Giants of the Monsoon Forest Read online

  In exploring this argument, we’ll enter the shared world of forest elephants and their mahouts. We’ll see how mahouts catch elephants in the forest and train them, and how these elephants balance the duality in their lives, where they are both working animals and “wild” ones free to mate with passing herds. We’ll watch these elephants perform complicated work, even devising their own ingenious solutions to urgent problems like river logjams, rescue operations, and emergency construction projects. The elephants’ intelligence and acute situational awareness have often made them brilliant co-workers for humans. We’ll look at examples of intense wartime escapes on elephant-back from the combat zones of World War II, the Vietnam War, and the ongoing Kachin conflict in Burma’s far north. The elephants possess unique evasive or “fugitive” skills, and we’ll examine how their partnership with humans may have resulted from gradual historical and geographic processes involving co-species migration and escape—processes that never affected or shaped the Asian elephants’ more numerous cousins in Africa. In Africa, as we’ll see, the history of elephant domestication presents a different sort of drama.

  An important aim of the book is to give readers a sense of what might be “done” with Asian elephants during the remainder of the twenty-first century. Today the demographic trendlines for Asian elephants are very grim. By this century’s end, the species seems likely to succumb to what some paleontologists are calling the “sixth great extinction,” the tsunami wave of species extinguished by the activities of humankind.8 Are there promising strategies of avoiding this outcome for the Asian elephants—of saving the species? On a continent whose human population is in the billions and will certainly continue to grow, is it nonetheless possible to set aside sufficient forest ranges for Asian elephants to become a completely and sustainably wild species as they were millennia ago? Alternatively, are there favorable future roles for the elephants as work animals, roles that can still keep these amazing creatures happy and help them flourish once again? In the book’s final chapter, I propose one such possible role: elephants as helpers in flood relief operations. This could ally Asian elephants with a human need that seems likely to expand in future years, as a growing human population finds itself, increasingly, on flood-prone terrain.

  Some might find it helpful to think of this book as a kind of “ethno-elephantology”—a term coined in recent years to describe new research, among anthropologists, geographers, historians, biologists, and others, aimed at better understanding the complex relationship between elephants and people.9 Much of the research done in this area has focused on elephants in tourist parks, government-managed wildlife preserves, and religious festivals. Mostly omitted have been the domesticated elephants of the frontier forest zones, where elephants are released into the forest each night and fetched each morning.10 Giants of the Monsoon Forest looks to this frontier.

  Throughout the book I refer to a wide array of ethnic groups from which forest mahouts tend to hail: Kachin, Hkamti, Karen, ethnic Burmese (Bamar), Assamese, Moran, Adi, and others. Many of these groups are small ethnic minorities, and a reader can be forgiven for finding this whirlwind of ethnic names a bit bewildering. The involvement of so many minority peoples in forest-based mahoutship is no coincidence. Elephants are most useful as labor where an infrastructure-building state is weakest. The groups likeliest to be living in such areas are so-called “hill tribe” minorities. Indeed, keeping the state at arm’s length was often the reason these groups took to the geographic margins in the first place. The use of elephants for everyday work helps such groups derive wealth from their forest surroundings and in turn consolidate power—a power connected directly to the continued existence of this canopied hinterland. The elephants get something from this arrangement too. By associating themselves with these humans and their forest-based economy, Asian elephants boost their own likelihood of inhabiting the sort of landscape in which they tend to be healthiest and happiest: a large forested area, buffered from the “normal” human world of huge cities, farms, and motor traffic along busy roads.

  During the mid-2010s, I traveled to two regions where mahouts work with elephants in the forest. One region was central Burma. Here I visited teak forests where the Burmese government uses elephants to drag valuable timber. This elephant logging system follows the synchronous life cycles of humans, elephants, and teak trees. In the government’s teak-logging villages, a mahout and an elephant may grow up together as children, reach peak work age at the same time, and enjoy retirement side by side. The teak wood is harvested in maturation cycles lasting between three and eight decades, depending on the desired wood quality. Though this would be a rare event, the same elephant-mahout pair could conceivably harvest a single timber tract twice: once as teenagers and again in their fifties, each time replacing mature trees with saplings.11

  Another area I visited I’m calling the Trans-Patkai region, a tribal area straddling the Indian-Burmese border, encompassing Burma’s Kachin State, parts of Burma’s Sagaing Division, and the eastern part of the Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh. Unlike central Burma, this is an area of relatively weak state control over forest territory and over the elephant-riding peoples therein. The huge crescent formed by the Patkai Mountains bisects this region. I use the odd term Trans-Patkai partly to emphasize commonalities in the elephant cultures on both sides of the mountains, and partly to obscure the precise location of certain politically sensitive activities practiced by some of the mahouts, whether on the Indian or the Burmese side of the international border.12

  For a Western visitor raised on Conrad and Kipling, the Trans-Patkai can seem a land from the recesses of some dark and vivid imagination. Here is a land of tigers and great hornbills, of tribes that hunted heads until just a generation or two ago, where animist worship of forest spirits is widespread and many communities have their own “deathly priest”—their shaman who prays to the forest spirits in incantations of obscure origin. Meadows of opium dot the hills, and militant rebels cross jungle streams on elephant-back. Camp life is everywhere: the camps of hunters, elephant mahouts, and panners for gold. People’s houses here are made of bamboo and cane, fetched from the surrounding woods. For much of the year the region is blanketed in the thick clouds of monsoon that obstruct the watchful eyes of modern satellites passing overhead.

  In part, such romantic impressions can be misleading. People here drive cars and motorcycles and talk on cell phones and read the internet for news. The wage economy has eclipsed alternative economies almost everywhere, and the formal industrial sector here is not so different from that of the United States a few generations ago: mining, oil, coal, and sugar all loom large. One will pass a crater that used to be a hill, that once had monkeys, hawks’ nests, and jungle cats: now the hill is a pile of gravel that will become a road to provide access to another hill full of potential gravel.

  And yet one’s initial romantic sense that danger, beauty, and mystery lurk beyond each mountain ridge would not have been entirely wrong. Beyond the gravel roads lies a hidden world of work camps and communities linked by elephants. Here the typhonic force of geographic elements reigns, especially during the monsoon season, as windy storms beat upon the mountainsides and huge flows of rainwater, mud, and uprooted trees block the advance of wheeled vehicles. When mudslides and floodwaters swamp the roads’ uppermost reaches, a different logic of movement necessarily emerges.

  The normal world, the “exposed” one to which we’re accustomed, has not been good to the elephants. It builds endless roads and replaces forestlands with cities, towns, and farms. Sometimes the exposed world will put elephants in zoos or in gated park compounds. The people of the exposed world often mean well when they do this. But it’s ample forestlands, with plenty of room to migrate and eat bamboo and wade through running water, that these giants need most of all. Zoos and fenced parks cannot replicate such conditions. By contrast, the setting of this book is among the least deforested areas remaining in South and Southeast Asia, despite this s
etting’s position directly between two areas of incredible human density, India and China. The unique partnership here between elephants and humans has been a major factor in this remarkable geographic outcome and has helped resist the forces of deforestation.

  FORTUITOUS TIMING made this book possible. Some two-thirds of the world’s domesticated elephants who are released into the forest at night are in Burma. Since the 1960s, Burma’s main experience has been one of military rule, economic isolation, and instability due to interethnic civil wars and ethnic cleansing campaigns directed against minority peoples. A study like this one would have been far more difficult, perhaps impossible, to undertake at any point from the 1960s through the 2000s, especially for an outsider. The mid-2010s, though, were a period of relative liberalization and democratization for the country. During my first few trips, optimism seemed to be in the air, among nearly everyone I spoke with: in Yangon, in the central Burmese upcountry, in the eastern hills and in Kachin State.

  Sadly, during the last year or so of the research, the military began to reassert its control over the country’s fragile parliamentary system. Potential peace deals in the far-north Kachin conflict stalled or collapsed. And by 2017 the military regime and some sympathetic militias were conducting a full-blown ethnic cleansing campaign against the Rohingya minority people along Burma’s Bangladeshi border. Hopefully these recent conflagrations of violence, oppression, and military authoritarianism will rapidly extinguish themselves. Perhaps they’ll prove to have been merely the final death throes of a fading repressive regime. But I cannot help but anticipate that, in a few decades’ time, the mid-2010s—the period when I was able to speak with many Burmese forest mahouts about their lives, their work, and their unique knowledge about elephants—will seem to be a historic exception.

  It also would have been impossible for me to do this research alone. In addition to knowing how to ride an elephant, the “perfect” researcher for this kind of work would have to know the Burmese, Assamese, Hkamti, Jinghpaw (Kachin), and Karen languages. I had just English and beginner’s-level Burmese and Jinghpaw. Everywhere I went, I had guides who were multilingual and consistently brilliant. In the chapters that follow, I refer to them by their first initials or by altered names. Nor are all the mahouts we interviewed fully named. I took such precautions to protect the identities of several participants in the research. These people’s time, energy, attention, and resourcefulness made the book possible. I will have to find ways to express my gratitude to them other than by naming them. At times I felt the guides, along with a number of the interviewed mahouts, understood my research and research questions far better than I did.

  We have very little “hard data” pertaining to Asian elephants who live deep in the forest, in areas with relatively weak state presence. The topic is necessarily composed of the impressions formed by people who have lived and worked with these giants in such remote places. More often than not, such people articulate the complexity of their impressions and experiences through the vivid stories they tell about their lives in the forest and about the elephants they’ve known.

  Chapter 1

  CATCHING ELEPHANTS

  I WAS IN THE REGION I’LL CALL THE “TRANS-PATKAI.” Fifty million years before, the Indian continental plate had collided with Eurasia, scraping along a head of land to the east that formed the green march of the Patkai Mountains. It rammed with far greater violence to the north, to force up gargantuan masses of rock: the Himalayas. These two mountain ranges merge in a kind of topographic eddy that swirls across a series of high passes: the Pangsau, the Chaukan, the Phungan. During the epoch of human history, the mountains have divided powerful kingdoms and states: the Patkais separate India from Burma; beyond the Himalayas lie Tibet and China. Yet the passes through these mountains, though high and remote, compose regional entities in their own right. The Kachin, Hkamti, Lisu, and Naga peoples all have populations on both sides of the Patkais, linked by the passes.

  I arrived in that transmontane region when the mustard flowers were in full bloom. The landscape was awash in yellow, broken by the greenery of nearby tree groves and undulations of dark mountainous forest. Vistas of distant snowy peaks occasionally emerged between the trees. I was with a local guide, whom I’ll call Sang, on the sandy bank of a river. The spot was tranquil except for the occasional braying of black and brown goats who grazed on a steep grassy slope behind us. The slope led upward toward a lonely bamboo hut on a high crest, with yellow fields beyond.

  The drive here from the main road followed what was barely a dirt track and took nearly an hour. At one place, the track was obstructed by a swampy pool, filled with the overflow from an adjacent stream. Scattered messily across the pool were planks of wood. “Ah,” said the guide. “We’ll have to get out for a moment.” He and the driver set about retrieving the planks from the reachable margins of the water. Having collected a dozen or so, they carefully arranged the pieces in a tracklike pattern, engineering a temporary causeway. This was what the wooden planks were for, but they’d been dispersed by the previous week’s hard rains. The next such rainfall would scatter the planks again, and the next motor traveler down this quiet path would have to repeat the process. “Why does no one build a permanent bridge?” I asked.

  “No point,” replied Sang. “In the really dry season, it’s so dry that you don’t need any bridge. In the really wet season, it’s so wet that a bridge would wash away, even a very good one that was bolted down. And anyway, this whole road from start to finish can’t be used at all during the rainiest time of year; you’d walk—or with heavy cargo, you’d use an elephant.”1

  At the end of this drive, we stood at the remote riverbank, with the group of goats and the vast yellow mustard fields up the hill. The guide gestured across the river to the opposite shore. “Jacob—here they are!” Three massive elephants emerged from the forest and stepped into the reeds. They were carrying two men each, one perched on the neck and the other sprawled across the arched back. The three elephants waded toward us, the men smiling and waving. The guide spoke with them in the local language. The men were friendly but could not help but overawe. The three sitting on the aft hips of the elephants were armed, with rifles slung across their backs. Everyone wore scabbards that held long machetes. Huge coils of heavy ropes and dark chains were piled up like pythons on the elephants’ backs. The elephants themselves were enormous, some of the largest I’d seen in Asia, around nine feet at the shoulder. It was as if the men were riding on houses.

  “Khoonkie elephants,” Sang pronounced with satisfaction. This was what he and his partner the driver had brought me, across the swampy dirt track and the endless mustard fields to this riverbank, to see. These were elephants that I’d only read about in books. Khoonkie elephants (called pansein by some people in central Burma) were, from the standpoint of the local elephant people, the smartest and bravest of the tamed elephants, the ones with the strongest instincts for protecting the humans riding on their huge bodies.2 Their job, during this time of year, was to help humans catch wild elephants. It was not the most difficult job an elephant could get, necessarily—that distinction likely goes to the work performed by the Burmese logging elephants whose specialty is clearing midriver logjams. But it was certainly the most dangerous job for the humans involved. Only a special group of elephants was selected.3

  The three men riding on the necks of the khoonkie elephants were called fandis: master elephant catchers.4 The three armed men riding on the elephants’ backs were their assistants. Fandis have three methods of catching wild elephants. In the pit method, they dig a hole and cover it with branches and leaves. Then, riding their khoonkie elephants, they chase a wild elephant into the hole. Skilled fandis disdain this method, as the wild elephant usually injures himself or herself in the fall and thus makes a poor work elephant in the long run.5

  In the second method, sometimes called kheddah, or gor shekar, a huge stockade is built in the forest, made of wooden pikes strapped together w
ith strong bark rope. From the air, the stockade resembles a symbol for gamma, a huge V with a tiny circle at the point (γ). Elephants are chased into a broad opening in the stockade that gradually narrows until reaching a passageway, through which the stockade opens again into a circular compartment reinforced with the strongest pikes. The narrow passage is then barricaded behind the elephants.6 These stockades require much time, planning, and investment to build, but they have the advantage of being able to trap many elephants at once.

  Guy Tachard, a French Jesuit visitor to the Ayutthaya kingdom in Siam in the seventeenth century, described a kheddah of breathtaking scale. The Jesuit, a sometime astronomer, was there to observe a lunar eclipse, but since this astronomical event was still several nights away, the Ayutthaya king offered to take him to see the elephant hunt occurring in the nearby hills. The king had employed tens of thousands of royal subjects in the construction of a vast stockade, whose open section, the Jesuit tells us, extended outward for ten leagues: over twenty miles. The hunt took place at night. A long row of thousands of men swept through the forest, carrying torches and beating drums, frightening many hundreds of wild elephants into a retreat that would take them into the stockade opening. The Jesuit wrote of the spectacle of the torches: “it seemed to me in the dark the finest sight and loveliest illumination I ever saw.”7 One might dismiss Tachard’s story as hyperbole, but a separate account by an ambassador from Persia supports his estimate of the operation’s mind-boggling scale.8 The Ayutthaya kings, skilled in hospitality and diplomacy, seemed to enjoy showing off this incredible procedure to emissaries from abroad.