A movement, downstream, something grey coming round the bend.
Damn and blast and bloody hell. The luck of the bitch. Bloody elephant with its baby in tow, on its neck an oozie and on the back in the basket two boys, including the soft one, a couple of girls and that all-seeing brat Molly.
Schoolmarm was waiting for them to pass, waiting with a great smile on her lips. Bitch.
Keeping his breathing nice and shallow, putting the jungle knife down by his side. The whole sodding bunch of them had missed him, so he was pretty confident that he would remain hidden.
He’d have to wait a bit, then catch up and take his chance later. Just breathe quiet, be still…
Oh no, fucking hell, damn, damn, damn. Stone him, if the baby elephant didn’t come right up to his hiding place, stick out its sodding trunk and shove the ferns and shrubbery aside, then start to eat his cover, showing him to all and sodding sundry. On seeing him the baby took fright, squeaked like a piglet and ran back to his fat mother, who gave Gregory a nasty look. That was nothing compared to Grace’s reaction. When she saw Gregory revealed in his hiding place, her eyes grew as big as dinner-plates and she screamed – piercingly loud - and skittered over to the far side of the riverbed, placing the big elephant and baby between her and him.
‘You!’ Grace shouted at him, pointing her finger at him, hiding in the ferns.
The Burmese on the elephant’s neck took it all in. Eddie fancied that he’d clocked his dah. Pretty soon, the oozie might have a word with the Havildar, and that could be tricky. The kids, too, especially that brat Molly, stared at him as if he was some bloody creep hiding in the bushes. The baby elephant trumpeted shrilly at him, and then the little bastard had the cheek to suck up a puddle of water through his trunk and squirt it at him. Bloody circus trick. The kids were all laughing at him. Not funny, not funny at all.
On the surface, the cold hatred that consumed him did not show. Smiling, as if he didn’t have a care in the world, he stood up, bowed from the waist and sauntered off upstream, against the torrent.
That bastard baby elephant had saved the bitch’s life. But old Eddie Gregory wasn’t finished yet, not by a long chalk.
He would have to do the teacher, to save his neck. The way she’d pointed the finger at him, screaming ‘You!’ he knew there was no way he could smarm his way out of it. They’d suspect him, but tough. If she ever got to India, she’d start digging, she would be just the type, and then he’d be for it. A woman like Grace, she’d be certain to find out about old Eli and write letters to that bitch Jewess and the two of them would never shut up until he was dangling from a rope. Well, that wasn’t going to happen. He’d have to sort her out that very night, once and for all.
But that wasn’t the only score he wanted to settle. That little fat bastard Baby Elephant had humiliated him too, catching him in the bushes, squirting him, soaking him to the skin. And no one and nothing made a monkey out of Eddie Gregory. What would he do about it?
Come to think of it, if a tiger – yeah, that would do it nicely – if a tiger attacked the baby elephant in the night, that would make a nice little distraction. Everybody would fuss over the wounded little baby jumbo – he could already hear the children crying, how awful it was, the savage cruelty of the tiger – and while they were all worrying about it, no one would notice if schoolmarm went missing. At least, it would buy him some time. And if Sammy-boy started causing him trouble later, then he’d do him too, and that meant Sergeant Gregory would be the last white man standing, and no one would believe the word of a bunch of niggers and mud-coloured kids against a warrant officer of the British Army. The Havildar, though – he’d have to watch the sodding Sikh, old Cripple Fingers.
Slowing his pace, his thoughts turned to planning his revenge on the baby elephant.
Got it. Muscle and mind. When his darling elephant mama wasn’t looking, he’d give Baby Elephant a lovely shoot of bamboo in one hand and he’d stab an eye out with the other. And if it dared squirt him again, he’d do the other eye too, and then he’d be a blind Baby Elephant and he wouldn’t last five minutes in this shithole of a jungle. That’d teach him.
He would think of something. If he got the right opportunity he would make sure that the baby would rue the day he humiliated Eddie Gregory. And he began to whistle – ‘Oranges and Lemons’ – over and over again.
The Havildar’s eyes – ribbed with blood, red-raw and gritted with worry – told their own story. The elephant men had fallen into a trap of their own making. The riverbed was no longer dry, but three foot deep at its shallowest, and when the two banks narrowed closer together, it turned into a furiously fast stream five feet deep against which men struggled and children had to scale the rocks to avoid. Worse, there seemed no end to it, no prospect of them finding a way of climbing out and up into the jungle; worst, a secret no one knew, he couldn’t swim. The water scared him more than he could say.
What to do? Leave the river and they’d lose another day. But stay in the river, and he might lose a calf or a child. A less courageous man, given his terror of water, would have tried to get out of the river sooner, but the Havildar did not want his personal weakness to impede the operation to get the elephants and people as far away from the Japanese as fast as humanly possible.
Still, the river was getting deeper all the time. Soon, it might carry away a calf and then the rest of the elephants would panic and that could cause carnage. He clambered up the stony bank, his two and a half fingers scrabbling for handholds, to scan the rocks above him. Upstream, as far as he could see, there was nothing. Downstream on the bank he was standing on, again nothing, just smooth rock, maybe 50 feet high. But on the far bank, 100 yards back, he spotted a fissure in the rock wall, carpeted with vegetation– steep but perhaps just about manageable for the big elephants, leading up to who knew what.
Down below, a fresh surge of water bore down on the waiting elephants, causing a calf to lose his footing and be swept, squealing and trunk flailing, off his feet. His mother trumpeted a terrified alarm, the eyes of her oozie flashed anxiety. Instantly two aunties downstream angled their bodies so that the calf was swept towards the bank, where in the shallower water he regained his footing. Mother caught up with him and gave him a loving clout with her trunk, and the three adult elephants penned him in against the bank, so that he wouldn’t go surfing again.
The Havildar shouted down to the oozies to halt while he slithered down the bank, splashed into the river and shot down the current until he got to the foot of the break and managed to stand up against the flow. His breathing was deep and uneven, fear of drowning an unspoken terror. Unsheathing his jungle knife, he clamped it into his teeth and climbed up, gripping a trailing liana as a rope with his maimed hands.
Molly, watching agog from the safety of their elephant basket, whispered to Ruby, ‘He looks like a pirate king.’
The liana creaked and, cursing in Urdu, he scrabbled to find a firm hand-hold for his stumps, thinking back to the days when he had fingers. He heaved himself up the last few feet and was over the worst of it, sitting on a plateau of rock thirty feet above the riverbed, pressed in by thick jungle.
Ferns, bamboo, great lianas came crashing down as he slashed away with his dah until he came out to find himself on a ridge that dropped gently down to the west, to the next watershed. He’d no idea what lay beyond but they could camp here for the night.
As he turned back, his decision was made for him.
The whole green sky became an upturned bucket and the storm rain sluiced down, drenching everything and everyone. By the time he got back down to the riverbed, the water level had risen another two inches, reaching his waist and he was the tallest man of the whole march. If they didn’t get out soon, they might all die.
The elephants had sensed the danger of staying in the riverbed and were climbing out of it willingly, the pads of their feet prospecting for the strongest footholds, tempering their weight, their agility a wonder to behold as three tons of animal floated up the sides of the near-vertical bank. The baby elephants found it the hardest, too little to scale the ledges of rock, too heavy for the mothers or their oozies to lift them easily. The rain made everything worse, turning the rocks slippery-smooth, the children fractious, the elephant men at the end of their tether.
Mother was to go up before Oomy, the last of all the elephants. Po Net struggled to untie the harness ropes that secured the basket, but did so and the empty basket was man-handled up the slope. The oozie dismounted from Mother’s neck and held her gently by the ear, using his bamboo stick to point out the best route up, the elephant powering her heft up to the top with a nimbleness that belied her size. The moment Mother was up, she turned around on a sixpence and gazed down to see her baby follow. Coaxing, shoving, pushing didn’t seem to work. The little fellow looked up at the 30-foot climb, flapped his ears, bleated, and wouldn’t budge. Po Net found three strong lianas, cut them free, lashed them together and descended to the calf. He placed the middle of his cat’s cradle behind the calf’s bottom, and climbed back to the top with the two ends of the liana. At his signal, two tuskers tugged hard on their ends of the liana, while two more oozies and the Havildar worked to keep the cat’s cradle in place around Oomy’s fat bottom. At that moment, Eddie Gregory appeared at the top of the ridge, took in the scene and climbed down from the top, taking over from one of the exhausted oozies at Oomy’s level. Slowly the calf was dragged up, piping and yelping, Mother looking on, quivering with anxiety: twenty feet away, fifteen, ten, five.
‘Almost there, Oomy,’ said Molly, willing the baby to safety. The rest of the school were clustered around the top of the bank, gawking at the drama.
The tip of Oomy’s trunk touched the loose soil right at the top when, losing his footing on a slab of rock as smooth as a tombstone, Gregory’s side of the cradle slipped, the calf in danger of crashing down 25 feet. The Havildar, directly beneath the animal, braced himself as the full weight of the baby pressed down on his chest, two fingers of his left hand locked on to a snag of rock, his face blood-red with the strain. From her standpoint on the ledge above, Grace watched Gregory right himself, his fingers tugging, working on the cradle: she couldn’t quite see exactly what he was doing. Then Gregory gave a shout and the tuskers tugged on the lianas, taking the strain off the Havildar and the baby elephant began to rise again.
The liana that Gregory had been working on just a moment before snapped with a whip-crack and Oomy tumbled out of the sling, falling away from the Havildar, sliding and tripping down the bank, squealing horribly. The Havildar lunged out to catch him by the tail, but the baby elephant fell, splashing into the river like a great boulder. Mother bellowed, a ghastly, heart-piercing cry of anguish, and the watching children stared, mute in horror, as Oomy was picked up by the racing current and, bobbing up and down like a fat brown cork, vanished around the bend.