IT SEEMED IMPOSSIBLE. WILLIAMS WAS TOLD THAT AFTER THE CROSSING, the great tusker, just like all the other males, had been tied to a tree. When his uzi, Aung Bala, bent down in front of him to adjust the chains on his legs, Bandoola had run a tusk through him, killing him with a common technique—using his head to crush the man. He had then tossed the crumpled body away like a broken toy.
While these deaths were infrequent, they were a risk any rider accepted readily. Elephants were so valuable that even the rogues remained employed. They would be placed in the care of experienced handlers who received extra hazard pay, and would often be guarded by a spearman. An elephant who had killed would always wear a metal bell, instead of the wooden kalouk, to mark him as deadly.
Bad elephants, Williams always said, were as rare as truly wicked men. But even normal, good-natured bulls could turn into homicidal brutes when in the grip of musth.
Bandoola didn’t fit either category. He was no rogue, and he was obviously free of musth. “If the killing of an uzi when on musth was justifiable homicide, this looked horribly like murder,” Williams wrote. He left the other revelers on the paddleboat to investigate. Should the report prove true, Williams wasn’t half the elephant man he had thought himself, nor Bandoola half the elephant. He mulled it all over as the men paddled him to shore. Aung Bala, the dead uzi, was a known opium addict, but addiction was fairly commonplace and did not hinder other riders. And with Po Toke supervising the animal’s care, there should not have been a problem.
When Williams arrived, the uzis and their families met him. The sorrow in camp was palpable. As he walked forward, he saw something he had never thought he would: Po Toke, the icon of gentle training, spear in hand, guarding the shackled and disgraced Bandoola. A second spearman stood at attention, too.
Williams took a hard look at the tusker. He believed he had witnessed nearly every human emotion in elephants, including shame. In fact, many elephants who kill humans appear very remorseful afterward, even trying to pick their victims up and get them on their feet. But Bandoola looked unrepentant. If anything, the attack seemed to have given him an appetite. There were great mounds of fresh food all around him—sugarcane, plantain trees, and bamboo—and he was tucking into it all with an astonishing greed.
It didn’t make sense. And the answer would not be straightforward. Williams would have to play detective. The first step was to rule out any physical cause for a problem. Williams confirmed what he already knew—Bandoola certainly was not in musth; there were no fluids staining his cheeks.
So had someone beaten the elephant? Since there were no conspicuous wounds, he looked for hidden ones. He told Po Toke to carefully pull Bandoola’s ears forward. If an uzi were going to mistreat an elephant, he would target this sensitive skin behind the ear. Williams saw nothing. Bandoola was unmarked.
The more Williams studied the scene, the more nervous Po Toke became. And then one peculiarity suddenly stood out to Williams: There were no droppings near the chained elephant, and no sweep marks in the sand indicating their removal. The elephant simply had not defecated for hours.
Williams asked Po Toke who had brought Bandoola’s banquet, and he said that Aung Bala had. Now that just didn’t seem likely: The man had been dead for hours and there was too much food still there, particularly for an elephant eating so ravenously. Williams thought he had figured it out: Bandoola had been starved. Williams said nothing about his hunch, but told Po Toke to walk the half mile to the village with him to view Aung Bala’s body.
All along the route they passed the other elephants who had made the crossing that day. The little clearings in which each group of elephants stood were in contrast to the scene of Bandoola’s incarceration. For the rest of the elephants, there was hardly anything left of the evening meal and plenty of evidence of digestion: piles of droppings where the elephants stood.
U San Din, who had led the river crossing, was waiting at the headman’s house. When Williams confided what he thought, U San Din looked relieved. He had not wanted to be the informer. Now he didn’t have to be; Williams had solved the mystery. U San Din filled in a few details. Yes, Bandoola had gone without food, and not just on this evening. For at least three days he had been given nothing, and restricted from foraging on his own. Unlike most other nights when the elephants were released into the jungle, the days before and after a big swim, they were secured in order to keep them close. Bandoola’s rider, the “opium eater,” had been too high to care properly for the tusker. He should have been reprimanded by Po Toke, but Po Toke had also neglected Bandoola. Po Toke’s own emerging domestic drama had distracted him. He had taken on a second wife, a teenager. The unhappiness of his first wife and the demands of the second kept Po Toke too busy to look after Bandoola.
Days without a real meal and then the extreme physical exertion of a wide river crossing had exacted their toll on the tusker. He was famished and exhausted, and yet still compliant when his uzi ordered him to stand near a tree for shackling. After that, however, he had grown impatient. Standing there alone, with no food, he had protested by stamping his feet and heaving himself side to side. His chains tangled and knotted. When Aung Bala approached him, it was to straighten the fetters, not to give him food. “Then the captive elephant saw red” and killed the man, Williams wrote.
Po Toke had attempted to conceal his culpability by quickly stacking heaps of vegetation around the hungry animal. There was plenty of blame to go around, and Williams shared some of it. Yes, Po Toke and Aung Bala had abused Bandoola. But Williams had been drinking his way through the last several days. Not one of the three men in Bandoola’s chain of command, he felt, had come through for him.
Williams returned to the boat. Harding heard the story and told him that he would leave disciplinary decisions to him. Both men agreed that Bandoola was not a killer and that to label him as such would only turn him into one, with fearful handlers who would subject him to jabs of the spear on a regular basis. The killing would not go down in Bandoola’s official record, nor would he wear a metal bell.
Po Toke was a trickier matter, but, ultimately, Williams could see the bigger picture. This was the first time the old elephant man had ever failed Bandoola. Williams knew he was heartbroken over it. He demoted Po Toke but did not reduce his pay.
This did not settle the matter. Something larger was happening with Po Toke, but what exactly, Williams couldn’t say. A short time later, when Po Toke tried to quit his job, Williams was able to persuade him to take a leave of absence instead. But Williams continued to be mystified by Po Toke, and, it would turn out, he had no clue about what the master mahout was plotting.