Elephants -- Juvenile literature; India -- Juvenile literature
thought some water animal was going to swallow me. I heard the
squealing of Kari, and I knew it was his trunk about my neck. He
pulled us both ashore.
As the boy lay stretched on the ground I recognized the cowherd.
He had gone to bathe in the river, had slipped too far out, and
not knowing how to swim had almost been drowned. I put him flat
on his face on the sand and the elephant put his trunk about his
waist and lifted it gently up and down, and then up again. After
doing this three or four times, the water began to come out of
the boy's mouth and, not knowing what else to do because his body
was cold, I slapped him very hard all over. After that I propped
him up against the elephant's leg. Then the boy slowly came to.
In the meantime all his cows had wandered away in different
directions. As I thought some had gone into the jungle, where I
was afraid they might be eaten up by tigers, I sent Kari to bring
them back to the river bank. But Kari got lost himself; so when
the cowherd had recovered entirely, I went to look for his cows
and my lost elephant. Where do you think I found him? He had gone
right into the forest where I had left the saplings and the twigs
and had buried his trunk into the heap and was eating the best of
them, without any concern for the cows, the cowherd or myself.
But I could not punish him that day because he had done his duty
by saving the life of the boy.
Kari was like a baby. He had to be trained to be good and if you
did not tell him when he was naughty, he was up to more mischief
than ever.
For instance, one day somebody gave him some bananas to eat. Very soon
he developed a great love for ripe bananas. We used to keep large
plates of fruit on a table near a window in the dining-room. One day
all the bananas on that table disappeared and my family blamed the
servants for eating all the fruit in the house. A few days later the
fruit disappeared again; this time the blame was put on me, and I knew
I had not done it. It made me very angry with my parents and the
servants, for I was sure they had taken all the fruit. The next time
the fruit disappeared, I found a banana all smashed up in Kari's
pavilion. This surprised me very much, for I had never seen fruit
there, and as you know, he had always lived on twigs.
Next day while I was sitting in the dining-room wondering whether
I should take some fruit from the table without my parents'
permission, a long, black thing, very much like a snake suddenly
came through the window and disappeared with all the bananas. I
was very much frightened because I had never seen snakes eat
bananas and I thought it must be a terrible snake that would
sneak in and take fruit. I crept out of the room and with great
fear in my heart ran out of the house, feeling sure that the
snake would come back into the house, eat all the fruit and kill
all of us.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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