IN 1926, WHEN WILLIAMS WAS SETTLED IN AT ONE OF THE LOGGING camps, an itinerant worker named Aung Kyaw showed up. Williams knew him well, having watched him grow from a teenager into a young man working and living on his own. He stood out: first, because he was handsome, athletic, and so much taller than the rest—about five-ten—and also because of his natural magnetism. He was an extraordinarily able forest worker with particular knowledge of jungle life and medicine. But Aung Kyaw was also attracted to trouble in the bigger towns along the railroad line. Only when he needed money would he go back to the camps—to grab temporary jobs as a follower with the elephant men. He had a reputation for disappearing before his full term was up. “He was the New Year’s Resolution,” Williams noted, “bright, fervent but not lasting.” Perhaps he was even unstable. Because of this, Aung Kyaw had been blacklisted with the company. Though Williams was officially prohibited from employing him, he felt the directive was inherently unfair—any officer could ban a worker without explanation. This kind of random authority irked Williams, and he often enjoyed flouting it. Aung Kyaw was hired.
At first, everything was fine. In fact, Aung Kyaw worked diligently, so when the camp was in need of eggs and live chickens for an impending trip to a valley near the Chin Hills, Aung Kyaw and another man, San Ba, were sent off with fifteen rupees each. But San Ba returned alone, reporting that Aung Kyaw had left for another village. Williams was annoyed. He assumed that was the last he would see of Aung Kyaw.
Williams went back to the paperwork that had been preoccupying him—hashing out the details of a complicated fifteen-year teak extraction plan. The calculations were tedious, and he spent hour after hour with papers spread out over two camp desks. Exhausted by the end of each day, he looked forward to quiet evenings—a nice dinner, a few pegs of whiskey, and reading the weeks-old periodicals that had arrived in the mailbag.
There were enough things to keep Williams’s mind so full that he had nearly forgotten Aung Kyaw when a week later, it was announced that he had returned empty-handed—no chickens, no eggs, no money. Williams summoned him but did not glance his way as he arrived at the tent. Aung Kyaw had to wait, squatting on the rug, while his boss deliberately ignored him, slowly checking some of the timber figures in front of him. Finally looking up, Williams questioned Aung Kyaw, already knowing the answers: How many chickens did he get? How much money was left over? Aung Kyaw had nothing in hand and no explanation. He looked ashamed, muttering vague answers.
Williams admonished him—he swore mildly in Burmese, saying Aung Kyaw must have spent the money on liquor and women. “My language was not violent,” Williams would later write, “but I did use every Burmese jungle expression at my command to tell him what I thought of him as a man.”
Even during the exchange, Williams would regularly disengage from the conversation to peer down at the paperwork, tallying sums to show Aung Kyaw his contempt. And then he’d ask questions again. Aung Kyaw’s mortification seemed to redouble, but he stayed silent. A full minute went by. Finally, Williams lost his temper. He told the worker to leave. Rather than using the polite phrase in Burmese, he barked a demand as an insult: “Thwa like!” or “Clear out!”
As soon the words came out of Williams’s mouth, he regretted them. “It made me almost ashamed to have insulted Aung Kyaw so deeply,” he said, “and I looked down at my papers so that he could go away without further humiliation.”
But Aung Kyaw didn’t go away. He defiantly remained in place. The longer he ignored his boss’s order, the more Williams lost face. So Williams whipped around in his chair. Just as suddenly Aung Kyaw stood, reaching for a sheath tucked into his waistband at the small of his back.
Williams was incensed. “You dare draw a dagger at me?”
Aung Kyaw held the weapon in his right hand—a brutal eight-inch-long knife with an ivory handle.
They glared at each other. As Williams lunged forward, Aung Kyaw raised the knife. They struggled. Williams landed a solid punch to the face, which sent his adversary backward, bleeding. Then, Aung Kyaw came forward, “crouching like an animal,” lashing out with the knife. Williams dove at his attacker’s knees, lifting him “like a rugger tackle.”
The brutal embrace was intimate. “For a moment,” Williams would write later, “I felt the warmth of his body against mine.” As Williams prepared to throw his assailant to the floor, the knife struck his arm and then plunged into his left side. “There was no pain,” Williams recalled, “but a sound like a stone being thrown into water and I groaned with the blow.” Now Williams got Aung Kyaw to the ground, pinning him. It was victory of a sort, but even as he gained the upper hand, he saw the blood flowing down the knife blade toward the handle and realized it was his own. On the verge of blacking out, he yelled for help. Aung Net came running to the rescue, heroically snatching the dagger from Aung Kyaw’s hand. Williams was afraid that Aung Net, driven by his loyalty, would kill Aung Kyaw. But very quickly, half a dozen men appeared.
Williams stood up, “feeling rather strange and seeing round specks revolving before my eyes.” With everyone tending to Williams, Aung Kyaw ran off. The camp men chased after him.
Williams assessed the damage. A cut on his arm was bleeding profusely, but the real devastation was to his ribs. Blood saturated his shirt and streamed down to his socks. The sodden garment was tugged off, revealing a gash. He prayed his lung had not been harmed.
After being bandaged, he rightly figured a whiskey would only increase the bleeding, so he asked for tea. Lighting a cigarette, Williams took his first long drag. It hurt like hell but made him realize his lung was not punctured.
He needed a tetanus shot, though because of the bleeding, he could not be moved quickly. There would be five painful days in camp. Shortly afterward he arrived at headquarters in Mawlaik near the border of Manipur. Aung Kyaw was already there, having surrendered in remorse.
Williams was having similar feelings. Over the three weeks it took for him to heal and for the days he waited for the trial, he constantly ruminated about what had happened. The pain that lingered in his ribs did not spark a desire for vengeance. Instead, he came to feel that he had mishandled the meeting entirely. Put simply, he said, “I asked for it.”
Aung Kyaw was the first and last Burman he ever hit, he wrote. He blamed himself for having been belligerent and contemptuous from the start. Things would have gone quite differently if he had been more humane. When the dagger appeared, Williams felt, he should have made an effort to calm, not provoke, Aung Kyaw. He could have called out to the camp workers to intervene before anything started. But he had felt his manhood challenged, so he had escalated the tension. A better man would have risen above the misunderstanding, not stooped to it.
Williams had an epiphany: “If I had shown Aung Kyaw the sympathy and understanding that I prided myself on having for elephants,” he wrote, the stabbing would never have occurred. He realized that the emotions of men in trouble mirrored those of the animals he loved. He had forgiven elephants for killing men if what the elephant had done seemed justified. There was a lesson in that. “One thing certain,” he wrote, “was that in those jungles no one including myself ever thought of destroying an elephant for killing a man.” He let that thought guide him now.
As the trial date approached, Williams reframed the incident with Aung Kyaw in a characteristically honorable way. “We had very nearly committed a murder together,” he reasoned, “the murder of me. I was thoroughly ashamed of my own part in that affair, and I thought Aung Kyaw was ashamed of his.” Aung Kyaw’s life was at stake, and he alone would pay the price, Williams wrote, “for what was in some measure my crime.”
Williams entered the District Sessions desperate to help Aung Kyaw. When their eyes met, he saw the accused’s face break into a genuine smile. The horrible incident had forged a strange bond between them. “If only the judge could have ordered him to say that he was sorry, I felt that justice would have been done and Aung Kyaw and I would have left the court friends for life,” Williams said.
It was too late for that. Aung Kyaw wore a red jacket that marked him as criminal facing a charge of attempted murder. His legal team did not appear competent, and Williams saw the courtroom was packed with Burmans employed by the British (Bombine and government clerks) to side against the accused. The odds didn’t look promising.
Despite the fact that he was a witness for the prosecution, though, Williams was determined to be Aung Kyaw’s advocate, knowing he might be his only one. The accused looked bewildered as the proceedings went forward in English. He could not understand a word.
That gave Williams an idea. When motioned by the elderly Anglo-Indian judge to come forward and testify, Williams surprised everyone with a request never made by foreigners: Speaking in Burmese, he asked to take the Burmese oath after he had done so with an English Bible. “As the witness pleases,” the judge said, “but all evidence and proceedings will be taken in English.”
Williams was passed a pungent bundle of palm leaves bound in red cloth. Before a hushed courtroom, he held the frayed Kyeinsa over his head and kissed it. This abridged version of the Book of Oath, or Book of Imprecations, promised an unceasing hell for anyone falsely testifying.
The courtroom hushed as Williams told his story. The lawyer asked if Aung Kyaw had come to the camp with the intention of murdering Williams. Williams thought of all the times elephants had killed. It was never, he believed, premeditated. It was always “a spur of the moment reaction followed by remorse.” He answered no.
Aung Kyaw took the stand. Speaking through an interpreter who translated his testimony into English, he told an implausible tale about Williams brandishing a revolver and then falling onto the knife. When the prosecutor rose and began questioning Aung Kyaw, the story fell apart. Finally, Aung Kyaw recanted and asked if he could simply tell the truth. He then corroborated Williams’s version.
Aung Kyaw was given a light sentence of three years. A year later, as it turned out, he was out of prison and living with his family when Williams went to visit. “I saw his dear old parents,” he said, and they called for their son. “As soon as he entered he just fell on his knees and cried asking pity and forgiveness.” That had already been given, Williams said.
Making peace with the other beings in the forest wouldn’t be so easy.