The First Encounter with Baby Elephant

The meeting with the officials, heads and notables of Manna and I was able to get into my brand new, bright American car returning to Bengkoelen.

A 123-kilometer drive along the coastal road. This is for South Sumatra. not such a significant distance now, but the route has its special difficulties, because there are five wide river mouths in lie, which are not bridged. And at the time when this sketch there was no regular car traffic yet; my car was the first automobile to complete this route.

The crossing at the river mouths was done with rafts stacked on top of each other bound layers of bamboo; this was sufficient for light traffic. It is true that those rafts often got lost in the mud and were the surf was battered to pieces, and it took several days to get new ones to make rafts, so that a camp was formed on both banks waiting transport carts, but this also happened often when the bands made crossing dangerous; that wasn't so bad, one was in no hurry; and the cart drivers knew with a cheerful A game of dice and lots of sleep will kill the time.

My car, the pioneer of a new era, brought the first great consternation for those who regularly make the crossings servants, simple, good men from the interior, who with open mouth and pale faces the rumbling carriage with unexpected saw them coming at speed, without any draft animal; and even more were frightened they of the weight of the new vehicle, which usually carries the rafts submerged and, up to the axles in the water, from bank to bank swung over. It goes without saying that all kinds of small and large accidents happened when driving on and off the wobbly rafts, which could not always be properly moored to the banks repeatedly eroded by bands of squirrels.

And if automobiles were beings endowed with reason, then they would, who were tortured around bamboo rafts in South Sumatra, have left behind memoirs which have long since given rise have given to calling a congress against colonial horrors.

Now only the owners have painful memories, which are recorded are in bundles of receipts from car repairers.

But when I stepped into my light American that day, I had such souvenirs yet, and this time they were given to me by chance saved.

It had been an exceptionally warm day on the still bare square in front of the new Controller's House vibrated the heat waves.

But once you get moving, the heat no longer bothers you, and it was she who had smelled the delicious aroma from the clove trees along the road. They are beautiful trees, and they would lead one to believe that culture would be rewarding for these coastal strip, an expectation that Raffles also had. But the various experiments have failed, and of the last of them only these trees remain left over; among the indigenous population they keep the memory awake to the Controller, who had them planted [22], and to whom they still always call the Clove Man, toean tjabé tjongkah, a man who was strict and good and is therefore gratefully remembered.

The sun set tropically quickly, and now the most beautiful period of the Indian day in,—when the sharp contrasts of light make way for the halftones, when the sky is no longer so bright blue and the clouds are preparing to adorn themselves with the wondrous splendor of colors, with which the sun will tint it and the sky.

At one of the river crossings a rest had to be made, the ferrymen were still busy repairing the raft, which on one or had taken a hit in some other way. I was grateful for it, because the forest on the coast here has a peculiar charm, and I slipped away into the silence beneath the mighty aroe trees. [23]

The fine foliage of these cassowaries is very reminiscent at first glance think of needles and they are sometimes called pine trees, also because the fallen gray-brown needles thickly cover the ground, as in a pine forest; but the comparison with these giants doesn't hold up any further forty, fifty meters high and with their sparse, gray-green foliage, that every scent of resin is missing.

The ground is dry and evenly covered by the dead needles, which on their away from above often hang for a while on the peeling bark of the trees. Through the sparse shrubs that the undergrowth forms, one sees the ocean, completely open all the way to the South Pole. The white rollers end eternally in a final wrinkle, which in a sinuous, ever-changing line, softly spreads over the clear, flat sand.

The roar of the surf is whispered in the thin foliage; but Below, between the heavy trunks, silence reigns. And when in the glowing afternoon hours of beautiful days there is not a breath of wind, when the sticky sea air does not blow away, then the silence hangs heavy; the cicada, which seems to be the only living creature here and which is halfway a tribe repeats its high-pitched tune over and over, that silence can not breaking, further accentuates the eternal rest and the abandonment.

On the horizon a long plume of smoke streaked, there steamed a boat, a mail steamer perhaps to Holland, to our children...

A sharp stab on my hand suddenly called me out of the sweet homeland back. A red ant was from the trunk I was leaning against stood, walked over to me and took possession of the unexpected prey; she These kararangas are crazy about meat, they beat the terrible jaws firmly in, and triumphantly the abdomen lifts itself vertically on.

Poor devils, he and I, what a moment we were in a mess! I was even, in a dream, in the distant homeland, he, in his vitality, thought himself so sure of his prey. I loosed his grip and put him back on his trunk, where he sat dazed for a moment, but then quickly felt the painful jaws, the abdomen high in surprise air.

And now that I had returned to reality, I didn't notice to be more alone; on the beach walked two little girls in her national bathing costume a long way into the sea; here too the children do to "bathe"; but they were so embarrassed when they strange man discovered that I felt quite guilty and moved away hurried to the car, which was already on the other side of the river to wait; and Amin, my good driver, looked softly reproachful, we after all, we still had so far to go!

The section of road that now follows leads through one of the loneliest regions of Sumatra, which can be crossed by car. On the left, on the west side, a narrow edge of young forest runs along the edge, which blocks the view the ocean. On the eastern side stretch heavy overgrown swamps, created by the rivers as they are driven back by the spring tide from the sea, and as a result the low banks and the flat land are flooded. Broadly branched ficus trees support themselves with numerous light-colored arms gigantic roof, the side branches form walkways to other trees in a chaos of green and lianas and high-climbing, thorny rattan. The soil is largely marshy and becomes deep during the rainy season. underwater; pandans and other sharp-leaved plants grow there, and Everywhere there are clumps of young rattan, everything dense, thorny and sharp. And if man struggles through that chaos, then there are always, everywhere just at the level of his ear, the well-known barbs on the tip of the graceful feather leaves of the rattan, and they do their work every time and They angrily bite the captured ear, uttering their nickname: “wait-a-bit!”

In these impenetrable swamp forests, where one rarely hears the sound of birds, the world of climbing animals may be the have the upper hand, but they are also a dorado for snakes and monitor lizards[23] ; and the wild pig still finds dry places there enough to live in large groups. Even the clever elephant comes regularly; he has, from generation to generation, his safe place proven paths have been trampled down and they have been scoured out in the swamp edges. Woe to the hunter—I learned it personally later—who is deceived and without being doubly on guard, a wounded elephant follows in such forests, convinced that the ton-heavy giant helpless and lost in those swamps. The Great One of the forest moreover, the thorns of pandan and rattan do not harm them, they even eat with taste the young, prickly shoots; and when they touch the soft lower lip but protect it with the trunk and close your eyes, then you will walk they, on their massive rubber soles, through the densest thorn bushes as a soccer ball through the grass.

These swamp forests are not heavily populated, but they are home to actually all animals, except the tapir and the rhinoceros. Also the malaria mosquitoes, the most dangerous assassins of India, live there, and they are a terror to the sparse population of this coast.

It was exceptionally quiet along the lonely road that day. I had hoped to see again the black panther that had once crossed my path, the slender, long-legged cat with an exaggeratedly long tail. But even the pigs, which usually graze the roadsides in the late afternoon to stir, were lacking; I had to content myself with one gigantic monitor lizard, which crossed right in front of the car and which only, by to put in a dangerous gear, just at the front wheels escaped; in the grass at the side he stuck his ridiculously long tongue out at us.

Amin laughed. He was delighted with the new car, which was so ran silently; that was quite different from our old Fiat, however faithfully he had served us; he sat with a proud, straight back the wheel, and he too apparently enjoyed the coolness that had set in after the blazing day, which took leave of us in a sea of ​​flames.

Darkness now quickly fell, without any perceptible twilight, and the forests turned black before the clouds in the sky could even disappear doing the soft shades in infinite variety, which the last gave them light.

At the lower edge of the forest, where it was getting blacker, the crickets their song, accompanied only here and there by the cozy the croaking of a frog in its puddle.

And on the engine rumbled along the white gravel road. It was already high time to light the lanterns, but Amin always drove so long possibly without lights; he had driven a truck for several years with such bad carbide lamps that he considered it safer to to trust his sharp eyes to the utmost limit, also the The Fiat's carbide lanterns were far from brilliant; and I left such things entirely to him, the faithful, silent comrade, who has been through a lot with his boss and his car in the wilderness.

But now it was time to be careful. Although the white road was still clearly visible distinguished, the forest had become black as ink, and one can in the wild regions of Sumatra never know what suddenly appears You can shoot at the edge of the forest. Amin and I have done wonderful things together. polite, and one must have enjoyed the sensation of a cute tiger cub seen in the light of the lanterns in front of the car wheels hobbling, with the firm conviction that a mad mother in the black forest edge gallops along, for the wild charm of a night ride by understanding a wilderness like this.

Three more bends in the road and we would be standing in front of the Ngálam, the most capricious and dangerous of all estuaries, only 45 kilometers from home.

We both sharpened our eyes.

Wasn't it as if there was a house there, just off the bend? But... in the middle of the road, that couldn't be right, and there wasn't a living soul living there. What I saw there was also blacker, and had more convex shapes.

What could that be?! "Stop, Amin, Ada Hal, there's something strange!"

He discovered it at the same moment, braked with all his might and put the engine off. The awful silence of the night came over us, no cricket sang, only in the far distance the surf growled softly. And Sixty yards ahead of us, on the road, lay a black, flat hill. “Allah!”... and Amin shivered, “what is that, sir?”

“Oh my goodness…” I whispered, “those must be elephants, Amin!”

“Elephants??”... he said in astonishment; he was no hunter, and I knew, that he had never seen an elephant before; “but sir, shall we quickly turn around and go back to the pasanggrahan in Talo?”

“Amin, that is not possible; if we try to escape, they will definitely come us off; and you know how they do with ox carts, they take the oxen between the trees and sails the hood of kadjangmatten the trees in; they will try such things with our wagon too, and with us.”

But what then?! We had to do something. Even if we, the animals, whispered must have understood long ago that there was something there that was was actually worth any interest; only the strange, the for Their new sound must have captivated them. As far as we could see, there was no movement in the black lump.

“But you have a gun!” Amin suddenly found out, and it took I had trouble making it clear to him that one should not talk with a smooth talk hunting rifle in the dark against a front of startled Elephants. But what then? I racked my brains; besides, I didn't want I would so much like to know more about that mysterious black lump, but how?

It was Amin again who had a moment of clarity, and now he brought the decision: “My friend Kono, that old Javanese driver, has given me once said: if you ever have the misfortune to encounter an elephant in the evening If you meet them on the way, light your lanterns immediately, they are afraid for,” and Amin put his hand in his pocket, looking for matches. But at the same time we fools finally realized that this new The car had electric lights... and click! There lay the black lump Illuminated by two bright beams of light. Indeed, resting elephants! and they completely cut us off from the inhabited world; probably they came out of the swamps and they enjoyed the still warm road. But immediately one of them stood up, and others followed. Eyes blinked, ears flapped, trunks swung, but there was no flicker of heavy ivory. The group, about ten strong, staggered very much restlessly back and forth. What would they do? The seconds felt like minutes; Apparently they just couldn't come to a decision.

Finally one of the largest animals separated and walked to the left into the forest; I can still see the line of aversion and annoyance in the short neck, and I still feel the tremendous tension of this moment... would the others follow, and what would they do then, if they were once in the protective shade??

“Quick, Amin, start the engine, we have to get past there as quickly as possible, when they are all off the road.”

“Yes, but...”

“Really, boy, we have to do it; it's our only chance!”

The engine roared, Amin shivered, perhaps I did too, but it also sports fire flared up.

The hum of the engine made the animals come to a decision. A second elephant followed the first into the forest, and behind it came a even larger animal, a mother apparently, because, behind her pressed, a very nice round little elephant swung around, a giant circus horse plaything on thick columns, the baby of the rubbish.

We saw nine animals like that, one by one, in the edge of the forest disappear, the road was clear!

“Forward Amin, bismillah, the Lord help us!”

Amin boldly took up the matter, it was about our lives, and the first sixty meters gave us a thrill that I will never forget. Another ten meters... the road was still clear... and we rushed past the fatal spot. We Both quickly looked to the left, I saw that Amin was startled, a gigantic animal was standing not five meters away from us... go ahead!!

Then suddenly the air was torn by a blaring fanfare as if from a hundred bugles, the enchantment of the bright light was over, now eight trunks and one very small trunk went straight up into the air and eighteen ears were pressed flat... “teeeeeeèèèèèèèèt, alarm! the enemy!!"

A hoarse scream came from the steering wheel... "Oh, Allah, here they come!" and Amin stepped on the gas, the light car sprang obediently forward, but like a drunken man, because there was something wrong in Amin's neck fluff, with alarming force he hit it several times with one hand on the rebellious hackles, and the other had lost all certainty... “Yes, Allah, they are screwing us!!!”

I looked back but saw nothing running after us... then I burst out in uncontrollable laughter at the silly display.

But I patted Amin on the shoulder, and we wished each other luck, that that they would not wait for us in vain at home that evening.

That was my first encounter with Baby Elephant. I had him in the I no longer see the edge of the forest, but I would return to it two years later see in an adventure, where my son, a student on leave, and I only miraculously escaped unscathed; Baby's mother was also fall, later his uncle also died from our bullets, in a swamp forest, where he attacked us and nearly robbed me of the opportunity to ever to write this sketch about Baby's family. But a venomous Aunt took over the care of the orphan. And once we read from the traces that aunt and baby, having fallen behind the troop, suddenly appear wild men had broken a new path through the forest; and we understood what danger the young master had escaped, because we in the middle of the fresh trail of Baby's hind leg an even fresher one saw the trail of Him whose name must not be mentioned in the wilderness.