Giants of the Monsoon Forest Read online

  GIANTS

  OF THE

  MONSOON

  FOREST

  Living and Working

  with Elephants

  JACOB SHELL

  W. W. NORTON & COMPANY

  Independent Publishers Since 1923

  NEW YORK • LONDON

  For my grandparents

  CONTENTS

  INTRODUCTION

  1. CATCHING ELEPHANTS

  2. POWERS OF TRUNK AND MIND

  3. MUDDY EXODUS

  4. A COUNTERPOINT IN AFRICA

  5. BREAKABLE CHAINS

  6. STRANGE BEHAVIORS

  7. CAMPS AND VILLAGES

  8. PENCIL LINES ON A MAP

  9. FLOOD RELIEF ELEPHANT

  CONCLUSION

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Illustrations Insert

  Index

  Map A. Present and ancient ranges of the Asian elephant

  (Elephas maximus) in South and Southeast Asia.

  Cartography by Jacob Shell.

  Map B. Central and Upper Burma (Myanmar).

  Cartography by Jacob Shell.

  Map C. The Trans-Patkai region. The map shows the

  railway party and Russell party escape routes during

  World War II. Cartography by Jacob Shell.

  INTRODUCTION

  I AM A GEOGRAPHER BY TRAINING; THIS MEANS, SO I persuade myself, that I should pay close attention to those places that do not show up in today’s atlases and maps. Among these places are the tangles of elephant trails that wind their way through the remote forestlands between India and Burma. Pensive giants traverse these trails with humans perched on their broad necks and backs. The routes they follow have a secluded and untraceable quality—shifting their position in seasonal cycles, inaccessible for motor vehicles, hidden from satellite view by tree canopy and monsoon clouds. If contemporary maps are to be believed, the elephant trails stopped existing once modern cartographers traded in their boots and mosquito nets for software manuals and subscriptions to satellite imagery databases. But contemporary maps are not always to be believed. The trails are still there. So are the trained elephants who tread these paths, carrying their riders, who are called mahouts in English (a loanword from Hindi) and oozies in Burmese.

  I visited that sylvan country, in the shadow of the peaks where the green Patkai Mountains meet the precipitous white blockade of the eastern Himalayas, over the course of several trips during the mid-2010s. I always went to meet the working elephants and the mahouts who know them best, and to learn about the trails that elephant and mahout follow into the obscurities of the forest. On my first trip like this, in 2013, I visited a hillside village in Burma (also known as Myanmar) whose human inhabitants lived in bamboo huts, their work elephants thundering about the jungle by night and hauling great teak logs by day. The monsoon season was just breaking, and the tropical landscape teemed with creatures who dwell in some intermediate state of matter, something between water, air, and earth. One day I was coming down a rain-soaked path by the village and my boots became stuck in the thick, viscous mud. As I paused to poke the sludge away with a stick, I was startled by a strange “skipping” snake that hopped by like a rabbit, bouncing from the ground into the air in fast three-foot hurdles, then gliding back into the mud from whence it came. At night torqueing clouds of white flying insects arose from the spongy earth, seemingly hatched by the pattering of the constant rain. Some swirled through the falling droplets with goblin-like delight, while others crawled frantically along the solid matter of the bamboo human shelters, determined to get inside. During another trip, in a village at the base of the eastern Himalayas, I saw frogs hop along water surfaces like skimming stones. They went eight, ten hops at a time as if the liquid surface of a river were sturdy as rock, submerging only when they felt provoked into aquatic hiding.

  From this green backcountry, where earthly elements blend together during monsoon, emerge the headwaters of the Irrawaddy River, Burma’s largest watercourse, as well as the upper reaches of the Brahmaputra, the Mekong, and the Yangtze—the great river systems of India, Southeast Asia, and China. These uplands have traditionally been a kind of no-man’s-land at the outermost margins of the various kingdoms and empires that dominate the fertile river valleys. The discharge of monsoon rains helps hold the lowland powers at bay, combining with glacial melt from the Himalayas to inundate mountain vales, rearrange local watercourses, obliterate bridges, and obstruct highways with sudden landslides. Wheeled vehicles of all kinds become stuck fast in the mud and mire, as do the hooves of horses and mules. Boats and river rafts, though sometimes useful, are blocked by debris: felled trees, boulders, and silt.

  The elephants, by contrast, thrive in these dynamic conditions—in the constant flux between sand, mud, and mist. At certain times of year, and for people doing certain kinds of work, the elephants are the best way of getting around. Trained elephants have comprised the centerpiece of the Burmese teak-logging industry up through the 2010s. At the turn of the millennium, this industry produced nearly 70 percent of the world’s internationally traded teak wood—much of it felled, skidded, and then carefully arranged into neat piles by elephants ridden by their mahouts in the Burmese jungle.1

  The elephants go where the roads cannot. The ease and skill with which they move across monsoon-soaked landscapes has made them optimal transportation during floods. In one famous incident during World War II, elephant convoys from Assam, a state in northeastern India near Burma, rescued hundreds of Indian, Burmese, and British refugees trapped at an upland river confluence near the Burma-India border. The area had flooded during heavy rains and was unreachable by boat, train, or truck. The British officers charged with running the operation took movie cameras with them; footage of the remarkable “emergency relief elephants” shows the animals and their mahouts fording a torrent of white-capped floodwaters on the approach to the refugees’ camp. More recently, following the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, elephants assisted in cleanup efforts in northern Sumatra and southwestern Thailand, where the damage to local road infrastructure was so severe that jeeps and trucks could not be used.

  Elephants appear in more routine circumstances as well. In 2017 I visited a river at the far northeastern tip of India, called the Sissiri. Scattered along its rocky floodplain are the ruins of makeshift log bridges from dry seasons past. Locals design these temporary bridges to wash away with the first intense summer storms in May. Once the bridge has gone, one can use a floating raft or a canoe to ferry people across. But by the time of high monsoon, in late summer, the river landscape is simply too unsteady for such floating craft. A good crossing point for a boatman in the morning might become obstructed with boulders, silt, and runoff forest debris by afternoon. So by late summer and early autumn, the crossing belongs to elephant and mahout.

  Spending several August afternoons at this crossing spot, I watched from the shadows of a bridge ruin as an elephant named Burmay-Moti, a powerful female with a gentle expression, waded back and forth with passengers and bags of rice on her back. Her mahout, Pradip, was shouting commands from her neck and tapping his foot onto her ear. Some locals in the area, mostly members of a hill tribe called the Adis, refer to the elephant crossing as the elephant ghat—a Hindi word that intriguingly carries the double meaning of “riverbank” and “mountain range.” Throughout the crossing (which can swell to a mile wide after very bad storms, though it was only a hundred feet or so when I was there), Burmay-Moti displayed the sublime combination of power and sensitivity in her trunk, purposing the snakelike mass of intricate muscle to h
elp passengers climb onto her back, or to check river fathoms for unstable boulders, or to hoist obstacles out of the way—or, when she was beyond the shallows, to breathe through a natural upturned snorkel. Under normal monsoon conditions, she could carry five or six human passengers on her back at once or, alternatively, several well-fastened motorcycles. Once, during an especially severe monsoon storm, she carried even more passengers than that: a dozen people in one trip. The diligent giant was needed for the rescue of a large group of fishermen who had become stranded on a flooding midriver island. During this urgent operation, Burmay-Moti was working alongside her mother, Sesta-Moti (and Sesta-Moti’s mahout), who also carried many people away to safety.2 It’s often the case that elephants involved in these sorts of operations in the forest work alongside their own family members.

  The Sissiri River has a strong personality. For humans seeking passage across this dramatic and confounding landscape, elephants can be essential. During a monsoon storm, the Sissiri thunders, froths, and fans, hydra-like, five new broad courses born out of one, and these snake their way through great white boulders down to the Brahmaputra valley below. Every new week the monsoon brings a new and unfamiliar Sissiri to behold. New spates of rainfall, or breached mountain ice dams, engorge the valley with water and rearrange its riparian mess of channels, rapids, and shoals. Forest debris afloat on the current scours the landscape. The maintenance of permanent roads here is a Sisyphean task; meanwhile, elephants calmly traverse the beds of mud and winding streams, carrying passengers and cargo on their reliable backs.

  Elephants have participated not only in everyday crossings through such seasonally flooded landscapes, but also in more clandestine, or subversive, pursuits. An elephant who can go where the roads cannot is an elephant who can move people and supplies in secret across wet, mountainous borders, beyond the view of military patrols or modern surveillance. For millennia throughout South and Southeast Asia—and more briefly in the sphere of the ancient Mediterranean—trained elephants were used for combat. But in this remote hill country of the Southeast Asian and northeastern Indian uplands, “war” elephants have served not as cavalry but rather as facilitators of secret human movements. Examples of this sort of thing are surprisingly recent. In the Burma theater of World War II, the British rode elephants across the Patkais to escape the Japanese invasion, and the Japanese employed elephants in the construction of their Burma-Siam Railway (a project made famous in the film Bridge on the River Kwai). The conflict between the Allies and the Japanese over Upper Burma was brutal, the “Stalingrad of the East,” as some in the wartime press called it. As the region’s natural “transport vehicles,” the elephants became objects of intense struggle. Some memoirists who survived wartime operations in the region suggest that elephants were the key to controlling not just Upper Burma but also its pathways between India and China—and thus by extension the key to the entire Asian theater of the war.

  The postwar period, despite its increased mechanization, did not render the transport elephant obsolete. During the Vietnam War, Vietcong mahouts rode elephants along the famous Ho Chi Minh Trail, under cover of the forest canopy, so as to keep the flow of supplies hidden from American reconnaissance planes. Elephants have similarly proved instrumental in Burma’s numerous insurgencies over the past half century, especially in Kachin State, in Burma’s far north. Here an armed ethnic organization called the Kachin Independence Army, or KIA, utilizes some fifty to sixty elephants for moving goods about the jungle. These clandestine “elephant brigades,” the last of their kind in the world, were still very much active in the 2010s. The elephants carry passengers and goods—jade, gold, food, medicine, and arms—across river courses similar to the Sissiri, across remote hill ranges, and through secret mountain passes. The militia soldiers prefer these elephant-mounted convoys in order to avoid the better-equipped Burmese army, whose patrol trucks and jeeps are confined to the region’s sparse network of all-weather roads. Traversing the refuge of the Kachin forest, the KIA elephants sometimes cross paths with wild elephants, with whom they mate; elephant pregnancies are inconvenient but happy occasions for the brigade.

  South of the hilly forests of Kachin State stretches the wide valley of the Irrawaddy River. In the roadless hill ranges along the sides of this great channel, there are yet more trained forest elephants who drag timber by chain or carry them upon their tusks. In these Burmese timber forests, as in the secret KIA elephant trails of the Burmese far north, as at the fords across the remote Sissiri River, the elephants work as partners with humans. Everywhere the two adjoined figures, elephant and mahout, are furtive and elusive: the taciturn giant trying to survive in an increasingly crowded and inhospitable world; the chattier hominid perched above, seeking passage across one of that world’s last great “shadowy” spaces, the Asian monsoon forest. They share a mysterious bond and a unique, codeveloped understanding of the sylvan country on which both of them, for distinct but overlapping reasons, depend. This book explores that relationship’s surprising persistence through modern times.

  ASIAN ELEPHANTS are the world’s second largest land animal species, behind African elephants. They live in the forests and grasslands of the South and Southeast Asian tropics. There are many more African elephants remaining in the world today than Asian elephants: some half a million African elephants survive, in contrast to only forty or fifty thousand Asian elephants. Unlike African elephants, a large percentage of the world’s remaining Asian elephants—between a quarter and a third—are trained for work. Some of these “work elephants” give rides to tourists, or march in parades, or perform tricks. Most of them, though, probably around nine thousand elephants overall, are engaged in labor, especially transportation and logging, which is well beyond the view of most tourists.3

  It should not surprise us that humans work with elephant partners. After all, over the millennia, we have developed complex working relationships with other large or midsize mammals, such as horses, cattle, or dogs. Among these animals, though, Asian elephants are highly unusual. Humans have selectively bred these other species around specialized practical tasks. Domesticated dogs have been bred into many varieties for hunting, digging, retrieving, guarding, attacking, pulling sleds, rounding up sheep, and so on. Similarly, horses have been bred for racing, cavalry warfare, or hauling heavy wagons. Cattle have been bred for dragging plows, in addition to producing milk or meat. Camels have been bred for racing, or for carrying people and baggage across arid regions. And of course, humans have bred a number of other animals (cats, sheep, chickens, and so on) who don’t “work” in the sense of performing imposed tasks separate from their natural inclinations but nonetheless provide benefit for people.

  But humans have never selectively bred elephants.4 Elephant generations take too long—usually two decades, or ten times longer than a dog generation. (The specialization that a dog breeder achieves over fifty years would take an elephant breeder half a millennium.) Furthermore, elephants resist mating in micromanaged, human-controlled environments, preferring the relative freedom of the forest. How is it possible that elephants, despite having never been selectively bred by humans, have nonetheless proved to be indispensable work partners for humans in the forest? The work can be complex and cognitively demanding. Sometimes the tasks that the elephants perform have incredibly high stakes: rescuing people stranded during a flood, for example. And yet elephants weren’t selectively bred to do this. To appreciate how extraordinary this outcome is, where the elephants just “happen” to be good at these sorts of urgent and complex jobs, it’s helpful to further pursue an analogy with dogs. Imagine if, instead of using a Saint Bernard as a mountain rescue dog, or a Belgian Malinois as a bomb sniffer, humans attempted these same tasks with wolves—wild animals captured directly from their natural habitat and then trained for a few years—and that it worked. That is in effect the situation of Asian work elephants.5

  Giants of the Monsoon Forest goes to a remote part of the world to understand how peo
ple live and work with elephants in the forest, and why they’ve done so for millennia. People in these remote areas haven’t been selectively breeding the elephants, in the sense that a dog breeder breeds dogs or a horse breeder breeds horses. But they have been employing the elephants in tasks that give the elephants substantial periods of time in the forest every day to roam and mate with a considerable degree of freedom. In fact, these work elephants’ daily pattern might sound familiar to anyone with a nine-to-five job. They do transportation or logging by day. Then, in the late afternoon or early evening, they are released into the surrounding forest to wander, sleep, forage for food, and mate with each other and with wild elephant herds passing by. The next morning the mahout comes to “fetch” the elephant, to return it to its daily work site, a logging tract or a cross-forest trail. An elephant employed under these conditions has a much better chance of reproducing than an elephant trapped in a spatially enclosed environment like a zoo.6 With access to fresh vegetation and room for plenty of exercise, work elephants in the forest tend to live much longer than the elephants in zoo compounds: one scientific study suggests over twice as long.7

  In this book I argue that Asian elephants have in effect formed a kind of interspecies “alliance” with humans who seek to go where roads and wheeled vehicles cannot. Perhaps these humans covet resources in areas where topography or weather conditions hinder the construction and maintenance of permanent roads. Perhaps, for political reasons, they’re trying to avoid other groups of humans who are “road-bound”: military patrols, for instance. Perhaps they’re trying to harvest a crop that grows best in quiet, roadless forests. Humans with any of these compulsions or motivations are of special interest to Asian elephants, from the standpoint of elephants’ survival. And over hundreds of generations, Asian elephants have in effect cultivated skills that make them useful to those humans. While it’s important not to naÏvely romanticize this relationship (a relationship that can sometimes be harsh or even abusive), the dynamic between elephants and humans presents clues about how the giants have survived for so long and how they might survive in the future.