BANDOOLA HAD JUST SAVED BILLY WILLIAMS’S LIFE, CARRYING him sick and unconscious across the raging Yu River. Though delirious through most of the trip, Williams, in flashes, remembered the tusker’s Herculean effort, his slow and careful search for footing in the boulder-strewn waters, and the animal’s stamina. Williams recalled, too, the sensation of the river water washing right over the basket he was riding in. Their safe crossing was a miracle.
Now they were on the opposite bank, but still only halfway to the medical help of the wilderness station on the Chindwin. Williams’s eyes were rolling back in his head again, and Aung Net and the other camp worker who had ridden across with them knew they had to get him out of the rain. The men first set Bandoola free to forage, and then pulled Williams up a set of ladder stairs into a dank, sturdily built hut, raised up on stilts. Aung Net toweled Williams down, got him into clean clothes, and tucked him into a cot.
Under normal circumstances, getting to the Chindwin would have been straightforward, as the Yu fed into the greater river. But one section of the waterway, dangerous even in good weather, had been rendered impassable in the rains. In fact, Williams knew of no one who had even attempted the rapids at this time of year. His only choice was to ride Bandoola through miles of virgin forest to reach the Chindwin below the chute. But, now, even that seemed beyond him. As his condition worsened, Williams feared he would not survive the lurching ten-day trip.
The thigh-high mud of the rainy season carried a sometimes deadly fungus that the men called elephant itch.
The torrential monsoons of 1927 were conspiring to kill him. He was experiencing a cascading series of maladies, including malaria, and the effects of a sometimes deadly fungus that thrived in the thigh-high mud of the rainy season. The men called it tinea sin wai, or elephant itch. Wherever the sludge touched, the skin would erupt in little pustules. “I knew the course this hideous thing would take,” Williams wrote. “Ulcers developed in some places on my calves. In sympathetic reaction the glands in my groins had swollen to the size of fists. It was impossible to stop scratching for a moment, impossible, even with the aid of whiskey to gain any sleep.” In his torment, the onset of malaria was nearly a blessing, for at least it regularly knocked him unconscious.
But, of course, he didn’t stay asleep. Waking in the hut, and in agony again, Williams called for Aung Net to fill an old kerosene can with boiling water. Aung Net helped steady his shaking hands, as the two lifted the heavy tin and poured its contents onto Williams’s legs. It was torture, but it helped. “The discharge from the sores oozed down like black treacle,” he wrote, “and the relief was such that I was able to endure the pain in my groins for as long as a quarter of an hour before collapsing on my bed again.”
The rain was as relentless as his illness. After two days, Williams’s condition worsened. Delirious and weak, he gave up. He hoped to simply die in his sleep. Over the years, he had spent enough time stopping in this place, which was on his regular circuit, to have cultivated some favorite flowers and shrubs. It was all too possible, he realized now, that the bougainvillea bushes he had planted would soon mark his own grave.
Eventually the rain paused just enough to allow some of the other men carrying supplies on elephantback to reach him. For Williams, though, there was no relief. The rains resumed. Then, a second miracle took place. Three dugout boats arrived, the last piloted by Colin Kayem, the Bombine man whose bravery was legendary.
As soon as Kayem stepped off the boat, Aung Net ran to inform him that Williams was near death. The two scrabbled up the ladder. In the lantern light, Kayem found his old friend delirious, soaked in sweat, and gaunt. Gently pulling the sheets back from where they stuck to Williams’s weeping legs, Kayem saw the devastation. He got to work, spending the entire night draining the “venom” from the drum-tight ulcers.
Somehow, this time, it worked. By morning, Williams felt the best he had in more than a week. Sitting up weakly in his cot, he even joined Kayem in a cup of tea.
Over the din of the rain hammering the roof, Kayem announced a decision. “We’re getting out of this bloody hole,” he said. “I’m making up a crew of three volunteer boatmen to shoot the rapids.” It was just what Williams had worked so hard to avoid. And yet his friend somehow made it sound easy.
“I don’t mind,” Williams responded. “Anything you say.”
Kayem organized the strongest men and loaded supplies into the boats. He secured his patient into a chair in the bow of one of them and had a canopy draped above him. Aung Net would be at his side. Bandoola and the rest of the elephants stood in the pummeling rain as the camp men waved good-bye. The boats pushed off, paddling right into the center of the fast-flowing rain-pocked waters. For hours, they battled their way down, nearly capsizing again and again through the surging current and whirlpools, and around the sharp rocks. Kayem was finishing what Bandoola had started. Once past the worst of the rapids, he called to Williams, “Don’t worry, old boy, you’ll see Paris again.”
And he was nearly right. Williams would at least see Rangoon again, where he was hospitalized for an extended stay. Only months later, by Christmastime in fact, was he fit for the jungle again.
AT DAWN THE DAY after Christmas, Billy Williams woke up hung over aboard the fancy company-owned stern-wheel paddle steamer anchored in the Upper Chindwin River. Harding, long back from his leave and now set to retire shortly, gently woke him: “You had rather a thick night, partner,” he said. “You’ll probably need this to see those elephants across.” He was holding a glass of “black velvet”—a potent half-and-half mix of champagne and stout. Williams came to groggily. He could hear the soft lapping of water against the sides of the boat.
There were four of them onboard—Williams, Harding, Millie, and Tony, a young man flirting with the idea of a life in the jungle—and they all had been drinking for days. The night before, Harding had passed out in such a state of torpor that his friends thought he was dead. During a late game of cards, he had suddenly slumped forward in his chair. Williams saw that the sunburned bald patch on the top of Harding’s head had lost its color and now “looked as white as a bladder of lard and as cold.” It made him realize that he “deeply loved” the old man.
At dawn the tough bird had been the first to rise, tenderly waking Williams with a little hair of the dog. Williams drained the glass and got up into the chill to look out at the blanket of mist covering the water. He could see just a few of the taller trees on the far bank reaching above the fog like a dream.
This was the big day, and though two of the men aboard—Harding and Millie—were more experienced, it was Williams’s job to lead. And not just his job. It was his calling. He was now clearly better with elephants than men who had decades on him. And it took a true elephant man to supervise a river crossing. Thirty-five working elephants were assembled on the shore, ready to ford the mile-wide river to a new logging site. Love it or fear it, to all elephant men, a crossing this vast was a colossal event.
If the passage were to be successfully accomplished, it had to be on the elephants’ terms and timing. This wasn’t a matter of superstition or sentiment; there really was something mystical about the whole endeavor. It took one elephant to lead, her identity unknown. When she emerged, it would be as though she had been anointed in a secret ceremony. No observers could detect how her rank had been sorted out. It was a baffling event that pointed to the sophisticated nature of leadership, at least as it is conducted among elephants.
Crossing a wide river, even this one with its long sandbar in the center, was challenging. Although they could pause on the shoal, the elephants still faced two long swims on either side of it. With the river current and the number of elephants making the crossing, Williams knew they would all end up scattered on the far shore—some drifting a half a mile downstream.
Alone, Williams left the steamer on a native dugout at ten to meet U San Din, the head elephant man. It would take time since the animals would be loath to enter the water before the chill was out of the air. As the dugout cut across the surface of the water, Williams was struck by what he saw in front of him—bright sun, a layer of lingering mist, the far bank of sand and tall grass, and dozens of elephants gathered in a jagged queue, ears flapping, sinuous trunks snaking, feet shifting.
They were vocalizing, too. By now it was familiar talk that Williams could parse. Low rumbles to make close contact. Full-throated roars for longer distances. Short squeaks signaled unease; longer squeaks, joy. Earsplitting trumpets announced a charge. And then there was that odd, metallic boom created by the trunk knocking on the ground when an elephant was unsure of something.
It pleased Williams. Despite the inherent risks in the mission ahead, he was touched just looking at them in formation. He felt connected. Even more so when his eye was drawn to the handsomest among them—Bandoola. Though Bandoola was with the other males, held back away from the front line of females, his size made him easy to spot. No doubt Bandoola was aware of him, too, if not by sight, then by the sound of his voice, or his scent in the air.
Using dugouts and canoes, the families of the elephant riders, along with the dragging gear, were ferried to the far shore. By two o’clock, the air was warm. The riders mounted the elephants and tested the beltlike ropes fastened around the girth of the animals. The uzis would be hanging on to these straps when the elephants joyfully submerged themselves occasionally during their swim.
It was time to ask the elephants to cross. Williams gave the order for silence among the riders. All was still. Everything was left to the animals. They were free to enter the river. U San Din climbed into a dugout canoe to monitor things from the water. He and other paddlers in canoes would act as shepherds, rallying the elephants straight across if they began to let themselves drift downstream with the current.
Everyone waited for the as-yet-unidentified leader to start. In the wild, hierarchies are well established—family groups are led by older females. Even in zoos, elephants work out their pecking order. Their chain of command is a matter of both competition and subtle cooperation. In logging camps, the natural ranking is dismantled. Leaders don’t emerge in that setting for one simple reason: They are rarely allowed to lead. If there’s a power structure, it asserts itself when the elephants are released into the forest at night.
Here on the bank of the river was another of life’s lessons from the elephants that could be applied to people: Dominance is not leadership. From animals, Williams said, people could learn about taking “authority without being a bully.” The big tuskers could splash into the water but no one would follow them. What was needed was confidence rather than bravado. In fact, years of experience had taught the uzis that the leader would not be a male. The notion of the wise matriarch remained alive among them. So the riders had marshaled the bulls at the rear.
The fog had burned off, but mystery still hung in the air. Who would go first and who would the others follow? The men were fascinated and on edge. There was stillness and quiet in the waiting. Then the silence was broken.
With a whoosh of water displaced by their huge bodies, eight females waded in, “as casually as if they were going for their daily scrub.” Five more entered. But they stalled out. This was recreational, a dozen elephants enjoying a soak. No leader yet. It was almost as though the vote was still being tallied. The elephants casually stood about as the tension among the men grew.
Williams heard a commotion from the shore: Finally, a young female with an uzi on board pushed her way to the front and darted into the water. No hesitation. She progressed into deeper and deeper water, lunging directly toward the channel with purpose. She even submerged. “For a moment she disappeared, rider and all,” Williams said, “then she rose with the buoyancy of a cork. She was afloat, swimming steadily towards the shingle island in mid-river.”
Maybe it was her confidence that caught the other elephants’ attention. Maybe they had chosen her to begin with. Whatever the transaction, one by one all the other females convoyed behind her. They swam strongly, occasionally dunking their riders under, but always popping back up to the surface. It was such a thrilling sight that from the bank, where they had gathered together, Williams, Harding, Millie, and their young guest Tony all spontaneously rose in a silent standing ovation. “There are few sights more delightful than to see a powerful young elephant swimming in deep water,” Williams wrote.
The makeshift matriarch let the current carry her clear from the sandbar. She didn’t seem to want to rest. She just kept swimming for the far shore, with all the other females in tow. “For this migration,” Williams wrote, “the elephants, who worked in teams and as individuals, suddenly became a herd as in the wild state, following the females.”
With the girls well on their way, it was time to release the tuskers. Williams watched Bandoola enter the river like a handsome frigate, plowing the water before him in great waves. Even when most of him was underwater he was magnificent—his great head above the surface and his exposed skin shiny purple with wetness.
All the elephants were in the water now. The uzis rode, but they gave no commands—the animals were dictating events now. Captive elephants had transformed into wild ones, becoming just a little more majestic for it. It was enough to keep the human audience on their feet.
It took a few hours before all the animals made shore. Not an elephant or uzi was lost. Everyone would eat and rest now on the far bank. Williams saw them off and returned to the steamer, looking forward to celebrating. But no sooner had he arrived than a dugout made its way to him carrying a horrible message: Bandoola had killed his rider.