails him.
Though he recognized the beauty of the Burmese, he said, he did not want to adopt the colonial habit of using and discarding local women as needed. Instead, he would take the three-day river run down the Chindwin and then grab a train to visit the houses of prostitution or fleshpots of Rangoon. The writer George Orwell had been to such establishments in his time in Burma, in the 1920s, and described them as “dark & mean” places, with dying flowers on the front doors and rotten bamboo floors stained with betel spit within.
With a little luck, Rangoon could also bring the prospect of proper dates. It was a challenge, though, to swoop into town on little notice, and with hardly any pocket money, and then find an unattached beauty to squire around. More remote still was the hope of meeting a woman who would welcome a life in the jungle.
HE WASN’T HAVING MUCH success in finding a wife, or even a girlfriend, but he did begin to build something of a family around him of animals and people. It had started with Aung Net—their bond was instant and lasting. Williams would say, “No man ever knew me better and I knew him as I knew no other Burman. He grew up with me almost as my son.” He was the first of many without conventional appeal that Williams brought into his fold, hiring the misfits and the unfortunate. There was his personal cook, Joseph, a half-Indian and half-Burmese Christian who spoke English, Burmese, and Hindustani. He was unflappable—nothing riled him, and however many guests showed up or wherever in the forest they were, he was always remarkably creative with the ingredients at hand.
There would be a gardener taunted by his peers as an idiot, and San Pyu, an orphan from the Shan region to the east. San Pyu was born with no thumb or fingers on his left hand. But he used his “stump,” Williams wrote, “with devastating effectiveness,” for tasks such as kneading dough.
Animals were part of his chosen family, too, though, except for the elephants, they didn’t stay long. Wild creatures usually returned to their wild lives. An orphaned baby otter named Taupai was one. “She was a darling,” Williams later said, “one of the most lovable pets I ever possessed.” But after only about six months, she was gone. “She found her happiness,” Williams wrote, swimming off with a group of wild otters.
Dogs would be with him for a few years at a time. The jungle life was hard on them, and rabies, leopard attacks, or accidents would take them long before they reached old age. He would have many: pariah dogs; a bull terrier named Sally; Cobber, a Labrador retriever; a springer spaniel, a cocker spaniel named Rhona; a black chow named Bilu; German shepherds Karl and Molly Mia; there were more, and they often overlapped.
In fact, this tumultuous year was the one in which he lost his very first dog in Burma, Jabo. Always an independent spirit, Jabo had chased after a female in heat and then tried to catch back up to Williams by hopping aboard a passing canoe. The men on board hit him with an oar and drowned him. Williams was heartbroken. Though he didn’t find out the truth about Jabo’s end for years, the dog’s disappearance added its weight to what was becoming a period of “tremendous restlessness,” one that led him to consider resigning. Ultimately, he would stay put. He needed the elephants and they needed him. Especially, as it would turn out, Bandoola.
Williams was in Po Toke’s camp the morning the tusker returned on his own, bleeding profusely, his skull and shoulders covered in gore. It was a nightmare vision, the huge bull elephant staggering into the clearing, blood running down his gray hide, seeping into the soil around his feet. The men shouted and Williams ran out to Bandoola. Williams quickly ordered water and disinfectant and began to delicately clean away the blood to reveal the actual wounds. Most of the injuries were superficial. Still, he knew he couldn’t afford to miss an abscess. So once Bandoola was well scrubbed, Williams carefully examined every inch of him. The bull was stoic. Cut by cut, Williams’s fingers probed and explored their way over the elephant’s forehead, eyes, cheeks, trunk, ears, and neck. All seemed good. But when he made his way to one of Bandoola’s shoulder blades, he found trouble. What looked like a nick on the surface turned out to be a deep, penetrating gash the width and length of a typical tusk. Here was the answer. Bandoola had fought a bull elephant. And since all the camp’s own male elephants were accounted for, it had to have been a wild one. The wound was serious; Williams knew his beloved elephant had come within inches of losing his life. Only the bone of the shoulder blade had prevented Bandoola’s heart or lung from being clipped.
Williams syringed the big wound with disinfectant and patched all the other lacerations. It was time to gather food and water for Bandoola and to let him rest. But Williams couldn’t help wondering: What damage had Bandoola done to the other guy? After washing up, he headed out to investigate. The fight had taken place nearby—trampled vegetation and blood spatter marked the spot. One blood trail led back to camp; another pointed in the opposite direction. Bandoola’s foe was clearly mortally injured—since wherever he had paused in his flight there were bloody droppings. Pools of coagulated blood showed that Bandoola had thoroughly trounced the animal. This wild bull must have sustained serious head wounds, Williams deduced, because leaves that were skull height to a tusker were marked with red along the route.
Following the trail, Williams came to a forest of tall elephant grass. It would have been suicidal for him to follow a stricken tusker into the dense sea of vegetation, so he stopped; he knew already what the ending would be for the poor creature.
Back at camp, Bandoola’s lacerations were looking better, but a systemic infection took hold. “His whole blood-system became affected,” Williams reported. “He developed abscess after abscess, sinuses and fistulas.” All of them received aggressive care. Through the painful procedures, Williams found the tusker to be “the most wonderful patient I have ever handled, man, woman or animal.”
Williams changed his schedule to focus on Bandoola, and for the first time, he was closely involved in his everyday care, bathing, feeding, and doctoring him. There were times when every step forward seemed to be followed by a step back, and a few points at which Williams thought he might lose the tusker for good. Through it all, it seemed Bandoola felt shamed by the erosion of his magnificence. Months went by before the elephant was able to eat normally, walk without soreness or weakness, and keep weight on. Even then, Williams couldn’t quite bring himself to let the animal out of his sight, so he recruited him as one of his travelers. It seemed a little beneath Bandoola’s dignity, but he got to know the other pack elephants. It would take an entire year for the tusker to fully regain his health. Perhaps Williams was being overly cautious. Or maybe he just enjoyed the elephant’s company. But eventually, when there was no denying Bandoola was restored to his physical magnificence, he was returned to logging work. And the two friends said a temporary good-bye.