Giants of the Monsoon Forest Read online

  We climbed hillsides choked in vines and creepers. Otou and the forest guide both seemed sleepily comfortable, but I was already winded and perspiring. It was just after six a.m. Distractedly, Otou removed a machete from a green scabbard at the end of his sash and started thwacking at a baby bamboo shoot. “The baby shoots are very hard,” P. explained. “He’ll make it into a new handle for his knife.” We proceeded through a gully and into an area of low brush. Here at last Otou looked perplexed. “Gunjai the elephant likes to play tricks.” The mahout looked at us. “You stay here.” Otou jogged up ahead and looked around. “No, no, he didn’t go that way. He’s clever and naughty.” We returned to the gully. “He went down the gully and doubled back,” Otou mused. “To confuse me. He’s done it before.” While climbing along the gully toward a hillcrest above, Otou explained other such elephant tricks. “Sometimes they pick up leaves with their trunk and stuff them into their wooden bell. That way the bell makes no noise and it’s harder to find them.” This trick might buy an elephant another thirty minutes or an hour before the mahout finally finds him, and the workday begins.16

  Hearing about such tricks as we followed the elephant’s path, I recalled a story I’d read from a British forest officer, Bruce, who was stationed in these jungles in 1903. He once saw a female elephant running away from her mahout. The attendant ran after her, shouting for her to stop and trying to catch the long chain attached to her leg. Seeing that the mahout was getting too close, the elephant picked up the chain with her trunk. She galloped off into the jungle, holding the chain triumphantly overhead; Bruce did not say whether this elephant was ever found.17

  Evidently the double-back at the gully was the only trick Gunjai had in store for us today, for promptly the air began to fill with the tink tink tink of a wooden bell, a sound that could almost be mistaken for the babbling of a stony brook. The bells are carved of teak, and each one produces a slightly different note, identifiable by the mahouts. These elephant bells are a Burmese custom: one tends not to see them in the work elephant areas of northeastern India.

  We found Gunjai at a grove of bamboos, munching tall blades of grass. He wasn’t a beautiful creature, at least not from the angle we approached. In fact, he looked ridiculous. His belly bulged outward, full of fodder consumed during the night. He was a mokona elephant, a male born without tusks. In a normal herd, a certain percentage of the males always carry this trait. Isolated herds adjacent to ivory hunters will sometimes lose all their males with the tusker gene, leaving only mokona males. This seems to have happened in much of Sri Lanka, as well as in a section of the Patkai Mountains called Tirap.

  “Dwa! Dwa! Come here!” Otou’s commanding voice stopped short of a full shout. The elephant looked and snorted. His trick hadn’t worked well enough. He stepped toward the mahout and released a quantity of steaming dung, as if to make a point. It was a dreadful display. But his belly looked more elegant now. I forced my way through the bramble to get a better look at Gunjai. He had the nice high forehead typical of mokona elephants. His long trunk ended in a splotch of pink.

  A chain connected the elephant’s two front legs: the fettering chain. Elephants released into the forest at night almost always wear one. The fetters are slack enough to permit the elephant to walk comfortably but not to run. This way the creature rarely wanders more than a mile or two from the evening release spot. Otou removed Gunjai’s nighttime chain.

  More often than not, Gunjai would be found close to the base area, usually as little as a half-mile away, but the route of the mark left by his dragging chain, which often wound in confusing patterns through hills and gullies, took Otou on long excursions that sometimes lasted over an hour. This was the morning ritual. It occurred to me that some time could be saved if the elephants were wearing GPS devices. Perhaps the time saved would make it possible to loosen that fettering chain more—or to remove it altogether.

  P. interrupted my musings. “Why don’t you step back from the elephant, Jacob,” he said. “I don’t think he likes you.”

  The guide perhaps had a point. As we followed the elephant, who now had Otou on his neck, the huge animal kept glancing back at me and P. and nervously walking faster. “I spend a lot of time with this elephant, and we always get along. It must be you.” P. gave the matter some thought. “It’s your trousers!”

  He explained. That morning I was wearing beige pants that resembled the trousers that timber industry officials wore when they did surprise inspections. Otou and the guide, by contrast, were wearing traditional Burmese longyi: long fabric wrapped around the waist like a skirt. Gunjai knew the mahouts hated surprise inspections from the officials, so he hated them too. My pants and height and my general manner suggested to the elephant that I was an industry official, a member of the Burmese professional class. Not a mahout.

  I liked P.’s theory. If it wasn’t right, it surely ought to be.

  We reached a small watering hole—too small, as the springs in these hills were running dry—and Otou began to wash Gunjai with a brush. The elephant clearly enjoyed the procedure. This relaxing bath was his daily reward for agreeing to exit the forest and begin the workday.

  “What do the mahouts here do during musth?” I asked Otou as he scrubbed the elephant. Musth (pronounced “must”) is a hormonal surge that male elephants experience—and females too, on rare occasion—which causes black tears to flow from glands near their eyes. The black tears are followed by a visceral urge to mate, which is followed by bouts of aggression and violence. A biologically important component of elephants’ reproductive behavior, musth places forest mahouts in close proximity with the elephants when they were at their most dangerous. To me, this hormonal surge sounded like a serious impediment to the elephant-based work in the forest.

  “It depends a lot on the elephant,” Otou explained. “What we usually do here is let him go into the forest for a few days or a week. We try to let him get the musth out of his system. Usually during that first week, he just wants to mate and doesn’t feel aggressive at all, and really he isn’t so dangerous. But later the aggression sets in, and at this point we have to tie him up. Sometimes we tie him up by the ear. If we just tie him by the legs, he can break free with his strength or even knock down the tree he’s tied to. But if we do it by the ear, he knows not to move.” Sometimes, Otou went on, mahouts don’t immobilize the elephant until after a mishap. The elephant in musth might attack another elephant. Or he might knock over someone’s hut or even kill a person. But such events were rare.

  Listening to this, I thought back to similar conversations about musth I’d had in the Trans-Patkai area to the north. Two tribal logging mahouts—one Kachin, the other Hkamti—told me their musth strategy was to give the elephant more tasks to do during the day, in the hopes that the extra burden would leave him too exhausted to become aggressive.18 But a retired commander of the elephant transport brigade of the Kachin Independence Army described an approach similar to what Otou was telling me: during musth, the militia’s mahouts give the elephants time off in the forest.19

  Gunjai’s bath was over, and he and Otou came up from the watering hole. P. the guide had found a bush full of sweetflowers and offered me one, demonstrating how to suck out the sugar. Then, as if proving to me that he was indeed old friends with this elephant, so the issue really must have been my pants, he hoisted himself onto Gunjai’s neck and set off down the hill.

  THE CAPTURE OF wild elephants and the nightly release of work elephants are foundational practices for the human-elephant working relationship in this part of the world. The nightly releases are needed because of the sheer quantity of fodder an elephant requires, which is around six hundred pounds each day.20 An elephant engaged in cross-forest transportation might require less food at night, since the elephant probably spent much of the daytime munching on shrubs and bamboo shoots along the forest trail. Nonetheless, from the mahout’s point of view, the nocturnal roaming period is a required element for keeping the elephant a healthy, h
appy, and reliable co-worker. A British elephant logging official from the colonial period, James Howard Williams (or “Elephant Bill,” as he was nicknamed), remarked that in these forests a work elephant is really domesticated only “eight hours of the twenty-four.”21

  The nighttime wandering period also gives the elephants time to sleep and to mate: either with other domestic elephants or with elephants in wild herds passing through. Domestic female elephants free to wander the forest on a nightly basis leave progeny with far greater frequency than females stuck in enclosed compounds like zoos. Domestic males with this same freedom mate with wild females, which to some extent (but not fully) offsets the reduction in the wild population due to capture.22

  The capture of wild elephants out of the forest, through methods like mela shekar and kheddah, is similarly vital, as it provides the mahouts with a significant number of their elephants. Though mahouts will often say that the elephants born to domesticated mothers make the best workers, female work elephants are less likely to mate during the night when work areas become isolated from wild elephants’ migratory routes. This problem has become especially pronounced with greater forest fragmentation in recent decades.23 Elephant capture can help offset such losses. A mahout may also turn to capture in order to supplement his herd while one of his females is pregnant or nursing her young. (The pregnancy period lasts around twenty months.) Though fandis sometimes “overcatch” elephants and destroy a wild herd, usually they do so to feed demand for elephants from tourist parks or from religious organizations that need elephants for their parades—not from the logging and transport mahouts. Lacking external demand, the forest population should tend toward an equilibrium, where the number of wild elephants who are caught by fandis and sent to work with forest mahouts is counterbalanced by the wild herd’s birthrate, as well as by occasional escaped domestic elephants who rejoin the wild herds.24

  Agricultural interests consider huge forested areas in the Trans-Patkai region to be cultivable and profitable for staple crops like sugar, wheat, and rice and thus present deforestation pressures. But numerous groups here have a direct stake in the continued existence of the forest, and these groups’ mutual interest is the basis of a kind of forest-centered coalition. That coalition consists not only of mahouts and fandis who use elephants for logging and transport, but also poppy growers, gold panners, and hunters, all of whom need the forest as well. Rebel militias in the region (in particular the Kachin Independence Army and the National Socialist Council of Nagaland) depend upon the forest to provide cover for their clandestine operations. The Kachin Independence Army depends not only on the forest canopy but also on the elephants for moving supplies about in secret. Add to these affinities bonds of kinship, clan, and language, and suddenly the forest-centered coalition, with which the caught elephants have managed to align themselves, starts to look very formidable: the strongest network of such forest interests anywhere in the Asian elephant’s natural range. But remove the fandis from the picture, as well as the input of trained elephants that they provide, and conditions begin to favor agricultural expansion and consequent deforestation.

  One area I visited in the Trans-Patkai revealed what happens when elephant capture is removed from the local picture. In this area, police have been especially aggressive over the past decade in pursuing and arresting local fandis who capture wild elephants. (Hence my decision not to name this location.) As a result, mela shekar is dying here. This shift has gone hand in hand with a decision among local elites to transition the local economy away from forest resources and toward farming wet rice in paddy fields. However, as the paddy fields spread into former forestland, domesticated elephants have begun wandering into the paddies at night. Consequently, the local elites have told local mahouts to keep their elephants chained to trees during the night. The local elites—who are usually the formal owners of the elephants—have done this reluctantly and unhappily, but the feeling has been that the rice paddies need to be protected, because they are compensating for local economic losses due to cessation of local elephant capture.

  Because this village is located in an especially lush jungle zone, the elephants can be confined by 100 to 150 feet of chain at night and still find sufficient fodder. Nonetheless, the chain means the domesticated elephants cannot seek out wild herds and potential mates at night. And so even as the community receives no new elephants from mela shekar, its females are not becoming pregnant. Sometimes mahouts try to conjure pregnancies by leaving their elephants tied up in corridors they think wild herds will pass through; it’s not clear yet whether this sort of thing can be effective. Due to these interconnected factors, the political and economic system here is in the process of “tipping” from being forest-oriented toward being farming-oriented, and the long-term situation for both the elephant-keeping culture of the area and the local forestlands looks very uncertain.25

  This is not to say that, in areas with less police intervention, the elephant-keeping cultures of the Trans-Patkai region have necessarily succeeded in expanding local elephant numbers or even in maintaining a level population. Overall, numbers in the Trans-Patkai have not been definitively tallied by anybody, but they seem likely to have gone down over time.26 Even so, the pressures against the local elephant population seem to have more to do with deforestation, ivory poaching, and market demand for captured elephants from distant religious organizations and tourist compounds than with mela shekar captures aimed at keeping the elephants situated in these forests. Likely, some captures of elephants have even helped move elephants away from forest areas with ivory poachers and toward safer sections of the forest, since poachers are less likely to encroach upon the forest turf of armed fandis and mahouts. Indeed, some mahouts remarked that the reason they bring their guns into the forest is only secondarily to protect themselves from wild elephants and other dangerous animals; primarily it’s to protect their elephants from poachers.27

  The working relationship between the two species must be understood with open eyes. When talking to the fandis of the region, I usually had to harden myself before listening to certain descriptions of mela shekar—and especially the subsequent training process. In the Trans-Patkai, a captured elephant is usually tied up for months on end in the forest, each leg fastened to a tree. The fandis will deny food to the elephant at first, then gradually bring more and more fodder, and eventually rice and salt treats, to reward the elephant for learning the command terms and developing desirable human-friendly behavior. Sometimes the relationship can retain this abusive dynamic long after the training period is over. The working relationship can sometimes be complicated and cruel, a topic we’ll return to in Chapter 6.

  Yet even with these troubling aspects of the relationship between forest mahouts and their work elephants, the mahouts’ communities have proven more adept at resisting the economic pressures associated with deforestation than have areas elsewhere in the Asian elephant’s natural range. And elephants require that forest cover, to eat, to mate, and to be happy. Through the unique combination of elephant capture, elephant employment, and nightly elephant release, such communities have been able to meet this requirement of forest access in a way that no one else in the world has.

  Some indignant outside observers might assert that all these elephants should be left in the wild, and that the remaining forestlands should receive sufficient investment and protection to safeguard the wild elephants’ migration corridors. In reality, such indignation has not been effective at stopping deforestation in this part of the world. While a number of practices among some fandis and mahouts here cannot be defended from a conservationist standpoint, overall fandis and mahouts have a great deal to teach concerned outsiders about how human beings, as morally imperfect creatures, can act as guardians rather than destroyers of the forest’s last giants.

  Chapter 2

  POWERS OF TRUNK AND MIND

  LET US RETURN TO THE SCENE OF THAT HUGE ELEPHANT-catching stockade of the Ayutthaya king in the seventeenth
century. The stockade was the size of a geoglyph, and within its wide opening, which was many miles across, stood a particularly steep mountain. This mountain had no stockade wall. Nor was it secured by any of the royal elephant hunters carrying torches and drums. The Jesuit priest visiting this royal Siamese kheddah asked his hosts why the escape path had been left exposed. Because, he was told, the mountain’s slopes were so steep that they were insurmountable even for the elephants. The mountain was a natural barrier aiding the king’s titanic stockade.

  Soon the mass capture began. The long front line proceeded toward the kheddah’s narrowest point, carrying torches and drums and lighting firecrackers. But as many wild elephants in the forest retreated farther into the trap, the Jesuit priest kept his eyes on the steep mountain. He made note of what he saw:

  Ten or twelve of them escaped that way, and for that purpose made use of a very surprising expedient; fastening themselves by their trunks to one of the trees that were upon the side of that very steep mountain, they made a skip to the root of the next, and in the same manner clambered from tree to tree with incredible efforts, until they got to the top of the mountain, from whence they saved themselves in the woods.1

  Some twenty elephant generations later, in the teak-logging area of central Burma, I witnessed something that reminded me of the Jesuit’s extraordinary account. An elephant had been asked by her mahout to retrieve a log at the pinnacle of a steep hill. The log was an awkwardly shaped piece. Instead of going to the timber company’s main depot, it would likely become construction material for the mahout’s own family hut a mile down the stream from this prominence.